>>Hey everyone. Lisa Martin of the cube here, HPE and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment. And I'm here with four guests. Please. Welcome Charlie Mulrooney global presales engineering manager at Athi John saws also of Shi joins this global pre-sales technical consultant. And back with me are Terry Richardson, north American channel chief and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Welcome gang. Great to have you all here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thanks. You good to be here? >>All right, Charlie, let's go ahead and start with you. Keeping the earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions. Greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses, right? Everywhere. Globally. Can you talk Charlie about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable? It? >>Sure. So starting about a year and a half, two years ago, we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports, their chairman's letters, their sec filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral or carbon zero goals starting with 2050 dates. And then since then we've seen 20, 40, and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and RFPs, RFIs that we're fielding. Certainly all now contain elements of that. So this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers, our fortune two 50 and fortune 500 customers. For sure. We're, we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this. We get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand, you know, here's what we have today. What can we do better? What can we do different to help make an impact on those goals? >>So making an impact top of mind, pretty much for everyone, as you mentioned, John SAS, let's bring you into the conversation. Now, when you're in customer conversations, what are some of the things that you talk about with respect tohis approach to sustainability, sustainable it, are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space? >>Well, so Charlie touched on something really important that, you know, the, the wake up moment for us was receiving, you know, proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability. And it was really around two years ago, I suppose, for the first time. And those requests started coming from European based companies, cuz they had a bit of a head start over the us based global companies even. And what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to use renewable energy for data centers utilize the, they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance cost and other factors that you typically have at the top. So as we started working with them, I guess at beginning it was more tactical cuz we really had to find a way to respond. >>We were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability, we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second headquarters in Austin, Texas, those are lead gold certified. We've been installing solar panels, reducing waste across the company, recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles, all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in, in, in our offices and in our headquarters. But it's a lot more than that. And what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of, of customers and partners. We have over 30,000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers. And we wanted to find best practices and technologies and services that we could talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a, as a really large global reseller and integrator. We can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple partners that we work with to help solve customer problems. And so over time it's become more strategic and we've been as a company building the, the, the, the, the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that, and then also reporting for CDP Ecova and so forth. And it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years. And we take it very seriously. >>It sounds like, and it also sounds like from the customer's perspective, they're shifting from that tactical, maybe early initial approach to being more strategic, to really enabling sustainable it across their organization. And I imagine from a business driver's perspective, John saws and Charlie, are you hearing customers? You talked about it being part of RFPs, but also where are customers in terms of, we need to have a sustainable it strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers. Charlie, John, what are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, that's top of mind with, with all the folks that we're talking to, I would say there's probably a three way tie for the importance of attracting and retaining investors. As you said, plus customers, customers are shopping, their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities and sustainable priorities with their own and who is gonna help them with their own reporting of, you know, scope two and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining talent. It's another element now of when you're bringing on new talent to your organization, they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align. So we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with, with the customers we're talking to. And it was a little surprising, cuz it, we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors, but it really has become quite a bit more than that. And it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization >>More comprehensive across the organization. Let's bring Dr. John Fry into the conversation and Terry your next. So stay tuned. Dr. Fry, can you talk about HPE and S H I partnering together? What are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned? >>Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them. No one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our collective customers the same way. From an HPE perspective, we bring the expertise on our products. We bring in sustainable it point of view, where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies implement a sustainable it program. But our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers. And in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table. So they extend the reach, they bring their own expertise. Their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just enterprise products. So by working together, we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs, give them the right technology solutions and enhance that customer experience because they get more value from us collectively. >>It really is better together, which is in a very appropriate name for our segment here. Terry, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to us about AMD. How is it helping customers to create that sustainable it strategy? And what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that, that are able to be delivered through partners like Shi? >>Well, Lisa, you used the word enabling just a short while ago. And fundamentally AMD enables HPE and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers. So in the data center space, we began our journey in 2017 with some fundamental design elements for our processor technology that were really keenly focused on improving performance, but also efficiency. So now the, the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about is really that measure of performance per wat. And you'll continue to see AMD enabled customers to, to try to find ways to, to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing, whether it's availability of power data center space, or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals. So we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to HPE and two Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers. >>Sounds like to me, Terry, that it's, that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler, but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability. >>You you're right about that. And, and we actually have tools, greenhouse gas, TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the, the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals. So we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like HPE and Shi >>Better together. As we said at the beginning in just a minute ago, Charlie, let's bring you back in, talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable it and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives. >>So for quite a while, we've had some offerings to help customers, especially in the end user compute side. A lot of customers were interested in, I've got assets for, you know, let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and, you know, those need to be refreshed. What do I do with those? How do I responsibly retire or recycle those? And we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time. It's within the last year or two, when we started offering for them guarantees and assurances assurances of how they can, if that equipment is reusable by somebody else, how can we issue them? You know, credits for carbon credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else. So it's not necessarily going to be e-waste, it's something that can be recycled and reused. We have other programs with helping extend the life of, of some systems where they look at well, I have a awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the, the, the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically. We can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment. So we've been able to come up with some creative solutions specifically around end user compute in the past, but we are looking to new ways now to really help extend that into data center infrastructure and beyond to really help with what are the needs, what are the, the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them. >>That's a great point that you bring up. Charlie and security kind of popped into my head here, John Saul's question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about, or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling, where are you having those customer conversations? Cause I know sustainability is a board level, it's a C level discussion, but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization? >>Well, so it's a, it's a combination of organizations within the customer. These are these global organizations. Typically when we're talking about asset life cycle management, asset recovery, how do you do that in a sustainable green way and securely the customers we're dealing with? I mean, security is top sustainability is right up there too. O obviously, but Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are global rollouts, tens of thousands of employees typically to, to have mobile devices, laptops, and phones, and so forth. And they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to, to the employees. And how do you do that in a sustainably? You need to think about that. Does it all go to a central location or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way? >>And I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that, well for, for example, one European pharmaceutical that states in their reports that they're already in scope one in scope two they're fully net zero at this point. And, and they say, but that only solves 3% of our overall sustainability goals. 97% is scope three, it's travel, it's shipping. It's, it's, it's all the, the, all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times, but they're coming to us now as a, as a supplier and as, and, and we're filling out, you know, forms and RFPs and so forth to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal >>Sustain sustainable supply chain. Absolutely. Yes. Dr. John Fry and Terry, I want to kind of get your perspectives. Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective, customers coming through RFP saying, Hey, we've gotta work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway, HPE and AMD hearing the same thing Dr. Fry will start with you. And then Terry >>Sure, absolutely. We receive about 2,500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year. And that's come up from a few hundred. So yeah, absolutely accelerating. Then the conversations turn deeper. Can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption? Then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can HPE offer net zero or carbon neutral technology solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those solutions in their own carbon footprint. So the questions are getting more sophisticated, the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing. And as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions, I think this trend is just gonna continue up. >>Yeah. And we see the same thing. We get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals. But the surveying that survey work that we've done with customers has led us to, you know, understand that, you know, approximately 75% of customers are gonna make sustainability goals, a key component of their RFIs in 2023, which is right around the corner. And, and, you know, 60% of those same customers really expect to have business level KPIs in the new year that are really related to sustainability. So this is not just a, a kind of a buzzword topic. This is, this is kind of business imperatives that, you know, the company, the companies like HPE and AMD and the partners like I, that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really gonna be ahead of the game. >>That's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't, we're not talking about a buzzword here. We're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all industries and Dr. Far, you mentioned regulations. And something that we just noticed is that the S E C recently said, it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions. If they were, if that were to, to come into play, I'm gonna pun back to Charlie and John saws. How would Shi and, and frankly at HPE and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of regulation were to be implemented. Charlie. >>Yeah. So we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that, with the reporting, we know reporting is a challenge. The scope two reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was gonna be a ways out now, all of a sudden, Hey, if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three targets, then you have to report on them. So that, that has become really important very quickly as word about this requirement is rumbling around there's concern. So we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose, but stay tuned, cuz we have something coming. That's interesting. >>Definitely PED my, my ears are, are, are perk here. Charlie, we'll stay tuned for that. Dr. Fry. Terry, can you talk about together with Shi HPE and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the da data obviously, which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it. We talked a little bit about security, but how are from a better together perspective, Dr. Fry will start with you, how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it? And at these days what it's real time requirements. >>Yeah. It's, it's an increasing challenge. In fact, we have changed the H HP story the way we talk about H HP's value proposition to talk about data first modernization. So how often do you collect data? Where do you store it? How do you avoid moving it? How do you make sure if you're going to collect data, you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value. And then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable it, because when I talk to technology executives, what they tell me again, and again, is there's this presumption within their user community, that storage is free. And so when, when they have needs for collecting data, for example, if, if once an hour would do okay, but the system would collect it once a minute, the default, the user asks for of course, once a minute. And then are you getting insights from that data? Or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge, because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network. There's huge power and carbon implications of doing that. So it's really making a better decision about what do we collect, why do we collect it, what we're gonna do with it when we collect and how we store it. >>And, and for years, customers have really talked about, you know, modernization and the need to modernize their data center. You know, I, I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that catalyst to really drive true modernization. And as they think forward, you know, when we work with, with HPE, you know, they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in, you know, specific customer workloads from the largest, super computers down to kind of general purpose servers. And when we work with partners like Shi, not only can they deliver the full suite of offerings for on premise deployments, they're also very well positioned to leverage the public cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there. And, and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end to end sustainability goal. >>That's a great point that, that it needs to be strategic, but it also needs to be an end to end goal. We're just about out of time, but I wanted to give John saws the last word here, take us out, John, what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest, but what are some of the things that you are excited about as HPE AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives? >>Sure. Couple comments here. So Charlie, yeah, you touched on some upcoming capabilities that Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management. See, this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way. This is a train coming at everybody very quickly and they're not ready. Most customers aren't ready. And if we can help as, as a reseller integrator assessments, to be able to understand what they're currently running compare to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state, that seems valuable if we can help in that way. That's, those are things that we're looking into specifically, you know, greenhouse gas, emissions, relevant assessments, and, and, and within the comments of, of, of Terry and, and John around the, the power per wat and the vast portfolio of, of technologies that they, that they had to address various workloads is, is fantastic. >>We'd be able to help point to technologies like that and move customers in that direction. I think as a, as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers, I saw an article on BBC this morning that I, I, I think if, if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems. The BBC article mentioned this was Ethereum, a cryptocurrency, and they have a big project called merge. And today was a go live date. And BBC us news outlets have been reporting on it. They basically changed the model from a model called power of work, which takes a, a lot of compute and graphic, GPU power and so forth around the world. And it's now called power of stake, which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct. >>They have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency. And if they're wrong, it's taken from them. This new model reduces the emissions of their environment by 99 plus percent. The June emissions from Ethereum were, it was 120 telos per, per year, a Terra terat hours per year. And they reduced it actually, that's the equivalent of what the net Netherlands needed for energy, so comparable to a medium sized country. So if you can think differently about how to solve problems, it may be on-prem, it may be GreenLake. It may be, it may be the public cloud in some cases or other, you know, interesting, innovative technologies that, that AMD HPE, other partners that we can bring in along, along with them as well, we can solve problems differently. There is a lot going on >>The opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting. We thank you so much for talking together about how HPE AMD and SSHA are really working in partnership in synergy to help your customers across every organization, really become much more focused, much more collaborative about sustainable it. Guys. We so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. My >>Pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

