>>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)

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering Adobe summit 2019 brought to you by Adobe welcome back everyone live cube coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe summit 2019 I'm John fry with Jeff Frick two days of wall-to-wall coverage our next guest is Josh Van Tonder group product marketing manager to Dobby thanks for joining us thanks pleasure you're managing the marketing of the products of experienced manager within the platform great event here really the keynote we have agreed a good view good review this morning it's a great platform a lot of elements to it journey it's the Holy Grail that's super interesting and I mean I think you can see the Holy Grail you know it's it's just great actually hearing from the customers right I think it comes to life when you hear the stories they're telling kind of the solutions they're bringing a market on top of it it's it's it's very exhilarating for the product teams to see it all in action and coming to life through the customers you know we cover hundreds of events a year we hear all the stories everyone talks about innovation it's really happening here is gadot bees transform to cloud years ago so now you start to see Marketo Magento coming through the mix full platform architecture open API is open data this is the beginning of a sea change we started to seeing customers having the end-to-end experience where each functional element can do its job and connect with the data this is progressive that's great stuff it's great stuff so so where where are we what's going on with the product what's what's going on how our customers dealing with this because you got Best Buy up there forty million emails personalized yep personalization at scale yep I mean I think the the crux of what's going on is I think a lot of the organizations I mean essentially the name of the game is delivering personalized experiences right I mean how do you how do you get someone to have that moment that moment of truth where they they get to see and interact with the brand in a way that's relevant to that right I mean I think we all we all respond that way I think you know even statistics show that our own statistics show that so we've done some surveys of other consumers um it's 51 percent say I'm much more likely to buy something from a if it's personalized and 49 1% are gonna say look I'm gonna be more loyal to you because it is relevant to me which makes sense I think you and I would probably agree that if it's it's the nail on the head I want to bring up a point that the in the keynote the CEO said he said people don't buy products they buy experiences okay and this is now kind of become the the kind of the mission of all companies just seeing a big frame with direct-to-consumer yeah in all verticals not just B to B to C directly consumer so now companies can go direct to the consumer so how does that change like the ite equation because the old days were you know Bill stack and rack servers load some soft yeah sell it to a customer but now you're dealing with a user experience model that's everywhere yeah that's an interesting basis I mean a the crux of the issue is under the underneath that is it takes contents and data together to kind of deliver the great experience and at the end of the day IT is front and center as the enabler strategically for how that gets delivered I think what we've been seeing is they're they're sort of I would say four key pillars elements that that they've been using to turn their portfolio to be a strategic advantage so one is how do you manage omni-channel right I mean I guess it's getting further with your message so it's if that's essentially an omni-channel thing the other is being faster about getting to market with that message so you know maybe how does cloud play into that how does how do you enable the marketing teams and then I think the last thing and this is this is one that's been a hot topic is where does where does AI simultaneously help drive that better experience so I think those are sort of the pieces we're seeing coming into play from an IT standpoint where they they have a lot of a lot of influence to advance the overall business mission you know Jeff and I were talking about our intro about how the cloud has really in changed the game with Adobe and the customer base you know the old cloud conversation around DevOps and around the building applications work waterfall processes are gonna be dismantled by agility process based processes you started to see that now with content and creative yet we're agility and feed and data are now the new thing so a Content developer is kind of like a software developer for software you guys are providing cloud tech capabilities for content developers yeah creative developers that's right kind of metaphor there what's how do you view that how do customers react to that that's interesting I mean I think you you know usually you bring up the one side is cloud agility and the corollary to that it's just overall content velocity if you will right so I think from a cloud standpoint the the model would be you know how do i how do I get to market faster and in more geographies how to get to more geographies how do I you know support rolling out new infrastructure or new products more more quickly on the cloud infrastructure and then how do I deal with growth right how do i ami system if you look at it from the content lens which i think is what you're getting at there's a similar paradigm in terms of this agility so from an IT standpoint how do you enable someone that's on the marketing team to discover their content to reuse it more effectively and then deploy it more effectively and there are many pieces to the ité equation that fundamentally empower if you will let that velocity in terms of being able to manage discover and and frankly optimize that content as you get it out there so it's an interesting thing that I think we've been doing a lot of looking at a lot of product innovation specifically from an Adobe standpoint in terms of actually enabling that that product velocity which I mean the platform out there basically is the architecture for the platform to do that yes elements so this is just a perfect storm that's come together finally in terms of capability because we've talked about 360 view of the customer ad nauseam and and we've talked about omni-channel for many many many years but I think the execution on those was was was certainly lagging behind the vision but is it now because of the integration of the platform is it because the Big Data architectures is it because now you know it's it's it's you're reading real-time data on ingest you're not going back this normal data what is it this now and abling just actually execute on the vision that we've been talking about for years yeah I mean I think there there are multiple pieces kind of coming together that are helping so I think you know as you said I think in some sense what you're getting at is there there were historically many silos of how these things have historically been managed and what we're seeing