The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi, everybody went back live at the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center. Dave Ante with David Nicholson. UI. Paths forward five. This is the fourth forward conference that the Cube has done. So we've seen the ascendancy of UI path, the growth customers. UiPath is one of the first companies to actually come back Post Covid. Last year, 2021 at the Bellagio. They took a chance and it actually worked out great at a couple thousand people there. Lots of customers. We're here with Lauren Joyce, who's the global automation lead at Whirlpool. She's joined by Regener Facade rp, who is the global automation lead at Accenture. Good to see you again. Lauren. Welcome to the Cube first timer. Very much, >>Yes, thank >>You. So you're relatively new to automation, but you, as we were talking, you're a process with talk about the center of excellence that you're building out. What's the importance of that to Whirlpool? >>Absolutely. So we are first looking at automation from our finance organization and they were coming to us with, Hey, here are 12 things we wanna automate. And really what we are finding is that not all of these things were suitable for automation. So we've started on the COE journey of, well, how do we make sure that we're getting the most ROI for our business? Starting with discovery, making sure that what we're automating it makes sense, it's the right process versus just an upgrade or, or retooling set. So for us, especially being a global company, making sure that we had that governance in place, that mindset and what should be automated and when really made sense and helped us on our journey pursuing. >>And, and, and I presume that's where Accenture comes in. I mean, rp, you got deep industry expertise, you've got automation expertise. What role do you play in that prioritization exercise? >>So the, the way we approach any automation implementation is similar to what we did here in our pool. First step is, you know, I call it as knowing where you are in the automation journey. Like what always is, if you don't know where you are on a map, a map won't help you. So baselining the current automation maturity and the current journey where they are. And once you do that, you identify you are not star and prioritization and the goals that are required and then you build a plan. And exactly how we approach in establishing a center of excellence that drives the automation with rigor, knowing where you are and where you want to get to, >>What's the team look like in a, in a, who's on the bus, You know, who's who's, who's in in the circle if you will. How do you com you know, build, you've written about this, it's like a sports team. You put it together, you need be a quarterback, you need a lineman, you need, you know, wide receivers who's on the center of excellence team. >>So the way you always build the center of excellence is making sure that your business partners and the senior leadership team is committed to the entire automation journey. That's the key ingredient for success. Then you build, one of the critical aspect is the talent, the quarterback, you said the talent. In today's world, automation talent is just not about knowing, you know, RPA techniques or you know, process optimization, but it is an end to end technology stack starting from cloud to data to analytics and entire platform capabilities of automation that combined and coupled with change management and how do you drive an enterprise chain management is very, very critical in terms of implementing automation. >>Absolutely. Lauren, I'm curious, did, did Accenture bring UI path to Whirlpool or did you bring, or did you bring Accenture in and UI path in together? How, how did that interaction? >>Yes. So we brought Accenture in and they really helped us along with that journey and they brought UI path to us. Our European business was actually using Blue Prism and that's when we said no, we wanna standardize specifically on UI path and make sure from a global standpoint we're using the same tooling. And that really helped that as we were building our team, we leaned on their expertise and then even we're retooling people within our corporation of, hey, we took our SAP lead, our GCP lead to be our technical architect and and people that could help speak the language and translate from process and explain that doesn't have to be a large project and explain what automation is to help drive return investment for sure. >>Now you're early in, but have you seen results, you know so far? Can you talk about that, quantify it in any way or? >>Absolutely. So we started our journey December of 2020. We've automated about 60 or so bots, but really everything that we've done is based on hours saved. So we're at about 60,000 hours automated and with some of our biggest, like our big box stores and our KitchenAid small appliances, we've even had hard dollar savings that we had a bot that went live about in 60 days. We had a $3 million return and take took out 3000 hours of human interaction. That was great for us. >>So the world's kind of a mess right now. You got supply chain issues, you got inflation, you got a recession, you got the United States. Anyway, you got the Fed trying to figure out, oh there's sling shoting, you know, some people are, you know, really hurting stock market is starting to show that there's a lot of confusion out there. The world is changed quite a bit obviously the last few years. How do you guys see it? What role has, I wonder if both of you could answer, what role has automation played in helping like, for instance, Whirlpool with maybe supply chain problems or maybe bigger forecasting and, and what are you seeing across organizations? But Lauren if you could start. >>Absolutely. So for us being able to show improvement in a six to eight week development cycle and instead of saying here's a heavy dollar investment or a new tooling that you gotta get people resources up to speed on, we can take where we are today, automate save hours where we're getting our employee engagement scores of I'm overworked, I have too much on my plate, how can you help me? And automation is there to support and that's really helped our business one take unnecessary work off their plate and show very quick value add to the business without having to have huge dollar investments in our, I'm you trying to save money. >>Are people, what are you seeing in terms of, so some of the problems that people I see as sign out here said, oh, in inflation at five to 7% go after productivity and make it in 20% gains. I mean, what are you seeing in the field? >>More than ever, More than ever, automation is more relevant now given the current economy environment that we are operating. Because automation always free up or optimizers the capacity that every enterprise has. Optimizing capacity is very important so that you can take your talented employees and the talented resources to do more strategic transformation program, which helps to sustain and stay and scale in your business. So I see that automation playing a significant role to impact business imperative. >>What are some of the common misconceptions? I mean we talk a lot about people's fear of automation. You know, I don't think that's necessarily a misconception. I think a lot of times people are fearful about automating though. Maybe they, they shouldn't be. We had Dentsu on today, DS like, you know, this giant global branding firm and they get a lot of young kids, they're like, No, bring it on. I don't want to do all this mundane stuff. But you know, a lot of folks are are are concerned, but, so that maybe is one misconception. Are there others, Lauren, that you found that you can share? >>I think we were lucky that we didn't necessarily have that fear of being replaced by automation. I think our change management plan really helped drive that. We included some fun things of any time a bot went live you got almost like a birth certificate of here's the process we save for you, here's how it's grown over six, six months, 12 months, 18 months. But I'm not sure if we had any other major gaps like that or or pitfalls >>Or, or p anything that, >>So my philosophy is automation is human plus machine combination. You can't run just, you know, people can't think that, you know, if my task get automated, I lose the, I lose my my jobs. That's not how it works because you, you do need human expertise, competency skills to kind of argument what you do with automation. And most important thing when you do this change is that most of the enterprises do not believe, do not understand that you have to get even process, right? You don't want to, you know, have an inefficient process and put automation on the top of it. Then you just made your inefficiency run more faster. So you need to kind of make sure that you address inefficiency, optimize your process, then infuse automation, then have human plus machine capability to strengthen your automation. >>Is it really that easy? Sounds easy, right? It, >>So from an, from an Accenture perspective, if you're, if you're looking at the market as a whole or looking at industry verticals, what's the difference between an organization that is leveraging automation and an organization that is not leveraging organ leveraging automation? Is there, is there sort of a range of percentage of efficiency that you can put on that? What does it mean for their bottom line? >>Essent, you must have data on this. Yeah, I mean what, >>Yeah, >>Today, today's world in the technology world, every organization understands the importance of automation that's given. That's a table stake. Now, where an organization is in the journey differs some of the enterprises maybe at the beginning of the maturity spectrum. In my book I talk about automation maturity framework wherein there are the initial stages of automation. Some of them are intelligent automation at the end of the spectrum where they're using data cloud and AI to drive the automation journey. But in every enterprise, the key success of automation depends upon whether you do automation and enterprisewide not in a silo in the organization, but if you do enterprise wide apply across, you get a lot more benefits, lot more efficiency to drive. >>Does does automation being more strategic or key? Does it, does it in a way make investments in automation more, more scrutinized or more circumspect? I, I would, I would use the term discretionary. We heard Bobby Patrick today say this is not discretionary, it's strategic to me. If it's strategic it might be a mandate but it's might be something I can kick down the road. What are you seeing there in the field just in terms of overall demand and sentiment? >>Automation today, as I said, is a table stake. When it becomes an integrated DNA of enterprise, it is always, you know, whether you want to call one pillar of strategy, key DNA of your strategic roadmap you are in investments have to be directly proportional to what you want to accomplish as your business KPIs to thrive and deliver your business with. Otherwise, if you do it as like a one off thing, you know you won't get the benefit. Yeah. >>Or from your standpoint, where do you want to take the automation initiative inside a whirlpool? How are you thinking about scaling it? What have you learned that you can apply to driving scale? >>So we put some strict governance in place who weren't just automating everything under the sun cuz >>Wild west >>Yeah, I can't support that. Right? So we made sure that everything had at least less than a one year invest return on investment and 500 hours worth of automation for us to even consider it as part of our coe. So because of that, we do have some automations that would make sense, but that's why we're looking at a citizen development program or low code, no code. What other types of options are there to make sure that it does become a part of our culture and dna that you can automate those even small parts of your workflow to, to make your day better. >>When, when you're looking at those workflows, do you, are you, are you literally looking over someone's shoulder with a stopwatch and measuring, Measuring how time >>And motion studies? No >>Question. Yeah. I mean is it time and motion studies? I mean, is that sort of the entry level data that that you use or is it more, or is it more automated than that? >>I would say it's a little more automated than that, but we do sit down and we ask our business process, show me what this process looks like to you. And then from that we can take some task mining and look at, okay, how long did it take you to do this? How often are you doing it? And then based on how long the automation would take, see how many hours are saved and how many people are doing that same task on a monthly, daily, weekly basis. >>Great. All right guys, thanks so much for coming in the cube and sharing your story. A whirlpool and always love to have Accenture on. You guys got such a massive observation space, global depth of industry. So thank you very much both. Thank you. Thank you. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante will be back right to the short break, you watching the cubes coverage of UI path forward. Five live from Las Vegas.

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with John Furrier covering Dell Technologies World 2019. This is our first day of coverage, two sides or, as John likes to say, it's theCUBE cannon, a cannon of CUBE content. We're very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni, Joyce Mullen, the President, Global Channel, OEM and IoT from Dell Technologies. Joyce, welcome to theCUBE cannon. >> Thank you so much. Happy to be in the cannon, it's a great place to be! >> The cannon is off the a great start! So, before we get started into all of the nitty gritty, I just want to acknowledge, you are one of CRN's Women of the Channel on Power 100 last year. Congratulations on that. >> Thank you. Thank you, thank you. >> It's always great to have strong females on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Talk to us a little bit about the Global Channel. There's about 4,000 partners here? >> 5,000 actually, over 5,000. >> 5,000? You've got a channel of over 150,000. Global Partner Summit kicking off today, what are some of the exciting things, news? >> Well, I'm sure you've talked about the news from this morning. I mean that obviously was dominating a lot of the discussions in terms of the solutions that we're offering and things like that. Really exciting stuff and very cool to see the collaboration between VMware and Microsoft and Dell, I mean, that's pretty powerful stuff. But also, our partners are really excited because they've been asking us for more and more highly integrated solutions. We heard about two new ones today that really span the Dell Technologies family of brands and they... You know, we have a bunch of things that we've talked about with the partners today. But we set it up last year with three strategic imperatives, and one of them is about making it easier to do more business with us. That's really, operationally, how do we improve the partner experience? The second one is around helping them enable and transform customer's environments across Dell Technologies families of brands and that one, you know, is tough to do. And so, we made some progress on that this morning, which was really exciting to hear about and then we also announced a change in our branding to our program. So we were the Dell EMC Partner Program, now we're the Dell Technologies Partner Program, which obviously carries broader significance. And then the third imperative is all around helping our partners embrace and monetize these new, emerging technologies, like IoT and AI. You heard a lot about that from Michael today, too. So we are working very hard to figure out how to help our partners do just that. >> Talk about the economics on the channel, because the channel's great leverage sales, indirect, great business models, proven over the years to be great. As new technology comes in, if it's complicated, it's hard to sell. If it's complicated, you need training. And if it doesn't throw off more profit for the partner, it tends to not work out well. You guys have really been working on this. Talk about the partner reaction to their opportunity to serve their customers, who are your customers. You're essentially going to be doing that. This has been an opportunity, because we're seeing that, with some of the services teams out there, there's more technology required in their... Skills gaps to architects. That's an opportunity for the channel partners to actually add value. >> Absolutely. >> Talk about that value piece that the partners now can add on top of it, because if it's an easy, consistent end-to-end environment that's turn-key from Dell, the partners take that and they can wrap value around that. >> Absolutely. >> Talk about that dynamic specifically. >> Well, so, when we think about these new technologies, and we think about the environments our customers are facing, or if you think about IoT, which is generally quite vertically specific, it requires new sets of skills, no doubt about it. But this complexity that we're basically facing right now in IT around more servers, more processors, more accelerators. I mean, we've gotten pretty used to a world where x86 is kind of king. But five years from now, it's going to be much different. Artificial intelligence will drive a whole bunch of specialized servers, for example. Anyway, that's an illustration of the complexity that our customers are facing, which is great news for our partners, to your point, John. So, when we spend time with our partners, we're talking about the importance of, of course you need to know the technology. Of course you need to know what AI means. You need to understand augmented reality. You need to understand IoT. But probably even more importantly, you got to get a deeper understanding of the businesses that your customer's in. The verticals, the industries. Because it's not a uniform, horizontal environment that we're deploying this stuff into now. It's a much, much more highly varied, highly complex environment, which is great news because customers need our help. That does mean that the partners have to have the certifications. We're trying to make that easier so that if they have gotten certified with VMware on VCF, they can apply that to Dell Technologies. Vice versa. >> Joyce, that's a great point. That kind of connects what Michael Dell said on stage, because the vertical specialism is where the data adds value. So where you actually bring data into the equation, which is the lifeblood of, or the heartbeat of digital transformation, to quote Michael Dell on that one. That's where the specialism is important. In the verticals. >> Yes. >> So knowing how to make data work is a partner opportunity. >> Absolutely. And that means you got to understand the business, the outcomes that your customers are looking for, and what that data looks like in those environments. So it's way different if you're in a plant or a hospital. I mean, those are pretty different environments. You got to know what you're talking about. I think it's a great opportunity for partners, but it does mean, maybe a reorientation, or a consideration of vertical expertise. >> I want to get your thoughts on IoT. So two verticals that are smoking hot right now are health care and manufacturing, machine, you know... >> Industrial Automation. >> Industrial Automation, yeah, thank you. I know RPA is high. I see people using RPA, it's really hot. In those areas, okay, OT, operational technologies, and IT have been kind of at war. Not at war, but they're different cultures. IT is about connecting internet protocol devices that have data to it. OT's, some cases, HVAC system or something else. All are getting computers on them now. So for say, for security... So the realization that it's an IT mindset, coming together with operational technology folks, are two culturally different markets but the products are blending, it's kind of becoming blurred. What is your view on this? How do you guys see that? How do you posture to that marketplace? What's the value proposition? >> Yeah, so I think it's fascinating, because we've been in cases where we're talking to customers on the operating technology side, and on the IT side, of course, given our heritage. But through our OEM group, we have a lot of experience with industrial automation, for example. And we've actually introduced people at the same company to each other. On the OT side and the IT side. >> Wow. >> Because they just you're... I don't know if I would say that they were at war, John, but they were definitely... It was parallel play going on. You know what I mean? They were not necessarily helping one another. And I would say, still, when we are in these environments, I would say roughly a third of the time, the operating technology guys say, I got this. I don't need the IT guys to tell me what to do. I'm running my plant. They do not understand. I am all about throughput, I'm all about yields, I'm all about output, I'm all about safety, I'm all about quality, whatever. The IT guy is saying, Um, well, yeah but you got to be all about security. If you're going to put this stuff on my network it's got to meet these criteria, right? So the Operating Technology guys a third of the time will say, Don't talk to the IT guys, I got this. On the IT side, a third of the time they'll say, Those OT guys really don't understand what I'm up against here. I've got to make sure this is a completely secure environment and I've got to think about all sorts of terrible data issues and things like that, privacy, all that sorts of stuff. Let me... I got this. And then, about a third of the time, we have a very productive relationship where they're working together. I expect that those... That third will become half, will become 75 percent, because it has to. >> Which half becomes 75 percent? >> I think we're going to >> The collaboration. >> see a collaboration and we will not have people taking sides because you just can't. You can't afford it. You can't afford these parallel universes. From a security point of view, or an economic point of view. >> You can't be warring, that's what you're saying. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You've got to come together and get a solution. >> Exactly, exactly. >> How can you facilitate your partners becoming that enabler of that collaboration? In terms of educating them on, a third does this, a third does that, this is my sandbox, that's yours, and then there's the third that's like, Oh, we kind of get it. How do you see yourselves as enabling your channel to be that mediator, that facilitator? >> So there's a couple of different ways. One is through Competency Development, and we have things like an IoT Competency. We have a Dell Technology Cloud Competency, as of this morning. And we will see more and more solutions-based competencies, versus product-based competencies. So, clearly, that's a trend. And that means we're helping our partners develop a level of expertise around deployment of those solutions. So that's step one. The other thing is, we're trying to figure out how to facilitate that with product offerings. So Integrated Product Offerings. You heard a couple of those today. We also have things like our award-winning, actually, IoT Connected Bundles, which are trying to facilitate that. And then the third way we're trying to do that is, we're trying to encourage our partners to take advantage of the power of this massive ecosystem we have. If you think about all of the OEMs who are building their solutions on Dell Technology, and you think about all of the partners who are trying to figure out how to offer a broader solution set to their customers on the OT side. Video Surveillance is a great example. Digital City Solutions is another one. That combination could be really, really powerful. So we have, I would say it's a very rudimentary capability right now, we call it Partner Finder. We also have something called Cloud Partner Connect, in case a partner needs service provider capability. We're going to build that out this year and include our OEM, so our partners can actually find like-minded partners who have the same kind of focus on Dell Technologies as a core component of the solutions. That means it's just going to be easier to integrate these things. >> Channels love bundles, they love turn-key because, again, that reduces their, cuts cost. >> Yeah, of course. >> They can wrap margin around that with services. >> Of course. >> Always a great playbook. >> Exactly. >> Simplicity wins. On the business side, I want to get your thoughts on the integration stuff. I love the simplicity, bundling, love that, but when you start dealing with channels within channels within channels, you get the embedded relationships. I got VMware on Azure, I got Dell Technologies with VxRail, going through this Microsoft guy. The joint sales, I mean, my mind kind of explodes. It must be really hard. How do you guys handle that complexity? Is that something you're used to? Is it not a problem? Computation programs and things of that nature? >> I mean, for sure, we got to figure out how to weed through all that, and then simplify it to a point that a partner understands what they get. If you do X, this is what you get. If you do Y, this is what, I mean, cause they have to make their own economic decisions about that. And so, yes, we have to weed through that. I think that one of the things, though, that we're very, very clear on now is, through our track system in our partner program, we've tried to ask partners to designate themselves. I am a service provider. I am a systems integrator. I am an OEM partner. The truth is, those lines are blurring, and are increasingly meaningless, and we have to meet partners where they are. So, we're working very hard this year on trying to get rid of a bunch of those tracks, simplifying the program. It doesn't really depend on what you call yourself, you want to deliver the solution how the customer wants to buy it, and we need to facilitate that. >> And be profitable, make some money. >> Of course. >> There's always that. Well Joyce, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE cannon! >> Hey, theCUBE cannon! I love it! >> ...this afternoon, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Great. Thank you guys very much. Appreciate it. Thanks so much. >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live, from Dell Technologies World 2019. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> live from Mountain View, California It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen Brought to you by Cisco >> Hey, welcome back to the cave, Lisa Martin with John Barrier. We're coming to you Live from the Computer System Museum at the third annual Cisco Definite Create twenty nineteen Excited to be joined by Joycelyn Developer Advocate from Postman Joyce Welcome to the Q Thank you. So you are a developer advocate. But postman is a tool that helps the community learn about Cisco ap eyes Postman is a Cisco was a customer of yours but a little bit about your experience at definite cry Because you have an interesting story from last year, which was your first year of this event >> Exactly last year. We just happen to stop by. And as I was walking through this very room you hear all these workshops going on behind us My ears perked up cause I heard somebody say python in postman or two of most powerful tools And I was like, Hey, I >> work a postman >> So I like, stopped in to see and I slapped my team back immediately at the office there, really using postman to teach Cisco Technology here. >> That was surprising to you. And here you are now here a year later. Tell us some of the things that you're expecting to learn and hear and feel and see from twenty nineteen. Create. >> So this year I hear about all these people learning postman learning about tech through postman. So I'm actually giving to talks this afternoon The first talks talking about building the community because a lot of people use postman in the second talk is about using mock servers. Had a fake an AP I until you actually coded and deploy it. >> Take a minute to explain. Postman. Why is it so popular? Why Francisco jazzed about it? What are they using it for? How they bring that in take a minute to talk about what you guys do >> Well, several years ago, when postman started as a side project was primarily for developers and help developers do their day to day jobs. But we found a lot more People are interacting with technology or working at tech companies where they might not have the setup to initiate a request. AP I request, and so postman allows them tio on their desktop be able. Teo interact with the tech in a way that normally they wouldn't have the whole set up to do it. >> So So in terms of developers, what's is a freemium model? They do have a free hand leads >> premium. And I think within the last year we've scooch almost anything that used to be a paid feature down to free so you can try it out. And in fact, if you have a small business or a side project, it's it's free. >> And what's the talk track? You're gonna have to get to talks. One on community, one on serve servers. Monster. >> Yeah, So Mock service is something that I thought might be interesting to this crowd. But a lot of these people have are in charge of managing the infrastructure or supporting existing AP eyes or services that are out in the cloud. And so mock servers are a way that you can essentially mock an FBI for parallel development or to build a prototype put into >> you. And so this helps develop, get faster app up and running. And then what happens when they have to get rid of mock server and put a real server on there? They had built out the re p I. Is that what happens? >> Typically, they're spinning Oppa marks over first, and then they're building out their own servers. So, yeah, they would swap out the mock with their own. >> And what's the other talk on community? Just how did do a community open sores? What's the aspects of the community talk? >> It's kind of on >> odd topic for this kind of crowd, but a lot of people work for companies that are or work for teams where they're just trying to build, like, a sense of community or foster some sort of mission. And so just telling the Postman story and Postman was free for absolutely free for a super long time in growth has just been astronomical. >> You're six million developers on the planet working on that, but I can't say on the company's one hundred thirty million plus AP eyes. And that's all. Just since the company was established in twenty fourteen after this sort of side project that you talked about so pretty, >> pretty quick >> growth trajectory that you guys are on >> and a lot of it was word of mouth. I mean, until I came here last year and heard all the system people talking about how they're using postman. We did not know that. >> So how have how has Postman actually evolved your technology in the last year? Just since you stumbled upon? Wow, this we're actually really hot here. We are really facilitator of developers. This community that's now what five hundred eighty five thousand members strong Learn about Cisco AP eyes. I'd love to know how that has sort of catalyzed growth for postman. Well, back in the >> day, Postman started as developer first. So here's an individual developer. How can they work more effectively? But teams like Cisco you'll be lucky if you find a team of ten people these air hundreds and thousands of developers coming together to work together. So postman as a tool has shifted from focusing on on ly the developer to how do you support developers working in larger teams? >> So what? The community angle? Because one of the things that Lise and I were just talking about you she does a lot of women in tech interviews with Cube and we're building out these communities ourselves and in Silicon Valley, the old expression fake it till you make it. It's kind of a startup buzzword, but people try to fake community or by community. You really can't get away with that. In communities, communities are very fickle. A successful open source projects you've gotta contribute. You've gotta have presence. You've got to show your work to get you to the bad actors. It's >> pretty >> efficient. But things air new now in communities this modern era coming into slag, you got tools. How is community evolving? That's your perspective on this. >> That's an interesting question. I think the community you never wanted fake community absolutely agree, and something that Postman is kind of lagged on is the community's been huge, but we haven't really been involved. So around the world we have people giving workshops that we don't even know about, like around the world. And how can we support them and allow them to tell, teach things consistently and teach best practices? So I wouldn't say unfortunately, well or fortunately, we're not in the position where we have to encourage the growth, but rather just support the people that are already doing this. This >> is the pure ingredient Teo Community development, because you're enabling other people to be relevant with their communities. So you're not so much like just trying to be a community player. You're just your product enables community growth. >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> You just gotta come feed >> postman as a tool. And then postman, the seeds >> of community. >> Yeah, we're healthy. >> So talk about some of the where you guys locate. How many people in your company? What's this? What numbers >> were headquartered in San Francisco. We have a huge engineering department in Bangalore where our founders air from. And I think just a few months ago, we started having distributed people. So now we're everywhere. I think we're about a hundred head count. Uh, fifty five percent of that is engineering. So where? I don't know where a >> start off. I mean, they were started hunting with number two hundred thousand companies using the technologies. We said over six million developers. How do you get a handle on to your point earlier supporting all of these groups that are out there enabling us Johnson enabling and fueling communities like Deb. Nanny? How do you start that with a one hundred person organization? >> Yeah. I'm so glad you're like, Wow, that doesn't seem like a huge organization because other people are like I thought you are way bigger than that. One thing is that we do listen to our community. And so if they're having a pain point way, try to aggregate all those voices and then come out with a cohesive road map because what might be the loudest voice for even a lot of voices might not be what's right for the tool. The other thing is, we're not open source company, but we have a ton of open source projects. So the community has again developed converters, integrations all these open source tools that for their specific workflow works for them. And actually, they're sharing with the community. >> How did you get into all this? How did you join the company? What attracted you and what's what story? >> Well, I'm in San Francisco, so I work for a tech company. I have a hodgepodge background, but I won't go into because it just sounds confusing. Some people call me the Wolverine at work. >> That's a nickname. >> Um, hopefully it's not because I'm so Harry, but because I've had many lives, so I I kind of bring a little bit of that, too. My developer advocate role, a little bit of product, A little bit of marketing, little bit of the business side. >> It's good versatility, lot of versatility. Yeah, let me ask a question. One of the things we've been covering is actually we love cloud nated. We've been covering cloud in the early days. Oh, wait. Oh, seven All the way through Love Cloud native We get that check enterprises Ha! You see Cisco using your stuff. Enterprise developers are hot right now. People are fast filling applications has got a cloud native flare to a definite create. It's also gotta integrate into the classic enterprise. What's the difference in your view and your experience, your observations between enterprise developers and then your classic You know, hard core cloud native developer >> I would say that's something that postman, as an organization is dealing with right now because we started developer first. Now we're finding Oh, it's a different person making these decisions. What tools should we use? Sometimes it's top down, but at the end of the day, it's always the developer that is going to support a top down decision. A developer that's going to find the utility out of certain tool. So we're shifting our focus. But not necessarily by that much. Because long as you focus developer first, it's still >> so enterprise. Kind of taking more of a classic cloud developer or native cloud native developer. You think that kind of profile you in your mind? >> Well, again, you have an enterprise developer. But what? Where's that enterprise developer going to be in two years? So we're not hanging our hat too much on Enterprise? Only now >> what do you want? The Ciscos measures of programming. The network. I mean, infrastructure is code. That's kind of a nice value proposition. Take the complexity away. What's your take on reaction toe that vision? >> I don't know what you're talking >> about. I don't know what part. >> What part of tell you are. >> Well, they're saying developers shouldn't have to configure hardware. You know, abstract the network capabilities out and make it code. So the developers just it just happens. >> Got it? Yeah, And if you think about how you Khun scale, can you scale linearly or exponentially? Enabling every developer or team to deploy their own code at their own pace with their own tools is something that allows you to scale exponentially. So things like mock servers that were talking about earlier. If I'm relying on somebody, that's my bottleneck. To spin this up with the normal workflow for the organization, that's a bottleneck. Spin up your own mock server. >> Find mock servers were great. Resource because remember the old days and mobile the emulators kind of had to have an emulator to kind of get going. Okay, that was, like five years, but similar model like, Hey, I don't need I can't build that out now. But I need to know what it's gonna look like so I can get this done. >> And that allows you to iterated at the fastest >> level at the local >> developer level. >> We've been covering the old days here in the Cube world. >> Throwback. Joyce, thanks so much for your time joining us on the cue program this morning. It a definite creed. Best of luck in your two sessions later on today. We look forward to seeing you next time. Great. Thank you. Nice to meet you for John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching to keep live from Cisco Definite create twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching

(theme music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hi I'm Peter Burress and welcome to another Cube conversation from our studios in lovely Palo Alto, California. One of the biggest challenges that every business faces, especially the tech industry, is to reimagine the marketing concept. What will be the role of marketing in domain in an era in which customers have greater options, greater power to set prices, while at the same time better understanding of the role the data's going to play and how engagement happens. And to have that conversation we've got Joyce Kim who's the CEO of Arm with us today. Joyce, welcome to the cube. >> Thanks, great to be here Peter. >> So I kind of said in the preamble that one of the challenges the marketing faces in the concept is to establish how it imagines the role that it's going to play in overall customer engagement. What do you think the key challenges of marketing are? You know, marketing has evolved so much over the last even five, seven years. I mean, overall when you look at how we look at the entire customer journey and most marketers have really focused on sort of the prospect journey. Not really thought through. You're constantly marketing to your customers and engaging them in so many ways. So, from an overall industry we've sort of married technology, new ways of reaching and speaking to audiences both, you know at a professional level and a personal level. And then sort of dealt with the deluge of data that we've gotten as a marketing organization and what we do with it ultimately to, you know further the business objectives of the company as well as to meet the needs of the prospecting customers that we're talking to. So it's a fascinating time for a marketing organization. >> Well I want to build on something you said that during the customer journey, which the customer is focused on. The traditional role of marketing has been to just, at that initial inquiry, or do the product launch, or get the collateral out there. But the, as we move from a product orientation where the presumptions that the value is in the product being sold and it's caveated up to on a customer, to more of a services orientation which suggests that we have a continuing ongoing relationship with the customer, who's constantly evaluating the value that's being provided. That marketing has to participate and sustain a sense of engagement so that value is constantly being communicated and the source and and and being recognized. Have I got that right? >> Absolutely, I mean it's even beyond just once a product is launched. When you look at the entire value prop and the problem that, you know, product and engineering and some of these core sort of tenants of the business work on. Marketing is an incredible input to that. We can understand and help define the landscape and the specifics of roles and the pain points that, you know, from a pure feature function perspective that they would just never get. And I think today that your seeing marketers become much more of a partner to not just the sales organization to drive leads, which is obviously a critical part of what we do from a demand gen and lead generation. But really a true input to the direction of the product, to the go to market strategy. And even sort of looking at, you know, where do we go next? You have growth areas that you want to look into. And we can be a great vehicle to test out, you know, possible adjacencies or additional value layers that your going to add to your existing product, so absolutely. >> And one of the reasons why marketing can do that is because marketing historically has been one of the stewards of customer data. And because data is such a fungible asset within the business. If managed and handled right you get data in about how something is being used. Kind of what the market thinks about and that can be applied to products, can be applied to service, can be applied to sales, can be applied to partners, etc. So is that kind of the central reason why marketing's role in the business is starting to change is because data is informing all parts of the business data that has historically come in through marketing and been managed by marketing? >> Yeah, I mean data comes in though marketing, and a big chunk of it does but really, you know, so take a step back, today with the digital realms that we have, you have a lot more avenues in which to collect data and to understand the journey of the customers, or the prospects. The other part that I think is fascinating that we can do today is to inject that with product use data, or other third party data. And so there's sort of this constellation of information that comes together and uniquely marketing can put that together to really paint a picture of what's happening, what is causing something, what is correlating in different ways. So we become sort of a data clearing house for customers for sure. >> Well let's talk about that. So the data, you say, data clearing house for customers or a clearing house for customer data. But also a provider of value back to prospects and customers to sustain that journey. What then are the appropriate limits of data collection and data utilization? It's a topic that marketers kind of understand or recognize that it's an issue, but they don't get into it too much. >> Yeah. >> How does a marketers responsibility, vis a vis, privacy play out? >> Yeah, so ARM actually is a great example of that. Where, you know, we have been a steward of customer partner data. So our ecosystem, as we call it, of pretty much all of the semiconductor players on the planet. Our close relationships to understand the roadmaps, to really, you know, understand where the trends of devices is going. It's something we have had and we have worked with the ecosystem and the industry to lead forward but not abused it in any way and really been respectful of what the individual data provisions are. As a marketing organization, you know, even B to C or B to B, you really need to think about the trade offs that each particular customer or prospect is willing to give and the value that your going to provide. We could justify all day long that, you know, having more data will provide better advertising or better targeted something. That's not necessarily universal. And so for us as a marketing industry to really think about what are the boundaries and, you know, the lines that we need to draw for ourselves. So that we don't violate that customer trust or that we respectfully use the data that helps, you know, both side is one of biggest challenges that we have coming. And one of the areas that I think will drive it much more to the forefront is if you look at marketing technology and the data that we're creating. If you inject AI to that, and some of that's starting to be done where, you know, we've got it in shades, you know, predictive analytics and certain optimizations that we can do. Today the technology is going where that's going to be on steroids and so, you know, before you let a machine decide what the lines of privacy is, I personally think we need to have that conversation. >> Well, one of the things that suggests ultimately is you go back many years people talk all the time about what is an employee's responsibility? Is it to shareholders, other employees? Well, Increasingly we recognize that it's the customer. >> Yes >> And sales is historically the advocate for the deal and product and engineering is the advocate for the product. It seems as though marketing has become increasingly recognized as the advocate for the customer. What constitutes good behavior? What constitutes good engagement? What constitutes appropriate value exchange? But that suggests that there is a real cultural requirement. >> That's exactly right. >> So change is the culture that has to happen. Do you see marketing emerging as the advocate for the customer and having that notion being embedded increasingly in how marketing operates? >> I mean believe it or not I mean marketing has always done that to some degree. But yes, but now where it comes to not just what the customer needs are, you have to go through how do you. What are the boundaries that we as a company are willing to live with? Or go to in order to again best serve the customer. I mean I fundamentally believe in the mantra that if you treat your customers right or if you respect, you know, the market in which you're trying to win, that that serves your company best. So, you know, having a great product and having all the other things that are super important, no question. But we're the face of that company. We're the reflection of that to the external world. And so that is a responsibility that I think all marketers should take very seriously and respect. >> Yeah, but I think also that it's historically, especially in the tech industry, marketing has been something that we worry about at a certain time. >> At a later point. >> Where we pigeon hole to a certain step in the process. And your suggesting and I'm suggesting that marketing increasingly has to be that voice that cuts across not only the customer journey but also the technology journey, the product journey. The evolution of the company. Where you want to demonstrate internally as well as externally that you've got the customers interest at heart. Your not just trying to make money, your trying to serve your customer. >> Yeah, and it's a consistency. Right, so from general high level impressions to a customer prospect doing research to when they are ready to entertain speaking to different tools or vendors or solutions. I mean that whole thing, once you buy, after you buy, after you buy more. I mean this is literally the entire life cycle where the cultural aspects of who you are cannot be hidden. They will figure it out at some point during that engagement. And so we really have to drive not just the marketing programs to reflect that. But if I can't get the organization to really buy into it, you know, at the heart of it. We'll fall apart. So at ARM we've really done a lot of work to try and understand. You know, people at work will always hear me say, lets not market our internal org structure or internal, you know, something. What do the customers think? What do they care about? And if I can get everyone to ask that question. I think that's a huge win. >> Yeah, what's valuable to the customer? So that every touch is a source of value. So that's a conversation you have with your people. >> Yeah. >> How do you get the rest of the corporation to see marketing in the same way? To think the same way? So that ARM or any company can in fact become that strong partner, that thought leader, that advocate for customer outcomes. >> Yeah it's literally a multi touch effort. You can't just start at the top bottom, bottom up. It has to be across the board. But I do fundamentally think that if leadership isn't bought in on that, it will be a barrier. The strongest companies that truly believe, it's easy to say that we want to do what's right for the customer or to think about the market. That's sort of a, you know, table stakes if you will. But to live it, when you have to make some tough choices. That's where leadership can play a big role because whether your the call center person or the sales engineer or, you know, the product manager that's talking to a customer. If they fundamentally believe that the leadership driven by good data that they can have the right information to make the right decisions, married with a culture that supports the customer first mentality. I mean that is ultimately what I think comes, brings all of this together. >> Yeah, I think that's a great point and I've, you know we've had a number of CMO's on and the rubber meets the road when an individual proximate to the customer feels confident that they can take action on behalf of that customer based on the right data and not be countermanded by a political or some other agenda that exists somewhere else in the organization. That's really the test of a customer driven business. >> That's right. That's exactly right. And I think empowering them with the data and the knowledge as well as the support of the organization and leadership is what enables that person to give that kind of positive experience to the customer, ultimately. >> So Joyce, you've worked in a number of different companies, you've been around Silicon Valley for a while. Not too long. >> (laughing) >> Here at ARM, what is the one lesson that you want to leave other CMO's based on your experience at ARM. Which is a little bit out ahead of the curve in a lot of the fundamentals. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, I always believe in today you're in an environment and a technology landscape where you can take a lot of risks. You can test things out. It's just as important on how you react or how you shift based on that data than actually creating that initial program. And so I live by sort of, you know, the the. We won't progress if we don't innovate and kind of continue to try new things. We're very fortunate in a way, you know, time where we can do that and get almost instantaneous feedback. >> Immeadiate testing for the role of marketing. >> Exactly. But it's also sort of married with the other side which is know your boundaries. Know where you're willing to go as a company and what you believe is the right thing for your industry or your company or your customer. And if you put those two things together, that's what moves it forward in a positive way. >> Joyce Kim, CMO of ARM. Thanks again for being on the cube. >> Thanks Peter. >> And once again I'm Peter Burress. This has been another Cube Conversation. Until next time. Talk to you soon. (theme music)

(techy music playing) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBEConversation. I'm here with Tom Joyce, CEO of Pensa, from our beautiful Palo Alto theCUBE Studios, and we're talking a bit about some of the trends and most importantly, some of the real business value reasons behind some of the new network virtualization technologies, but before we get there, Tom, tell us a little bit about yourself, how did you get here? >> Okay, thank you, Peter, thanks for having me in today. I am CEO of Pensa, I've been there for about six months, company's about three years old, so I joined them when a lot of the engineering work had already been done and I've been around the tech industry, mostly on the enterprise side, for a long time. I worked with Hewlett-Packard in a number of different roles, I worked at Dell, I worked at EMC and a number of startups. So, I've been through, you know, a lot of different transitions in tech, as you have, over the years, and got excited about this because I think we're on the cusp of a number of big transitions with some of the things that are coming down the road that make a company like Pensa really interesting and have a lot of potential. So, it's been a tremendous amount of fun working in startup land again. >> So, what does Pensa do? >> So, Pensa is a software company and again, we're based here in Mountain View. Most of our operations are here. We also have an engineering team over in India, and they're all people that are focused on networking technology. They have a long history there and what we do is help primarily service providers, you can think the classic telecommunications industry, but also other modern service providers, build modern networks. We're very focused on network functions, virtualization technology or NFE, which is about building network services that are highly flexible in software that you can deploy on industry standard server technologies, you know, kind of cloud native network service development as opposed to, you know, what many folks have done with hardware-based and siloed networking technologies in that industry for a really long time. So, what we help them do is use intelligent automation to make it easy to build those things in incredible combinations with a lot of complexity, but do it fast, do it correctly every time, and deliver those network services in a way that they can actually transform their businesses and develop new apps a lot faster than they could do otherwise. >> So, Tom, I got to tell you, I'm an analyst, I've been around for a long time and every so often someone comes along and says, "Yeah, the tel-cos are finally going to "break out of their malaise and do something different," yet they always don't quite get there. What is it about this transition that makes it more likely that they succeed at becoming more than just a hauler of data to actual digital services provider? >> Yeah, I mean, it's an excellent question. Frankly, you know, it's one that I face all the time. You know, as you traffic around Silicon Valley people are focused on certain hot topics, and you know, getting folks to understand that, you know, we are at a cusp point where this industry's going to fundamentally change and there's a huge amount of money that's actually being spent and a lot more coming. You know, a lot of folks don't necessarily, who don't spend their time there everyday, realize what's happening in these communications service providers, which you know, we used to call tel-cos, because what's happened, and I think, you know, I'm interested in your perspective on this, over time you see long periods in that industry of things don't change and then everything changes at once. >> Yeah. >> We've seen that many, many times, you know, and the disruptions in that industry, which were very public, you know, 15 years ago and then another 10 years before that, those were trigger points when the industry had to change, and we strongly believe that we're at that point right now where if you look at the rest of, like, enterprise IT where I've spent most of my career, we've gone through 15 years of going from hardware-based, proprietary, siloed to software-based, industry standard servers, cloud, and cloud native. >> Peter: And service-based. >> And service-based, right, and the formerly known as tel-co business is late to the party, you know. So, it's almost like that industry is the last domino to fall in this transition to new technology, and right now they're under enormous pressure. They have been for a while, I mean, I think if you look at the industry it's a trillion dollar plus business that touches basically every business and every person in the world, and every business and every person has gone to wireless and data from wire-line and the old way of doing things, and these service providers have pretty much squeezed as much as they can possibly get out of the old technology model and doing a great job of adapting to wireless and delivering new services, but now there's a whole new wave of growth coming and there's new technologies coming that the old model won't adapt to, and so frankly, the industry's been trying to figure this out for about five years through standards and cooperation and investment and open-source stuff, and it's kind of only at the point now where a lot of these technologies work, but our job is to come in and figure out how do we make them, you know, work in production. How do we make it scalable, and so you know, that's why we're focused there is because there's an enormous amount of money that gets spent here, there are real problems. It's not crowded with startups, you know. We have kind of a free shot on goal to actually do something big, and that's why I'm excited about being part of this company. >> Well, the network industry is always, unlike the server and storage industries, always been a series of step functions, and it's largely because of exactly what you said, that the tel-cos, which I'll still call them tel-cos, but those network service providers historically have tied their services and their rates back to capital investments. >> Tom: You're right, yeah. >> And so they'd wait and they'd wait and they'd wait before they pulled the trigger on that capital investment-- >> Tom: Mm-hm. >> Because there was no smooth way of doing it. >> Tom: Right, yeah. >> And so as a consequence you've got these horrible step functions, and customers, enterprises like a more smooth set of transitions, >> Tom: Yeah. and so it's not surprising that more of the money's been going to the server and the storage guys and the traditional networking types of technologies. >> Mm-hm, yeah. >> But this raises an interested question. Does some of the technology that you're providing make it possible for the tel-co or the network service provider. >> Tom: Yeah, yeah. >> To say, "You know what, I can use NFV "as a way of smoothing out my investments "and enter into markets faster with a little bit "more agility so that I can make my customers "happy by showing a smoother program forward." You know, make my rates, adjust my rates accordingly, but ultimately be more likely to be successful because I don't have to put two or three or $10 billion behind a new service. I can put just what's needed and use NFV to help me scale that. >> That's exactly right, I mean, we're really bringing software programmability and devops kinds of capabilities to this industry, us and other folks that are involved in this, you know, this transition, which we think is enormous. I mean, it's probably one of the biggest transitions that's left to happen in tech, and the old model of set it and forget it. I put in my hardware based router, my switch, build out my, make a big investment, that step function you talked about, and depreciate it over a long period of time doesn't work it anymore, because during that long period of time new opportunities emerge, and these communication service providers haven't gotten all the growth because other people have jumped into those opportunities, the over-the-top people, the Netflixes, probably increasingly cloud players and saying we're going to take that growth, and so if you're one of these... You know, there's a few hundred large communication service providers throughout the world. This is an existential problem for them. They have to figure out how to adapt, so when the next thing comes along they can reprogram that network. You know, if there's an opportunity to drop a server in a remote branch and offer a whole range of services on it, they want to be able to continually reprogram that, update those, and you know, we've seen the first signs of that, we saw-- >> And let me stop-- >> Right, as an example of that. >> But not just take a hardware approach to adding new services and improving the quality of the experience that the customers have. >> That's exactly right, they want to have software programmability. They want to behave like everybody else in the world now-- >> Right. >> And take advantage, frankly, of a lot of things that have been proven to work in other spheres. >> So, the fundamental value proposition that you guys are providing to them is bring some of these new software disciplines to your traditional way of building out your infrastructure so that you can add new services more smoothly, grow them in a way that's natural and organic, establish rates that don't require a 30-year visibility in what your capital expenses are. >> That's right, I mean, so one of our, you know, our flagship customers is Nokia. Nokia you can think about as kind of a classic network equipment supplier to many of those service providers, but they also provide software based services through things like Nuage that they own and some things they got from Alcatel-Lucent, and they do system integration and they've been kind of on the leading edge in using our technology to help with that of saying, "Look, let's deliver you "industry standard, intel-based servers, "running network functions in software," and what we help them do is actually design, validate, build those capabilities that they ship to their customers, and you know, without something like Pensa... Somebody has to go in and code it up. Somebody has to really understand how to make these different parts work together. I've got a router from one place. I've got a virtual network function from someplace else. Interoperability is a challenge. We automate all of that. >> Peter: Right. >> And we're using intelligence to do it, so you can kind of go much faster than you otherwise could. >> Which means that you're bringing value to them and at the same time essentially fitting their operating model of how they operate. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So, you're not forcing dramatic change in how they think about their assets, but there are some real serious changes on the horizon. 5G, net neutrality and what that means and whether or not these service providers are going to be able to enter into new markets, so it does seem like there's a triple witching hour here of the need for new capital investment because those new services are going to have to be required, and there's new competitors that are coming after them. We like to think that, or we think in many respects the companies that are really in AWS's crosshairs are the tel-cos, and you guys are trying to give them approach so that they can introduce new agility or be more agile, introduce some services, and break that bond of rate-based, capital investment-based innovation. >> Yeah, exactly right, and also, frankly, break the bond of having to buy everything from the same tel-co equipment provider they've done for the last 20 years in extraordinary margins. People want to have flexibility to combine things in different combinations as these changes hit. You know, 5G, you mentioned, is probably the biggest one, you know, and I'd say even a year ago it was clearly on the horizon but way out in the distance, and now almost every day you're seeing production deployments in certain areas, and it is going to fundamentally change how the relationship works between businesses and consumers and the service providers and the cloud people. All of a sudden you have the ability to slice up a network, you have the ability to program it remotely, you have the ability to deliver all kinds of new video-based apps and there's a whole bunch of stuff we can't even conceive of. The key thing is you need to be able to program it in software and change it when change is required, and they don't have that with technology like this. >> That's right, and 5G provides that density of services that can actually truly be provided in a wireless way. >> Exactly. >> All right, but so this raises an issue. Look, we're talking about big problems here. These are big, big, big problems, and no company, let alone Pensa, has unlimited resources. >> Tom: Hm. >> So, where are you driving your engineers and your team to place their design and engineering bets? >> Yeah, I mean, look, there's clearly a set of problems that need to be solved, and then there's some things that we do particularly well. We have some technology that we think is actually unique in a couple of areas. Probably the heart of it is intelligently validating that the network you designed works. So, let's say you are a person in a service provider or you're an SI providing a solution to a service provider, you make choices based on the requirements, because you're a network engineer, that I'm going to use this router, I'm going to use a Palo Alto Networks firewall, I'm going to use Nginx, I'm going to use Nuage, whatever that combination is, so I've got my network service. Very often they don't have a way to figure out that it's going to work when they deploy it. >> Peter: Hm. >> And we build, effectively, models for every single element and understand the relationships of how they work together. So, we can, you know, pretty much on-the-fly validate that a new network service is going to work. The next thing we do is go match that to the hardware that's required. I mean, servers, you know, they're not all the same and configurations matter. I mean, we know that obviously from the enterprise space and we can make sure that what you're actually intending to deploy you have a server configuration or underlying network infrastructure that can support it. So, our goal is to say, you know, we do everything, frankly, from import network services or onboard them from different vendors and test them from an interoperability standpoint, help you do the design, but the real heart of what we do is in that validation area. I think the key design choice that we are making, and frankly, have had to make is to be integratable and interoperable, and what that means is, you know, these service providers are working with multiple different other vendors. They might have two different orchestration software platforms. They might have some old stuff they want to work with. What we're going to do is kind of be integratable with all of the major players out there. We're not going to come in and force, you know, our orchestrator down your throat. We're going to work with all of the major open-source ones that are there and be integratable with them. You know, we believe strongly in kind of an API economy where we've got to make our APIs available and be integratable because, as you said, it's a big problem. We're not going to solve it all ourselves. We've got to work with other choices that one of these customers makes. >> So, we like to say at Wikibon that in many respects the goal of some of these technologies, the NFV software defined networking technologies, needs to be to move away from the device being the primary citizen to truly the API being the primary citizen. >> Mm-hm. >> People talk about the network economy without actually explaining what it means. Well, in many respects what it really means is networks of APIs. >> Tom: Yes. >> Is that kind of the direction that you see your product going and how are you going to rely on the open-source community, or not, to get there, because there's a lot of ancillary activity going on in creating new inventive and innovative capabilities. >> Yeah, I think, I mean, that's a really big question and to kind of tackle the key parts of it in my mind... You know, open-source is extremely valuable, and if you were a communication service provider you may want to use open-source because it gives you the ability to innovate. You can have your programmers go in and make changes and do something other folks might not do, but the other side of the coin for these service providers is they need it to be bullet-proof. >> Peter: Right. >> They can't have networks that go down, and that's the value of validation and proving that it works, but they also need commercial software companies to be able to work with the major open-source components and bring them together in a way that when they deploy it they know it's going to work, and so we've joined the Linux Foundation. We're one of the founding members of Linux Foundation networking, which now has open NFV, and has ONAP, and a number of other critical programs, and we're working with them. We've also joined OSM, which is part of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, which is another big standards organization. I'm not aware of another company in our space or related to NFV that's working with both, and so we feel positively about open-source but we think that there's a role for commercial software companies to help make it bullet-proof for that buyer and make... If you are a very large service provider you want somebody that you can work with that will stand behind it and support it, and that's what we intend to do. >> Well, as you said, your fundamental value proposition sounds like yeah, you're doing network virtualization, you're doing the, you're adding the elements required for interoperability and integration, but also you're adding that layer of operational affinity to how tel-cos, or how service providers actually work. >> Tom: Mm-hm. >> That is a tough computing model. I don't know that open-source is going to do that. There's always going to be a need to try to ensure that all these technologies can fit into the way a business actually works. >> Tom: Yeah. >> And that's going to be a software, an enterprise software approach, whoever the target customer is, do you agree? >> Yeah, we use a great partnership between the open-source community, commercial software companies like us, and the service providers-- >> Peter: Right. >> To build this thing, and we've seen that happen in enterprise. Devops was that kind of a phenomenon. You have winning commercial software providers, you have a lot of open-source, and you have the users themselves, and we think a lot of those concepts are going into this service provider space, and you know, for us it's all about at the end of the day we want to have the ability to get people to do their job faster. You know, if things change in the industry, a service provider using Pensa or an SI using Pensa can design, validate, build and run that next thing and blow it out to their network faster than anybody else. >> Peter: Time to value. So, it's time to value. >> Right, time to value. >> And certainty that it'll work. >> And in many respects, at the end of the day we all want to be big, digital businesses, but if you don't have a network that supports your digital business you don't have a digital business. >> That is correct. >> All right, so last question. >> Tom: Yes. >> Pensa two years from now... >> Tom: Hm. >> What does it look like? >> Yeah, I think we're, our goal right now is to line up with some of the leading industry players here. You know, folks that service those large service providers and help them build these solutions and do it faster. I think our goal over the next two years is to become a control point before service providers and again, folks like SIs that work for them and sometimes help run their networks for them. Give them a control point to adapt to new opportunities and respond to new threats by being able to rapidly change and modify and roll out new network services for new opportunities. You know, the thing we learned in the whole mobile transition is you really can't conceive of what's next. What's next two years from now in this space, who knows? You know, if your model is buy a bunch of hardware and depreciate it over five years you won't be able to adapt. We want to be-- >> You do know that. >> We know that, you know, we want to be one of those control points-- >> Peter: Right. >> That helps you do that quickly without having to go wade into the code. You know, so our goal is to allow... You know, our whole tagline is think faster, which means use intelligent technology to drive your business faster, and that's what we intend to be in two years. >> Excellent, Tom Joyce, CEO of Pensa. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> And for all of you, this is Peter Burris. Once again, another great CUBEConversation from our Palo Alto Studios. Look forward to seeing you on another CUBEConversation. (techy music playing)

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching SiliconANGLE Media's Flychip Production of theCUBE. We're here at CloudNativeCon and KubeCon here in Austin, Texas. Happy to welcome back to the program, a many-time alum Tom Joyce, who is now the CEO of Pensa. Tom, great to see ya. >> Great to see you too. >> Alright, so Tom, we've had you on, so many different ecosystems, so many different waves of technology. Talk about Pensa, how it fits into this whole cloud native space that we're looking at this channel. >> Great, yeah, and like you said, you and I we've known each other a long time, we've seen a lot of revolutions in technology, and we're in the middle a number of them right now, and at this event you've got the Cloud-native folks and you've got the folks that are tackling connectainers and Kubernetes orchestration. You know, it's interesting, this crowd here is so young, and so creative. The last few days, I was at the Gartner Data Center Infrastructure show, and-- >> Stu: Not so young there? >> Not so young, but the same problems, right? Two different communities trying to solve the same problems. Which are how do we deal with insane complexity? How do we deal with an environment that's now not just three public clouds and some hybrid clouds, but a growing list of specialty clouds. How do we manage all of that? And what Pensa is trying to do, is be a part of solving that problem, using intelligent automation technology. Especially in managing the underlay complexity, the infrastructure layer. It's kind of funny we've gone through a period of time when the whole discussion has been, hey, containers are going to be at Pensa, and infrastructure doesn't matter, and infrastructure is going away. I think there's some truth to how that is evolving, but it still matters especially when you get down to having to deliver services to customers. >> Tom first of all, Dan Cone got on stage from the CNCF, and he said, "It is exciting times for boring infrastructure." >> Tom: Yeah. >> Maybe too exciting. I love that line, because every wave comes out, it was like, Tom you remember, virtualization, I'm not going to have to worry about things like that. >> It's been the biggest revolution, and it is the biggest wave of infrastructure ever. >> We spent a decade fixing that. Containers came out, oh, once again we're extracted away and it's going to take that. So, what do you see as that role, between the infrastructure layer and that cloud native? What are the big challenges? What are your customers seeing, and how Pensa have an effect? >> Well, I think what we're seeing, in my opinion, is we're going from operations running everything to DevOps, to now their starting to talk about NoOps. How do we get to a point where-- >> Ah, we might have argued over the terminology. We need Ops, obviously. >> Here's what I think, I think it's going to be less Ops and more architecture. I think the challenge becomes around, how do you do the design, how do you architect these systems so that they'll work and not fail. It's a lot like one metaphor I heard somebody use and I'm going to steal is we went from drafting on a sketch pad, using CAD technology, to using 3D CAD technology, to automated CAD technology, to now servers providing it. Right? And what happened? Everybody got smarter about architecture being the important part, not the actual physical plugging together. I think the role of the architect, in a cloud native environment, in a Kubernetes environment, in a VM environment, is frankly more important than ever. Somebody needs to know how the tools work, to make sure the the service levels actually deliver. I have sat in a lot of these meetings where people say, "Look, just put your old app in a container "and you can run it anywhere, it'll be fine." Somebody needs to think about the architecture. We want to provide intelligent technology that helps them do that. Like AutoCAD and like some of these things that came along in that ecosystem. >> One of the things I've been poking at, you know, most of this year and coming into this show especially, is people say, "Ah, it's too complicated." The response really is, "Well apologizes, it's never going to get simple." What we need is, I need proper tooling, things like automation to be able to help because humans alone will not be able to fix that. I really need to have the combination of the tooling, proper architecture, as you said. What are you seeing, how's that playing out in the customer environment? >> I think what we're seeing is folks figuring out that number one it's cross domain and cross cloud. So whatever you design needs to work in multiple different environments that are going to end up having different capabilities. Nobody really has deep expertise and everything about networking, everything about containers, everything about compute and storage, but all those things still matter. What folks are asking for is a layer of technology that kind of arbitrates between the underlying infrastructure and the upper level applications, they're actually trying to deliver. And that's where this automation layer, that's submerging comes in. Part of that orchestration, and part of it's what we do. What we're focusing on is design, validate complex designs, build them and deploy them, using tools that help people do that a lot faster and get it right every time. So mistakes don't transpire. >> Yeah, Tom, I want you to help explain to our audience this whole SDN wave, kind of it played out, and sure Vmware NSX and Cisco ACI, they're doing okay, but for a lot of the industry, SDN equals still does nothing. Yet networking critically important, heavily involved in both the container and all this cloud native discussion. How are we fixing networking, how is it being set up for this type of environment versus what we we're trying to do with SDN? >> I think this is a good point, I think you've got SDN and the enterprise. You also have network functions virtualization and the service providers and often overlook that in the enterprise you're going through cloud native and DevOps transitions. And surge providers are going through a revolution of their own. Going from being telcos, becoming digital service providers. The problems are similar that technologies are different. My observation is this, is the hype cycle's real. We've gone through five years of talking about SDN, talking about open stack, talking about network functions virtualization. All of a sudden now, what I've seen in this job is that there's real money getting spent and the technology's being used. NSX's being used in a whole variety of ways that people didn't anticipate. We're seeing in everyone of these service providers, whether they're a classic telcos, they're wired, or they're wireless, or they're cloud. They're investing in technologies to revolutionize how that core of that network works, and how the edged network works. I think the first signs of that are really NSX and SDN. SDN has now gone mainstream because customers have seen that there's a real used case for it. That's kind of your first broadly applicable network function. And I think through the next couple of years, it will be one after another. Those problems are going to get knocked down. Frankly in our business, we started focusing on a lot of these enterprise problems with NSX and VSAN and software defined data center technologies around VMware. We're working on containers, but frankly the biggest area of growth for us is probably going to be these large service providers. It's like a trillion dollar business and it's going to be revolutionized over five years. We're getting involved in a lot of these network functions virtualization conversations. I wouldn't say it does nothing, it does a lot, but getting there, it's been a really hard technology to figure out. >> It took a little bit while to mature. The other thing you've got some strong background on, the management monitoring in this type of environment. What's new? How does that change in the networking space, when we have all microservices and all of these various pieces there? What are you seeing there? >> The short answer is I have a little bit of a controversial view on that. It's not unique but I think-- >> John Ferrer would say, we love controversy here on theCUBE. >> I think monitoring goes away. Monitoring the way it's been done for the last 30 years goes away. I think when we had mainframes, we had client servers, we had internet, and now we have this set of technologies we're working with in virtualization. Every time that transition has happened, there's been a whole bunch of monitoring companies. I think classic monitoring is eventually going to go away. Ultimately, there is a lot of complexity, and the machine needs to manage it, right? The machines going to need to manage it. The eyeballs watching the problem and remediating it to a greater and greater extent, are going to be automation technologies. Versus throwing out more and more alerts in front of a human that says, "I'm just going to turn them off "because I don't know what this means." I think automation technologies are going to replace classic monitoring. Again, you go around this event here, the folks that are doing cloud native, they don't want to have a bunch of monitoring alerts. They're not going to tolerate that. They just want to deliver an application service. They don't want to deal with operations, they don't want to deal with monitoring, they don't want to deal with problems, they want the problems to take care of themselves. That's hard, but I think that's coming. >> Tom, the end users whether it be enterprise, service providers, there's a lot of technology out there, there's a lot of things happening out there. When do they know to call Pensa? Give us some of the big value problems that they should knowing that say, "Oh hey", "Yes that makes sense to me, I need to give you guys a call" >> You can boil it down very simply, we deal with two kinds of people, and they're really the architects. Think about that CAD analogy. We're dealing with people that are doing complex designs in two areas. One is typically software defined data center. So people that are bringing all of these technologies together and need to deliver a working system, maybe a really complex proof of concept or big systems where they're using VMwear, as an example. We help them get that job done, do it fast. That's what the automation systems we provide do. The other is, in large scale service providers. Folks that are dealing with onboarding VNF's, building complex networks and have been grappling with that, with open stack in some of these early technologies for a number of years. We have a revolutionary way to onboard those VNF's, validate designs, deliver designs and do it in a way that integrates with all the open source technologies people are using. To be honest with you, I don't which of those is going to be more important to us, but their two big areas, and our technology applies to both. >> Tom, you've been CEO at a couple of companies now. I want to get your view point, just being the CEO for a startup in today's landscape, what's it like? What advice do you give your peers? When you guys are grabbing a drink at the bar, what are some of the biggest challenges and biggest things that excite you? >> We are to tired to grab a drink at the bar. I'll tell you that I love this. It is a great mental challenge, because again I've been like you, I've been doing this for over 30 years. It forces you to learn and learn and learn and question what you know. And that's what I really like, the opportunity to engage with the leading edge of technology. Frankly all the folks here are young and creative and it's forced me to become better at what I do. There are a lot more unknowns than working for a big company. With a big company, a lot of what you have to do is laid out before you. In this job, I have to constantly force myself to question what I know, to listen to the customer, to learn new things, and it can be tiring, but it's a good kind of tiring. >> Alright, last question I have for you. What are you most proud, what you've done since you've joined Pensa? And give us a little bit of outlook for 2018, for those that are watching, what should we be looking for, kind of miles stone deliverables or other items. >> I think what I'm most proud of, this sounds like a silly statement, but I'm proud of what the team has accomplished. I didn't do anything, right? I don't write the code. We have a bunch of engineers that are actually delivering the product. I think we've been really fortunate to keep all those people and get them focused on some big problems. I'm proud of delivering Pensa Lab to market, and I'm proud of the customers we've signed up, since we launched that just at the beginning of October. I'm proud of what we're doing with Nokia on large scale networking in the NFP area. And frankly I'm proud of the ability of this team to constantly engage and learn and try new things and take risks and screw up and try again. It's that whole experience, it's good to work with good people that you like. >> Alright and 2018? >> 2018 I think is going to be surprising for the people in terms of the kind of the reemergence of open stack. I think open stack is coming back. >> Don't let them hear that Tom, the wolves will come out. Why? >> Well because I think it's reaching at a point where the economics of certain kinds of cloud models, and frankly the economics of the Mware are forcing people to reconsider. But it especially around digital service providers. These large companies have been grappling with "How do we revolutionize our poor networks" for five years dealing with open stack. And they kind of got a lot of the stuff to work now. I think that is another sort of controversial statement. When I got into this job, I was like "Yeah open stack is dead". I was involved with Helion at Hewlett-Packard, and I was like "That's never coming back". Well guess what, it's coming back. I think the other thing is, we're going to see a lot more money being spent on revolutionizing the core networks, and these telcos and digital service providers. That's what I think the big things going to be. >> Absolutely, we've been at the open stack show for any years. The networking component especially for the telco and service providers, absolutely a strong area of focus. Your average enterprise, might not be looking for open stack. >> There might be pockets. >> Internationally there's some pockets, but absolutely. Tom Joyce, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Looking forward to seeing you the next time. And well be back with lots more coverage here from theCUBE at KubeCon. In Austin Texas, you're watching theCUBE.