(futuristic music) >> Hey everyone. Lisa Martin here for theCUBE back with you, three guests join me. Dan Molina is here, the co-president and chief technology officer at NTH Generation. And I'm joined once again by Terry Richardson, North American channel chief for AMD and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Gentlemen, It's a pleasure to have you on theCUBE Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Dan. Let's have you kick things off. Talk to us about how NTH Generation is addressing the environmental challenges that your customers are having while meeting the technology demands of the future. That those same customers are no doubt having. >> It's quite an interesting question, Lisa, in our case we have been in business since 1991 and we started by providing highly available computing solutions. So this is great for me to be partnered here with HPE and the AMD because we want to provide quality computing solutions. And back in the day, since 1991 saving energy saving footprint or reducing footprint in the data center saving on cooling costs was very important. Over time those became even more critical components of our solutions design. As you know, as a society we started becoming more aware of the benefits and the must that we have a responsibility back to society to basically contribute with our social and environmental responsibility. So one of the things that we continue to do and we started back in 1991 is to make sure that we're deciding compute solutions based on clients' actual needs. We go out of our way to collect real performance data real IT resource consumption data. And then we architect solutions using best in the industry components like AMD and HPE to make sure that they were going to be meeting those goals and energy savings, like cooling savings, footprint reduction, knowing that instead of maybe requiring 30 servers, just to mention an example maybe we're going to go down to 14 and that's going to result in great energy savings. Our commitment to making sure that we're providing optimized solutions goes all the way to achieving the top level certifications from our great partner, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Also go deep into micro processing technologies like AMD but we want to make sure that the designs that we're putting together actually meet those goals. >> You talked about why sustainability is important to NTH from back in the day. I love how you said that. Dan, talk to us a little bit about what you're hearing from customers as we are seeing sustainability as a corporate initiative horizontally across industries and really rise up through the C-suite to the board. >> Right, it is quite interesting Lisa We do service pretty much horizontally just about any vertical, including public sector and the private sector from retail to healthcare, to biotech to manufacturing, of course, cities and counties. So we have a lot of experience with many different verticals. And across the board, we do see an increased interest in being socially responsible. And that includes not just being responsible on recycling as an example, most of our conversations or engagements that conversation happens, 'What what's going to happen with the old equipment ?' as we're replacing with more modern, more powerful, more efficient equipment. And we do a number of different things that go along with social responsibility and environment protection. And that's basically e-waste programs. As an example, we also have a program where we actually donate some of that older equipment to schools and that is quite quite something because we're helping an organization save energy, footprint. Basically the things that we've been talking about but at the same time, the older equipment even though it's not saving that much energy it still serves a purpose in society where maybe the unprivileged or not as able to afford computing equipment in certain schools and things of that nature. Now they can benefit and being productive to society. So it's not just about energy savings there's so many other factors around social corporate responsibility. >> So sounds like Dan, a very comprehensive end to end vision that NTH has around sustainability. Let's bring John and Terry into the conversation. John, we're going to start with you. Talk to us a little bit about how HPE and NTH are partnering together. What are some of the key aspects of the relationship from HPE's perspective that enable you both to meet not just your corporate sustainable IT objectives, but those of your customers. >> Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things that HPE brings to bear is 20 years experience on sustainable IT, white papers, executive workbooks and a lot of expertise for how do we bring optimized solutions to market. If the customer doesn't want to manage those pieces himself we have our 'As a service solutions, HPE GreenLake. But our sales force won't get to every customer across the globe that wants to take advantage of this expertise. So we partner with companies like NTH to know the customer better, to develop the right solution for that customer and with NTH's relationships with the customers, they can constantly help the customer optimize those solutions and see where there perhaps areas of opportunity that may be outside of HPE's own portfolio, such as client devices where they can bring that expertise to bear, to help the customer have a better total customer experience. >> And that is critical, that better overall comprehensive total customer experience. As we know on the other end, all customers are demanding customers like us who want data in real time, we want access. We also want the corporate and the social responsibility of the companies that we work with. Terry, bringing you into the conversation. Talk to us a little about AMD. How are you helping customers to create what really is a sustainable IT strategy from what often starts out as sustainability tactics? >> Exactly. And to pick up on what John and and Dan were saying, we're really energized about the opportunity to allow customers to accelerate their ability to attain some of their more strategic sustainability goals. You know, since we started on our current data center, CPU and GPU offerings, each generation we continue to focus on increasing the performance capability with great sensitivity to the efficiency, right? So as customers are modernizing their data center and achieving their own digital transformation initiatives we are able to deliver solutions through HPE that really address a greater performance per watt which is a a core element in allowing customers to achieve the goals that John and Dan talked about. So, you know, as a company, we're fully on board with some very public positions around our own sustainability goals, but working with terrific partners like NTH and HPE allows us to together bring those enabling technologies directly to customers >> Enabling and accelerating technologies. Dan, let's go back to you. You mentioned some of the things that NTH is doing from a sustainability approach, the social and the community concern, energy use savings, recycling but this goes all the way from NTH's perspective to things like outreach and fairness in the workplace. Talk to us a little bit about some of those other initiatives that NTH has fired up. >> Absolutely, well at NTH , since the early days, we have invested heavily on modern equipment and we have placed that at NTH labs, just like HPE labs we have NTH labs, and that's what we do a great deal of testing to make sure that our clients, right our joint clients are going to have high quality solutions that we're not just talking about it and we actually test them. So that is definitely an investment by being conscious about energy conservation. We have programs and scripts to shut down equipment that is not needed at the time, right. So we're definitely conscious about it. So I wanted to mention that example. Another one is, we all went through a pandemic and this is still ongoing from some perspectives. And that forced pretty much all of our employees, at least for some time to work from home. Being an IT company, we're very proud that we made that transition almost seamlessly. And we're very proud that you know people who continue to work from home, they're saving of course, gasoline, time, traffic, all those benefits that go with reducing transportation, and don't get me wrong, I mean, sometimes it is important to still have face to face meetings, especially with new organizations that you want to establish trust. But for the most part we have become a hybrid workforce type of organization. At the same time, we're also implementing our own hybrid IT approach which is what we talk to our clients about. So there's certain workloads, there are certain applications that truly belong in in public cloud or Software as a Service. And there's other workloads that truly belong, to stay in your data center. So a combination and doing it correctly can result in significant savings, not just money, but also again energy, consumption. Other things that we're doing, I mentioned trading programs, again, very proud that you know, we use a e-waste programs to make sure that those IT equipment is properly disposed of and it's not going to end in a landfill somewhere but also again, donating to schools, right? And very proud about that one. We have other outreach programs. Normally at the end of the year we do some substantial donations and we encourage our employees, my coworkers to donate. And we match those donations to organizations like Operation USA, they provide health and education programs to recover from disasters. Another one is Salvation Army, where basically they fund rehabilitation programs that heal addictions change lives and restore families. We also donate to the San Diego Zoo. We also believe in the whole ecosystem, of course and we're very proud to be part of that. They are supporting more than 140 conservation projects and partnerships in 70 countries. And we're part of that donation. And our owner has been part of the board or he was for a number of years. Mercy House down in San Diego, we have our headquarters. They have programs for the homeless. And basically that they're servicing. Also Save a Life Foundation for the youth to be educated to help prevent sudden cardiac arrest for the youth. So programs like that. We're very proud to be part of the donations. Again, it's not just about energy savings but it's so many other things as part of our corporate social responsibility program. Other things that I wanted to mention. Everything in our buildings, in our offices, multiple locations. Now we turn into LED. So again, we're eating our own dog food as they say but that is definitely some significant energy savings. And then lastly, I wanted to mention, this is more what we do for our customers, but the whole HPE GreenLake program we have a growing number of clients especially in Southern California. And some of those are quite large like school districts, like counties. And we feel very proud that in the old days customers would buy IT equipment for the next three to five years. Right? And they would buy extra because obviously they're expecting some growth while that equipment must consume energy from day one. With a GreenLake type of program, the solution is sized properly. Maybe a little bit of a buffer for unexpected growth needs. And anyway, but with a GreenLake program as customers need more IT resources to continue to expand their workloads for their organizations. Then we go in with 'just in time' type of resources. Saving energy and footprint and everything else that we've been talking about along the way. So very proud to be one of the go-tos for Hewlett Packard Enterprise on the GreenLake program which is now a platform, so. >> That's great. Dan, it sounds like NTH generation has such a comprehensive focus and strategy on sustainability where you're pulling multiple levers it's almost like sustainability to the NTH degree ? See what I did there ? >> (laughing) >> I'd like to talk with all three of you now. And John, I want to start with you about employees. Dan, you talked about the hybrid work environment and some of the silver linings from the pandemic but I'd love to know, John, Terry and then Dan, in that order how educated and engaged are your employees where sustainability is concerned? Talk to me about that from their engagement perspective and also from the ability to retain them and make them proud as Dan was saying to work for these companies, John ? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we see in technology, and we hear it from our customers every day when we're meeting with them is we all have a challenge attracting and retaining new employees. And one of the ways that you can succeed in that challenge is by connecting the work that the employee does to both the purpose of your company and broader than that global purpose. So environmental and social types of activities. So for us, we actually do a tremendous amount of education for our employees. At the moment, all of our vice presidents and above are taking climate training as part of our own climate aspirations to really drive those goals into action. But we're opening that training to any employee in the company. We have a variety of employee resource groups that are focused on sustainability and carbon reduction. And in many cases, they're very loud advocates for why aren't we pushing a roadmap further? Why aren't we doing things in a particular industry segment where they think we're not moving quite as quickly as we should be. But part of the recognition around all of that as well is customers often ask us when we suggest a sustainability or sustainable IT solution to them. Their first question back is, are you doing this yourselves? So for all of those reasons, we invest a lot of time and effort in educating our employees, listening to our employees on that topic and really using them to help drive our programs forward. >> That sounds like it's critical, John for customers to understand, are you doing this as well? Are you using your own technology ? Terry, talk to us about from the AMD side the education of your employees, the engagement of them where sustainability is concerned. >> Yeah. So similar to what John said, I would characterize AMD is a very socially responsible company. We kind of share that alignment in point of view along with NTH. Corporate responsibility is something that you know, most companies have started to see become a lot more prominent, a lot more talked about internally. We've been very public with four key sustainability goals that we've set as an organization. And we regularly provide updates on where we are along the way. Some of those goals extend out to 2025 and in one case 2030 so not too far away, but we're providing milestone updates against some pretty aggressive and important goals. I think, you know, as a technology company, regardless of the role that you're in there's a way that you can connect to what the company's doing that I think is kind of a feel good. I spend more of my time with the customer facing or partner facing resources and being able to deliver a tool to partners like NTH and strategic partners like HPE that really helps quantify the benefit, you know in a bare metal, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and a TCO tool to really quantify what an implementation of a new and modern solution will mean to a customer. And for the first time they have choice. So I think employees, they can really feel good about being able to to do something that is for a greater good than just the traditional corporate goals. And of course the engineers that are designing the next generation of products that have these as core competencies clearly can connect to the impact that we're able to make on the broader global ecosystem. >> And that is so important. Terry, you know, employee productivity and satisfaction directly translates to customer satisfaction, customer retention. So, I always think of them as inextricably linked. So great to hear what you're all doing in terms of the employee engagement. Dan, talk to me about some of the outcomes that NTH is enabling customers to achieve, from an outcomes perspective those business outcomes, maybe even at a high level or a generic level, love to dig into some of those. >> Of course. Yes. So again, our mission is really to deliver awesome in everything we do. And we're very proud about that mission, very crispy clear, short and sweet and that includes, we don't cut corners. We go through the extent of, again, learning the technology getting those certifications, testing those in the lab so that when we're working with our end user organizations they know they're going to have a quality solution. And part of our vision has been to provide industry leading transformational technologies and solutions for example, HPE and AMD for organizations to go through their own digital transformation. Those two words have been used extensively over the last decade, but this is a multi decade type of trend, super trend or mega trend. And we're very proud that by offering and architecting and implementing, and in many cases supporting, with our partners, those, you know, best in class IT cyber security solutions were helping those organizations with those business outcomes, their own digital transformation. If you extend that Lisa , a Little bit further, by helping our clients, both public and private sector become more efficient, more scalable we're also helping, you know organizations become more productive, if you scale that out to the entire society in the US that also helps with the GDP. So it's all interrelated and we're very proud through our, again, optimized solutions. We're not just going to sell a box we're going to understand what the organization truly needs and adapt and architect our solutions accordingly. And we have, again, access to amazing technology, micro processes. Is just amazing what they can do today even compared to five years ago. And that enables new initiatives like artificial intelligence through machine learning and things of that nature. You need GPU technology , that specialized microprocessors and companies like AMD, like I said that are enabling organizations to go down that path faster, right? While saving energy, footprint and everything that we've been talking about. So those are some of the outcomes that I see >> Hey, Dan, listening to you talk, I can't help but think this is not a stretch for NTH right? Although, you know, terms like sustainability and reducing carbon footprint might be, you know more in vogue, the type of solutions that you've been architecting for customers your approach, dates back decades, and you don't have to change a lot. You just have new kind of toys to play with and new compelling offerings from great vendors like HPE to position to your customers. But it's not a big change in what you need to do. >> We're blessed from that perspective that's how our founders started the company. And we only, I think we go through a very extensive interview process to make sure that there will be a fit both ways. We want our new team members to get to know the the rest of the team before they actually make the decision. We are very proud as well, Terry, Lisa and John, that our tenure here at NTH is probably well over a decade. People get here and they really value how we help organizations through our dedicated work, providing again, leading edge technology solutions and the results that they see in our own organizations where we have made many friends in the industry because they had a problem, right? Or they had a very challenging initiative for their organization and we work together and the outcome there is something that they're very, very proud of. So you're right, Terry, we've been doing this for a long time. We're also very happy again with programs like the HPE GreenLake. We were already doing optimized solutions but with something like GreenLake is helping us save more energy consumption from the very beginning by allowing organizations to pay for only what they need with a little bit of buffer that we talked about. So what we've been doing since 1991 combined with a program like GreenLake I think is going to help us even better with our social corporate responsibility. >> I think what you guys have all articulated beautifully in the last 20 minutes is how strategic and interwoven the partnerships between HP, AMD and NTH is what your enabling customers to achieve those outcomes. What you're also doing internally to do things like reduce waste, reduce carbon emissions, and ensure that your employees are proud of who they're working for. Those are all fantastic guys. I wish we had more time cause I know we are just scratching the surface here. We appreciate everything that you shared with respect to sustainable IT and what you're enabling the end user customer to achieve. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure. From my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment, Dave Vellante will return to give you some closing thoughts on sustainable IT You're watching theCUBE. the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