is is a trend towards centralizing that information because ultimately you can drive more insights by looking at it and it's just you get more velocity for reusing it so you know to look at it from let's just take an example of the V omni-channel so if we look at it purely from delivering content what we as say an IOT device comes to market or you have these more advanced single page apps on the web page or an Alexa right what we saw is a rise of separate systems in some sense to manage those but now we're seeing a trend where gosh if we were to have all that content in one place if we had all the analytics behind that in one place we can more effectively personalize the customer journey across each of those and that's effectively what you're hearing a lot of today is can I have sort of a centralized but hybrid model that supports through api's getting that information to different touch points and then the data engine that will allow the personalization across each of that those touch points and that I think is the fundamentally the part that's unlocking a lot of value and is it the acceptance of the of the AI and and kind of the machine learning that's going to help you do it because you can't you can create 40 million emails with the people right you mean you have to have automation and you have to have some intelligence behind that you just can't do it manually so is that where we finally kind of broken through so that I can send 40 million different emails in one campaign with some intelligence and some logic behind who's got what yeah I think you hit the nail and I had that right I mean I think if personalization is the name of the game and you're interacting on more touch points with more pieces of contents how do you get it right for each audience and so that's where AI is it's just adds tremendous a tremendous velocity and help for businesses to get that right so I think you can think of it almost this pipeline to deliver the experience so on one hand how do you create that experience hey I can play a role how do you manage it internally hey I can play a role in terms of discovering the assets and we're using it delivering it it can play a role and actually getting the right content out there I'll give you some examples of that in a second but and then the final piece is it has you know the actual optimization of that right so to give you some examples what we've seen happening is you can literally use the AI the the data on interactions of how people interacting across your system and actually create interfaces on-the-fly for specific segments of audiences right so instead of say I as a marketer creating that interface you know using web development or tooling why not have the system actually recompose what is being served up you know maybe a certain layout with multiple columns works for some audiences maybe it just needs to be one banner with a certain type of image a I can actually do that for you by looking at the analytics of you know how do you react to certain things versus me and drawing corollaries so there's a lot of police places along that chain where AI is the impact is productivity obviously because you know the right to queries or figure out what's come in that's presented to you that's good that's kind of the impact of the marketer right it's about yeah it's about scaling the market or right I mean I think that's one of the big challenges from a business standpoint is you know your team's never big enough to serve every person every single customer as a marketer so that's where a I essentially unlocks that that scale it gives you a marketing team of thousands where you may only have a team of a hundred or twenty depending on the size of the order to tune that up in terms of a customer I've got an Adobe I'm Adobe customer I go the Adobe cloud experience cloud how do I tune this up I mean is there a way that you guys have figured out that allows them to kind of get it up and running fast without a lot of complexity yeah that's like that's a good question it's I mean that's actually it's really critical because that from a marketing standpoint you know IT can bring to bear a number of different technologies but unless they're easy to adopt you're not gonna go anywhere so I think the trick is almost giving marketers the easy button so I think that's that's where a lot of the magic and AI happens is you pick one specific problem you know in Adobe's case we pick a problem where we know we have a lot of intelligence about creative assets and we have visibility and how those are being used so if we bring those together we can solve specific problems about discovering content or how we deliver that optimally but the wit to answer your specific question it's almost as though we try to give an easy button for the marketer right so I feed you a bunch of say audience segments and then I plug you into my my analytics data press a button and I ideally it's gonna just figure it out for me write it and and then test if it works that's the key thing is once you get in a market test it right and and it can do that for you and I don't think there's enough you know kind of highlight on that where you know those dramatic before to do a/b testing now you can test everything you know at such scale it's such detail into your point you think you know your segments and you can create your own segments but you can actually let the Machine create segments based on actual behavior of people which I guess really is enabled by most you know so many of your interactions now with brands is digital so give you that opportunity to grab a piece of that exhaust do the analytics and get some insight out of it yeah that's exactly right I mean I you know data the scale of data I mean everybody's flooded with data right now but it's really where's the needle in the haystack and I think that's that's where AI plays a crucial role I mean it it can do things like figure out anomalies on on your interactions across a large swath of users right if something something you see in the data is it's statistically normal or not and should I pay attention to it and what should i do from it so AI starts to play a role in that it can even do simple things like we all have mobile phones we all want to watch more video on mobile phones the problem is as a business as a marketing team and and I'm sure even you know you folks have the same situation is the content that you create may not be ready to be consumed appropriately on each device right so if I pick up my mol device has it been optimized properly so you can do things like have a I pick the focal points in a video and crop out the rest and follow the focal point and only show that on the phone so well certainly gonna call you up because we have a lot of video we don't have twenty videos here today so a lot of luck but this is the norm people gonna have more velocity of videos that's that's podcasts yep blog posts so the waterfalls I was getting earlier this waterfall thing is over it's more of an agile environment so I got to ask the customer question is that reality yet grounded in the customer base or is it still early adopters or I guess