(futuristic music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE Studios here in Palo Alto, CA I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE and co-founder of Silicon Angle Media, Inc. I'm joined here with Tom Joyce, Cube alumni. Some big news, new role as the CEO of Pensa. Welcome back to the Cube. You've been freelancing out there as an entrepreneur in residence, CEO in residence, you've been on theCUBE commentating. Great to see you. >> Good to see you, too. Thanks for having me back. You know, fully employed. >> Congratulations. You know, finding where you land is really critical. I've talked to a lot of friends, and they want to get a good fit in a gig, they want to have a good team to work with it's a cultural issue, but also you want to sink your teeth into something good, so you found Pensa. You're the CEO now of the company and you've got some news which we'll get to in a minute, but what's going on? Why the change, why these guys? >> You know, last time we talked, last time I was in here, I was running a consulting business, and I did that for almost a year so that I could look at a lot of options and you know, kind of reset my understanding of where the industry is and where the problems are. And it was good to do that. These were some of the best people that I met, and I got interested in what they were doing. They're smart, technical people, I wanted to work with them It was a good fit in terms of skills because when I joined Pensa just a couple of months ago now they were all technical people, and they'd been heads-down developing core technology and some early product stuff for almost three years. So they needed somebody like me to come in and help them get to the next level and it was a really good fit. And the other thing is, frankly, in my last job I was running an IT shop and I also had a thousand people out there selling, and about 300 pre-sales people, and when I saw this, I saw a product that I could've used in both of those areas. So sometimes when you resonate with something like that you start to think well geeze, this is something that I could, that a lot of people are going to need. And so there are many aspects of the technology that are interesting, but ultimately, I saw that this is a useful thing that I could go make a big business out of. So that's why I did it. >> You've had a great career, you know we know each other going way back, EMC days, and certainly at HP, even during the corporate developments work that Meg Whitman was doing at HP but involved in a lot of M&A activities, so you seen the landscape, you are talking about all the VCs, and all the conversations we've talked about in the past on other interviews you can check it out on YouTube, Tom Joyce, if you're interested in checking those conversations out. Worth looking at. So you landed at Pensa. What do they do? What was the itch for you? What was the, why are they relavant? What do they doing? >> Well, the first thing is, the company was founded about three years ago by people that had hardcore experience in big networking and virtualization environments. And they've been tackling some of the hardest problems in virtual infrastructure as you move from the hardware to everything being virtualized on multiple clouds. These guys were tackling the scale problem. And they'd also drilled down into how to make this work in the largest network environments in the world. So they had gotten business out of one of the largest service providers in the world as their first customer. So you look at that, and you say, alright these are smart people. And they're focusing on hard problems and there's a lot of, a lot of longevity in the technology that they're going out and building. And basically, what they're trying to do is help customers go to the next level with all software-based or software-defined, if you will, infrastructure, so that you can take technology from a whole bunch of different sources. It's going to be VMware, OpenStack, DevOps, the DevOps Stack as well as the whole constellation of people in the security industry. How do you make all those software parts work together at scale, with the people that you have? Rather than going out an hiring a whole new IT staff to plug all this stuff together and hope it works, these guys wanted to solve that. So it's without a lot of expertise, this product can go design, validate that it works, build and deploy complete software-defined environments, and it can do it faster than you could do it any other way that I'm aware of, and I've been around this industry for a long time. So that's what I saw when I said, geeze, I could have used this before, I could have used it in my own IT where our exposures were things like we had all this old software that we needed to update and we're scared to touch any of it, right? You look at things like Equifax. I was exposed in the Equifax breach, and that was exactly that scenario. >> Yeah, and they had four months in there playing around. Who knows what they got? >> To be honest with you, in my business we were doing the same thing because we weren't comfortable with upgrading our software cause we couldn't validate that it worked. How do you move from the old stuff to VMware six-dot-five and make sure nothing else breaks? We're kind of in the era of needing machine learning, intelligent technologies, autonomous kinds of ways to deploy this stuff, cause you can't hire enough smart people to go do it. And that's what I saw. >> Well, we'll do a breakdown or a tear-down, however you want to look at it, of the company in a second, but you guys have some news. Let's get to the news. What's the big news that you're sharing today? >> Okay, great. Well, there's a couple of key parts of it. First, we're formally launching the company. We've been heads down in development and I've been there for a few months, but the company hasn't been launched. So we're doing that, we're introducing Pensa to the world and the new website is Pensa.ai. The second thing is we've completed our Series A financing so we've got the financing under our belt. Third thing is we've been hiring a team. We've brought in certainly me, I've brought in a fella named Jim Chapel as the VP of marketing, long-time industry guy in both large and small software companies. And we're rolling out the first product. So the technology is called-- >> In terms of shipping? >> Yeah, it's going to be shipping as a SaaS offering and it's available now. It's built on our technology which is called Maestro, which is this smart machine, and the first offering is called Pensa Lab. And I can describe to you what it's used for, but it's for helping people go figure out how do I design, build, run, try new scenarios, and roll out stuff that's actually going to work and do it a lot faster than people can do with traditional technologies. >> Congratulations for launching the company, congratulations on the new role, great job. I'm looking forward to seeing you, But let's get into company, Pensa. >> Alright. >> So let's just go in market you guys are targeting. Take a minute to go into the market. What's the market, what's going on in the market, what trends, what's the bet in the market for you guys? >> With a early company like this, there's always a lot of things you can do and the battle is figuring out what is the first thing we're going to do? So I think over time we're going to be relevant to a lot of people, the first customers we're going to be focusing on are people in IT that are trying to manage complex virtualized networks. So a lot of them are people using VMware today. >> So the category is virtualization cloud? What's the category? >> It's a SaaS product for design, build, run. So it's really designing autonomous IT systems that are built on software-defined environments. So it's VMware, OpenStack, DevOps stack, and being able to kind of bring all those parts together in a way that from an operational standpoint you can deploy quickly. In the first version of the product is going to be designed for test in depth. And next year, we intend to bring out production versions of it, but virtually every one of these folks has environments for test today to figure out alright, I want to go do my update, my upgrade, my change I want to try a different security policy, cause I've got a hack happening and I want to do that fast, we're going to go after that. The other side of it is folks in the vendor community. Almost anybody that's selling a solution, again, like me and the job that I used to have, has people out there doing proofs of concept, demos, building systems for customers. And what we can do is give you the ability to spin up complete working environments and do it (snaps finger) basically like that. If you got a call this afternoon to go show VMware NSX running with some customer application with some other technology from a third we can make that work for you, and then you can tear it down and do the next one at four o'clock in the afternoon. >> So that a VMware customer-based you're targeting, I mean, it sounds like, and clarify if I don't get this right, you don't really care if it's private cloud, or hybrid cloud, or public cloud. >> We don't care. No, we don't. And there's a lot of folks-- >> And VMware, is that a target market, VMware buyers? >> Absolutely. Yup. And frankly, we've had people inside of VMware working with us as a number of the beta testers on this and demonstrating that they can spin up their own environments faster, so that kind of proof point is what we're after. Then there's a lot of folks in DevOps, right? DevOps is one of the hot targets for our business and a lot of businesses and what we see is folks that are focusing on the app development side of DevOps and then they get to the point where they got to call IT and say alright, give me a platform to run my new application on and they get the old answers. So a lot of these folks are looking for the ability to spin up environments very very quickly, with a lot of flexibility where they don't need to be and expert in alright, how's the storage going to work and how do I build a network, right? >> So are you targeting IT and DevOps hybrid, or is it one of the other DevOps developers? >> It's both. >> Okay and you don't care which cloud so you're going to draft off the success that VMware's seeing right now with their cloud strategy with AWS >> Absolutely. I mean look, there's a lot of ways >> Software design is booming. >> We can help those customers figure out how do I do VSAN faster? How do I do NSX faster? How do I set up applications that I can move to AWS faster? It's kind of bringing-- >> So software-defined clouds, software-defined data center, all this is in your wheelhouse. >> Yes, that's exactly right. >> This is what you're targeting. >> And that's the opportunity and the challenge. Again when you're doing a small company, the world is your oyster but you have to kind of focus on the first thing first. So we're going to go in and try to help people that have, are dealing with alright, I need to kind of update my software so that I don't have an Equifax, or I need to fix my security policies, I need an environment like, today that I can use to test that. Or, I want to go from the old VMware to to the new VMware, I got to make sure it works. That's good for the customer, that's good for VMware, it's good for us. >> And the outcome is digital productivity for the developer. >> Absolutely. >> OK, so let's talk about the business, and the business model. So you guys raised some money, can you talk about the amount, or is that confidential? >> It's confidential at this point and we have some additional-- >> Is it bigger than 10 million? Less than 10 million? >> It's been less than 10 million. We're going to go lean and mean, but we're set up to make the run we need to run. >> OK, good I got that out of the way. Employees, how many people do you guys have? What's the strategy? >> Just over 20 now, and we have a few more folks that we're going to be adding. We're going to go fairly lean from here. >> Okay, in terms of business model, you said SaaS Can you just explain a little bit more about thee business model, and then some of the competition that you have? >> Yeah, this product was designed from day one to be a SaaS product, so we're not going to go on-premise software or old models, we're going with a SaaS model for everything we're doing now and everything we intend to do in the future, so the product sits in the cloud, and you can access it basically on demand. We're going to make it very easy for people to get in and give this a try. It's going to be simple pricing, starting at about 15 hundred dollars a month. >> So a little bit of low-cost entry, not freemium, so it's going to some cost to get in, right? Try before you buy, POC, however that goes, right? >> Yeah, it's see a demo, do a trial, give it a shot. I'll give you an example, right. When I was at my last job, I had 300 pre-sales people >> Where's this? >> This was at Dell Software. >> Dell Software, okay, got it. >> Now it's called Quest. They would go out and they'd use cloud-based resources to spin up their demo environment. Well, I'm going to give them, and I'm calling them, by the way, the ability to buy it for a very short amount of money and you're not committed to it forever, you can use it as much as you want. And get the ability to say alright, let's spin up VMware, let's spin up OpenStack, let's spin up F5 Palo Alto Networks whatever security I want, get my app running on that without being an expert in all those parts. >> You can stand up stuff pretty quickly, it's a DevOps ethos but it's about the app and the developer productivity. >> Right. And from a business model standpoint, it's how do I make this really, really easy? Because the more of those folks that use it in this phase, next year, when we get to say alright, let's punch that thing you built into production on your cloud, we'll be ready to go. Our goal is to grab space quickly. >> Talk about competition. >> I think the competition for this part of it this kind of dev test lab spin up scenario, the Pensa lab that I just described, the biggest competition is going to be people that build their own. So in the corner you've got your test environment running on your old hardware, right? So that doesn't come with this automated software capability. The other ones are going to be people like Skytap, as an example, that a lot of people use, and I've used in the past, that gives you a platform to run on, but again, a lot more cost and not the automated software capabilities. So there are a lot of scenarios like that that we can go after, and it's almost universal. Everybody's got a need to have some sort of a test or dev environment, right? And we are going to prove to them that the software is better. >> So not a lot of competition. It's not like there's a zillion players out there. >> No, it's a big target, but there's not a lot of players. And for the most part, you're going to go into scenarios where customers have something they've cobbled together that isn't working as well as they'd like. >> And Pensa AI hints a little bit of a automation piece which is really all our people know in the enterprise. Let's talk about the technology. What's under the hood, is there AI involved, also you've got the domain name .ai, which I love those domain names, by the way, but what's the tech? What's driving the innovation and story differentiation? >> To be honest with you, inside that's something you debate because that's what it is. If AI is a way to use technology, to do things as well or better than people used to do before, that's what it is. And if you take all the hype, and nonsense out of the conversation, you say it's not about SkyNet and computers taking over the world, it's really about doing stuff better than we can do and making people more effective, that's what we have. Now, under AI there's a bunch of different techniques and we're going to be focused on primarily modeling and the core IP of this is how we build the model for all of those components and how they interact and how they behave, and then machine learning. How do we apply techniques to actually-- >> So you're writing software that's innovating on technology and configuration, tying that together and then using that instrumentation to make changes and/or adaptive-like capabilities-- >> Exactly, but rather than go spend a month building the template that you're going to go deploy the system will build that for you. And that's where the smarts are. And we'll use machine learning techniques over time to make that model better. So that's kind of where we're digging, and frankly it's a big problem for people. >> So software you're main technology. >> It's 100% a software platform. >> Okay, well, Wikibon Research was going viral at VMworld and I'll make a note cause I think this is important cause automation is our and it's a key point of your thing is that Wikibon showed that about 1.5 billion dollars are going to be taken out of the market as automation takes non-differentiated labor out of the equation, which essentially is stacking servers and racking, stacking and racking. That plays right into your trend. >> That's exactly what we're doing. And what we want to do is-- >> By the way that value shifts, too, all the parts. >> Yeah, and I think we're trying to focus-- automation isn't new. It's not new in IT. Certainly there's been a lot of focus on it the last 10 years. The question is how do you make the automation smarter? So you don't have to do the design and say push play. Cause the problem with automation in these really complicated microservices, multi-- the problem is, if you automate it, if you build that template wrong, you can make the same mistake a thousand times in a row. And I've had products in the past where they've worked great as long as that template was correct. Well what if the template changes? What if I need to put new security policies in there, changes? Maestro is going to build it for you. That's what the story is all about. >> That's your product, that's your product name. >> Yep. >> Well, that's what DevOps is all about. Programming the infrastructure, and that's always going to change. So that's really the DevOps ethos. >> Yeah, and that's why if you expand out from the first play run, this test dev scenario, well, frankly, we'll learn a lot. We'll learn a ton about different patterns that we see, we'll learn a lot about the Interop environment that customers want, I want you to add this or add that, the system is going to get smarter to the point where when we punch it into production, it's going to know a lot more than it does today. >> Well congratulations on the launch. My final question for you is really the most important one which is, if I'm a customer, why do I care? What's in it for me? What's the value? Why should I pay attention to Pensa.ai? What's going on, what's the value to me, why should I care, why should I call you? Gimme that bottom line. >> It's about risk reduction. It's about making sure that the things you need to change you can actually do it without it blowing up in your face. And it's also, frankly, the other side of the AI-- >> What, the infrastructure blowing up in my face? Or just apps? >> If you make changes to your environment and you're not sure if they're going to work, but you know, again, take the Equifax thing. If they had made those changes and put them into their environment, it wouldn't be on the front page of every newspaper in the world. Frankly, my information wouldn't have been hacked. >> What would you guys have done if I was Equifax and I knew that potentially I had to move fast? How could you guys solve that problem? >> If you have a problem, upgrade the software today. And what we would've done is give them the ability-- >> Do you think they knew they had a problem? >> Uh... I don't know if they did or not, but you can see this scenario over and over and over again in other companies, where they say, we know we need to do an update, but we're not doing it. We're going to wait for the six months-- >> Cause it breaks stuff. >> Cause we're scared. >> Scared, or that it breaks stuff, or both? >> It breaks stuff and we need to test it, right? So we're going to bring test velocity into that, we're going to bring intelligence to make sure the design is right, right? So that you can do it more quickly. In many different scenarios. >> It's interesting in the old days, it was like, patch management was a big thing, that was the on-premise software, but with DevOps, you need, essentially, test and dev all the time on? >> You do. If you're developing these applications with DevOps in the front end, and you're dropping new versions of 'em in hours, rather than quarters, the infrastructure in the back end has to kind of speed up to DevOps speed. And that's where we're going to focus our attention. >> Alright, here's the hard question for you and we'll end the segment, is when does a customer, your potential customer, know they need you? What's the environment look like? What's the pain points? What are the signals that they need to be calling Pensa.ai? What's the deal there? >> Yeah, I think we're going to talk to the DevOps people that are looking to get their applications out and get them built and deployed-- >> So, need for application pushing, that's one. >> That's one. The other ones are going to be folks inside any IT organization that need better velocity, need to be able to test one and take money, cost out of it, cause we're going to do it for a lot less than what it costs you to do now. And the third one is the vendor community. Folks out there selling software. VARs, pre-solicit people. >> So I guess the question is more specific. What is the signs inside the customer that make them want to call you? Stuff's breaking, upgrades not happening fast enough, I'm trying to get to the heart of it. If I'm a customer-- >> On the IT customer side, it's all about velocity. We need to push our apps faster, we need infrastructure faster, we need to test security policies faster, we're not going fast enough-- >> So basically if you're going slow, not getting the job done, they call you. >> Pretty much, that's our guys. >> Tom, congratulations on the launch, congratulations on the new CEO job, we'll be tracking you guys. Series A funding, congratulations, who's the VC involved? >> We have The Fabric, which was the seed funding source, and then March Capital has been very helpful to us in this A round. >> Great, well they got a great pro in you as CEO. We'll keep in touch. Cube alumni, good friend Tom Joyce here inside theCUBE Studios on the conversation around the launch of the company, Series A funding, new team members, and Pensa.ai. This is theCUBED. Cubed.net is our URL, check it out. Siliconangle.com and wikibon.com is where you can go check out our stuff. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (futuristic music)

(upbeat music) >> [Announcer] Live, from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> 'Kay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Palo Alto, theCUBE studios, our new 4,500 square foot studio. We just moved in in January. We're covering Mobile World Congress for two days, 8 a.m. to six, every day today, Monday the 27th, and Tuesday, the 28th. That's Pacific Standard Time, of course. Barcelona's ending their day, people are at their dinners right now going to the after hour parties. Really getting into the evening festivities, the business development, and we're going to break down all the news with that. And we have Tom Joyce here for reaction. But first, my talking point for this segment. Tom, I want to get your reaction to this, is Mobile World Congress is going through a massive change as a show. CES became an automotive show, you saw that show. Mobile World Congress used to be a Telco show, device show. Now you're seeing Internet of Things, and Internet things and people, as Peter Burris from Wikibon pointed out on our opening today, where people are now the device, the phone, and the watches and the wearables, and the things are sensors, cars, cities, towns, homes, devices. Now you have this new connected Internet that goes to an extreme edge to wherever there's a digital signal and connection, powered by 5G. 5G is the big story at Mobile World Congress, certainly the glam is the devices, but those devices becoming more powerful with chips from Intel and Qualcomm and others. And as those devices become more powerful, the connected device, thing, or people, become much more powerful equation. The data behind it is a tsunami, and this, to me, is a step up in a game changing wealth creation, a value creation opportunity for the society or around the world, and for companies. So the question is, can this be the kind of change significantly impacting the world similar to the iPhone in 2007 when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone it changed the entire mobile landscape, and even Blackberry's making a comeback, and they were decimated by the iPhone. Can this 5G, this Internet of Things, Internet of Things of people, change the game, and what will happen? We believe it'll be massive. Tom, your reaction to this new change? >> Well, you know, I think you hit on a lot of it. I come at it from a different perspective, right? I spent 30 years in infrastructure, systems and software. So, when you're coming at it from that side, and you see this mobile world exploding, and Internet of Things starting to take off, and changes in terms of how the connectivity at the edge works, and this massive evolution, you can think about it from one of two ways. On one level, you can be terrified, you know? Cause it's all going away, (John laughs) all the stuff we built is going away. And, on the other hand, it creates a tremendous number of new opportunities. And I think we're only really just starting to see the creativity come out of the enterprise side in terms of not adapting to this change in mobile, but actually starting to invent things that will enable it and make Internet of Things possible. And, you know, new approaches to how silicon should be developed for those applications. New applications altogether. You know, I spent a lot of time recently looking at a number of different storage companies, and, you know, something fundamentally needs to change there in order for that technology to adapt, and guess what? It's now starting to really really come forward, and so, yeah, I think that what we're starting to see is the big engines, the big historical engines of innovation, starting to catch up to this big trend, and it's only the very beginning. >> We have Tom Joyce, who's an industry executive in the infrastructure area. Worked at EMC back in the early days, and then HPE and a variety of other companies. Tom, you're an expert in infrastructure, and this is what's interesting to me, as a technical person. You have the glam and the flair of mobile, the devices and the awesome screen capabilities, the size of the devices, the role of the tablet's now changing where it's going to become an entertainment device in home, and a companion to mobile. That's what people see. They see the virtual reality. They see the augmented reality. The coolness of some of this awesome software that needs all that 5G bandwidth. But, there's an under the hood kind of engine, on the infrastructure side that's going through a transformation. It's called network transformation because you have networks that move the data around. You have the compute power, the cloud, that computes on things. The data, and the storage that (laughs) stores it all. It's getting better on the device side, the handset, but also the stuff going on in the cloud. So I got to get your take. Why is now the time for the key network transformation? What are the key things happening now that really make this concept of network transformation so compelling? >> Well, you know, again, I'll take it from kind of a non-technical perspective, looking at it from an infrastructure guy standpoint, alright? What we've been looking at is, in the transformation of the compute platform, from inside your data center to the cloud, you know, all the things we've known kind of changing and going away. But, the parts the cloud hasn't really touched yet, or really transformed yet, are the piece between the cloud itself and that end user, or that remote office. You know, if you've got offices in far off lands, or, you know, small cities, getting the connectivity to be able to enable that new infrastructure platform is a challenge. And so, for a couple of years, there's been a lot of work done in network virtualization, and network functions virtualization, for ways to kind of break