foreign [Music] Lisa Martin of the cube here hpe and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment and I'm here with four guests please welcome Charlie mulrooney Global pre-sales engineering manager at SHI John saw is also of shi joins us Global pre-sales Technical consultant and back with me are Terry Richardson North American Channel Chief and Dr John Fry Chief technologist of sustainable transformation at hpe welcome gang great to have you here all here Thank you Lisa thank you good to be here all right Charlie let's go ahead and start with you keeping the Earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses right everywhere globally can you talk truly about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable I.T sure so starting about a year and a half two years ago we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest Enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports their Chairman's letters their SEC filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral uh or carbon zero goals starting with 20 50 dates and then since then we've seen 20 40 and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and rfps rfis that we're Fielding certainly all now contain elements of that so this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers our Fortune 250 and Fortune 500 customers for sure where we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this we get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand you know here's what we have today what can we do better what can we do different to help make it an impact on those goals so making an impact top of Mind pretty much for everyone as you mentioned John Sal's let's bring you into the conversation now when you're in customer conversations what are some of the things that you talk about with respect to shi's approach to sustainability sustainable I.T are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space well so Charlie touched on something really important that you know the the wake-up moment for us was receiving you know proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability and it was really around two years ago I suppose for the first time and those requests started coming from european-based companies because they had a bit of a head start uh over the U.S based global companies even um and what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to uh use renewable energy for data centers uh utilized they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance costs and other factors that you typically had at the top so as we started working with them uh I guess that beginning was more tactical because we really had to find a way to respond uh we were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second Headquarters in Austin Texas um those are the gold certified we've been installing solar panels producing waste across the company recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in in uh in our offices and in our headquarters um but it's a lot more than that and what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of supply of customers and partners we have over 30 000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers and we wanted to find best practices and Technologies and services that we could uh talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a as a really large Global uh reseller and integrator we can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple uh partners that we work with to help solve customer problems and so over time it's become more strategic and we've been uh as a company building the uh the the the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that um and then also reporting for CDP echovatus and so forth and it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years and we take it very seriously it sounds like it also sounds like from the customer's perspective they're shifting from that tactical maybe early initial approach to being more strategic to really enabling sustainable I.T across their organization and I imagine from a business driver's perspective John saws and Charlie are you hearing customers you talked about it being part of rfps but also where are customers in terms of we need to have a sustainable I.T strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers Charlie John what are your thoughts on that yeah that's top of mind with uh with all the folks that we're talking to uh I would say there's probably a three-way tie for the importance of uh attracting and retaining investors as you said plus customers customers are shopping their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities in sustainable priorities uh with their own and who is going to help them with their own reporting of you know spoke to and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining Talent uh it's another element now of when you're bringing on a new talent to your organization they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align so we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with with the customers we're talking to it was a little surprising because we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors but it really has become quite a bit more than that and it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization more comprehensive across the organization let's bring Dr John Fry into the conversation and Terry your neck so stay tuned Dr Frey can you talk about hpe and Shia partnering together what are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned yeah it's a great question and one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them no one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our Collective customers the same way from an hpe perspective we bring the expertise on our products we bring in a sustainable I.T point of view where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies Implement a sustainable I.T program but our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers and in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table so they extend the reach they bring their own expertise their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just Enterprise Products so by working together we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs give them the right Technology Solutions and enhance that customer experience it's because they get more value from us collectively it really is better together which is a very appropriate name for our segment here Terry let's bring you into the conversation talk to us about AMD how is it helping customers to create that sustainable I.T strategy and what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that that are able to be delivered through Partners like Shi well Lisa you use the word enabling um just a short while ago and fundamentally AMD enables hpe and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers so in the data center space We Begin our journey in 2017 with some fundamental Design Elements for our processor technology that we're really keenly focused on improving performance but also efficiency so now the the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about was really that measure of performance per watt and you'll continue to see AMD enable um customers to to try to find ways to to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing whether it's availability of power data center space or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals so we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to hpe and to Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers sounds like to me Terry that it's that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability you're right about that and and we actually have tools greenhouse gas TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals so we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like hpe and Shi Better Together as we've said at the beginning and just a minute ago Charlie let's bring you back in talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable I.T and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives so for quite a while we've had uh some offerings to help customers especially in the end user compute side a lot of customers were interested in I've got assets for you know let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and you know those need to be refreshed what do I do with those how do I responsibly retire or recycle those and we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time it's within the last year or two when we started offering for them guarantees and Assurance assurances of how they can if that equipment is reusable by somebody else how can we issue them you know credits for uh carving credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else so it's not necessarily going to be E-Waste it's uh something that can be recycled and reused we have other programs with helping extend the life of of some systems where they look at boy I have an awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically we can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment so we've been able to accomplish some Creative Solutions specifically around end user compute in the past but we are looking to new ways now to to really help extend that into Data Center infrastructure and Beyond to really help with what are the needs what are the the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them [Music] that's a great point that you bring up Charlie and the security kind of popped into my head here John saw his question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling where are you having those customer conversations I know sustainability is a board level it's a c-level discussion but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization well so it's a it's a combination of um organizations within the customer these are these Global organizations typically when we're talking about asset like cycle management asset recovery how do you do that in a sustainable Green Way and securely the customers we're dealing with I mean security is top sustainability is right up there too obviously but uh um Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are Global rollouts tens of thousands of employees typically to to have mobile devices laptops and phones and so forth um and they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to to the employees and how do you do that in a sustainable way you need to think about that does it all go to a central location um or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that well for for example one European pharmaceutical that the states and their reports that they are already in scope one in scope two they're fully uh Net Zero at this point and and they say but that only solves three percent of our overall sustainability goals uh 97 is scope three it's travel it's shipping it's it's uh it's all the all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times but they're coming to us now as a as a supplier and ask and and we're filling out forms and rfps and so forth uh to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal so sustainable supply chain absolutely Dr John Fry and Terry I want to kind of get your perspectives Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective customers coming through RFP saying hey we've got to work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway hpe and AMD hearing the same thing Dr Fry will start with you and then Terry sure absolutely we receive about 2500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year and that's come up from a few hundred so yeah absolutely accelerating then the conversations turn deeper can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can hpe offer Net Zero or carbon neutral Technology Solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those Solutions in their own carbon footprint so the questions are getting more sophisticated the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing and as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions I think this trend is just going to continue up yeah and we see the same thing uh we get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals but the surveying that the survey work that we've done with customers has led us to you know understand that you know approximately 75 percent of customers are going to make sustainability goals a key component of their rfis in 2023 which is right around the corner and you know 60 of those same customers really expect to have business level kpis uh in the new year that are really related to sustainability so this is not just a a kind of a buzzword topic this is this is kind of business imperatives that you know the company the companies like hpe and AMD and the partners like Shi that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really going to be ahead of the game that's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't we're not talking about a buzzword here we're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all Industries and Dr Farr you mentioned regulations and something that we just noticed is that the SEC recently said it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions um if they were if that were to to come into play I'm going to come back to Charlie and John saws how would Shi and frankly at hpe and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of Regulation were to be implemented Charlie yeah so we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that with the reporting we know reporting is a challenge uh the scope 2 reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was going to be a ways out now all of a sudden hey if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three uh targets and you have to report on them so that that has become really important very quickly uh as word about this requirement is rumbling around uh there's concern so we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose but stay tuned because we have something coming that's interesting definitely peaked my ears are are parked here Charlie well stay tuned for that Dr Brian Terry can you talk about together with Shi hpe and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the data obviously which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it we talked a little bit about security but how are from a Better Together perspective Dr Fry will start with you how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it and these days what is real-time requirements yeah it's an increasing challenge in fact we have changed the HP Story the way we talk about hpe's value proposition to talk about data first modernization so how often do you collect data where do you store it how do you avoid moving it how do you make sure if you're going to collect data you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value and then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable I.T because when I talk to technology Executives what they tell me again and again is there's this presumption within their user community that storage is free and so when when they have needs for collecting data for example if if once an hour would do okay but the system would collect it once a minute the default the user asks for of course is once a minute and then are you getting insights from that data or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network there's huge power and carbon implications of doing that so it's really making a better decision about what do we collect why do we collect it what we're going to do with it when we collect and how we store it and for years customers have really talked about you know modernization and the need to modernize their data center you know I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that Catalyst to really Drive true modernization and as they think forward um you know when we work with with hpe you know they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in you know specific customer workloads from the larger supercomputers down to kind of general purpose servers and when we work with Partners like Shi not only can they deliver the full Suite of um offerings for on-premise deployments they're also very well positioned to leverage the public Cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end-to-end sustainability goal that's a great point that that it needs to be strategic but it also needs to be an end-to-end goal we're just about out of time but I wanted to give John saws the last word here take us out John what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest but what are some of the things that you're excited about as hpe AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives sure um a couple of comments here um so Charlie yeah you touched on some upcoming capabilities uh that uh Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management see this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way this is a train coming at everybody very quickly and um they're not ready most customers aren't ready and if we can help um as as a reseller integrator assessments to be able to understand what they're currently running compared to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state that seems valuable if we can help in that way that's those are things that we're looking into specifically uh you know greenhouse gas emissions relevant assessments and and um and what in the comments uh of Terry and John around the power per watt and um the vast um uh portfolio of technologies that they that they had to address various workloads is uh is fantastic we'd be able to help point to Technologies like that and move customers in that direction I think as a as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers I saw an article on BBC this morning that I I think if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems um the BBC article mentioned this was ethereum a cryptocurrency and they have a big project called merge and today was a go live date and BBC US news outlets have been reporting on it they basically changed the model from a model called The Power of work which takes a a lot of compute and graphic GPU power and so forth around the world and it's now called a power of stake which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct they have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency and if they're wrong it's taken from them this new model reduces the emissions of their um uh environment by 99 plus percent the June emissions from ethereum were it was 120 uh terawatts per per year terawatt hours per year and they reduced it um actually that's the equivalent of what the Netherlands needed for energy so the comparable to a medium-sized country so if you can think differently about how to solve problems it may be on-prem it may be extremely it may be that may be the public cloud in some cases or other you know interesting Innovative Technologies that the AMD hpe other partners that we can bring in along along with them as well we can solve problems differently there is a lot going on the opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting we thank you so much for talking together about how hpe AMD and sha are really working in partnership in Synergy to help your customers across every organization really become much more focused much more collaborative about sustainable I.T guys we so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights Thank you Lisa thank you my pleasure for my guests I'm Lisa Martin in a moment Dan Molina is going to join me he's the co-president and chief technology officer of nth generation you're watching the cube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Lisa Martin here of theCUBE. I have three guests now here with me. Please welcome Dave Fafel, chief technology officer at WEI. And welcome back to the program, Terry Richardson, North American channel chief at AMD, and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Gentlemen, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for hopping on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> (indistinct) >> So, Dave, let's start with you, a lot of acronyms here. Talk to us about WEI and its approach to sustainability. >> Yeah, absolutely, sure. So, WEI is a innovative, full service, customer-centric, IT solutions provider. We're experts in business technology improvement, in driving efficiency, helping our customers to optimize their IT environments. That's what we do. And of course, sustainability is really now part of the core function in architecting IT solutions these days. It has to be. I look at sustainability and I hear the word sustainability and I think efficiency. And that's the way that our organization designs solutions for our customers today. >> Talk about the impetus. You mentioned being customer centric you talked about efficiency, all incredibly important to all of us on this Zoom, but Dave, talk about the impetus for WEI to develop and implement this sustainability initiative. Well, I mean, so look, for WEI, it's part of our business model, it's part of our culture. So it's natural that that comes out in the solutions that we design for our customers, but we're trying to solve business problems for our customers, We're not just geeks building something really cool with the latest technology, we're trying to solve real world problems and sustainability addresses real world issues. And so, our customers are looking for us to help them either implement their sustainability programs, or to mature their sustainability programs. And IT has a big responsibility in that. And so, when we're working with them to solve these problems we're really solving that business problem, solving that sustainability, IT initiative that they have. >> And we're going to dig and unpack that in a little bit. John, I want to bring you into the conversation. HPE and AMD have been long partnering on advancing sustainability goals for quite a long time now. Can you talk about how HPE and WEI are partnering? What are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help support not only the goals that Dave talked about but HPE's sustainability goals? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things in sustainability is partnership is really leadership. No one company can do this by themselves, and customers really need that input and perspective from all of their partners as part of this process. So, for us as HPE, 65% of our carbon footprint, for example, is when our customers use our technology products. So, for us to lower our carbon footprint, it also requires us helping the customer do that. And that's where the power of the AMD and HPE relationship comes together, but we can't give our expertise widely to every customer in the world. And so, we use our channel partners like WEI to not only extend our reach, but they bring that deep knowledge of the customer and all of their operations across technology, even places where HPE does not offer that technology, in the client space, for example, or in the printer space. And so, what it allows us to do is develop better solutions for the customer. WEI has a deep relationship with the customer. They have a deep expertise in local nuances if there's regulations or local constraints. In fact, in many cities in the world, you can't, for example, build new data centers because of power infrastructure constraints. So, that's where we leverage partners like WEI to improve the customer experience and make sure that we give the best solutions to the customer. >> All about improving those customer experiences as demand for technology does nothing but increase. Terry, let's bring you into the conversation now. Speaking of customer centricity, we find that sustainability is very complicated, that a lot of large companies might have the resources to figure it out, but some of the smaller and mid-size companies might not quite have the boots on the street. What should some of the smaller organizations do, Terry, in your perspective to get started where sustainability is concerned? >> Well, I first off, appreciate the opportunity to be here and it's really terrific to have such a strong partnership with both HPE and WEI in order to deliver innovative solutions to customers. I think what AMD brings to the table is a real choice for customers that they haven't had. All of our personnel are really expert in articulating a differentiated value proposition that hits on a little bit what John talked about which is higher performance but with very, very efficient systems. And we've been offering those to the market since 2017 and we continued to get better. And now, there's an absolute opportunity to do more with same amount of servers, or do a workload with far fewer servers, that require far less energy. So, bringing in the AMD resources to assist the efforts of HPE and WEI, I would say, would be a good step for customers. >> Are there any Terry, sticking with you, any recommendations or tools particularly that you've seen really help customers get kicked off well, and strategically? >> Yeah, there actually are a couple that are readily available and I would encourage through WEI, customers take a close look. Two that really come to mind. We have a virtualization TCO tool that helps optimize configurations for virtual environments. And one of our newest tools is one that's focused on bare metal and greenhouse gas emissions TCO. So, really quantifying the impact to customers and expressed in terms that are familiar and help them achieve their sustainability initiatives. >> Excellent, that's great that those resources are available for customers, especially those smaller ones that might need a bit more guidance and handholding. Dave, let's come back to you. Let's now unpack the sustainability initiatives at WEI that you're really leveraging and implementing to meet the demands of customers and their future technology demands. >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a great question, what we're getting to. So, look, we're going to combine, the advancements in technology from an AMD and from an HPE into an architecture that's really usable for a customer. So, 10 years ago, we were all looking at consolidation ratios for virtualization as one driver to a more efficient IT environment. And so, look, we've done this over the last decade, where we've added as many virtual machines to a server as we can get and as many containers to a physical machine as we can get, and now we've got to find other ways to drive efficiency. And so, when we see technology from AMD that's maybe having the socket count from a CPU perspective with a 30 plus percent reduction in power consumption and heat output, that's huge. So, we're architecting these solutions, using that best of breed technology but also implementing technology that was previously consumed more by larger enterprise customers for that small and medium customer base that you mentioned earlier. And that is implementing infrastructure as a service as a way to more efficiently utilize IT resources. So, we'll design the right systems, we'll put them into a consumption model that allows us to dial up and down when we need to, as opposed to having to build oversized environments that consume too much power, that produce too much heat and that aren't really driving toward those sustainability initiatives. So, we want to change not only the technology but also the models of which we consume IT. That's how we're driving that forward with customers today. >> And Dave, another question for you. How are you seeing from a cultural perspective this be adopted and accepted across the customer base? 