the question is what's the pattern that you're seeing in customers Bart what makes a good market or what makes a good organization to embrace the kind of change that's on our doorstep right now it's a good that's a good question and it I think it takes two to tango I think there's a an IT elements and a marketing elements and I think we're seeing an evolution and how how the two work together in this new model so from an IT standpoint they are the enabler for example to get content onto multiple multiple different channels from a from our marketers standpoint they ultimately are the ones that define and help articulate the right message and type of content if IT and marketers are working well together the more the the IT team is going to enable that market or T marketing team to essentially iterate quickly in content so there's a whole set of things that can be done to enable the marketing team to be agile and getting that content out there so I think you know the evolution I would say is is in in how the two teams are working so I think your waterfall model and past I'd say it's entirely gone but it has been reframed in a ways exploring it that's a good way to test to see if if IT and CM a CIO and the CMO working together yeah probably aligned to four change right they're not maybe not it's so I mean I'll give you a very specific example so one thing that we've been seeing in our world is so for example on cloud you know there's a lot of things you can do more quickly traditionally there have been some waterfall development models what we've seen is IT now has a DevOps process where they're very fast and rolling out application updates but if you can actually standardize that if you can create a pipeline for Creek getting code onto the onto the different environments if you test it and roll it out faster what that means for marketing and business is the time to market goes down so for example we've actually been baking that into our products can we literally here's a best-in-class pipeline for doing an agile development model it's already pre-built into the the infrastructure to enable IT to kind of go faster on the behalf of so here's a question for you put you on the spot sure in all the stores major shifts is always gaps there's always gaps in new markets or white spaces so there's three areas technology gaps skills gaps and culture gaps yep can you talk about what you see as the key gaps that people are starting to get over on figure out how to fill those gaps because they can become direct walkers if they're not resolved so tech gap skills gap and culture gap so just because we talking tech a lot let's reverse it and talk you know sort of the the team and organization elements I mean you think one thing that we've we've definitely been seeing is is if you will the the alignment of what was traditionally a channel management is now moving more closely into the CDO or CMO arm which I think is a good thing right I think what we see as some of our leading customers is the marketing and and chief digital officer x' have increasingly more alignment and a seat at the table of how the individual channel line of businesses are operating and that's a very good thing because it does help close the loop on the customer journey across those channels which I think it's traditionally been a bit of a dilemma so I would say that's one thing we're seeing much more is that the channels the channel management actually going under directly or more alignment with the marketing arm or something like a CDO so on the org side that's one area and that helps with the velocity right and they're rearranging the org structures to align with how does content me to be shared across these teams do you really own that channel is it is it do we do we have a customer journey that is owned across all channels right and I think that's an important conversation that these companies have been struggling with in our and I've evolved a lot in the last few years and we talked about the tech gap already but skills gap what skills are out there that are needed obviously day the machine learning yeah a big one date the machine learning stuff I mean I think Adobe's fuel horse on the races I think we're trying to democratize some of that so as I said earlier the hope is for the marketing team we we give them a neat easy path to to unlock that there are areas where there's been big growth like so for example the front and frameworks and development for single page applications that's an area from an IT standpoint where we've seen a tremendous growth in that technology set and and how that plays a role with the rest of the infrastructure yeah and and and simply how does that actually align with the traditional tools they've been using for managing their websites I think what we've seen is that they're now skill wise and technology wise actually taking of you that you you still have one centralized platform but ultimately you'll have IT developer resources that plug in to say one central hybrid content management system for example any new personas popping out of this just shift that's going on with cloud and and creativity experience cloud any new roles that are emerging that you see popping out yeah I mean I so I mean one example we've seen and it's it's it's been an evolution but you know for example we've seen the rise of something called journey managers right which just goes back to what I was mentioning earlier which are our people that their business and tack align but they're interested in understanding how does a customer actually move across a specific journey so they're mapped to if you will a task a customer's trying to do and how do i optimize that you know assuming and knowing that you know if Josh is going to try and get some customer support he's not just always going to call the support line he's going to try other things and how do I simplify that for him and taking a very holistic view so I think that's that's one thing we've seen more of and it's it's a you know a great way to approach it fascinating insights Josh thanks for coming on I'll give you the final word I put a plug in for what you're working on experience manager what's new what's happening yeah absolutely so we're I'm part of the experience manager team so we're part of the organization that that helps our brands deliver and manage digital experiences so essentially we're enabling if you will omni channel delivery and management of those experiences and a key thrusts for us are around enabling IT to get content effectively across channels and also experience intelligence how do we how do we deliver AI and machine learning innovation to make the marketers job easier for getting personalized experiences to market and enabling IT to support them more efficiently so there's a number of innovations and exciting things that we're very excited about it someone for the congratulations Josh van Tonder group product marketing manager at adobe experience manager his product breaking down what's going on here at Adobe summit and in the industry I'm Jennifer Jeff rick stay with us for more coverage here at adobe summit after this short break