the stranglehold that a lot of these old proprietary technologies have had on that problem. And now we're starting to see new approaches to how you do WAN management across those, especially long distances. And I think that, especially with the growth in capacity demand from things like 5G, from things like Internet of Things, from the many different kinds of mobile devices we now have, it creates a forcing function on IT managers, and especially on telcos to say "geez, you know, we can't keep doing it with T1s. We can't wait 90 days to put in a T1 every time we open up a new building. We can't, you know, use the same old hardware because the cost model needs to change." And so there are, you know, quite a few companies, and by my count about a dozen of em that are looking at completely virtualized software ways to break that down. Do it flexibly, nine minutes instead of 90 days, a lot more performance. And so, you know, it's the demand is creating the opportunity but now you're starting to see innovators adapt and deliver new stuff to solve this problem. >> Tom, for the folks watching, I'll share some props for you. You've obviously been an executive in the infrastructure, but also at HPE prior to your role, and after your role they did some other things. But at HPE you were doing some mergers and acquisitions with Meg Whitman so you have a view of looking at the entrepreneurial landscape. So kind of, with that kind of focus, and also the infrastructure knowledge, what is some of the opportunities that the service providers in these telcos have? Because the network transformation that's happening with 5G and the software can give them a business model opportunity now that they have to seize on. This is the time. It seems like now the acceleration for those guys, and you can also apply it to say the enterprises as well, but there are opportunities out there. What are those opportunities for these service providers? >> Well, you know, I think if you're an established business there's a trade off between the bird in the hand and something's that disruptive but I might have to do anyway? And so I think some of these opportunities actually could potentially degrade profitability in the short term and that's, I think, where these guys kind of figure out "do I hold onto the old vine, or do I swing to the new vine?" And, it's a tough set of problems, but I think there is clearly opportunity to go completely software based, virtualize, around how you managed Wide Area Networking traffic. And I think some customers are starting to kind of force the telco providers to do that, by-- >> Andy Roe was the one who coined the term "eat your own before the competition does", but that's the dilemma, the innovative dilemmas that these telcos have and the service providers. If they don't reinvent the future, and hold onto the past-- >> They'll get disrupted. >> [John] They'll be extincted. >> Yeah. >> [John] They'll be extinct. So that's interesting. So I got to get your take. With that premise, it's pretty obvious what's happening. >> Yeah. >> Faster networks are happening. You want low latency, faster bandwidth on wireless, that's happening. >> Yeah. >> What does this mean for the new kind of networks? Because that seems to be a theme coming out of Mobile World Congress on day one, that's going to probably be big tomorrow on the news, is this network transformation. This new kind of network, where you have to have fast storage, you got to have low latency data flying around. >> Yeah, I think there are many different parts of it, and you could talk all afternoon about it. But on that one part we were just talking about, and I don't know this company very deeply, but a company like Viptela, right? Viptela is going up against those big T1 sales models and saying "we're going to do it a different way". And it's about speed, it's about performance, about capacity, latency, cost. It's also about flexibility. Like, what if I could kind of totally re-engineer how everything's wired up right now on Tuesday, and do it differently on Wednesday? You know, what if I could set up entirely new business models on the fly as opposed to having to plan it months and months in advance? In that, the word agility is overused, but that's what that is. And so, I think as you move more and more into software for every one of these functions in the network, it brings with it this benefit of agility. And I think that's under-measured in terms of how people value that. You know, the velocity being able to change your business it's a lot more than what the gear cost, what the depreciation it was, you know, what the pipe cost. And so, I think as folks make those moves, and they can go faster and do more than their competition, it's a game changer. You know there's a big discussion about the, you mentioned, the compute layer, and the storage layer. The kinds of storage systems you need if you're going to deploy services as a service provider. Whether it's a telco, or a small VAR that's acting like a service provider. If you're going to compete there, you need stuff that's a lot more flexible, again, a lot more agile, than the traditional storage systems. Now, I think, the notion of software defined storage has been around for a while. Figuring out how you make money at that? That's still a work in progress. But, as folks move towards more of a service model for their business it's not going to look like-- >> So it sounds like what you're saying is, the first wave of that is, from a table stakes standpoint is, speed and scale are kind of the first foundational thing that the storage guys have to get going. >> Yeah, I think, and storage is still the same. It has to be cost per, you know, cost per megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte. You need to have low latency, high I/O. Those are like the three things. And then the additional things are the services. Is it resilient? Now we're at a point where I think agility matters more than ever, right? If I can reconfigure everything and build a new service and I can do it today, versus plan for months, the benefit and the dollars around that are game changing. And the people they're game changing for are the service providers. >> Tom, I want to ask you a question from the mind of the average consumer out there, and we all have the relatives ask "hey, what's going on in your tech business?" Break it down for us. When people say "why can't my phone just go faster? Why can't I have better bandwidth?" They might not understand the complexities of what it takes to make all this stuff happen. What's holding back the acceleration in your mind? Is it the technology? Is it the personnel? Is there any kind of area out there that once that straw breaks the camel's back, what is that straw that breaks the camel's back to accelerate this production of great tech? >> Yeah, I mean look, I'm actually one of those grandparents that's asking how come it's not going faster, (John laughing) so I may not have the complete answer, but I'm that frustrated person. I will say that, you know, we're in an interesting period of time in terms of how investments get made in new technology. And if you kind of, somebody very smart said to me the other day "try to think of the pure innovations that came out of large, established companies in the last 10 years". And I've worked for a couple of em, right? But, the pure ground up innovations that became big, and you can't come up with a very long list right? It's been really driven through the venture community, certainly as Silicon Valley, you know, it's been an engine for decades now. But that's where it comes from. And we've kind of been in a limbo cycle, where folks have invested a lot of money in some areas that haven't paid off. So, I think we're in a little bit of a gap, where there's a lot of money going into obvious spaces. One of those obvious spaces is security. You know, before that it was all these apps that we use for social. But there hasn't been enough engineering and core hard tech silicon to drive these new apps. There hasn't been enough hard engineering and building entirely new, you know, storage platforms in software that scale at service provider levels, cause that's going to cost a lot of money. So I think we're starting to see the beginnings of that, but it takes time to play it all out. >> It's interesting the whole digital life thing is coming into the transformation, and Reuve Cohen, who was on earlier, said "Snapchat IPO is the big story", but if you look at it like say Snapchat, what they're doing, they're both a media company and a platform with the fake news from the Facebook platform in the previous election. You're seeing these platforms delivering the kind of value that they weren't really intending, the unintended consequences for these platforms is that they become other things too in digital. Like a media company when they weren't really trying to be that, and media comes in trying to be platforms. So, there seems to be a platform war going on around who is going to control the platforms. And the question that I always ask is, okay how does this work in a multi-company environment where composability is much more the new development philosophy than owning a stack, owning technology? >> Well, I agree with ya, and I think that, again, if you look at it from the standpoint of a customer that's going to buy a lot of their services from the cloud and a lot of their services from other service providers, you have to hit the price points and the performance and the reliability. After that, it's how fast can you turn me on? How fast can you change? It's back to that software based reconfiguration on the fly. If you can then bring to bear the ability to do that with different qualities of service, and more automated control of those changes, that's gold right? But I don't think we have seen that actually implemented yet at scale, in ways that people can consume. So, again, I think you're seeing a wave of investment by the VC folks in a number of areas, one of em is new kinds of silicon, new kinds of next generation flash technologies, and things like that. I think you're seeing service provider scale storage technologies starting to emerge. You're starting to see fundamental changes in how Wide Area Networks are managed, all in software, right? So, I think you play that through in the next year or two, the demand from mobile usage, but especially from Internet of Things, and its related demand for data is going to create a new market, a new market opportunities, and who will win? I don't know, but there's a lot of smart investors making bets there. >> So certainly you see a lot of the old guard out there, Intel, for instance, sponsored this program, gave us the ability to do the programming thanks to Intel and also SAP contributed a little bit. But you got HPE out there, you see IBM, all these guys are out there, these traditional suppliers. What's the one thing that you can point to that in this new era of supplying technology to the new guard of winners, whether they're telcos, or providers, or enterprises. The game certainly changed with the cloud. What's the blind spot for some of these guys? And where should they be looking for MNA activity-- >> [Tom] Yeah. >> [John] If you're the CEO of a big company, and you "hey I got to pivot, I got to fill my product lines", where's the order of operations from a focus standpoint? >> Okay, well you take a couple of those companies, and I'd say that I've both observed and been guilty of some of (John laughing) what's not working now, right? And the instinct, if you're in one of those places, is to say "look, we've got all this technology. We've got servers, storage, networking. What if we just bundle up what we've got and point it at this new set of applications?" And I think you can make some ground up there, you can do some stuff, but at the end of the day the new requirements require new technology. And I think the larger companies haven't been successful at investing in new stuff in their own, like memristor, or some of these new technologies folks have talked about, the machine. They get announced, they come, they go, why? Because they're expensive, they're really hard. >> [John] It takes real R&D. >> It takes years. Yeah, years of real R&D. And it's difficult in the economic environment that we're in to sustain that. So the reality is, I think there needs to be a lot more aggressive focus on identifying hard technology that can feed the supply chain for some of those solutions. And, that's what I think-- >> [John] That's what a startup opportunity is too. >> Startup opportunity-- >> Those guys got to fill that void cause they're doing the R&D. >> But the startups that are going to succeed in the future that relate to this problem, they're not the guy building an app. That's not where it is. It's technology that's actually hard. That's why I think you see things like Nvidia, why is that stock so high? Well, they developed unique silicon, that was applicable to a whole bunch more areas than folks realized, right? >> So the difference is, if I hear what you're saying, is there's two approaches. Technology looking for a problem, and then a problem that's solved by technology. Kind of the different kind of mindset. >> Yeah, exactly right. And I think that if you take Tesla as a very well known example. The amount of demand for analytics data is just extraordinary there, right? And that will lead to more requirements to say "no, no, no. I can't use your old stuff. You can bundle up the crap you have. (John laughs) You need to give me something that's tuned for the scale I'm talking about now and next." And I think that we're starting to see the venture community, and certainly my travels around the Valley here over the last couple of months, saying "we're probably going to have to get in earlier, and we're probably going to have to invest more and longer. Because the payoff's there, but these problems are big and require real hard technology." >> Well, Tom Joyce, thanks for coming in and sharing the commentary and reaction to Mobile World Congress. Real quick, what are you up to these days? I know you're looking at a bunch of CEO opportunities. You've been talking to a lot of VC firms in the Valley. What are you poking at? What's getting your attention these days? >> Well, you know, part of what I was just talking about is exciting, you know? There's a bunch of new things out there. There's some young people that are investing in the next wave of infrastructure, and so I'm looking at some of those things. And, you know, I may do a CEO thing. I've had a few opportunities like that, and I may focus more on the business development side and the investing side cause I've got a lot of experience-- >> But you're looking for technology plays? >> Yeah. >> Not in the, say a me too, kind of thing-- >> No I want to do something fun and big and new. (John laughing) You know, something that has potential for super growth, and so there are a lot of those here now. So it's a-- >> Well I think you made a good observation, and I think this applies to Mobile World Congress. One is it's kind of turning into an app show on one level because apps are the top of the stack. That's where the action is, whether it's an IoT app or car or something. But then there's the hard problems under the hood. >> I think that's right. And I think that's where a lot of the money's going to be. >> Yeah, and Intel's certainly done a great job. We're on the ground with Intel. We're going to have some more call-ins to analysts, and our reports on the ground at Mobile World Congress. Stay with us here at theCUBE, in Palo Alto live, in studio coverage of Mobile World Congress. We're going to be doing call-ins, folks hitting the parties, certainly hope they're a little bit looser from a couple cocktails. And Tapas went later in the night. Hopefully he had them calling in and get all the dirt, and all the stories. And from Mobile World Congress, we'll be right back with more after this short break. Thanks to Tom Joyce for coming, appreciate it. >> [Tom] Thank you too. >> Taking the time. We'll be back. (upbeat music) (elated music)

>>Hey guys, welcome back to the cubes. Continuous coverage day, one of AWS and re-invent live that's right live in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. Pleased to be here. We are running actually one of the industry's most important hybrid tech events with AWS this year, and it's huge ecosystem of partners. We have two lives dots, two remote studios over 100 guests on the program. We'll be talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. I'm pleased to welcome back one of our alumni and a new guest to the program. Savina Joyce Sabina, Joseph GM of technology partners at AWS joins me as well as Scott Owen, the VP of business development and global channels at air slate, guys. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having us. It's a great to be here. Live happy. Fantastic. Let's go ahead and give the audience an overview of your roles. Sabina. We'll start with you. And then Scott will go to you. >>Great to see you again, Lisa general manager for technology partnerships globally out of the Americas, and we also help partners out of EMEA and APAC grow their business in the Americas. >>Awesome. Scott goes, I'd give, give us an overview of air slate and then your role. You will. >>You bet. Uh, so, uh, air slate, we have two offerings on the AWS marketplace or e-signature offering, which is sign now and then our no-code workflow automation, which we're really excited to bring on the marketplace. I lead our business development, uh, in channels organization for the company global partnership with AWS. Uh, we're very excited about it. >>Talk to me about some of the challenges that the tools that you just mentioned, what challenges are those solving for customers in any industry? So, >>Oh, the biggest challenges right now, obviously we are in a COVID environment and, and companies are trying to drive automation optimization, especially for remote workers to today. And so part of our solutions is obviously solving that in a very, very big way on a global basis as well. >>What are some of the key trends that you're seeing? We've seen so much flux on change in the last 20 months, but what are some of the key trends, especially as it relates to workforce productivity with those work from anywhere environments still persisting, >>It's still persisting. And I'd say the challenge is we're in a hybrid mode where you have both, you know, coming to the office, not coming to the office, but still very remote, just a last week's announcement of a new variant, for example, forcing everybody back out of the office, back into a remote environment. So flexibility, uh, around supporting that hybrid workforce is key. >>And of course here we are at a hybrid event. There are people here at a lot of them in person, but there's also a lot of content that's going on virtually for those folks that weren't quite comfortable coming back to an in-person event. But let's talk about savings about how AWS has been helping joint customers with air slate through the pandemic over the last 20 months as we saw this scatter. And now this work from this hybrid kind of work environment. Yeah. So, >>So I, Scott mentioned, right, that customers are really looking for business solutions. I did have some rapidly increased the last 20 months. We are really, we've been really working together to help both workers and businesses adapt to this remote environment. And customers are looking for simple and cost effective solutions anywhere from, you know, improving and automating their business workflows with e-signature solutions, all the way to complex processes with no code capabilities and air slate does a great job of providing these solutions for our customers. >>Some of the things from a business automation perspective that are critical these days is anything contactless talking about. E-signatures for example, it's, that's really became table stakes in the last 20 months. It's not talk to me about how you would from a biz-dev lens. Describe the partnership that air slate has with AWS. >>Yeah. For our company, it is the most strategic partnership that we have and it's all the way from our board level to our executive leadership team all the way through, throughout our organization end to end it's our most strategic partnership. >>And the things that we know and love about AWS that we've talked about with Sabina is their customer first focus, their customer obsession from a cultural perspective, is there alignment there with air Slate's culture, >>A hundred percent. And one of the cool things about the AWS partner program, which we're in a high echelon period, is the focus on the customer. The customer can reduce their EDP commit by buying solutions like ourselves on the AWS marketplace, as well as the AWS account executives are also paid and incented to sell our solution as well. So it's a one plus one equals three scenario. >>That's a good scenario. One plus one plus three. So be it, talk to me about the evolution. How long have you guys been partnering with air slate? And talk to me about the evolution of the partnership. >>Yeah. We've been working together for a few years now, but I would say the last 15 months, we've really accelerated that partnership again because of customer need and really built out high velocity Cosell motions. We made available to our slate, our partnership resources, both from commercial and public sector to scale the sales motion. As Scott mentioned, they're available in marketplace and they're also part of our ISV accelerate program, which means that our sales teams are incented to work with air slate, to close opportunities. And the key is all of this has led to 250% increase in customer wins year to date as compared to 2020. So that really speaks volumes with the partnership and the need that we are solving for our customers. >>Amazing, amazing growth, 250% in, in a year's period during a pandemic, that's massive, but we saw the acceleration of cloud adoption of digital transformation and this dependence on SAS and cloud for our business lives, our daily lives, our consumer lives. That was really absolutely critical. So Scott, from your perspective, what are some of the key aspects of the AWS relationship that you think really contribute to that success and that big metric that we just met? >>Yeah, absolutely. Well, the metric is driven by the partner programs. When you have a customer that can buy on the marketplace, reduce their EDP commit. You've got account executives that are incented to resell us, but for us, we have really great leadership support around the globe. We've created joint KPIs of which we all have stacked hands on and said, here's the KPIs we want to deliver as a joint partnership. And we're delivering those, which is creating these results as well. Can you share >>Some of those KPIs even at a high level? >>Yes. A lot of them are what, uh, opportunities in our renewal base can we bring into the ado, uh, UWS, uh, ecosystem, if you will. Um, as well as in nearly every deal that we're in, we're asking, is this an AWS customer? Is it a Greenfield opportunity for AWS and bring in the associated teams together to close that opportunity, >>Scott, about some of the business outcomes, the benefits that your joint customers are achieving, leveraging the power of this partnership? >>Absolutely well there's enormous cost savings in the solutions that we bring to the table creates the optimization that we talked about, that they need. It's also driving that digital transformation, any company, any size in order to survive has to move digitally into this new space. And we believe that the two offerings we bring to the marketplace can solve that for them. >>That's one of the things that we saw, there's definitely some silver linings that have come out of the last 20 I'm losing count 22 months, something like that. And nothing like that, right. A time to value is absolutely critical. Let's talk about now go to market Sydney and going back over to you, how does AWS support partners like air slate, um, and taking the solutions to market? You talked about the marketplace, but talk to me about that from a strategic perspective. Yes. >>So one of the things we are very focused on is creating business automation solutions, especially for industry verticals across automotive, telecommunications, healthcare, life sciences, and air slate really has solutions that help address all of the horizontal use cases and the vertical use cases, which means then we can focus our demand generation activities and actually help both our direct sales team and also our channel partners really, really scale. So again, it's kudos to Scott and the air slate team in order to be able to really scale this partnership, but most importantly help our customers through these really tough times in the past 20 months. >>And it's, uh, uh, you mentioned that with the Omicron Darion variant being announced just in the last week, of course, these challenging times persist in this uncertainty persists to it's important to have partnerships, but I also imagine Scott from your, from your perspective, being able to show transparency to the customers that you're really one team, you know, with AWS, with your channel partners. Talk to me a little bit about that. What does customers actually see and feel >>While we're excited, especially around the ecosystem piece is for example, in the last few months, we've been able to activate 35 of AWS's largest channel partners, uh, due to the fact that we are in this hand, stacked KPI go to market together. And so the ecosystem of AWS, it's the trusted partner of almost every customer. And we are trying to advantage ourselves with that trusted relationship, bringing a set of solutions that helps drive the customer's outcome. >>You mentioned an important word there, Scott, that trust that is critical for every company that is becoming a data company. If they haven't become a data company by now, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about from a trust perspective, what that means for your customers to be able to adopt these solutions, automate their businesses, allow their folks to work from anywhere and have that trust and this solid partnership and technology. >>Well, and that's the benefit of the AWS partnership. When you think of security, reliability, our entire offering basis completely on the AWS infrastructure. So we bring that trust of you can trust that the technology that it's sitting on, you can trust that it's secure, that's reliable, and we're bringing a set of solutions that drives those customer outcomes, which is cost savings, optimizations, et cetera. That combination is a win-win out there. >>And that outcome spaced focus is critical. What are some of the things Scott that folks can learn at air Slate's booth this week at reinvent for those folks that are here in person and those folks that are attending virtually >>Great question. I love that question first and foremost, both offerings are on the AWS marketplace, but we're the only e-signature offering on the marketplace. And we're the only end to end workflow automation offering on the marketplace as well. So again, uh, important to note we're on that AWS marketplace, AEs from AWS can take advantage of that end. Customers can take advantage of that. Uh, and we take advantage of it just to the, our great go to market partnership. >>We're going to mark great, good to market partnership, but also I'm hearing a pretty significant differentiator being the only ones in the marketplace with those. Talk to me about how that, I mean, one, one more question. How does that facilitate like customer conversations? I imagine that's a huge differential >>Here's is a significant different traitor to us obviously, but again, it's the power of one. Plus one equals three in the partnership, we brought a set of solutions that the customer needs. We do it on the AWS marketplace and AWS infrastructure that we sit on that creates that trust factor that you mentioned. >>I have to add, right? That air slate and team, when they saw that they were the first right, they embraced that and they broke ground and they listed on marketplace and that's paying off for them. >>Very smart. Well guys, congratulations on your joint success. Your go to market strategy seems brilliant, and we look forward to hearing many more successful years from airside and AWS together. Thank you for your insights. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure. You were great for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from AWS. Reinvent the leader in global alive tech coverage.