'Cause change management is challenging but we all know sustainability is a focus of pretty much every business on the planet. >> It is, but fortunately we've got good partners like AMD and HPE, so they make it easy for the channel to implement these things. If you take a look at HPE's GreenLake solutions, for instance. These are tool sets that allow us to go and easily implement that for customers and reduce that change or cost of change for them. In fact, it actually allows them to take the models that they're currently used to and yet still leverage that new consumption model that I just referred to. >> Got it, awesome, thank you. John, let's go back to you. There's a tremendous opportunity here for customers from a sustainability standpoint, across every industry. And I was looking at some data that HPE shared that said for example, 25% of compute in data centers is comatose. First of all, I think the description is brilliant. What are some of the outcomes that customers can expect in working with HPE and AMD and WEI in terms of better leveraging their technology investments today and in the future? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And we do see a tremendous amount of equipment in the average data center that's not doing any useful work. And so, comatose is a great name for that. We also see a tremendous amount of equipment that's being dramatically underutilized as well. So, when the three companies come together and share that expertise with the customer and the customer follows through on that you can expect a whole lot of things. So, you reduce over-provisioning, you have the IT assets in your infrastructure doing useful work for you. The second thing you you tend to see is utilization levels going up. So, where the average utilization level across compute today even in a virtualized or containerized environment is about 30%. You see that almost doubling, for example, in good scenarios where the customer has that equipment doing a tremendous amount of additional work, keeping them from needing to add additional assets to the infrastructure. So, all of that drives cost savings, both CapEx and OPEX, cost savings opportunities. It drives efficiency savings. If you have less equipment being more well utilized and better managed, you tend not to have over temperature situations or equipment that goes down for no explainable reason that then drives staff work to go find out and fix workloads that go down. In fact, many of our customers are measured on service level agreements. They want to keep that infrastructure running all the time to keep their customers happy as well. And finally, one that sometimes is missed is employee satisfaction. Technology companies are having a tough enough time finding and attracting and retaining employees to start with but those employees want to see how what they're doing contributes to purpose. So, as our customers can use these employees to do more productive work, show them how it connects to the purpose of their company and show them how it makes the world a better place at the same time, they can do a better job of holding on to those employees that they so value. >> That's such a great point, John, that you bring up that employee retention but also talent attraction and retention for your customers. Dave, back to you. Are you seeing more and more customers come to WEI, saying, "We have sustainability initiatives. "We can only partner with companies that are also really focused on this because we need to make sure that our employees are satisfied and that we can attract and retain customers." Is that something that you're seeing an increase of? >> Yeah, absolutely. So very often, we're asked to explain how we're implementing sustainability in our business, that the partners that we work with are also doing the same and I'll give you an example of that. So, we've been talking about IT efficiency and good utilization of IT equipment but let's not forget that life cycles of IT equipment result in that equipment leaving a customer site eventually. So, we've got to be responsible in the way that we handle that. And so, this is the area where WEI has put together programs to connect the sustainability aspect of IT recycling, if you will, with the social aspect of corporate social responsibility. And that is, what do we do with this stuff? So, we offer programs to customers where we say, "Hey, look, let's take back some of that IT equipment, there's value in this." It may be that we need to go and recycle this in a responsible way. And we can extract valuable components out of this that result in funds to do something with. Well, what can we do with those funds? Can we put those towards social programs? So, this is where we, again, tie together sustainability and social responsibility. We've been talking about data centers but this also extends to other IT devices. So, if we're pulling back laptops, as an example, from a customer environment, well, those may still have a useful life someplace. Can we bring those to disadvantaged communities and utilize those for educational purposes and other things? Again, this is how WEI connects our customers with these opportunities to enhance their CSR programs. >> Tremendous opportunities there for customers across every industry. Dave, sticking with you for a second. From a differentiation perspective, talk about what the partnership with HPE and AMD delivers WEI from a unique value prop perspective. >> Yeah, so we touched on it a little bit already, and that is, you've got the incredible technology from AMD and from HPE that work seamlessly together but is also focused on driving down the cost of computing. I mean, just the overall efficiency built into design of these solutions makes it easy for an IT consultant like us to build an efficient architecture. But it's not just the technology. It's also the models, or the IT provisioning and consumption models that are important. And again, that's where the relationship between HPE and WEI comes together, because we get to leverage some of these other programs. I mentioned before GreenLake, as an example. This gives us the opportunity to build that infrastructure as service model for our customers who would otherwise maybe go out to a hyperscaler for a similar solution. But as we know, most of our customers even small and medium businesses, can't move everything out to the cloud. They have to use their own data centers. They have to keep data on site and on-prem. So, building that model for them drives efficiency and quite honestly, that's the thing that they're looking for, it's driving cost savings, it's driving efficiency, it's aiding their CSR initiatives. >> Got it. Let's chat now about the strategic versus the tactical. Terry, I would like to get your feedback and then John, yours as well. We talked a little bit about this already but how do you help advise organizations that might be in that tactical mode, approaching sustainability from a tactical mode and really up level that to a strategy that's around sustainable IT? Terry, what are some of the things that you're seeing in the marketplace? Well, at AMD we're fortunate to be passionate about partnerships and sustainability. We're fortunate to work with companies of all shapes and sizes and in different geographies around the world. Some are a little bit more advanced in the way they think about this, but it really is becoming a strategic imperative for companies. And I think certain companies don't know exactly how to proceed. So, the opportunity to educate and open their eyes to the way that you can do both, you can meet your IT goals and objectives, but also do it in a very socially responsible and sustainable way, to me is a win-win. And we welcome the opportunity to just have those conversations. I think some customers are not necessarily understanding how much IT can really contribute to their ability to meet their current and future sustainability goals. And we look forward to having as many conversations as possible 'cause it goes in the category of just the right thing to do. If you can power your IT and do things that are good for the planet and good for all. >> That's a great point. It really is the right thing to do. John, just question, last question for you, is similar to what I asked Terry, but I would like to know where are your customer conversations when it comes to really looking at IT as a big driver of sustainability? Who in the organization really needs to be the spearheads around that initiative? >> Yeah, great question. Often we see customers have one organization that sometimes is a sustainability organization. Sometimes the facility's a real estate organization or sometimes IT is spearheading this and often doing that in isolation. To your point, we really need to think about this as a sustainable IT strategy and get all the right organizations involved together. So, for example, for us, after seeing many customers that didn't know how to develop this strategy, we wrote a workbook called "Six Steps For Implementing A Sustainable IT Strategy." And the steps are things like figure out what your company goals already are that you've made public to your customers then grab the right stakeholders and bring them together. For example, you know you're going to have cost savings, so have the finance team in the room, You know this is going to save utilities, have the real estate team in the room. You know it's going to generate a sustainability benefit, have the sustainability team involved so that they can quantify the benefit in a meaningful manner. Have the communication and marketing teams because when companies implement a sustainable IT strategy they have a great story that they can then tell their customers about how they're doing a better job from an efficiency perspective and from an environmental perspective as well. So, when you bring all of those stakeholders together you can have a much broader and deeper strategy. It becomes a strategic imperative. And when your institutional investors, if you're publicly traded, or your customers come asking about your programs, you're ready to answer those questions in a credible manner. >> Sounds like it really needs to truly be a collaborative effort across the organization. You mentioned John's story and that goes back to employee retention, talent attraction and retention for your companies and your customers as well. We could go off on that but we're almost out of time. So, I want to go back to Dave to take us home here. You walked us through what WEI is doing from a sustainability initiative perspective, the impetus to develop that. What are some of the things that we can expect to see on the horizon from WEI where sustainability is concerned? What are you excited about? >> Well, that's a good question. So, we're excited about how we can continue to deploy those infrastructure as a service models. That's the next step in the direction. How do we automate these things, and then how do we quantify them? So, you've got to build the environment but then you've got to be able to measure it. And that's another area where WEI really adds value to this whole solution set is how are we measuring these things in the long term and developing a program that extends beyond just the implementation of this, but through its entire life cycle and the value of it? Because if you can quantify the value and if you can show what the savings really is and how it's helping customers meet their sustainability goals, well, guess what? They're going to want to implement more of this So, it's good business, and that's what we're excited about, is that next mile of implementation after we developed the initial architecture. >> That measurement is key. It sounds like then it really becomes a flywheel of sustainability. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today talking about from your three perspectives and how you're partnering together to really enable businesses across any industry to develop a sustainable IT strategy that they can implement and then create a flywheel of optimization. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> All right, my pleasure for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment, John and Terry and I are going to be joined by Charles Mulrooney, global presales engineering manager at SHI and John Sahs, global presales technical consultant at SHI. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Sustainability has become one of the hottest topics, not just in enterprise tech, but across all industries. The relentless pace of technology improvement over the decades and orders of magnitude increases in density have created heat, power and cooling problems that are increasingly challenging to remediate. Intense efforts have been implemented over the years around data center design techniques to dissipate heat, use ambient air, liquid cooling and many other approaches that have been brought to bear to get power usage effectiveness, PUE, as close to one as possible. Welcome to Better Together Sustainability, presented by the CUBE and brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD. In this program we'll lay out today's challenges and how leading companies are engineering solutions to the problems just introduced, along with some recommendations, best practices and resources as to how you can initiate or enhance your sustainability journey. First up to help us better understand this important topic are John Fry, senior technologist IT efficiency and sustainability at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Terry Richardson, North America channel chief for AMD. Gents, welcome. >> Great to be here. >> (indistinct). >> John, let's start at the high level here. Why is sustainability such an important topic today? Why now? Why is it such a challenge for customers and, and how are you guys approaching the solutions? >> The topic has been an important topic for a number of years, but what we're seeing across the world is more and more corporations are putting in place climate targets and sustainability goals. And at the same time, boards and CEOs are starting to be asked about the topic as well, making this topic much more important for technology leaders across the globe. At the same time, technology leaders are fighting with space, power and cooling constraints that caused them to rethink their approach to IT. To get a better sense of how wide this challenge is, we did a survey last year and we asked 500 technology leaders across the globe if they were implementing sustainable IT goals and metrics and programs within their infrastructure. Personally, I thought the answer would be about 40% of them had these programs. Actually it turned out to be 96% of them. And so when we asked them why they were implementing these programs and what was the primary driver, what we heard from them was three things. Those of them that were the early adopters and the ones that move were moving the fastest told us they were putting these programs in place to attract and retain institutional investors. If they're a publicly traded company, their investors were already asking their boards, their CEOs, wanting to know what their company was doing to drive efficiency within their technology operations. Those companies in the middle, the ones that were just moving along at the same pace as many other companies around the world, told us they were putting these programs in place to attract and retain their customers. Customers are increasingly asking the companies they do business with about their sustainability aspirations specifically how technology contributes to their carbon emissions and their sustainability goals. And so these customers want to make sure that they can keep their own customers. And finally, a third group, the digital followers, that group of companies that's a little slower adopting programs, more conservative in nature. They said they were implementing these programs to attract and retain employees. In fact, over the last year or so, every customer we've talked to when they describe their pain points and their challenges that we can try to help them meet, has had a difficulty in finding employees. And so what we know is these younger employees coming into the workforce, if you can show them how what they are going to be doing connects to the purpose of their company and connects to making the world a better place, you can attract them easier and you can retain them longer. So a variety of business reasons why companies are looking at these programs, but what we know is when they implement these programs they often reduce over-provisioning. They save money, they have a lower environmental footprint, and again they have an easier time attracting and retaining employees. So for all of these reasons, driving sustainability into your IT operations is a great thing to do. >> Yeah, I never would've expected 96%. And of course, investors, customers and employees. I mean, this is the big three. Terry what's AMD's perspective on this topic? In other words, what do you bring to the table and the partnership? I mean, I know processors, but what's unique about AMD's contribution? >> Yeah. Thanks Dave. And, and John, great to be with you. Appreciate the opportunity and the partnership. You know, we too are very focused on sustainability and enjoy our partnership with HPE very much in this area. You know, since 2017, when AMD introduced its epic processor family, there's been a couple of core design elements in that technology. One has to do with performance. And the second has to do with efficiency. Both are critically important to today's topic of sustainability because increasingly, customers are understanding and measuring performance per watt and fortunately, AMD really excels in this area. So whether we're talking about the larger super computers in the world, or even general purpose servers, customers can fundamentally do more with fewer AMD servers than competitive alternatives. And so, so we, we really bring a technology element on the processor side, CPU and GPU, to play a role in delivering real ability for customers to meet some of their core sustainability goals. And of course, in partnership with HPE, together we have really a compelling story. >> Great. Thank you, Terry. And, and John, wonder if you could talk to the differentiation that you bring from HPE's perspective, the total package. >> Yeah, of course. The first thing as partnership. As Terry mentioned, AMD and HPE have been working together since HPE was founded actually, to drive power efficiency up to meet the demands of our customers. At the same time, as our customers have asked more and more questions around technology sustainability, we've realized that we needed to not only develop a point of view on that from an HPE perspective, but actually write the white papers that give the customer guidance for sustainable IT strategies, for tech refresh cycles, give them some guidance on what are the right questions to ask technology vendors when they're buying technology equipment. So a series of white papers and you might not appreciate why, but this is a topic that you can't go get a college degree in and frankly can't even buy a book on. So for customers to get that knowledge, they want to get it from experienced professionals around the globe. And in fact, in the survey that I mentioned earlier, we asked customers, where's the number one place that you expect to get your sustainable IT information from? And they said, our technology vendors. So for us, it's really about driving that point of view, sharing it with customers, helping customers get better and even pointing out some of the unintended consequences. So a great example, Dave, you mentioned PUE earlier. Many customers have been driving PUE down for a number of years, but often the way that they did that was optimizing the data center building infrastructure. They got PUE pretty low. Now, one of the things that happens and customers need to be aware of this, particularly if they're focused