>> from Palo Alto, California It's the Cube covering the EM Where women transforming technology twenty nineteen. Brought to you by V. M. Where. >> Hi Lisa Martin with the Cube on the ground at the end. Where. Palo Alto, California For the fourth Annual Women Transforming Technology Even W squared. Excited to welcome back to the Cube. Kathy Chou, VP of R and D. Operations and central services at work. Cappy. It's a pleasure to have you back. It's one of you will be back. So you and I saw each other this morning. Big hug. This is one of my favorite events to be at, and I'm proud to be here with the cute because this this authentic community of women is unlike anything that I've really seen or felt in a long time. Fourth annual. I know it's grown over the last year. What do you What are some of your thoughts, even just walking in the doors this morning? Well, it's funny. It is the fourth annual and I I've been toe all four. The very first time I came, I was not a B M or employee, and I fell in love with the company. The campus because it was the very first time. And every single time I come to one of these events, I either meet someone or multiple people better fantastics or learn multiple things that will help me do what I need to do and I will tell you, and I'm not just saying cause you're here. But last year when I met you, I just felt like there was an instant spark. And like you say at these conferences, don't you feel it's safe? You can. You could be authentic. You could be who you want to be. You could be vulnerable, right? And as we can learn with each other, we can share what we need to work on. You move on and we can also Peter chests a little bit right for stuff that we've done well that sharing is so critical. Eye all the women that I've spoken to today we look at even our own career. Trajectories are looking at a lot of the statistics of the loan numbers that women technology where where is the attrition happening? What's happening in and grade school in middle school when girls, you know between seven and twelve years old, way have to help each other build up cos it's just and I think there's no better >> way than sharing stories and cheer point that means being vulnerable. I think vulnerability is one of the best price you can exhibit, period. But it used truly conceit and feel the impact Hearing. >> As you've said, you've seen that over the last four years that this is really an authentic community in every >> sense of the word. Absolutely. And, you know, you mentioned quite a few things that I'd like to talk about. So first, is these >> young. Let's start first with diversity. Okay, I know a lot of people do talk aboutthe. They think of gender diversity or ethnic diversity. Diversity of the capital. >> Dia's much broader, right? It's okay. Diversity of experience, education, you know, geography, seniority, right. There's all different types of diversity. But if we do hope, focus in a little bit on young girls. Right? Because you think about that. I was just in the I wish conference in Cork, Ireland. Stop back. Yeah. And what was amazing about that was so this is all of Court County. They had all of the what they called secondary school girls every single one of them for two days at this conference. But they got to listen to speakers from all over the world to give them that confidence to stay in, because statistics are when they're in primary school or middle school. Right? Girls say I want to be a computer scientist. I wantto do this techie thing. I'm gonna do Sam with them when they go to high school there, given all these messages like, you can't do it and you don't look like a computer scientist, right? And then all of a sudden it gets It becomes because in her head and it really does affect our confidence. And then, sad to say, years and years ago, when I graduated from college, there was only nine percent of the women were mechanical engineers. Sad to say today, that number is not challenged much. Do something just conferences like these that give us the courage to be better mentors and sponsors of those that will come after us. >> I agree. I think that it's and in some cases it seems like it's so simple where we make I don't think we're making this so hard, but I think that having the opportunity of a community to just have okay like minded people in terms of experiences that they shared well, how did you get through this barrier of, for example, you know, really kind of dissecting to your point diversity with a capital B. There's so many layers to that. What does that mean? How do we achieve it? I mean, if you look at a lot of the statistics companies that have you say females, uh, on the executive staff are like twenty seven percent more profitable. Yes, the amount of oven of reinvesting of income that women do back into the community. Their family's one of the things, Joy said this morning in her keynote joyful Fulham. We need him saying that, >> right? So is it looking at women and people of color as the underrepresented majority that that was absolutely spot on? I absolutely >> thought it was spot on this well, and you know, if you think about it, think about these experiences. You know again about diversity. There's a new dawn. It's a new phrase. But intersectionality is the word, which means, you know Okay, you're a woman. I'm a woman. I'm an Asian woman, But I'm also a woman that lived on the East Coast. I went to these sorts of schools. I had these types of experiences. So what it means is everyone bring something to the table. So if you really think about diversity now, we'LL hear this talk about inclusion. That's kind of the big word. And I've I've actually witnessed this myself on my own team because if you look at my direct staff on paper, when you look at them, they look very diverse. But actually diversity. That's like the tip of the iceberg. What you see is only the little piece when you bring down, get to those deeper layers. You realize, >> really how diverse team Miss Wright of spiritual >> diversity, experiential all of that and by including and created a inclusive environment were able to get the most out of diversity. And I think that's how you do it, because I thought about this. When you single out groups, you're not being inclusive, right? That's a good point. So I think the goal is to get what we can call the model. What we think is the majority, which is the minority to embrace the underrepresented majority and >> your perspective? How do you think V m? Where is doing on that? I was talking with Betsy said earlier, and some other folks and learned that the eggs I don't know how far down this goes, but at least execs are actually their bonuses are related to our tied to diversity and inclusion. That's a huge kind of bold statement that a company like the Mars making, not just to the tech industry, but every industry. Where do you think the emperor is on this journey of really identifying diversity and inclusion and actually starting to realise the positive impact? >> Yes. So first of all, I think you said something earlier. This is a It's an epidemic situation. OK, in that I do tell me, almost in every industry, there isthe right entertainment manufacturing, high tech, legal, professional, whatever way, there's an issue with diversity, and you're absolutely right. The peace and above our bonuses air tied to diversity, inclusion the awareness of the, um, where is second of them. The interesting thing is, there's no silver bullet. If it were that easy, we would've solved it. So what? It iss. It's one of those things where I say it takes a village and it's little things like talk about inclusion earlier, right? Hey, when you have a meeting, make sure everyone's voices voices are heard. Doesn't matter who it is. I don't care if it's a woman and under represent minority or white male. It doesn't matter. You shouldn't it? It shouldn't right. Everyone should be heard. And I was just giving a breakout talk about when you increase. Inclusion will drive more innovation. And that's my job as a leader of six hundred folks in an RD organization is to create that culture that allows people to have confidence, to take risks, to be vulnerable, authentic and to innovate right and to do new things. And if I can create that culture of inclusion, it will drive those business results. >> I couldn't agree more Tell me about like since we spoke last year. I love that driving inclusion to drive innovation. What are some of the things that you've actually seen as outcomes? Maybe just for your team as well as your own expertise as a manager? >> Yes. So I've been with him where for two and a half years, and when I first came Basically my team was a compilation of three separate teams, so each of them traditional silo new themselves in their own style but did not understand the power of the team across. So at that time, no one team was greater than one hundred people. Okay, let's say now imagine a mighty force of six hundred strong marching in the same direction, trying to do things together. One of the things that we're trying to do is start to build platforms across our organization. And what are the commonalities? That that's the difference is what commonalities across our teams so that we can drive that innovation much more effectively and efficiently. And so those are some of the things that we're doing have another fun story to tell me. Everything that I do to try to create an inclusive environment, just have opportunities for team members to meet each other. It's a simple assed. Hey, I don't know. Lisa. Lisa, what do you do? Oh, my gosh. I have a project that might need your help. I don't know how many times when we were working in the silos would enter calling someone outside our team to get the expert advice when it was on her own. And so we had one event when we had two people that sat next to each other. They didn't know each other at all. One needed some machine learning expertise. The other one was in machine learning enthusiast Fast. They came together. They have now built a patent pending piece of micro service called instead ML. That's so, uh, that's what happens when people when you're included >> and you think, Why is it so difficult? In some cases, technology is sort of sort of fuels that right because we get so used to being I could do everything from here >> on the phone from an airplane from the hotel from home, from or ever so we get more >> used to being less communicative. Absolutely right, Tio. Let's actually let's let's go back to the olden days where there were, You know, there was no device and phoniness and actually have a conversation because to your point, suddenly are uncovering. Oh my gosh. All of these skill sets are here. What if we did nothing for years? >> You're speaking my language. Eso You're absolutely right. But there's this. They used to be this rule that's a new one you wanted to communicate to someone. You have to tell them something seven times, >> right, because they're busy doing other times on the age of social media, they say. Now it's eleven times. Oh, great. And how I got exactly. So how often have you seen people who are sitting like this and they're >> communicating with each other? Be attacks and they're sitting right here. Why, it's >> important to go back old school. By the way, I think I'm old school. >> Whenever I want to pick up the phone, talk to my kids. It's on the phone. I don't care if they're, uh, ready for me to talk >> to her, and I just called them. It's because when you're innovating, it's not just the mind, it's the heart. >> And when you catch those human relationships, right is what makes the innovation stick. It makes you want to do more. It makes you want to achieve greater heights. Then you would have cause you're invested. You see, when it's an academic exercise, it's like check the box. But when you're invested in your hearts and you I feel like I can't let Lisa down, believe me, you're going to get more in depth and more advanced innovation. >> So with that and kind of the empathy approach in love to get your perspectives on a I, we talk about it all the time at every event that we go to on the Cube globally. And there's different schools of thought. Aye, aye is fantastic. It's phenomenal. It's it's becoming new standard, even a baby boomers known to some degree what it is. Yes, then there's the It's taking jobs away yet, But he's going to create new jobs. Yes, and there's the whole ethics behind this morning. Joy really kind of showed us a lot of the models and facial recognition at big companies that are better being built with bias. But one of the things I think that I hear resoundingly at events is it's going to be a combination of humans and machines. Yes, because machines can learn a lot. But it's that heart that you just mentioned in that empathy that comes from the human. So do you see those two as essential forces coming together is a. I continues to grow and take over the world. >> It's essential. Like you say. Technology is very How do we sit? Neutral. Okay, If you put it in front of a bad actor, it becomes bad. If you put it in front of a good actor, it becomes good. Okay, so technology is neutral, right? So now the goal is how do >> we ensure that we Khun tamp down the bad actors, people who want to use it for bad? And >> by the way, I am a fundamental believer that there are some jobs that should be automated. >> I mean, come on, some of the And by the way, things >> in the health industry. When you have big data and you've got a lot of things, you have to process a lot of information so we could be more accurate on things. Um, there other examples of if it's not in check, it can go right, right. Where will Over reliance on machines. Unfortunately, the seven. Thirty seven max eight is an example of it being too smart, right, and that >> you needed the human to actually adjust. So now I think also kind of combining a lot of the topics that we talked about. We need to train our children to understand that this technology is here to stay and with each and every one of them, how can they take that wonderful technology and use it for good? And I think that's the whole that's peace around inclusion. That's the peace around, building confidence in these young people and being examples. And so we need more people like joy out there so that she can. She has now raised this flag up saying, Hey, did you realize this >> happen? We need more young people. By the way, she's very young person. I'm >> totally impressed with what she's been able to do in here great for years, very, very inspiring. But if we all did a >> little bit of what joy did, we could change the world. >> Absolutely. The accountability factor and the social responsibility is so important. I was impressed with her on many levels, but one of them was the impact that she's already making with with Microsoft, IBM, uh, and actually starting to impact facial recognition a. I based on the research that she's done and show them Hey, you've got some problems here. So she's She's kind of at that intersection of your point neutral technology, good actors, bad actors. Maybe it's not good or bad. It's just Well, this is the data that we have. And it's training the models to do this. Oh, the but the accountability in the responsibility that it appears that a Microsoft and IBM face plus plus and even Amazon that she said, Hey, guys, look at how far off your models are. It sounds like these companies are actually starting to take some accountability. Civility for >> that? Yes, well, I think she proved it in our talk because last year, right, the numbers were in the eighty eighty percent tiles, and now they're up to ninety five. So you know, she's saying, by kind >> of being that lightning rod on this issue, one person could make this amount of change. Imagine if all was just a fraction of what she did, right? I mean, I think, and again, I feel very because I'm older and I have my own children just inspiring this generation, too. We could build up more joys in this world. >> So you have four boys. Yes. How are you inspiring them to finally become good humans, but also to look at the technology, the opportunities that it creates to be inclusive why it's important that some of the lessons that even parted on your boys >> Yes, first of all, I've one thing that's really >> important to me is I want them to accept whoever their partner will be for whatever they want to do. So if their partner wants to stay home and then you support them, if they want to work and go, do you support them? But just be supportive, be that partner, whatever that is, that's really important. >> The other thing is, I think just >> my husband and I are excellent examples of how that isthe, because he's an orthodontist and I've got a busy high tech job. I'm traveling a lot. My husband does more than his fair share of the household duties, and we split things pretty evenly. So I hope they've seen witness. It's not just talk, it's action and that this can actually work. And fortunately, I'm >> boys are a little older now because if you begin in the beginning, I thought, Oh, working. I don't >> know how these boys are going to turn out right, but three of them are college age and older, and they really turned into some fantastic children. The youngest is on his path as well as a junior in high school. And, you know, and I also see the type of friends that they make and how they treat women and other people that are different from them, and it just makes me very proud. >> Think the world needs more? Kathy Chow's I really dio Are you going off to see Ashley Judd? Her? What? Some of the things that you're looking >> forward to hearing her talking. Well, it's funny. I just came from a VP session. She is I again. You see someone right on the screen and you see him as an actor and you heard about Time's up and her speech and that sort of thing. But way had, but how were we just answered? Questions. She is so thoughtful, so connected, so well spoken communicates in a way that really touches you. She's another one of those lightning rides. I think w t, too, didn't excellent job of getting English speakers this year. Uh, and it's very different from joy. It's much more from a from her view, in her mind went in arts, and Joyce was much more from a technical aspect. But messages are the same, right? It's to be inclusive, understanding, embrace diversity and be authentic. You >> inclusive animators. Kathy is so great to have you back on the Cube. And Charlie, I know we could keep chatting, but we thank you so much of your time. We can't wait for next year. Wait. Excellent. Thank you for the Cuban Lisa Martin. You're >> watching the show from women Transforming Technology, fourth annual somewhere. Thanks for watching.