on PUE as their primary metric, is when they optimize their IT stack and make that smaller, PUE actually goes up. And at first they think, well, wait a minute, that metric is going in the wrong direction. But when you remember it's a ratio, if you get that IT stack component smaller, then you're driving efficiency even if PUE goes the wrong direction. So part of the conversation then is you might want to look at PUE internally, but perhaps you've outgrown PUE and now have an opportunity to look at other metrics like carbon emissions per workload, or or power consumption per piece of equipment or rack. So all of this drives back to that upward trajectory that Terry was talking about where customers are really interested in power performance. So as we share those stories with customers, share the expertise how to move along this journey, that really provides great differentiation for HPE and AMD together. >> So that's interesting. So PUE is not necessarily the holy grail metric. There are other metrics that you, you should look at. Number one, and number two the way you interpret PUE is changing for the better. So thank you for that context. I wonder Terry, do, do you have any like proof points or examples that you can share? >> Yeah, so one that immediately comes to mind that was a manifestation of some terrific collaboration between AMD and HPE was their recently announced implementation of the Frontier supercomputer. That was a project that we collaborated on for a long time. And, and where we ended up was turning over to the government a supercomputer that is currently the highest performing in the world, broke the exaFLOP barrier. And probably even more importantly is number one on the Green500 list of the top super computers. And, and together we enjoy favorable rankings in other systems, but that's the one that, that really stands out in terms of at scale implementation to shine really a spotlight on what we can do together. Certainly for other customers doesn't have to be the world's largest super computer. It's not uncommon that we see customers just kind of in general purpose business applications in their data centers to be able to do more with less, you know, meaning, you know, you know a third of the servers oftentimes delivering not only a very strong TCO but the environmental benefit that gets associated with significantly reduced energy that can be expressed in reduction in, in overall CO2 emissions and other, other ways to express the benefit, whether it's, you know the equivalent of, of planting you know, acres of forest or whatever. So we're really proud of the proof points that we have and and look forward to the opportunity to together explain this more fully to customers and partners. >> Right? So John, Terry sort of alluded to this being more broad based. I know HPE has a very strong focus on HPC. Sorry for all the acronyms, but high performance computing. But the, so this is more broad based than just the super computing business, right John? >> Yeah, absolutely. We see these performance benefits for customers and industry standard servers as well. In fact, many customers, that's the primary type of equipment they use and they want better power performance. They either want to as Terry alluded to, use less equipment to do the same amount of work, or if they've run into a space or power or cooling constraint in their data centers, they want to be able to increase workloads in the same footprint. So it allows them to take better use of their data centers. And for some customers even the data center enclosure that they started with they can actually use a much smaller amount of space. In fact, we have some that even move over to co-location facilities as they improve that performance per watt, and can do more work in the smaller space. So it starts an industry standard server, but increasingly we're seeing customers considering liquid cooling solutions and that generally moves them into the high performance compute space as well right now. So those performance improvements exist across that entire spectrum. >> So since you brought up liquid cooling John, I mean can you share any best practices? I mean, like what do you do with all that heated liquid? >> Yeah, it's a great, great question. And we have seen a lot more interest from customers in liquid cooling and there's a variety of things that you can do, but if you're considering liquid cooling the opportunities to think broader than just the IT stack. So if you're going to use a cooling loop anyhow and you're going to generate warm liquid coming off the it equipment as waste, think about what you can do with that. We have a, a government customer here in the United States that designed their high performance computer while they were designing the building it went in. So they're able to use that hot air, hot water, excuse me coming off the IT equipment to heat the entire building. And that provides a great use of that warm water. In many parts of the world, that warm water can either be used on a hot water utility grid or it can even be used on a steam grid if you can get it warm enough. Other places we're aware of customers (indistinct) and greenhouses next to data centers and using both the warm air and the warm water from the data center to heat the greenhouse as well. So we're encouraging customers to take a step back, look at the entire system, look at anything coming out of that system that once was waste and start to think about how can we use that what was waste now as an input to another process. >> Right, that's system thinking and some, some pragmatic examples there. Can, can you each summarize, maybe start Terry, with you AMD's and HPE's respective climate goals that may, Terry then John chime in please. >> Yeah, I'll go first. We actually have four publicly stated goals. The first one is I think very aggressive but we've got a track record of doing something similar in our client business. And, and so kind of goal number one is a 30 X increase in energy efficiency for AMD processors and accelerators powering servers for AI and HPC by 2025. The second is broad based across the corporation is a 50% absolute reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from AMD operations by 2030. And then the third is 100% of AMD manufacturing suppliers will have published greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals by 2025. And we've declared that 80% or greater of our manufacturing suppliers will source renewable energy by 2025. Those are the, those are the four big publicly stated goals and objectives that we have in this area. >> You know what I like about those Terry? A lot of, a lot of these sustainability goals these moonshot goals is like by 2050, it's like, okay. But I, I like the focus on '25 and then of course there's one in there at the end of the decade. All right, John, maybe you could share with us HPE's approach. >> Yeah, absolutely. And we've had almost two decades of emissions reduction goals and our current goals, which we accelerated by 10 years last year, are to be carbon new or excuse me, net zero by 2040. And that's a science based target-approved goal. In fact, one of the first in the world. And we're doing that because we believe that 2050 is too long to wait. And so how we reach that net zero goal by 2040, is by 2030, an interim step is to reduce our scopes one and two, our direct and energy related emissions by 70% from 2020. And that includes sourcing 100% renewable energy across all of our operations. At the same time, the bigger part of our footprint is in our supply chain and when our customers use our products, so we're going to leverage our as a service strategy HPE GreenLake and our energy efficient portfolio of products to reduce our scope three carbon emissions 42% over that 2020 baseline by 2030, and as with AMD as well, we have a goal to have 80% of our suppliers by spend have their own science based targets so that we know that their commitments are scientifically validated. And then the longer step, how we reach net zero by 2040 is by reducing our entire footprint scopes one, two and three by 90% and then balance the rest. >> Yeah. So again, I mean, you know 2030 is only eight years away, a little more. And so if, if, if you have a, a target of 2030 you have to figure out, okay, how are you going to get there? The, if you say, you know, longer, you know in the century you got this balloon payment, you know that you're thinking about. So, so great job, both, both companies and and really making more specific goals that we can quantify you know, year by year. All right, last question, John. Are there any resources that you can share to help customers, you know, get started maybe if they want to get started on their own sustainability strategy or maybe they're part way through and they just want to see how they're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely much of what Terry and I have talked about are available in an executive workbook that we wrote called "Six Steps For Implementing a Sustainable IT Strategy" and that workbook's freely available online and we'll post the URL so that you can get a copy of it. And we really developed that workbook because what we found is, although we had white papers on a variety of these topics, executives said we really need a little bit more specific steps to work through this and implement that sustainable IT strategy. And the reason for that, by the way is that so many of our customers when they start this sustainable IT journey, they take a a variety of tactical steps, but they don't have an overarching strategy that they're really trying to drive. And often they don't do things like bring all the stakeholders they need together. Often they make improvements without measuring their baseline first. So in this workbook, we lead them step by step how to gather the right resources internally, how to make the progress, talk about the progress in a credible way, and then make decisions on where they go next to drive efficiencies. >> Yeah, really that system thinking is, is, is critical. Guys. Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Okay guys, thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it. In a moment, We're going to toss it over to Lisa Martin out of our Palo Alto studio and bring in Dave Faffel, chief technology officer at WEI, along with John and Terry, to talk about what WEI is doing in this space to address sustainability challenges. You're watching Better Together Sustainability brought to you by HPE and AMD in collaboration with the CUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (lilting music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Okay, we're back here at HPE Discover 2022, theCUBE's continuous coverage. This is day two, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. John Frey's here. He is the chief technologist for sustainable transformation at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Justin Murrill who's the director of corporate responsibility for AMD. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> So again, I remember the days where, you know, CIOs didn't really care about the power budget. They didn't pay the power budget. You had, you know, facilities over here, IT over here and they didn't talk to each other. That's changed. Why is there so much discussion around sustainable IT today? >> It's exciting to see how much it's up leveled, as you say. I think there are a couple different trends happening but mainly, you know, the IT teams and IT leaders that are making decisions are seeing to your point how their decisions are affecting enterprise level, greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. So that connection is becoming very clear. Everything from the server processor to beyond it, those decisions have a key role. And importantly we're seeing, you know, 60% of the Fortune 500 now have climate or energy efficiency related goals. So there's a perfect storm of sorts happening where more companies setting goals, IT decision makers looking particularly at the data center because as the computational heart of an organization, it has a wealth of opportunity from an energy and a mission savings perspective. >> I'm surprised it's only 60%. I mean, that number really shocked me. So it's got to be a 100% within the next couple of years here. I would think, I mean, it's not trivial, right? You've got responsibilities in terms of reporting and you can't just mail it in, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot more disclosure happening but the goal setting is really upleveling as well. >> And the metrics involved too. Can you just scope the scale and challenge of like getting the right metrics, not when you have the goals. Does that factor in, how do you see there? What's your commentary on that? >> Yeah, I think there's, the aperture is continuing to open as metrics go, so to speak. So from an operations perspective, companies are reporting on what's referred to as scope one and scope two. And scope two is the big one from electricity, right? And then scope three is everything else. That's the supply chain and the outside of that. So a lot of implications there as well from IT decision making. >> Is there a business case for sustainable IT? I mean, you're probably not going to lower the power budget, right? But is it just, hey, it's the right thing to do. We have to do it, it's good for the brand. It'll allow us to attract people or is there a a more of a rich business case? >> So there really is a business case even just within inside the data center walls, for example. There's inefficiencies that are inherent in many of these data centers. There's really low utilization levels as well. And by reducing over provisioning and increasing utilization, there's real money to be saved in terms of equipment costs, maintenance agreement costs, software licensing costs. So actually the power consumption and the environmental piece is an added benefit but it's not the main reason. So we actually had IDC do a survey for us last year and we asked IT executives, 500 senior IT executives, were you implementing sustainable IT programs and why? My guess initially was about 40% of them would say yes. Actually the number was 96% of them. And when we asked them why they fell into three categories. The digital leaders, those that are the early adopters moving the quickest. They said we do it to attract and retain institutional investors. They've been hearing from their boards. They've been hearing from their investor relations teams and investors are starting to ask and even in a couple cases board seats are becoming contentious based on the environmental perspective of the person being nominated. This digital mainstream, the folks in the middle about 80% of the total pie, they're doing it to attract and retain customers because customers are asking them about their sustainable IT programs. If they're a non-manufacturing customer, their data center consumption is probably the largest part of their company. It's also by the way usually the most expensive real estate the company owns. So customers are asking and customers are not only asking, do you have basic programs in place? But they're asking, what are your goals to Justin's point? The customers are starting to realize that carbon goals have been vaguely defined historically. So they're asking for specificity, they're asking for transparency and by the way the science-based target initiative recently released their requirements for net zero science-based targets. And that requires significant reduction to your point before you start considering renewable energy in that balance. The third reason those digital followers, that slowest group or folks that are in industries that move the slowest, they said they were doing this to attract and retain employees. Because they recognize the data scientists, the computer science, computer engineering students that they're trying to attract want to work at a company where they can see how what they do directly contributes to purpose. And they vote with their feet. If they come on and they can't make that connection pretty quickly or if they spend a lot of their time chasing down inefficiencies in a technology infrastructure, they're not going to stay there very long. >> I mean, the mission-driven organization is definitely an employee factor. People are interested in that. The work for company is responsible, doing the right thing but that business case is interesting because I think there's recognition now more than ever before. You think you're right on. It used to be kind of like mailed it in before. Okay, we're doing some stuff. Now it's like, we all have to do it. And it's a board issue. It's a financing issue. It might be a filing issue as you guys mentioned. So that's all great. So I got to ask how you guys specifically are working together, AMD and HPE. What are you guys doing to make it more efficient? And then I'll see with Cloud and Cloud scale, there's more servers being shipped now than ever before. And more devices at the edge. What are you guys doing together specifically? >> Yeah, we've been working together, AMD and HPE on advancing sustainability for many years. I've had the opportunity to working directly with John for many years and I've learned a lot from him and your team. It's fantastic to see all the developments here. I mean, so most recently the top 500 and the green 500 list of supercomputers came out. And at the top of that list is AMD HPE systems. And it shows kind of the pinnacle of what can be possible for other data centers looking to modernize and scale. So the number one system, the fastest system in the world and the most energy efficient system in the world, the Frontier supercomputer has AMD HPE technology in it. And it just passed the exit scale barrier. I mean, I'm still just blown away by this. A billion, billion calculations per second. It's just amazing. And the research is doing around clean energy, alternative energy sources, scientific research is really exciting. So there's that. The other system that really jumps out is the LUMI system, the number three system because it's a 100% powered by renewable energy. So not only that, it takes the heat and it channels it to a nearby town and covers 20% of that town's heating needs thereby avoiding 12,400 metric tons of carbon emissions. So this system is carbon negative, right? And you just go down the list. I mean, AMD is in the top eight out of 10 most green... >> Rewind that second. So you have the heat and the power shifting to a town? >> Yes, the LUMI supercomputer has the heat from the system to an nearby town. It's like a closed loop, the idea of circular economy but with energy. And it takes that waste and it makes it an input, a resource. >> But this is the kind of innovation that's going on, right? This is the scale, this is where scale and efficiency kind of come together. That's huge. Where's that going to go? What's your perspective on where that goes next because that's a blueprint that could be replicated. >> You bet. So I think we're going to continue to see overall power consumption go up at the system level. But performance per wat is climbing much more dramatically. So I think that's going to continue to scale. It's going to require a new cooling technology. So direct liquid cooling is becoming more and more in use and customers really interested in that. There's shifting from industry standard architectures to lower end high performance computer architectures to get direct liquid cooling, higher core processors and get the performance they want in a smaller footprint. And at the same time, they're really thinking about how do we operate the infrastructure as a system not as individual piece parts. And one of the things that Frontier and LUMI do so well is they were designed from the start as a system, not as piece parts making up the system. So I think that happens. The other thing that's really critical is no one company is going to solve these challenges ourself. So one of the things I love about our partnership with AMD is we look at each other's sustainability goals before we launch 'em. We say, well, how can we help? One of AMD's goals that I'll let Justin talk about came about because HPE at the time of separation laid a really aggressive product, energy efficiency goal out, said but we're not sure how we're going to make this. And AMD said we can help. So that collaboration, we critique each other's programs, we push each other, but we work together. I like to say partnership is leadership in this. >> Well, that's a nuance point. Before you get to that solution there Justin, this system's thinking is really important. You're seeing that now with Cloud. Some of the things that GreenLake and the systems are pointing out, this holistic systems' thinking is applied to partnerships, not just the company. >> Yep. >> This is a really nuanced point but we're seeing that more and more. >> Yeah, absolutely. In fact, Justin mentioned the heat reuse, same way with the national renewable energy lab. They actually did snow removal and building heating with the heat reuse. So if you're designing for example, a liquid cold system from the start, how do you make it a symbiotic relationship? There's more and more interest in co-locating data centers and greenhouses in colder environments for example. Because the principle of the circular economy is nothing is waste. So if you think it's waste or you think it's a byproduct, think about how can that be an input to something else. >> Right, so you might put a data center so you can use ambient cooling or in somewhere in the Columbia River so you can, you know, take advantage of, you know, renewable energy. What are some goals that you guys can share with us? >> So we've got some great momentum and a track record coming off of, going back to 2014, we set a 25 by 20 goal to improve the energy efficiency for our mobile processors and mobile devices, right? So laptops. And we were able to achieve a 31.7x in that timeframe. So which was twice the industry trend to that. And then moving on, we've doubled down on data center and we've set a new goal of a 30x increase in energy efficiency for our server processors and accelerators to really focused on HPC and AI training. So that's a 30x goal over 2020 to 2025 focused on these really important workloads 'cause they're fast growing. We heard yesterday 150 billion devices connected by 2025 generating a lot of data, right? So that's one of the reasons why we focused on that. 'Cause these are demanding workloads. And this represents a 2.5x increase over the historical trend, right? And fundamentally speaking, that's a 97% reduction in energy use per computation in five years. So we're very pleased. We announced an update recently. We're at 6.8x. We're on track for this goal and making great progress and showing how these, you know, solutions at a processor level and an accelerator level can be amplified, taken into HPE technology. >> Generally tech companies, you know, that compete want to rip each other's faces off. And is that the case in this space or do you guys collaborate with your competitors to share best practice? Is that beginning? Is it already there? >> There's much more collaboration in this space. This is one of the safe places I think where collaboration does occur more. >> Yeah. And we've all got to work together. A great example that was in the supply chain. When HPE first set our supply chain expectations for our suppliers around things like worker rights and environment and worker protection from a health and safety perspective. We initially had our code of conduct asked their suppliers to comply with it. Started auditing in event. And we quickly got into the factories and saw they were doing it for our workloads. But if you looked around the factory, they weren't doing in other places. And we took a step back and said, well, wait a minute. Why is that? And they said that vendor doesn't require it. So we took a step back and said let's get the industry together. We share a common supply chain. How do we have a common set of expectations and push them out to our supply chain? How to now do third party audits so the same supplier doesn't get audited by each of the major vendors and then share those audit results. And what we found was that really had a large lever effect of moving the electronic supply chain much more rapidly towards our expectations in all those areas. Well then other industries looked and said, well, wait a minute, if that worked for electronics, it'll probably work broader. And so now, the output of that is what's called the responsible business alliance across many industries taking that same approach. So that's a pre-competitive. We all have the same challenge. In many cases we share a common supply chain. So that's a great example of electronic companies coming together, design standards for things. There's a green grid group at the moment looking at liquid cooling connects. You know, we don't want every vendor to have a different connection point for liquid cooling for example. So how do we standardize that to make our customers have a easier time about looking at the technologies they want from any vendor and having common connection points. >> Right. Okay. So a lot of collaboration. Last question. How much of a difference do you think it can make? In other words, what percent of the blame pie goes to information technology? And I think regardless, you got to do your part. Will it make a dent? >> I think the sector has done a really good job of keeping that increase from going up while exponentially increasing performance. So it's been a really amazing industry effort. And moving forward, I think this is more important than ever, right? And with the slowdown of Moore's law we're seeing more gains that need to come from beyond process architecture to include packaging innovations, to power management, to just the architecture here. So the challenge of mitigating and minimizing energy growth is important. And we believe like with that 30x energy efficiency goal that it is doable but it does take a lot of collaboration and focus. >> That's a great point. I mean, if you didn't pay attention to this, IT could really become a big piece of the pie. Guys thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate. >> People are watching. They're paying attention at all levels. Congratulations. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Dave Vellante, John Furrier and our guests. Don't forget to go to SiliconANGLE.com for all the news. Our YouTube channel, actually go to CUBE.net. You'll get all these videos in our YouTube channel, youtube.com/SiliconANGLE. You can check out everything on demand. Keep it right there. We'll be right back. HPE Discover 2022 from Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>>Hello, I'm John Frey with the queue here for cube conversation with Devon Reed, senior director of apex offer product mentioned Dell technologies. They have a great to see you. Congratulations on apex and the momentum and the big news. >>Yeah. Thank you for having me here, John. It's a, it's a pleasure to be here with you and I can't wait to talk to you about the stuff. >>So we chatted last Dell technologies world about apex in great length. Um, first given update on what's the new news and to where's it come from since Dell tech DEC world. What's, what's the big update on the product and the news you're launching today. >>Yeah, so it's been a, it's been a fantastic journey here, John. And, um, you know, since Dell technologies world, we've learned a ton from our customers and the reception has been extremely positive. We're seeing a ton of interest from our customers. We're building demand, um, and we're learning a lot, but I think if we boil it down to what we're, we're really learning here is that customers are living in a cloud first world. And what that means is that customers want to move, uh, you know, to the public cloud because the public cloud brings simplicity, agility, the ability to pay for only what they use and they don't need to manage their infrastructure. However, what we're hearing from our customers as well is that they're, um, a little hesitant to move all of their workloads to the public cloud, because there are certain performance requirements, latency requirements, and security requirements that are, uh, still, um, held from on-prem infrastructure vendors. And that's, that's the beauty of apex to bring that the, the simplicity of the public cloud and the security and the performance of the private cloud in one with it. >>I want to get your thoughts real quick before I move on to the news, because this comes up a lot in conversations. In fact, I just had a conversation this morning on camera and also off-camera around virtualization of data, right? So, and how on premises? The bare metal growth is there, right? So you starting to see from a performance standpoint, when you security, we get that. There's not a lot of on premises reasons why to be on premises for the security reason, but performance, you brought that up. Talk more about that real quick, because I think this is really becoming quite more traction than people thought there's a performance gain. On-premise with some of the new tech, what's your reaction to that? >>Yeah, exactly. I think that's a, it's a great call out John. And especially as you get into some of these new applications where the computation needs to be directly next to, uh, the data in which is processing latency and performance is extremely important. We hear that day in and day out from our customers. And that's why it's really, it's really important to focus on not only on public cloud environments, but on-premise infrastructure. And that's what apex really, really helps customers, um, bridge that bridge, that gap. >>And for the folks watching there's a great interview, search his name, Devon's name, and look at last year's announcement. We covered it in detail with apex. So some great content there. Go check that out. I got to ask about the news. You had some new announcements at VMworld earlier today. What can you tell us about the news? >>Yeah, yeah, we did. John. This is, this is an amazing year for Dell at VM world in general. Um, there's a ton of announcements that have come out with collaboration with VMware and Dell, but for apex specifically. And that's what I'm here to talk to you about is that we're introducing a new offer to the apex portfolio. And this offer, we call apex cloud services with VMware cloud. And what this really is, is it's a full infrastructure as a service stack and it's utilizing Dell's, uh, hyper-converged infrastructure. So it's integrated storage, networking compute, and we combine that with, um, the virtualization stack from, uh, VMware virtualization stack and the services. It's a solution that's managed by Dell, it's designed for six nines of availability. And again, going back to what customers are asking for, it allows customers, the performance, the security, and it also provides those consistent operations across their multi-cloud environments. >>What's the driver behind the customer requirements than this. Is there a specific use case that jumps out off the page on, on the managed service? Could you share why the traction? >>Yeah. You know, um, this space is growing really rapidly and it's the new space. And as we talk to more and more customers, we learned there's a ton of different use cases, a ton of different deployments that are really coming to the forefront. But if I really boil it down, there are a few that are kind of rising to the top year. And I think first and foremost, we see a lot of deployments in VDI and really the driver behind that is some of those, those environments are complex. And what the customers are trying to do is really offload those it administrative tasks and have companies like Dell manager. And that's what we're doing for them. Another one is, um, you know, really around that latency, latency and security, really trying to drive applications to not suffer from, you know, that hate latency and security kind of benefits. >>Now, um, what we've seen is we have a lot of interest from very large enterprises that actually want to build and modernize their data centers. So they're either consolidating their data centers or they're trying to move to a fully automated, uh, hybrid cloud situation, right. And I'm talking very large deployments of, uh, VMware based, um, private cloud, uh, capabilities. And I say one other place that we're seeing a lot of interest in these sort of capabilities is large distributed kind of edge use cases. So think, um, you know, think use cases where you have, um, hundreds of remote office locations or a thousands of retail locations that is very difficult for customers to manage. And we take that burden away from our customers. >>Uh, thanks for laying out the customer scenarios and the use case. Good stuff I got to ask you about the solution now appears that it was jointly developed with VMware. Is that right? And if so, can you tell me more about that? >>Yeah, yeah, exactly. John, this is, this is amazing. The amount of collaboration that has gone into this solution with VMware is incredible and really it's based on customer feedback. And we saw, you know, based on this feedback, we've saw a real need to basically take the best of VMware software and their services capabilities, and our, you know, Dell's world-leading infrastructure capabilities and really combine it with the simplicity and agility that apex apex provides. So we've been working with VMware very tightly, uh, over the past year and more to really develop the solution. It's been a great journey, been spending a ton of time with the VMware team building this and, um, you know, customers really love what VMware cloud enables and customers love apex. So it's a really powerful combo and we think it's, it's really the next, uh, kind of rocket ship for, you know, the combined companies here. Yeah. >>I think the VDI piece and these use cases, you mentioned only get more relevant and complex at the same time with the whole shifting in the working environments, you know, the work from home, the future of work, you know, you have the blurring of the lines between private, you know, home versus corporate network. It's like, I mean, we thought it was hard before it's going to get even more complicated. So the pressure's on to abstract away the complexity. So, so totally relevant. Yeah. >>And demand for these kinds of solutions we're seeing, you know, the interest is, is doubling. Uh, it seems like almost every six months, you know, there's a lot more interest, especially as we progress through this pandemic and the, and uh, this environment that we're living in you. So, okay. >>So I got to ask you going forward again. Great progress from our last time we chatted at Dell technology worlds last year, um, 2021, um, what's ahead for Dell and the VMware partnership. Tell us more, how does that look? Um, extending is what's the trajectory look like, and you share any specifics, what can we expect? What's the headroom? What should customers expect? >>Yeah, yeah. You know, we get that question a lot and really, um, you know, nothing is really, although we are going to be separating as, as different entities, you know, the collaboration and the, the level of, um, joint development that we have between the two companies, uh, couldn't be stronger now. And we don't, we do not expect that to change. And we're just getting started on this thing and there's a lot more to come for sure. >>What's the biggest thing that you're, you're excited about. Obviously apex has been a good, it's a trajectory. The progress has been great. The market's in your favor, what's, what's exciting for you right now. Where do you see the action? Um, you know, where's, where's the fun for you in this what's that what's, uh, what's your take? >>You know, it always, for me, the fun always comes down to customers and understanding what the customers want, understanding what the solution, where the solution works, where the solution doesn't work, really working with our customers to really understand their problems and really try to work. So that's where I, I get my energy, uh, in this whole thing and to see the, see the pipeline grow and the sales coming in, that's just, it's really exciting for me, you know, as we're kind of embarking on this new, as a service, uh, world for the, for the multicloud world, it's, it's just, it's fantastic, John, >>You know, the one-click buy as you go consumption-based, this is the trend and infrastructure as code, which is a cloud ethos, and you may not have any on premises with security and now performance, it seems like we're seeing the second wave of virtualization kick in on premises where now that you're in a cloud operating model from storage compute, networking, kind of almost a reboot, almost a reset or an extension or a real-life, it seems like it's another second life of, of, of, of, of innovation. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. I, I definitely agree with you, John, and, you know, from a, from a vision perspective, we're just, we're just starting to, uh, you know, we're just starting out there and we, you know, if we think about the power, uh, in the breadth of the portfolio that Dell has, it is unmatched in the industry. So first and foremost, you know, there's a lot more from a, from a solution perspective that we can bring to the floor. So I think that's, that's really exciting. I like the position that we have there and in terms of collaboration with VMware, we're just getting started there too. And, uh, I spend, uh, almost a half of my day with VMware employees, which is incredible amount of collaboration. And there's so much more that we've talked about in our roadmap, uh, to really build out this vision when you start thinking about not just virtualization, but you start to talk about, um, you know, these, these new operating environments, including Kubernetes and Tansu capabilities. And, um, you know, how do you, how do you hit different, uh, use cases with, um, not only hyper converged and hyper-converged infrastructure, but different types of infrastructure as well. And then you start to span, uh, not only the prem, but the co-location facilities and, and the edge, and you bring this all together under the apex console. And I like our future >>Console based provisioning, easy, uh, congratulations on the big news apex cloud services with VMware cloud, um, for the folks watching, that's going to come in and maybe adopt the solution, the managed service, what can they expect from Dell? >>Uh, what you can expect is a very simple experience. So, uh, everything starts and ends with what we call our apex console. So a customer from the time they, they want to learn about our services to, um, you know, getting quotes on them, to actually transacting the, uh, the service, um, to operating the infrastructure from that. And then we provide a full set of, uh, services under the cover where a customer doesn't need to worry about the actual infrastructure management. And we provide customer success managers for every account. So we, we are there with you, uh, along every step of the journey to make this as seamless and easy as possible. So it's a fantastic, uh, experience for our customers. And that's, that's one of the things that they really love about the apex is that, um, you know, kind of white glove service that we're providing >>Devin. Great to see you, Devin Marine, senior director of Dell apex offer product management. He's only getting the product to see and congratulatory success, apex cloud services with VMware clouds, the big news here at VMworld with Dell technologies, I'm John furrier cube conversation, breaking it down and bringing the news to you. Thanks for watching.

from New York it's the cube covering blockchain week now here's John furry hello everyone I'm John Frey here on the ground actually on the water in the majesty boat here in New York City part of blockchain week New York City I'm here at Maggie's ooh who's he whose abyss development a decentralized launched a huge party here we're on a four story boat it's like the Titanic but it's in New York you can see hopefully we won't hit me icebergs but no icebergs ahead in blockchain thanks for joining me here on the water thank you John it's actually really funny you mentioned Titanic first time we came and saw the bow we're like oh my gosh this boat look exactly like Titanic let's really do something about it because see Centro is really about technology both being forward and so yeah we I think we pulled a very crazy party right now so tell us about the event this is a really cool event how big is the book just give us the details you ran the event so I know it's hard to run these kinds of events a lot of moving parts you're giving away two aston martin cars on a bracelet that's gonna light up and turn off based upon if you want or not so is it how's it work okay so this boat has a thousand people on here right now plus our team member plus a boat people so we have about eleven hundred people here and this whole event was run in the last five weeks the team has been working so hard and right now this bracelet that you see it syncs with the music so beats per second it syncs the colors and everything with the music and 11:45 today we're going to be giving away to Aston Martin's the bracelet will dim down one by one and the five bracelets that remaining will go on the stage everyone's gonna cheer out the crowd we're really gonna get everyone you know cheered up and this is not just like you know us giving away Aston Martin's this is really about bring the whole blocking community together we want to be say hey this is a small community let's all get United the cars are just a way for us to thank our partners and everyone I found about you know and I get a little nervous when I see these kind of launch parties because it reminds me that comm bubble but what's different about what's going on with you central is you guys have a business that's up and running this is not an ICO there's no fundraising going on you guys are actually executing and this is important because you guys are doing this as a community take a minute to explain the role of the blockchain community for you guys how important that is right so if you think about a blocking community right now we have the different coins we have the different exchanges the community is very fragmented and that is unfortunate because you know someone like my mom doesn't really understand the term blockchain or cryptocurrency but at the same time it's kind of like Internet 2.0 where you know these technologies are so new there's a lot of people who are so passionate on one of them and just like we just want to spend every day trying to make this better so the central role is really a bell okay let's do all these partnerships so we have over a hundred partnerships almost 200 now all signed and these are the people that we work with like every single day and what kind of partnerships are they they code development together as an open source or they're using the Jax platform you guys made some significant announcements today yeah I'm the Jax Liberty cube ice cube for cold storage I like the cube name not be confused with the cube as in the media cube us but this is a unification strategy talk about the news what did you guys announce tonight all right so today we announced two things we announced at Jax Liberty renounced Jax unity and then we announced the other things but that are part of that whole essential project so the Jax Liberty is the platform it's kind of like an app store all of our partners are gonna be part of this app store and we're just gonna have over 200 partners and more going on onward and every single the apps and integration will be here and we'll make it kind of like a game for the new users what's the bet value proposition for people to join the network it's a free platform we're not charging anyone anything and you know we're probably gonna do that forever so for us the model here is really about bringing all of these different projects together whether it be exchanges whether it be cryptocurrency Wallis whether it be different new sites encrypted messaging all of these things that touch every part of our life we want to say hey we want to bring freedom and power back to you and freedom to us is really your ability to control the information you know I'm very impressed with anthea see I interviewed a couple times in the Bahamas and he's got a great vision and one of the things that he talked in the