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group hi I'm Stu minimun and this is the second year of the cube at what is now wtg transform 2018 and happy to welcome to the program Scott Winslow who is the president and founder of winslet Technology Group Scott always great to see you good afternoon still happy to be with you hey and Scott thank you so much you you not only brought us back a second year we've got a nice table here but I'm not tripping over myself saying that it's the you know 14th anniversary Winslow technology group Dell EMC user conference and lovely Boston Massachusetts in the background it was like ha it's literally wtg transform rolls off the tongue so thank you you were the inspiration for us to you your comments last year precipitated to change our name III know your team just looked at it and felt sorry for me because it didn't roll off the tongue quite as easily as as the new it was a mouthful yeah so Scott you and I did we bump into each other a bunch we'd say we tend to go to many of the shows the Dell show the Nutanix show let's talk about your show first here you said it is the 14th year its users one of the reasons Idol of coming here besides getting to talk to you and Rick and some of your partner's is users I will speak to more users in one day here than I do it some of the big shows I go to yeah I mean it's it's a great opportunity to thank our existing customer base you know we have a fourfold purpose for this event we like to educate our customers we hope that they can pick up some knowledge and maybe an aha moment that they have with they're looking at a hyper-converged solutions or all-flash solutions we've got a new Dell client display here this year that we've never had in the past so we're looking to educate we love to give them an opportunity to collaborate with other practitioners to compare notes the feedback I get from them is they really enjoy that piece of it we want to have some fun and you know it's a tradition that we want to keep rolling and they're helping you know to make it very successful so it's been a great it's been a great venue for us and a great event for so over 14 years now and Scott you couldn't have ordered a better day I mean New England you know it might change in an hour but right now temperatures in the low 70s it's mostly clear you know gorgeous backdrop here as you mentioned in the you open you know Sox have their ace pitching tonight and there are still in first place so yeah it doesn't doesn't hurt well you know we're in the customer service business right so you have to think of everything temperature starting pitcher and you know we try to make sure we've got a good agenda and there's a lot of good information for them here there to get customers to come out and spend a day with you like this is why there's a great event has going to be so biggest because year after year after year I feel like we've delivered and then we have kind of a continuous improvement process and we try to improve it every year here we are Scott one talk about your business you know first time we met you know winslet technology was one of the it was it was the Dell Partner of the year so you know been a long time dell partner the dell you know acquisition merger with emc it's been interesting to watch i know you've got some viewpoints but before we get into kind of the dell piece of it talk about your business as you know because we call you a channel partner and they're you know what's driving your business how's growth going how are things up here in new england and Beyond because yeah you're much more than New England yeah I mean well we've certainly evolved our business over the years with acquisitions being a big part of that initially we started out as a compelling partner then Compellent was acquired by Dell and then you know five or six years later after that we've the Delhi you see consolidation so I think we've had to learn to be flexible and and one of the things we've seen with that is we just each time there was an acquisition it allowed us to increase the size of our portfolio with more solutions that we can offer our end-users more services that we can provide you know along the way we've added a lot of other solutions too like the Nutanix solution and the hyper-converged space so our business is going great we're you know the highest employee count we've ever had our revenues were as high as they've ever been last year we had a record q3 record q4 in q1 we grew our Dell business by over 30% that makes Dell very happy and makes us very happy as well so you know as as this whole industry evolves and you know the digital economy progresses there continue to be the need for the services that we provide all right so let's talk about Dallas you said you've come from the compelling piece the the delicacy which the Nutanix OEM is something that I know your team is you know very involved with you know how is Dell and LEM see how they do and for the channel these days I think they're doing very well I think they you know tell likes to save they big ears and they listen well I think that they have proven that they put together a very good channel a partner program under the leadership of John Byrne initially and now Joyce Mullen you know I think that they incent you to work with them they try to incent the salespeople and sent the companies but they also put together very good programs for you to run marketing events like this so an event like this we couldn't do it without the support of Dell technologies and they've been you know very supportive of us you know they're providing speakers like Dave singer you've got all kinds of subject matter experts here we've got lots of hardware and software for folks through you know demo so I think I think overall the partner programs been very good great in Nutanix is this a you you get it through the Dell so I'm curious has it has the move as Nutanix is shifting more to really that software model does that have any impact on on your business or are you isolated from that since you've been using the Dell xcs yeah well I mean first of all we've been involved in Nutanix for you know three plus years now right before Dell acquired EMC our hyper-converged solution was Nutanix we've built together you know a very nice base with customers many of whom you know are here today so as they evolve to a software model I do think they're going to be less concerned about what or where platform it goes on because they're truly creating all their revenues you know from the software side so they're very they're they don't care really what you know what hardware platform is being used so you know we feel like we've got the best two solutions in the hyper-converged marketplace between the portfolio of Dell solutions you know visa and VX rail vce and then Nutanix with the Nutanix solution typically with Nutanix we tend to put that on a Dell server platform that's where we lean we think Dells got the best server technology in the industry that's a nice way for us to bridge that gap between the two companies so a lot of times our customers are putting a new tannic solution on a dell platform you know key themes I heard your talk rick's talk david singers talk this morning and what i hear from customers digital transformation and hybrid cloud are those top of mine with your customers today absolutely yeah I think you know Rick alluded to it in his talk a lot of customers are coming to us saying hey help us with our cloud strategy and so we're going in and saying tell us about your applications you know these are applications that we think belong in the public cloud that makes sense and the public cloud and you know that could be disaster recovery could be backup it could be office 365 and these are other applications that we think might be more well suited for an on-premise solution so that could be active file transfer and so you know we think that leads naturally to a hybrid cloud discussion we've got a customer here today a financial customer from New Hampshire and their CIO called me I had known him previously at a famous sneaker company in town he went to a financial institution and he said hey we wanna we want to move everything to the cloud can you come up and consult with us on that and we ended up putting in a hybrid cloud for him you know featuring a hyper-converged solution that had the cloud integration that he needed so I think that's the kind of activity we're involved in today yeah you use the word conversation that and the customers I've talked to they like they they need advice and they want someone that's not just oh well here's the solution that you're going to buy it no no it's a conversation there's lots of decision points and as you build out that hybrid cloud yes it's going to be made of by definition multiple pieces it's not necessarily going to be one company that's going to do it all but you know your team helps them that journey absolutely I mean you can't go in with a cookie cutter approach at sea you know you've got two years in one mouth we tell other salespeople you got to use them in that portion so you really kind of listen to the customer as I said try to understand what their applications are you got to understand what their biases are if it's a Microsoft shop you know as your might be their choice for you know public cloud or they might be interested in AWS so you got to kind of work through those you know scenarios and then build out a solution that's gonna work for them we and we rely on our solutions architects Brian veenu runs our sa team and he's got a group of five essays that we think are very adept at you know putting those solutions together yeah Brian's actually not not far from I said here you've got the new hands-on lab is one of the new things that you added here and anything from that or from other things at the event that you won't want to highlight as we wrap yeah I think I mean the hands-on lab gives you know customers the opportunity to come in and play with kind of structured and scripted demos and I see a number of customers in there using that so I'll talk to our team after the event and find out how it went we always try to look for you know improvements along the way but you know there's opportunity in there to play with those demos in terms of storage in terms of hyper-converged in terms of Dell OpenManage essentials which is the software that manages your entire server farm so I think that's been a good addition I'd say the other addition is this year is we were planning it we said hey our people are really good we need to get our people up in front instead of relying so much on the OEM and they're great and they provide great resources but I know that our people have so much to offer as well particularly because you know we're out there you know you're putting solutions together for customers and I think that breadth and depth you know comes through so that's been a nice addition this year where it's not just been Rick out on myself but we've utilized a number of members on our team Ed Palmer is the moderator for a customer experience as an outcome session this afternoon that we're really excited about because at the end of the day is a solution provider that's our job is to produce results and outcomes for our customers that's how we're going to be judged that's how we want to be judged so I'm really excited about that session because we've got em privada and Boston Architectural College they're going to present up their respective deployments and they were different of hyper-converged technology so I think the voice of the customer we really want to make sure we're continue to bring that back to this event so well Scott always a pleasure to see you thanks so much for taking the cube back to this event and thank you for all the customers we get access to we always loved to talk to the customers by the way if you're looking to get a customer on the cube that's we were always looking for customers so we look at the events or we do have a Boston area studio and a lovely Palo Alto studio so reach out to the team be happy to talk mom's to minimun thanks so much for watching the Q

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching the Cube and our continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Marius Hass is here, he's the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Dell EMC. Great to see you again. >> Dave, great to see you and Stu, wonderful. >> You're lookin' good. Business is good. The commercial business is cranking. Particularly impressive in servers and networking but the whole business is just really booming. What's going on? >> We're very pleased with the progress that we're making and I think from, you look at it last year and the share gain that we'll be able to have in all the key lines of business. The transformation stories are real and enabling our customers to progress in the journeys that they're on into a digital transformation movement and to an IT transformation movement. A workforce transformation security transformation. Every one of our portfolio elements plays a role in that. And it's resonating well. We're doing, we're aligning our team members to best serve our customers. Our partner community has really stepped up and performed really well around the globe as well. So we see every region doing quite nicely. >> And just to clarify for our audience, the commercial businesses, not the top of the pyramid, it's sort of everything else. Maybe you could just quantify it. >> If you think about it, take the top 3,000 accounts around the globe, it's the top of the pyramid it's at. So everything below that, so you take all public sector, you take some federal, and then here in the US also, department of defense, we've got a big customer, NATO in Europe is an example. All commercial accounts, and then in addition to that, I also have the pleasure of hosting our channel program. So we wanted to make sure we had two amazing channel teams when we brought the company together. We wanted to have one channel team, one program, driving simplicity, driving a predictable engagement model, and obviously making it extremely profitable for our partners. So that was the objective and it's all starting to come together very nicely. >> So a channel obviously a critical component of your business. Maybe talk a little bit more about that. You brought in sort of EMC's channel piece, your channel piece. Those things evolve, I mean, every five years the whole channel business changes. The Cloud changed everything. So how have you dealt with that? How would you describe this state of your channel business? >> I think, let me start by, the first thing you want to make sure that you do is that you align every single one of your core assets, which is inclusive of our team members as well as our partner team members, towards how do we best cover the total TAM. It's a 3 1/2 billion, almost 3 1/2 trillion dollar addressable market, large account-based, well over 500,000 that we've got as named accounts around the globe. And then you can imagine all the other small, medium businesses as well. So first thing we did is ensure that we understood how do we best cover those accounts with our team members? And then how do you best augment with a complementary coverage model with our partners? And then, now that you have the ability to get more at-bats with more customers, then how do you make sure that you present the best possible plays or solutions that solve their key business problems? And being able to do all of that refining, all of that, takes a lot of time and effort. But once you've got those levers and pulling them right, you just start to see the progression and then the nice momentum that we for example see today. >> Marius, what are some of the key concerns that you're hearing from the consumer clients that you have? Is it the digital transformation that we heard in they keynote? How much is that pervasive across every company these days? >> Oh, there's no doubt, I think every customer in every industry is going through some transformation today. They're choosing Dell Technologies as a partner of choice for them. The first question is, help me assess where I am in that journey, and then how do I translate, or how do I intersect that journey with the right technology so that I can now move forward? And many a time, it starts with the conversation around, how do I become a digital company? How do I transform my applications into a native Cloud application-based model that can reside on any OS, on any Cloud, anywhere? You talked to Pat earlier today from VMware. Clearly a big push for what they're doing. That conversation is typically the first one we have. But then very quickly it translates also into well what other core infrastructure components that I need in order to be able modernize it, automate it, and then start to orchestrate service levels so that I've got the best optimized infrastructure to be able to deliver those applications and those services to my constituencies. >> So your relationship with clients since the integration has evolved. I mean when you think about Dell, the Dell brand, EMC's long-term relationships. VMware, and then the other business, RSA, Pivotal, Dell Financial Services. You bring a lot to the table. Maybe talk about how you use that as a competitive weapon. >> I think it's the ability that we have now to transform the business problem conversation into here's how you solve it with technology and here are all the components and solutions that we have. And we bring that together in a business problem solving manner. That's where, it's what we call the art of the possible. It's truly transformed the way we have a conversation with our customers. And truly puts us in a position of being a strategic partner of choice. >> And how about the cross selling, the cohort selling. How has that transpired? How much of a lift is that to your business? Maybe you could give us some color there. >> I'll give you a little bit of a sense. One of the things obviously we did during the integration planning when we still had to operate as two separate companies was, how can we dissect all the accounts that we have? How much of our, in every one of these accounts, how many of our lines of business have we sold into those accounts? So from a planning perspective, we were able to get ready for the cross sell enablement as soon as we became one company. That truly put us in a position where once the clock started ticking the teams went off and running. They knew exactly which accounts to go pursue. They knew exactly what solutions to be offering to the customers. And our team members came together very nicely. We compensated them to go bring together a single architecture strategy. So all of those pieces were all part of the planning cycle that once we were able to execute, people were running at it at a fast, fast pace. >> So that requires some leadership. We were sort of talking off camera about some of the complexities of bringing two large organizations together. EMC for years, belly-to-belly, those guys love account control. You've had your organization, and you were hit in a groove swing before the merger, so how did you address that cultural mix? >> Well I think what, the cultures were a lot more similar than people expected. I think, we've talked about this before where we put all of our cultural traits and asked every single one of our team members, I think it went out to 75,000 of our team members and said, rank these 27 cultural traits in order. And the top five were exactly the same and in exact same order. From both cultures, which was impressive. And the first thing was always about embrace the customer. So then when we then go through and said to our team members, okay, we're going to align by our customers. And then make sure that we've got an account exec, we've got a pre-sales team, we've got a specialty organization, that is all aligned towards how do we best serve this customer? And then make it a very scalable model. All of a sudden you see that engine started clicking. You start the team members starting to realize that we're going to win together, as long as we win the hearts and minds of our customers. And that was a truly a differentiator in the process. >> Marius, one of the themes in the keynote this morning Michael talked about the pace of change. I want you to address how the channel is dealing with this pace of change. Because I think about when conversion infrastructure first rolled out, as Cloud over the last 10 years has come out. It's been challenging for some of the channel to work their way through. Where they add value, where they make dollars. What are you seeing out there, and how are you helping the channel through their own transformation? >> So we're kicking off our global channel summit today, this afternoon. Joyce Mullen is our channel chief. She's going to have Michael on stage. Willie Scannell and myself will be there with her as well. You see over 60% of what we call our metal partners, so these are titanium and so forth, grew well into the double-digits with us. So these are the majority of our partners that have understood how to embrace a solution orientation with our full portfolio. They're selling more lines of business, we added and re-activated 54,000 customers just this past year alone. That's a big number. And so, what they're finding is, again, embracing the transformations, embracing the portfolio, and becoming a lot more relevant to the customer journey. And we've seen nothing but success so far. So we've been very, very happy. >> So you have to position yourself with a channel obviously as relevant, and then of course at the end of the day, they care about margin, they care about things like deal registration. How complicated was it to bring those two different systems together? And it seems like you've done it pretty quickly but. >> We've done a good job, and we had plenty of time to get ready for it too. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Now as systems go, you know that it's never perfect. Right, so there was still opportunities for us to improve the deal registration process. We got well over 70% of the inquiries coming in are getting approved right away. And then you've still got to work long tail of the 30%. And how do you try to do that in a frictionless manner as quickly as possible? We've got SLAs that we've deployed for every one of our partners, so they know exactly how long it'll take to get a deal reg done, and some instances it's automatic where they've got lined-up business encompassing for example. So trying to put as many rules into the process to make sure that we have a very efficient, effective engine. Now we're still in the process of consolidating all our quoting and config engines site. I think you're familiarized with the EMC engine was an SAP-based model, the Dell core engine is an Oracle-based model. Well, bringing those configurations engines together isn't something that you do overnight. So what can we do to mask some of that complexity to our partners? By giving them an SLA that truly enables them to compete effectively across the globe. And we get better, and better, and better at it. To the point that our partners are feeling, obviously able to grow, obviously be in a position to be extremely competitive with us. >> So I'm guessing you masked that with people in process, right? >> Some of that, yes, and we continue to invest significantly in our IT infrastructure to continue to improve that. >> Right, right, okay so, what's going on this show? You talked about the partner summit. What else should we know about? >> Well, obviously you heard Michael's keynote. He was signaling some of the new technology announcements that will be made tomorrow. Jeff Clarke is going to have an amazing keynote and he's going to launch a number of new products, new solutions, new updates. Basically across the whole portfolio. Pay close attention. >> Well, I'm glad you brought up Jeff Clarke because he's not been shy about talking about simplifying, I mean you've done very well despite the fact that storage business is not held up to expectations. So you got some upside there. Jeff has come in and said we're going to simplify this. And so that could potentially add fuel to the fire in the next 12 months. >> And he'll certainly help for sure. And it's all about how do we simplify? How do we streamline? How do we accelerate the pace of innovation? How do we create a more consistent management orchestration layer across all of our storage assets is an example. And he is marching down that path at a feverous pace. So we're extremely excited about all of the things that are going to really enable us in sales and make us to present an even better portfolio to our customers. But, look, in the fourth quarter we grew storage. We've seen that same momentum continuing in the first quarter. So we're feeling pretty bullish about where we're heading. And we're pretty bold in our communications to our channel partners. Say hey, this ought to be a refuse to lose it approach. We're number one in storage today. Our customers have voted to have us as part of their solution. So, let's make sure that we embrace 'em. Let's make sure we bring 'em the best technology possible. >> Marius, one of the things people on the outside often don't notice some of the big changes that happen inside a company. We remember back when you joined Dell, gone through the whole privatization, we've had this huge merger. How is Dell different today than it was when you joined just a few years back? >> Can you believe it? It's been six years ago. I think that's when we probably first met, right? And it's again the, the magnitude shift, and what this portfolio can now do for our customers. It's mind-boggling. It's just unimaginable six years ago. Yes, we had great technology on the client side. We were making great strides on the compute side. We were starting to make hay in the networking side. Starting to progress on the storage side. And we've just now completely changed the industry landscape. Where I don't have a conversation today with a customer where there isn't an opportunity that they want to engage with. Not a single customer says I'm not interested in working with Dell Technologies. It just doesn't exist. So I think the stat is 99% of our Fortune 500 customers are Dell customers. Dell Technologies' customers. >> Well, it's hard not to bump into Dell when you walk into an account. I mean it's virtually impossible in some way, shape, or form. >> Marius: That's a good thing right? >> That's true. >> Yes. >> When your customers, particularly in the commercial area, go home, and they write up their trip report, what are their takeaways? What do you want them to take away from this event? >> I'd say it's a place your bets on Dell Technologies. That's the right partner for you. It's going to move you and your company into being future-ready all the time. Michael's got the right vision of where this is going. He's got the right technology to do it. And we've got great team members to help you get there. >> Marius, you look great, you got a winning spring in your steps. >> Love it. >> So congratulations. I know there's a lot more to go. You're not done yet, and we'll be watching. So thanks so much coming-- >> There's always more to do. Dave, Stu, awesome. >> Great to see you again. All right, you're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and we will be back, right after this short break. (upbeat music)