presentation was kind of not will say buried but I think is the most important notable thing is that he talked about a new Internet infrastructure okay and the wallet is central to this new Internet infrastructure you guys are doing something really pioneering where you're actually creating a unification around infrastructure in network effects with currency this is a super important thing do you guys is this part of your mission or is this part of a just part of the product in your mind our mission like I said is really about brain freedom back to everyone right now if you think about you know how Facebook has their social data how Google has our browsing data all these different entities have our data and we feel like that's really the only way so what descent who is doing is we're saying that we want to create a one platform where we can bring all these different partners together and in doing so we're able to allow people to you know just being able to take control of your life that that is our mission we want to empower people so your pitch basically is join dee central if you joined essentials platform you join the community that wants to unify that's pretty much sounds like the pitch yes we want to empower people and we want to unified whole block G and a world community now you talk about your background how did you get here I mean like you just wake up one day and say hey I'm gonna get in the blockchain I mean what's your background got a legal background how did you give so my background is in business and then business law so I practiced for two years as a business lawyer I may not look like one but you check my record and they were covering lawyers that's okay exactly recovery and then so what I really want to do is all about impact I went into law school because I wanted to do a lot of impact I realized a lot of it is one-on-one not really doing it going to technology and I saw I found my passion and then I found blockchain I was like oh my gosh like this is it does this really you know we are sitting at the forefront of a technology that might be able to just change millions or billions of people's life and a lot of it people are talking about it if we're not really explaining it properly or building things properly I fell decentral is really at a forefront to make sure that is being done that's awesome what are some of the partners you guys have that are notable can you share some of the names and what they're working with you guys on so we're from Toronto Canada proud Canadian and internal we have a all new Co you're a into probability blocking space we have poly mas they do security platform we also have Bri the blockchain Research Institute that's led by Tapscott you know he wrote a very famous book we also have a shift that's you know just doing the KYC AML we also have the big ones like hoeing base like just a lot like block that's the consulting firm we have a lot of different partners that are just like all to cure one ones because of Anthony's background because of our experience in the space for the last four years people trust us people trust our wallet people want to be part of our sea and be part of our mission while we're on the water gonna get you go back to all the partying and schmoozing that's going on great event thank you for putting it on and and I think the community is very very robust out there right now we're having a good time yes outside is like a zoo and I'm really excited that you're here and we're able to meet some of the really great people and you can interview them Maggie thank you for coming on the cube on the water okay with the new cube product with the central unified essential has a new offering on cube is here covering and I'm John Fourier your host thanks for watching [Music]

>>From the Mandalay convention center in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the queue at IBM. Insight 2014 here is your host, Dave Vellante. >>Hi, welcome back to IBM insight everybody. This is Dave Volante with John furrier. We're here with the cube. The cube is our live mobile studio. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Carla Gentry is here otherwise known as at data nerd. Carla, great to see you. Welcome to the cube. You are a data scientists. Do you have your own company? Um, we were just talking to, uh, to dr Ahmed Bouloud from a university in um, Istanbul and he said, well, it's data science. It really, really isn't a such thing as a data scientist. And so he and I are arguing a little about it. So I said, come back and see Carla, right? You're a data scientist, right? >>Well, you know, right out of college I started with a RJ criminal associates up in Chicago. And um, that that's what we all were a bunch of data nerds in there playing around with terabytes of data before anybody even knew what a terabyte one terabyte was really big. Right? Right back when the terabyte was big data, but a, you know, gleaning insight for a discover financial services. And then, you know, I've worked with consumer packaged goods, the education, I mean it's, it's been a wonderful, wonderful career. And what's so great about this is to be able to walk around and see how much data is a part of more people's lives now than it was 20 years ago. I mean, 20 years ago you couldn't have, you know, gotten thousands of people together talking about data analytics. Well, you know, the interesting thing about what you're saying without you, you CPG education, financial services, John and I talk about this a lot, how the data layer is becoming a transport mechanism to connect the dots across different industries and data scientists. >>You guys don't like to get locked into one little industry niche. Do you you'd like to gather data from all types of different sources? Talk about that. Well, that's the thing. Uh, unfortunately, uh, we get bored very easily because, you know, we like to have our fingers in a lot of different pies. But, you know, you wouldn't want to be necessarily siloed with just one kind of information because curiosity makes you think about everything. Education, risk, you know, I'm that way. I have no walls. You know, I can, I can glean insight from any type of data. If you've got a database, uh, we can jump in with both feet. Is data is data and why is the data more transformative today in this day and age, you know, circa 2014 versus say, when you came out of college, why is it that everybody's talking about data that data is able to, to change industries, transform industries. >>What's different? Well, now the, you know, data can actually give you, you know, an insight into your customer mean, you know, what is your customer buying, you know? Um, so when you go to, you know, run a campaign or something like that, you, you're not shooting in the dark. You know, you're actually, you have a face to your customer. So you know, you can make decisions and it's not just marketing, you know, which is what I started out in, you know, trying to do increase and lift, you know, sales. But now you know, you have risk, you have, you know, data breaches. You have, you know, what keeps CEOs up at night, you know, it's not only the cash flow, you know, it's the mitigated risk that's involved. And when you're looking at your, your data and you're collecting this information that gives you a view into what's really going on so you can sleep at night and have a little bit of comfort mostly, >>well not sleeping at night, it's a couple hours of sleep. The notification when I opened CEO's and CIO's, CFO's, chief data officer, you've seen much more formal roles around data where data is real key asset. And this is awesome because it brings to the forefront the role of data. And so I want to get your perspective on this. You brought into the kind of the, kind of the trajectory of where we've come from, um, and talking about the role of software because really what this highlights here at IBM insight is okay, it's not just data per se, you know, how software that's a key part of it. So it's now also an integral part of the platforms. You have a developer angle, you have the data asset, and now you've got this real time in the moment experience. And IBM is talking about engagement a ton here. And so what's your take on all that? I mean it's, it's exciting. Certainly if you're in the data business. >>Well definitely, I mean, real time data, of course it's very expensive. Um, but it's, it's more attainable now than it ever was. Um, the thing is now is you don't necessarily have to be a data scientist to be able to go and get at your data. I mean, thanks to software tools, you know, like IBM, they give you that benchmark, you know, the, these tools, uh, where you can use BI and things like that. To be able to get a view into your business. And you know, it's not just for, you know, your analytical department anymore. Um, so I think it's what it's done is it's actually made it more attainable now. You know, it was like people looked at data wagon back then, Oh, and it was so scary, you know, but now it's, it's bringing it to the forefront to where we can make decisions. We can want our bitter, our business better. And like I joined forces with a repo software years ago to look at the supply chain. Now when you talk about that, that's what keeps the lights on. But you're only as strong as your weakest link. So when you're working with third parties, you have to make sure that everything is going smoothly. So >>I want to get your take on a couple of things in. He chose SA was on earlier and she's an awesome guest. She's been on many times. She's dynamic and articulate and super smart, brilliant and beautiful. We love talking with her. She said, I asked her what are the top three customer issues? And kind of a double edged question. She said three things, customer experience, operational assets, AKA the supply chain, and then risk security and governance. And then we weaved in context computing and then cognitive. So let's break that down. So customer experience, internet of things is a data play, you know, probes and sensors and machines certainly get that >>analogies. People are things. Yeah, well you know, here's the thing that you think about. Data. Data is a person that record that you have in that database equates to a real live person and you want to, you know, you're not going to be friends with your, your customers, but you want to know more about them so that you can serve them better. Um, you know, for me the biggest thing is, you know, people will go out and spend millions of dollars on a database but not necessarily know what to do with it. So it comes down to what question are you trying to answer? >>Yeah. And the infrastructure piece is interesting because you want to have that agile flexibility, which is kind of a buzz word amongst vendors. Hey, be flexible. But there is meaning behind it. Right. So context computing is relationships across entities. The streaming stuff is very, very interesting to me because now you have streaming data coming off of devices and again brings up the real time piece. So making sense of all this means it puts it in the forefront. >>And what you can do with that data is if you do have a client or a customer and you let them link in socially, like log in through Twitter or LinkedIn or Google, Facebook, now you can append that social data. So now you, you've got an ideal, you know sediment and you know when you're positive you it's first party data. Yeah, exactly. The Holy grail of active data is first party data. Exactly. >>Cause we'd love the crowd chatting and love people. The logging in and, and thanks for, by the way, for hosting the crowd chat with Brian the other day. It was really fantastic conversation. My pleasure. Let's talk about cognitive because this brings a human element of it. And one of the things we've been teasing out of the past couple of shows we've been at around big data is the role of the developer where the developers in the old days from even going back to the mainframe days, cold ball, they were adding in these rooms, almost like almost an image of coders in the back room coding away. But now with the customer experience front and center with mobile infrastructure, the developers are getting closer to the customer experience. And so you're seeing more creativity on the developers side with the use of data. Could you share just observation, anecdotes, things you've been involved in that can tease out where this is going and how people should be thinking about it? >>Oh, do you know 20 years ago if he tried to show someone and graft with, you know, 16 different things at one time going on, they were like, that's messy. Now you can actually find the sweet spot or where everything interacts. So you know, when you're talking to an artist, a digital artist who's working with data and giving that picture, that's exciting for me. And going back when we were talking about cognitive computing, when you're talking about the Watson on ecology, that's exciting. Yeah, that's the highlight of it's almost magic. It's almost like black magic, this Watson stuff and people are really just now getting their arms around that and that is essentially making sense of the data, but that's the thing. See, it's no longer magic now. That's what they thought 20 years ago. Poof. People like me, they kept in a little closet, you know, and then our office and they only came to Moses when they needed something. >>Now we're an integral part and we actually are in the business development meetings and we're a liaison between the it department and the C suite. One of the, one of the things that it's interesting about your role as not only you out in the field doing some great work, you're also an influencer here at the IBM influencer program, so I want to get your take on this balance between organic data and kind of structural data. Organic data means free forming unstructured data and then existing data that comes in that's rigid and structured because of business processes. And I get that is data warehousing business has been around for years, right? It's intelligence, it's all fenced in, all structured. But now you have this new inbound data sources coming in, being ingested by these large systems, data changes the data. So you now have a new dynamic where latency, real time insights, these are the new verbs, right? >>So talk about that role, the balance being organic data and the structure data and what the opportunities are. Well, the wonderful thing about, you know, now that unstructured data was scary way back in the day. So now it's not so scary, you know, now we can actually take this data and make business decisions, but uh, you know, like social data and things like that. When you can add that in a pin that and get to, you know, what we all want is a better view of our customer and to be able to, you know, do better business with them. Like, um, like supply chain management and things like that. I mean you're, you're looking at open people, you know, collecting information from varying sources and this all has to be put together. So I think they mentioned earlier this morning how 80% of it is we're data janitors cleaning up this, that and the other. >>Whereas what we really want to do is, you know, glean the insight from it. But I think, uh, the tools these days are making that much more easier no matter what the source is that we can actually put it all together, what we used to call the merge Burj back in the old days. It takes weeks to do the merge purge and yeah, who all here knows what a DLT is trying to solve this problem for a while with traditional technology 17 years. So let's talk about, you know, the, the promise of BI and the traditional data warehouse 360 degree view of my customer, real time information. And that's what it's about. It's about drilling down predictive analytics, all these promises. Did the data warehouse live up to those promises in your view? Well, initially, maybe not, but you know, things are, it just seems in the last few years that people have had an epiphany of how this is really adding value to their company. >>Now back in the old days, they all knew that, you know, insight is wonderful, but now you can see it visibly showing signs actually making a difference in company so they can keep an eye on everything that's going on. Now, going back to what keeps CFOs, you know, up at night with the risk and stuff, there's still always the risk, but at least now you can get a little better handle on it. And thanks to the age of technology and the data that we have accessible to us today and the tools we have available to us today. It's, it's made a dramatic change. What are the technology catalyst? Is it do? Is it no sequel? Is it, what are the, what are the tools that are sort of the foundation of that change? Well, I think always the, you know, the new tools and making it so that you don't have to go out and learn SQL. >>You don't have to be a programmer, you don't have to, you know, go to college for four years and learn mathematics and engineering to actually be able to work with this data. So thanks to, you know, tools like had it been other tools. I mean you can really sit down and glean insight without having to write one single line of code. So the things we're getting some questions in the crowd chats, um, um, at furry, at data nerd, what are the key things that are messy, scary right now for CEOs and CFOs? So things are becoming less scary. What is the scary things right now? Oh, the scary thing is the breaches. You know, when you hear about target and these big names, you know, people getting access to your, your credit card data. That's, that's scary. So, you know, we've got to really try to lock down that risk, you know, and I know everybody's scrambling scratching their head, figuring out how we're going to keep these breaches from happening again. >>Yeah. Big data solves that. I mean you have big data technology, which is a combination of machine learning, streaming where you're getting massive surges of data coming in to these ingest systems where you can apply some reasoning to it, some cognitive, some insights to look for the patterns and that's where machine learning shines. Um, how do you see that aspect of machine learning and these new tools affecting that kind of analysis? Will I see it opening up a lot of different doors for a lot of different people and making a difference because, uh, you know, everybody knows that data is important, but not a lot of people know how to deal with it, especially when it gets into the zettabytes of data. When you have tools, you know, like the IBM tools that can handle this type of load and be able to, to give you, you know, instantaneous information. >>And, and like what we saw this morning where, uh, like risk, I mean an oil and gas industry, you know, you, you have to worry about, you know, as someone going to get injured on the job and they showed the the center, whereas she walked toward it, it went off. I mean the internet of things, being able to let us know in real time if there's a danger, you know, to personal life or to your database and then predictive to be able to say, well this is what we think is going to happen in the future and to be able to move and act on that. It's a very exciting time. You mentioned IBM, so obviously is a leader in here, >>Jeff Kelly's report shows IBM is the number one big data player. But big part of that is IBM. So big, right? >>Well and you guys were around a long, you've been around a long time. You guys were playing with big data way back before. Big data was big data. So yeah, we guys, us guys, yeah, well social, social data, >>those guys, right? So we're not all right, but so, but, but so you bring up IBM, a lot of people have a perception IBM big, hard to work with, but you're, >>but that's changing. So talk about that change. What I'm excited about is the Watson's analytics. I mean that in itself right there and made me sit up and, you know, get excited about the data world all over again. You know, to be able to excite you about Watson analytics platform? Well, I really like, uh, the, uh, the oncology, uh, Watson, um, they had the, the one for the, uh, not necessarily for the police, but for the, uh, the crimes. I mean, in real time, if you can see that a crime is about to happen and you can prevent it, or if you see someone's health is failing and you're able to step in. And that's why over there, earlier I was talking about IBM cognitive abilities can save lives, you know, so I mean, my, my mom passed away from cancer, so, you know, the, the, um, oncology Watson was very exciting to me, but it's gonna make a difference. And I think the thing is now is that how it's changed is to make them user friendly where you don't have to have a data scientist or an analyst to come in. You know, they talk about how expensive data scientists are. Now the reason I opened my business was to make it affordable to small businesses, you know, so although you know, people look at IBM and think it's scary, I think they're going to see now that the, the direction that they're moving is becoming more user friendly and more available. >>So Carla, I wonder if you could talk about how you engage with clients. So you mentioned small business, right? Cause you have a lot of, a lot of businesses, small midsize companies don't have the resources. Right? Um, so where did they start? Did they start with a call to you and, >>well, uh, most of the time it's a call where, you know, we spent all this money on this database and we still can't get what we want out of it. So it comes down to what question are you trying to answer? I think that's the most important thing because that directly deals with what data that you need. And if you don't have it internally, can we get it externally? You know, can we go through open source, can we get census data? Can we get, you know, work with hospitals and doctors and things like that and use this to be able to feed this information into them to make a difference. >>So what do you do? I mean, are you so CEO calls up small companies, is that got all this data? It's unstructured. I get some social data. I get my customer data trying to make sense out of. I'm trying to figure out, you know, who's >>ready to buy, where I should be, you know, focus my products. Uh, and I got all this, this, this date. I don't know what to do with it, but I know there's some gold in there. I know there's a signal in that data mining, right? So how do I get it? How can you help me? Well, it's gap analysis. First off, I would come in and I would sit down and first of all, I need to see what variables you're collecting. Uh, if you're telling me you you're collecting your name, address and phone number, but you want to do a predictive model, we can't get that. So, um, you know, the question that you want to answer is, is most important? Are you wanting to increase your sales? Are you wanting to get your, to know your customers better, to be able to service them better? >>Like in the healthcare industry, you know, you really want to know what's going on health wise, you know, so, uh, I sat down with them when we do a gap analysis, what are you missing? What do you have? How can we get it? What do you want? Where are you at? Yeah. And here's, here's what you have, here's what you're missing. How do we get at that? And that's oftentimes starts with data sources. Exactly. So then you go get the data sources and then more than what you do, well then we merge it back in. And here's the thing, you have to have that way to connect them. You know, the relational databases will always exist to where you have, you know, client information here and you've got other information over here and you have to always bring that back together. So, um, you know, it's a wonderful time. >>You're a data hacker in a sense, right? Is that fair data nerd in a complimentary way? I mean hacking is about exploration. Yeah, exactly right. So I mean, so you have the skillsets as a data scientist to pull all this data together, analyze it and well, you're going to bring in an external source and then when you bring it externally, you want to make sure that you can match it back up. And now that's the important and without a unique quantify or how do you do that? And that's why when you see databases with all these little arrows and everything pointing to where things belong, I mean we have to be able to pull that in to make decisions. >>Yeah. We were talking with frons yesterday to another influencer. We were talking about this particular point. He was ex P and G back in the day, which is very data-driven. Of course, they're well known for their brand work and certainly on the advertising side, but they're, they're quant jocks over there. They love data. Their data nerds over there, they're kicking out on data. And he used to say that the software would cut off data points that were skewing way outside the median. And so they would essentially throw away what are now exploratory points. So this kind of brings up this long tail distribution concept where, okay, you can get the meat of what you want in the head of the tail and distribution, but out into the long tail is all these skew data points that were once skew standard off the standard deviation that are now doorway. So, you know, we're old enough to know that that movie with Jodie foster with contact where they, they find that little white space, they open it up and there's a, a huge puzzle. That's the kind of things that's happening right now. So exactly >>the same thing. Well, yes, yes. I mean, you know, the thing is, uh, you know, a lot of people don't necessarily have the information that they need. So they're seeking it, you know, when they're going to what Avenue, where, where do I go to get this data? You know, and thanks to open source and things like that. You, you know, we've been able to get more information and bring it together than we've ever been able to do before. And I think people now are more open to analysis where it's not necessarily a dirty word. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to go out and spend $300,000 a year to hire a data scientist. You can sit down, you know, and look at what you have and uh, someone else mentioned that. Take the people that you have that know what's going on with your company. You know, they may not be data scientists, they may not be analytical, but they have insights they have. >>There's more of a cultural issue now around playing with data and an experimental sandbox way where you don't need to have the upfront prove the case. And then pre prefabricated systems you can say, I'm going to do some stuff in jest, for instance, bringing in data sources and play with the data. >>Well, and you mentioned, you know, outliners I mean everything when, when you look graphically at data, you expect everything to fall within this little bubble, this, you know, this thing. But when you see, you know, all these outliners going on for me, usually that means a mistake. Okay. So, and if it's not a mistake, it's something that calls attention. So it's definitely not something you just want to toss aside >>talking about creativity because creativity now becomes, you know, uh, uh, an aspect of the job where you gotta be creative, where it's not just being the math geek or being super analytical and you have to kind of think outside the box or outside the query, if you will, to do the exploration. What's the role of creativity in the new model? >>Well before, I think that we always thought of ourself as just being, you know, matter of fact, you know, just the facts please, you know, but now, you know, you can look at things visually and see, you know, and it is an art form to be able to find that sweet spot in the data. And um, you know, before, you know, years and years and years ago when you would take something like that to a CEO, he would say it was messy, you know, so now you get that creative side where you can actually make things visually attractive. And I think that's important to people too because it's not just data, it's the way you present it. >>It's also the mindset of understanding MSCI is a good start, start with messy and then versus getting the perfect answer. As we were saying, using it with pop-up Jana earlier about, don't try it at the home run right away. Hit a few singles. He's in the baseball metaphor given the world series going on. So totally awesome. Um, but I want to get your final thoughts as we wrap up the segment here on the practitioners out there. What's, what should they do? So there's an approach to the job now, right? So there is a shift and inflection point happening at the same time. What advice would you give to folks out there who say, Oh, I love Carla's interview. I want to do that. I just don't know where to start, what to do. How do I convince management I want to be, I want to get going. What do you, what would you share for advice? >>Well, I'm sure it's the platform. I mean, you know, think about the foundation of a house. Now if you have a strong data foundation, you can build on that. It's just like your house. If you have a weak foundation, your house is going to tumble down. So if you have a strong, you have a strong foundation or with your data and everything is built right now. When I say built right means, what are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish? You know, if it's risk, then you need to be, you know, looking at those, those factors. You know, how many people have been hurt? How many of you people been injured? You know, how many people died? You know, I mean, how many breaches do we have? You know, so it starts with the question, what is it that you're trying to accomplish? And then you go from there and collect the right variables. So don't wait, you know, a year later and call a data scientist and going, I've spent, you know, millions of dollars on this. I'm still not getting what I want. So think about an initially in the setup and you know, be involved, involved your analyst, involve your data scientists, make sure that they're in your business meetings because we're the liaisons between it and the Csuite. >>Yeah, and that's the key roles team as a team, that person really is collaborative. We heard from a med earlier pair programming pair, not pay eggs in an accent, pair programming, work in pairs, buddy system. This is really a true team effort. >>Well, I always said, you know, I am a team of data. Scientists can write programs, we can glean insight, but the team part has to come from working with it and working with your C suite. So very much agree. It's definitely a team sport. >>Carla Gentry, owner and data science analytical solutions influencer here at the IBM special presentation and second experience, second screen here in the social media lounge. Really doing a real innovative social business. Again, activated audience, you're an influencer, but also you're really a subject matter expert. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate and thanks for hosting the crowd. Chat with Brian Fonzo is really good content now. This is the cube. We are live here in Las Vegas. Extracting the ceiling from the noise, getting the data and sharing it with you. I'm John Frey with Dave a lot there. We'll be right back after this short break.

>>Okay. We're back here inside the cube, our flagship program about the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is strata conference. O'Reilly media is a big data event. We're talking about Hadoop analytics, data platforms, and big is come into the enterprise from the front door. As we heard them yesterday. I'm John Frey with Dave Volante, wiki.org. And we're here with Jack Norris, our cube alumni, and a favorite guest here. You're a in charge executive at map. Our, you guys are leading the charge with this use of a dupe. Welcome back to the cube. Thank you. Okay, so what's, let's chat about what's going on. What's your take on all the big news out here for the distributions. I'll the big power moose. You guys have a relationship with EMC. Okay. Exclusive relationship with those guys. Intel's got a distribution Horton versus with Microsoft, a lot of things going on. So this is your wheelhouse. So what's your take on the Hadoop action here? >>Well, I think there's an article in Forbes where I think they, they said it best. This is showing that map bars had the right strategy all along. And what we're seeing is, is basically there's a fairly low bar to taking a patchy Hadoop and providing a distribution. And so we're seeing a lot of new entrance in the market and there's, there's a lot of options. If you want to try Hadoop and experiment and get started. And then there's production class Hadoop, which includes enterprise data protection, snapshots mirrors, ability to integrate. And that's basically map R so start and test and dev with, with a lot of options and then move into production, class >>Mapbox. So break it down for the folks out there who are tipping the toe in the water and hearing all the noise. Cause it's right now, the noise level is very high, right? With the, with the recent announcements. But you guys have been doing business obviously for many years in this area. So when people say, Hey, I want to get a Hadoop distribution with enterprise. What, what should they be looking for? Okay. Because it's not that easy to kind of swing through the noise. So could you share with the folks out there, what, what to look for in like the, the table stakes, the check boxes? Cause there's a lot of claims. There's a lot of noise is this. And that is a lot of different options. Some teams have more committers or no committers than others, so that's all noise, but let's what are the key things that customers need to know? So I think there's, miling, >>There's three areas. All right. One is kind of how it integrates into your enterprise. And with Hadoop, you have the Hadoop distributed file system API. That's how you interact. Well, if you're able to also use standard tools that can use standard file and database access, it makes it much, much easier. So map ours unique and supporting NFS and making that happen. That's a, that's a big difference. The second is on dependability and there's high availability capabilities and then there's data protection. So I'll focus on snapshots as an example, you've got data replicated and Hindu. That's great. But if you have a user error, an application error, that's replicated just as quickly. So having the ability to recover and double-edged in time. Yeah. So if I can say, Hey, I made a mistake. Can I go back two minutes earlier with snapshots that makes it possible map ours, unique and snapshot support. And then finally, there's there's disaster recovery mirroring where you can go across clusters, mirror, what's going on across the land and being able to recover in the case of a disaster where you lose a whole cluster or use a whole >>Section and that's not available in >>Other, those aren't available either. That's >>NFS, >>Snapshots has been on the JIRA list for over five years. >>Yeah. Okay. So I wonder >>If I could find that and then there's third. Cause I said three and almost said two, the third is performance and scale and, but >>That'd be for >>Integration, dependability and speed. >>Okay. So dependability Jr's part of the VR snapshots. MDR. Okay. So let's talk about the performance because you guys had asked a Google's a big partner of you guys. So we should, we just had them on the cube strata. So you have to have a record setting. Do you have a record setting? EMC take that. Well, you work with DMC. So let me talk about the performance real quick. Then we'll talk about some of the EMC conversations, but performance, you have a variety of diverse performance benchmarks, Google you have within the enterprise. Can you talk about those? >>So, so what we announced this week was the minute sort world record. So minutes or runs across technologies is just, how can you, you know, how much data can you sort in 60 seconds? And if you look back at, at the previous record that was done in the labs with Microsoft with special purpose software, and they did 1.4 terabytes Hadoop hasn't been used since 2009, it's been several years because it's got features in there that work against performance. Things like checkpointing and logging because it assumes you've got long running MapReduce jobs. So we set the record with our distribution of Hadoop. So we have kind of one hand tied behind our back, given that technology. Secondly, we sent it in the cloud, which is the other hand tied behind our back because it's a, it's a virtualized environment. So we set the record with just with your legs And a 1.5 terabytes in 60 seconds. Very proud of that. >>Well, that's interesting because we've been doing a lot of labs testing, Dave and I and our teams on cost. Right. So, yeah. And it's an interesting benchmark because you always don't look at the nuance, the cost to compare a cloud performance versus bare metal. Most people don't factor into setup, cost of deployment. Exactly. So can you just quickly talk about that and how significant of an order of magnitude of your customer? >>So the, the previous Hadoop record took 3,400 servers about 27,000 cores, 13, 13,000, almost 14,000 discs and did 600 gigs, actually a little less than that at 5 78. And on Google, we did it with 2020 100 virtual instances, 8,000 cores did 1.5 terabytes >>And costs. You spin up the Google versus >>Basically if you look at that and you assume conservatively 4,000 per server, it's $13.8 million worth of hardware previously. And the cost to do that run on Google was $20 and 33 cents. >>Well, you got to discount. I mean, come on a partner mean it really costs that much. I mean, they that's what they would charge for it. Actually >>We are map artist's case on that minute. If you look at the Asheville charges to be 1200, >>Okay. It's not six millions, so millions to thousands. Yep. Okay. That's impressive. We'll have to go look at the numbers. Like we're going to look at GreenPlum's numbers in the next couple of weeks when talking about the Google relationship and men were that the up way with that was that >>Very excited about it. We're actually deployed throughout the cloud. We've got multiple partners Google's in limited preview. So we've got a number of customers kind of, you know, testing that and, and doing some really interesting things. >>So we monitor the data center market. I'll see with our proprietary tool that you know about the viewfinder and crowd spots and thing is that the data center verticals interesting, right? If you look at the sentiment analysis of what the conversation is on, on just the Twitter data, it's Facebook, apple, these companies. And when we dig into the numbers, it's not so much the companies, it's the fact that their data center operations are significantly being looked at as the leading indicator for where CEO's are going. So I want to ask you in your conversations with your customers, what are the conversations around moving to the cloud and where are they on that transition? Because we hear, yeah, one of the cloud for all the benefits you were mentioning, but Google and Facebook, these are the gold standards as, as architecture necessarily a cut and paste architecture, but they see the benefits that they're doing. So what are your conversations with your enterprise customers around the cloud cloud architecture and what other features besides replication and disaster recovery, are they, are they looking at >>Well, it's basically work, workload driven and dataset driven. So data that's already in the cloud are kind of a natural first step is, well, why don't I do the analysis there as well? So things like Google earth and digital advertising data, that's real interesting candidates for that also periodic workload. So if they have workloads that need to spin up and spin down, the, the cloud works, works really well for that. And in some cases it's driven by their own environments. They've got data centers that are approaching capacity and they need to kind of do offloads and then looking at the, at the cloud because it's easy to get up running quickly and uses an alternative. >>I want to do come back to one of your three sort of value props here, particularly the dependability piece and specifically the snapshot. So somebody asked me one time, how do you know a couple of years ago, how do you back up a petabyte as he could do this thing? And then his answer was, well, you don't know. So I want to, I want to ask you how your customers are protecting and, and, and, and what you guys are bringing to the table. >>So snapshots is not a bolt on feature. It's basically a low level feature based on the underlying data architecture. So when we architected that from the beginning, snapshots was, was a, was a core feature. And if you use a technique called redirect on, right, you're not copying the data, right? So you can do efficient, you can do a petabyte snapshot, you know, basically almost instantaneously because you're tracking the pointers of the latest blocks that have been written. So if, if the data change rate is, is basically, data's not changing, you can snapshot every minute and not have any additional storage overhead. >>Right. Okay. And, and so you can set that. So you, you map, map, our technologies will allow them to set that, dial that up, dial it down and switches. >>So we support logical volumes. So you can set policies at that volume and you can say, well, this volume is critical data. And then I can set policies. Well, critical data is every minute. And then I can change what the definition of critical data is. Maybe it's every five minutes, et cetera. So you can set up these different policies at volumes and have snapshots happen independently for each. >>Can you do that by workload or dataset or by application or whatever I get essentially provided as a service, as opposed to kind of a one size fits all approach. >>Exactly. And that, that also corresponds to user access, administrative privileges, you know, other features and policies within the, within the cluster. >>How about the, you know, this whole trend toward bringing SQL into, into Hadoop. What's, what's your take on that? And what's your angle? >>So interactive, SQL's an important aspect because you've got so many people trained in the organization and, and leverage, you know, sequel, but it's one of many use cases that needs to run across a big data platform. So there's a range of big data analytics, batch analytics, interactive capabilities with sequel, database operations, no sequel search streaming, all those are kind of functions that need to run across a platform. So it's a piece, but it's not the big driver, because what we've seen is that there's higher rival rate of machine generated data and machine generated response to respond to those for digital advertising, for recommendation engines for fraud detection can really move the needle for an organization, have huge swings and profitability >>And the ball down the field big time. Yeah. And >>Having an interactive piece with a kind of a human element involved, it doesn't really scale and work on a 24 by seven basis. >>Jack final question, we're over now by a minute. But when I ask a one party question, obviously, very competitive landscape right now in terms of competitiveness, the stakes are higher because the demand in the market market opportunities is massive. What's map ours business strategy going forward, no change in direction. Is it going to be same old, same old. You guys have any new things going down and you see the marketplace. >>We've got a huge lead when it comes to kind of mission critical enterprise grade features. And our focus is one platform. So the ability to support enterprise Hadoop, enterprise HBase and provide those full capabilities for ease of use for dependability, for performance. And, you know, we've seen a lot of companies test on one distribution and switch to map are and will continue to help that in the future. >>Well, we, we will, we will say we've been covering this big data space now going on four years now, Dave and I, and we've watched all the players pivot a few times. You guys have not, you guys have been true to your mission from day one and that we know where you stand. No one, everyone knows where you stand enterprise grade. It's a good strategy. I think everyone's putting that on their label now. So enterprise grade Washington, we call it a congratulations map art and said the cube. We'll be right back with our next guest here on day three wall-to-wall coverage at O'Reilly media. When do our news, our next from 12 to one, we'll be right back after this short break.