I[Announcer] Live from Silicon Valley, it's "The Cube." Covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> 'Kay welcome back everyone, we are live in Palo Alto for "The Cube" special coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. We're in our new 4,500 square foot studio, just moved in. We'll be expanding, you'll see a lot more in-studio coverage from "The Cube" as well as our normal going out to the events and extracting. Anyways I'm John Furrier Joining me is Jeff Frick. General manager of "The Cube." But a breakdown, all the action. As you know, we do a lot of data science. We've been watching the grid. We've been on the treadmill all weekend. All last week, digging into the Mobile World Congress. Sentiment, the vibe, the direction, and trying to synthesize all the action. And really kind of bring it all together for everyone here. And of course,we're doing it in Palo Alto. We're going to bring folks in from Silicon Valley that could not have made the trek to Barcelona. We're going to be talking to folks on the phone, who are in Barcelona. You heard from Lynn Comp from Intel. We have Floyd coming up next. CTO and SAP breaking down all the action from their new cloud. And big Apple news. SAP now has a general availability of the iOS native development kit. Which should change the game for SAP. There is tons of smart cities, smart stadiums, you know IOT, autonomous vehicles. So much going on at Mobile World Congress. We're going to break that down every day starting at 8AM. In-studio. And of course, I want to thank Intel for headlining our sponsorship and allowing us to create this great content. With some contributing support from SAP clouds I want to give a shout out, a bit shout out to Intel. Check out their booth. Check out their coverage. And check out their new SAP cloud, that's been renamed from HANA Cloud to SAP cloud. Without their support we wouldn't be able to bring this wall-to-wall great commentary. Jeff so with that aside. We got two days. We've got Laura Cooney coming in. Bob Stefanski managing this bridge between Detroit and Silicon Valley. And all that great stuff. Phones are ringing off the hook here in the studio. Go tweet us by the way at the cube or at ferrier We have Guy Churchwood coming in. We have great content all week. We have entrepreneurs. We have Tom Joyce, a Cube alumni. Who's an executive interviewing for a bunch of CEO positions. Really going to break down the changing aspect of Mobile World Congress. The iPhone's 10 years old. We're seeing now a new step function of disruption. Peter Burris said the most terrible in time. And I even compounded the words by saying and the phones are getting faster. So it's beyond the device. I mean what are you seeing on the grid? When you look at the data out there? >> John a bunch of things as we've been watching the stream of the data that came in and surprised me. First off just a lot of early announcements around Blackberry and Nokia. Who are often not really mentioned as the leaders in the handsets base. Not a place that we cover real extensively. But really kind of, these guys making a move and really taking advantage of the void that Samsung left with some of the Note issues. But what I thought was even more interesting is on our hashtag monitoring tools that IOT and 5G are actually above any of the handset manufacturers. So it really supports a hypothesis that we have that while handsets will be better and there'll be more data enabled by 5G, what 5G's really all about is as an IOT enabler. And really another huge step in the direction of connected devices, autonomous vehicles. We've talked about it. We cover IOT a lot. But I thought that was pretty interesting. >> Well Robo Car's also in there. That's a. >> Well everybody loves a car right. >> Well it's kind of a symbol of the future of the car. Which again ties it all together. >> Right right. The driverless race car, which is pretty interesting. >> Takes sports to a whole other level. >> I thought that was interesting. Another little thing as we watch these digital assistants and these voice assistants John, and I got a couple for Christmas just so I could try them out, is that Motorola announced that they're going to partner with Alexa. And use the Alexa voice system inside of their phones. You know I'm still waiting, I don't know why Siri doesn't have a stand-alone device and really when you use a Google Home versus an Amazon Alexa, very different devices, really different kind of target. So I thought that was an interesting announcement that also came out. But fundamentally it's fun to see the support of IOT and 5G, and really enable this next great wave of distribution, disruption, and opportunity. >> We're going to have Saar Gillia in the studio later today and tomorrow as a guest analyst for us on "The Cube." Of course folks may know Saar from being on "The Cube," he was recently senior vice reporting to Meg Whitman, and built out that teleco service provider, NFV business model for HP. And he's been to Mobile World Congress almost every year. He didn't make it this year, he'll be coming in the studio. And he told me prior to being, extremely vetting him for "The Cube" if you will, to use a Trump term, after extreme vetting of Saar Gillia he really wants to make the point of, and this is going to be critical analysis, kind of poking a hole into the hype, which is he doesn't think that the technology's ready for primetime. And specifically he's going to comment around he doesn't believe that the apps are ready for all this bandwidth. He doesn't think, he thinks that 5G is a solution looking for a problem. And I don't necessarily agree with him, so we'll have a nice commentary. Look for Saar today on "The Cube," at 11:30 he's coming on. It's going to be a little bit of a cage match there with Saar. >> I always go back to the which is the most underrepresented and most impactful law. Which is probably in the short term, in the hype cycle 5G's probably not going to deliver on their promise up to the level of the hype. As we find over and over with these funny things like Bluetooth. Who would ever think Bluetooth would be such an integral part of so many things that we do today? I think over the long term, the mid term, I think the opportunity's giant. >> I meant I think for people to understand 5G, at least the way I always describe it over the weekend, when I was at lacrosse games and soccer games over the weekend, for the folks that aren't in tech, 5G is the holy grail for IOT, mobile cars, and AI. Because what 5G does, it creates that mesh of rf, or rf radio frequency, at a whole other level. You look at the radios that Intel's announcing across their Telco partners, and what Intel's doing really is a game-changer. And we all know LTE, when the signal's low on the phone, everyone freaks out. We all know when WiFi doesn't work, the world kind of comes to a crawl. I mean just think 15 years ago wifi wasn't even around. So now think about the impact of just what we rely on with the digital plumbing called wireless. >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> When you think about the impact of going around the fiber to the home, and the cost it takes, to bring fiber to, Lynn Comp was commenting on that. So having this massively scalable bandwidth that's a radio frequency wireless is just a game-changing thing you can do. Low latency, 10 20 gig, that's all you need. Then you're going to start to see the phones change and the apps change. And as Peter Burris said a turbulent change of value propositions will emerge. >> It's funny at RSA a couple of weeks back the chatter was the people at RSA, they don't use wifi. You know, they rely on secure mobile networks. And so 5G is going to enable that even more, and as you said, if you can get that bandwidth to your phone in a safer, and secure, more trusted way, you know what is the impact on wifi and what we've come to expect on our devices and the responsiveness. And all that said, there will be new devices, there will be new capabilities. And I guess the other thing that's kind of funny is that of course the Oscar's made their way up to the, on the board. I thought that might wipe everything out after last night. But no IOT and 5G is still above Oscar's on the trending hashtag. >> Well I mean, Oscar's bring up... It's funny we all watch the Oscar's. There was some sort of ploy, but again, you bring up entertainment with the Oscar's. You look at what Hollywood's going through, and the Hollywood Reporter had an article talking about Reed Hastings with Netflix, he talked today really kind of higher end video so the entertainment business is shifting the court cutting is happening, we're seeing more and more what they call over the top. And this is the opportunity for the service providers but also for the entertainment industry. And with social media and with all these four form factors changing the role of media will be a packet data game. And how much can you fit in there? Whether it's e-sports to feature film making, the game is certainly changing. And again, I think Mobile World Congress is changing so radically. It's not just a device show anymore, it's not about the handset. It's about what the enablement is. I think that's why the 5G impact is interesting. And making it all work together, because a car talking to this device, it's complicated. So there's got to be the glue, all kind of new opportunities. So that's what I'm intrigued by. The Intel situation where you've got two chip guys battling it out for who's going to be that glue layer under the hood >> Right and if you look at some of the quotes coming out of the show a lot of the high-level you got to get away from the components and get into the systems and solutions, which we hear about over and over and over again. It's always about systems and solutions. I think they will find a problem to solve, with the 5G. I think it's out there. But it is... >> My philosophy Jeff is kill me with the bandwidth problem. Give me more bandwidth, I will consume more bandwidth. I mean look at compute pal as an example. People thought Morse law was going to cap out a decade ago. You look at the compute power in the chips with the cloud, with Amazon and the cloud providers it's almost infinite computes. So then the role of data comes in. So now you got data, now you got mobile, I think give us more bandwidth, I think the apps have no problem leveling up. >> [Jeff] Sucking it up. >> And that's going to be the debate with Saar. >> It's the old chip. The Intel Microsoft thing where you know, Intel would come out with a faster chip then the OS with eat more of it as part of the OS. And it kept going and going. We've talked through a lot of these John and if you're trying to predict the future and building for the future you really have to plan now for almost infinite bandwidth for free. Infinite storage for free, infinite compute for free. And while those curves are kind of asymptotically free they're not there yet. That is really the world in which we're heading. And how do you reshape the way you design apps, experiences, interphases without those constraints, which before were so so significant. >> I'm just doing a little crowd check here, you can go to crowdcheck.net/mwc if you want to leave news links or check in with the folks chatting. And I was just talking to SAP and SAP had the big Apple news. And one of the things that's interesting and Peter Burris talked about this on our opening this morning is that confluence between the consumer business and then the infrastructures happening. And that it was called devos but now you're starting to see the developers really focusing on the business value of technology. But yet it's not all developers even though people say the developers, the new king-makers, well I would say that. But the business models still is driven by the apps. And I think developers are certainly closer to the front lines. But I think you're going to start to see a much more tighter coupling between the c level folks in business and the developers. It's not just going to be a developer-led 100% direction. Whether it's entertainment, role of data, that's going to be pretty interesting Jeff. >> So Apple's just about finished building the new spaceship headquarters right. I think I opens up next month. I'm just curious to get your take John on Apple. Obviously the iPhone changed the game 10 years ago. What' the next big card that Apple's going to play? 'Cause they seemed to have settled down. They're not at the top of the headlines anymore. >> Well from my sources at Apple, there are many. Deep inside at the highest levels. What I'm hearing is the following. They're doing extremely well financially, look at the retail, look at the breadth of business. I think Tim Cook has done an amazing job. And to all my peers and pundits who are thrashing Apple they just really don't know what they're talking about. Apple's dominating at many levels. It's dominating firstly on the fiscal performance of the company. They're a digital presence in terms of their stickiness is second to none. However, Apple does have to stay in their game. Because all the phone guys they are in essence copying Apple. So I think Apple's going to be very very fine. I think where they could really double down and win on is what they did getting out of the car business. I think that was super smart. There was a post by Auto Blog this weekend saying Silicon Valley failed. I completely disagree with that statement. Although in the short term it looks like on the scoreboard they're kind of tapping out, although Tesla this year. As well as a bunch of other companies. But it's not about making the car anymore. It's all about the car's role in a better digital ecosystem. So to me I think Apple is poised beautifully to use their financial muscle, to either buy car companies or deal with the digital aspect of it and bring that lifestyle to the car, where the digital services for the personalization of the user will be the sticking point for the transportation. So I think Apple's poised beautifully for that. Do they have some issues? Certainly every company does. But compared to everyone else I just see no one even close to Apple. At the financial level, with the cash, and just what they're doing with the tax. From a digital perspective. Now Google's got a self-driving cars, Facebook's a threat, Amazon, so those are the big ones I see. >> The other thing that's happening this week is the game developer conference in San Francisco at Moscone. So you know again, huge consumers of bandwidth, huge consumers of compute power. Not so much storage. I haven't heard much of the confluence of the 5G movement with the game developer conference. But clearly that's going to have a huge impact 'cause most gaming is probably going to move to a more and more mobile platform, less desktop. >> Well the game developer conference, the one that's going on the GDC, is kind has a different vibe right now. It's losing, it's a little bit lackluster in my mind. It's classic conference. It's very monetized. It seems to be over-monetized. It's all about making money rather than promoting community. The community in gaming is shifting. So you can look at how that show is run, versus say e three and now you've got Twitch Con. And then Mobile World Congress, one of the big voids is there's no e-sports conversation. That certainly would be the big thing to me. To me, everything that's going digital, I think gaming is going to shift in a huge way from what we know as a console cult. It's going to go completely mainstream, in all aspects of the device. As 5G overlays on top of the networks with the software gaming will be the first pop. You're going to see e-sports go nuclear. Twitch Con, those kind of Twitch genre's going to expand. Certainly "The Cube" will have in the future a gaming cube. So there'll be a cube anchor desk for most the gaming culture. Certainly younger hosts are going to come one. But to me I think the gaming thing's going to be much more lifestyle. Less culty. I think the game developer conference's lost its edge. >> And one of the other things that comes, obviously Samsung made a huge push. They were advertising crazy last night on the Oscar's, with the Casey add about you know, people are creating movies. And they've had their VR product out for a while but there's a lot of social activity saying what is going to be the killer app that kind of breaks through VR? We know Oculus has had some issues. What do you read in between the tea leaves there John? >> Well it's interesting the Oscar's was awesome last night, I would love to watch the Hollywood spectacle but one of the things that I liked was that segway where they introduced the Oscar's and they kind of were tongue in cheek 'cause no one in Hollywood really has any clue. And they were pandering, well we need to know what they meant. It was really the alpha geeks who were pioneering what used to be the green screen technology now you go and CGI it's our world. I mean I want to see more of that because that is going to be the future of Hollywood. The tools and the technologies for filmmaking is going to have a Morse law-like impact. It's the same as e-sports, you're going to see all kinds of new creative you're going to see all kinds of new tech. They talked about these new cameras. I'm like do a whole show on that, I would love it. But what it's going to enable is you're going to see CGI come down to the price point where when we look at PowerPoints and Adobe Creative Suite and these tools. You're going to start to see some badass creative come down for CGI and this is when the artist aspect comes in. I think art design will be a killer field. I think that is going to be the future of filmmaking. You're going to see an indie market explode in terms of talent. The new voices are going to emerge, the whole diversity thing is going to go away. Because now you're going to have a complete disruption of Hollywood where Hollywood owns it all that's going to get flattened down. I think you're going to see a massive democratization of filmmaking. That's my take. >> And then of course we just continue to watch the big players right. The big players are in here. It's the start ups but I'm looking here at the Ford SAP announcement that came across the wire. We know Ford's coming in at scale as stuff with IBM as well So those people bring massive scale. And scale is what we know drives pricing and I think when people like to cap on Morse law they're so focused on the physical. I think the power of Morse law has nothing to do with the microprocessor per se. But really it's an attitude. Which we talked a little briefly about what does the world look like if you have infinite networking, infinite compute, and infinite storage. And basically free. And if you start to think that way that changes your perspective on everything. >> Alright Jeff well thanks for the commentary. Great segment really breaking down the impact of Mobile World Congress. Again this show is morphing from a device show phone show, to full on end-to-end network. Intel are leading the way and the entire ecosystem on industry partners, going to write software for this whole new app craze, and of course we'll be covering it here all day today Monday the 27th and all the day the 28th. Stay tuned stay watching. We've got more guests coming right back with more after the short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE. Covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we are live here in Palo Alto for special two days of wall-to-wall coverage for Mobile World Congress. Here in our new 45 hundred square foot studio in Palo Alto. We have folks on the ground. Analysts, we have reporters in Barcelona, but we're going to be covering all the action here in our studio, where we're going to bring folks from Silicon Valley who did not make the trek to Barcelona here to weigh in with reaction and commentary and opinions and analysis of all the happenings of Mobile World Congress. But first, as the day winds down Monday in Europe, we wanted to make sure we get on the phone and get with folks who are on the ground. And right now on the phone we have Floyd Strimling who's the global vice president of HANA Cloud, I'm sorry, the HANA Cloud Platform which the big news was, they renamed their product from SAP HANA Cloud Platform to SAP Cloud Platform. Floyd Strimling, thanks for taking the time after your dinner. Thanks for coming on. >> Floyd: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be there. Happy to help out and give you some insights on what's going on here in beautiful Barcelona. It's actually quite warm here. >> Is it warm? I saw some umbrellas over the weekend but great city, I would love to have been there, but I wanted to anchor the coverage here. One of my favorite cities. But first, tell me what's going on. Obviously over the weekend we were preparing, we were covering all the content for the folks watching, CUBE365.net/MWC17. The news is all there. Every single piece of signal is there. Go to our site. Check it out. Floyd, what's happening? It's been a hand-set show all weekend. Obviously Nokia making a comeback. Blackberry making a comeback. LG, Huawei, Hess Phones, they all want to be Apple, but yet 5G is also dominating as well. So there's a culture clash. What's happening in Barcelona? What's your analysis? >> Floyd: The biggest thing that I was surprised by is exactly what you're talking about. The number of headset announcements and the number of displays that are all based upon new devices and the nostalgia for Blackberry and Nokia continues. People are rooting for them to make a comeback. In the meantime, you've got new devices from Huawei. You've got Samsung doing announcements. You know you're in the show when Sony has a big presence in Europe with their handsets, which I don't see too much in North America and it just seems to be everybody is gunning really for maybe what they foresee as the perceived weakness in Apple just not going for the killer 7 and waiting for the 8 to change the game. And they're all going to try to knock them off the pedestal. There's some very interesting phones that are out there. 5G is definitely everywhere, too. Everyone's talking about it. Everyone's trying to be the first. Trying to show, especially the streaming capabilities. What that'll be able to do and what it'll be able to change. And then, you know what? One of my favorite sections was the drones. We got to see some commercial carbon fiber drones that I never saw up and personal. See what's going on in there. A lot of interesting things going on with those things and more than just delivery, right? Everything that you could possibly do. There's no shortage of IoT and connected this, connected that, but they're adding a flavor of AI now. And I think we still got to get to Step 1 with IoT before we go to Step 2. So, it's been interesting to watch people try to leapfrog each other as they move towards new technologies. [Interviewer] How big is the crowd there? How packed is it? I mean one of the things we were talking about was the identity crisis of the show, Mobile World Congress, you mentioned people going after Apple. But also Samsung. Remember, they're bailing out of the show. They had their own little presser conference last night, they're not active in the show and they have their own problems. I mean the Galaxy 7 blowing up is, everyone's going after Samsung and Apple on the phone side, but you've got Sony, you've got 4K screens, you've got Netflix there, you've got entertainment, it's like a CES wannabe show for those guys, and at the same time it's a serious meat-and-potatoes Telco show with a lot of 5G, IoT, and I haven't heard anything about E-Sports. I saw a little bit with Twitch doing some stuff there, but for the most part, it's a digital show. So is there a huge crowd there and what's the demographics like there for the makeup of the attendees? >> Floyd: You know, I'm seeing big crowds, judging from how long it takes to take a taxi or get the subway. It's a lot of people there. And I'm seeing it's mixed. I'm actually seeing quite a few large enterprises from around the world. They're looking around, just looking at different technology and trying to make sense of what's happening. I do see the big Telcos are here. You know, everything from Telefonica, you of course have Huawei, you have T-Mobile, and Orange and a bunch of those major vendors that are doing it. I'm also seeing HPE and Intel on the same show area that we are on the other side that are generating traffic. I think the mix is pretty good this year and I will tell you, look, I've been to a lot of shows and some shows have trouble drawing people and this medium, some people are saying is not going to survive. I love going to the show and actually feeling the energy. 'Cause there is a ton of people here, there are a ton of large exhibitions with some really interesting stuff. VR, some geek talk, some funny stuff. There's people selling cases, you know, for your phone. I thought that was kind of awesome to see that again. I mean it's all over the place. I think the show is extremely healthy and it's as busy as ever. [Interviewer] One of the things about Mobile World Congress, it's a lot of business development, too. There's some heavy hitters there. It's kind of like Sun Valley meets, you know, the CES show. It really is a mix there. I want to get your take on some of the emerging areas that are really exploding in the mind of the consumer. And these are forward-thinking categorical areas. Autonomous vehicles, Smart Cities, Smart Home and, just in general, this new IoT area. So, what's your take on those areas? I mean, autonomous vehicles, they're huge. But Smart Cities, Smart Home, entertainment, is there a lot of buzz there? You guys have a stadium exhibit. What's the sexy demos? What's the sexy areas? >> Floyd: Yeah, I'll tell you a couple of things on this. You know, on the autonomous vehicles, now it's not just autonomous vehicles, it's going to try to be the first 5K autonomous vehicles. You know, people are looking at just pushing the envelope on it. And I think in Europe where people definitely love to drive, it's big, but I don't know if it's got the same excitement as you do in the traffic-jammed areas of the United States where we're constantly battling this and to put the car into autonomous mode and be able to do something else while stuck on the 405 would be a nice thing to do. I do think that the Smart homes is extremely interesting right now. I mean you have some of the people getting their arms around and I'm starting to see people actually talking about it and you know, a lot of people talking about smart things. This ability through a single gateway to be able to connect to all different types of devices, to be able to hook in with Alexa and Google Home and to be able to actually do more things with it and trying to make it simpler. So that I can do this reliably and easily. That's what everyone wants right now. On the Smart Cities front, I'm seeing a lot of people talk about Smart Cities. I think we're still kind of in that experimentation phase. You know a lot of geo-sensing stories I'm seeing. Some power conservations for lights. The ones that I'm interested in are kind of like traffic management. I'm extremely interested in this. Where we finally can get even smarter traffic lights and systems where you can do things like turn on no left turn or make a lane that's all four lanes. You know, make it one direction if traffic comes up. Very interesting concepts that people are trying out. You know for SAP, the biggest thing that we've got going, it continues to be our Smart Stadium demonstration. Every time that runs it's standing room only. People very interested about. Of course, it's a football, European football, not American football, so we're showing what you can do, and teams experience watching the games and actually how you can change the experience of training. And tremendous amounts of people interested in that. I mean, it's always an amazing crowd of people. Just because it's so intriguing and something we can all relate to. Because we want to have a better experience with this. [Interviewer] You know, Floyd, the Smart Stadiums thing is a really interesting thing. I just shared a link on the CUBE365.net/MWC17, that's our URL for our new CUBE365 all year long site. But one of the articles I shared was from the FC Barcelona Football Club and there was a speech at Mobile World Congress where the president gave a talk to explain the role FC Barcelona in the development of sports through knowledge and innovation to generate value for the club and society. And you think about the stadium aspect of what you were just talking about, is interesting. It's a place where people get together in an analog world, but yet when you weave in a digital services, the role of say an SAP, powering the database and doing all the back office things to power the business, combined with IoT, you now can bring in real people into experiences that are tied to the sports. But also you can go beyond that. You can take that digital interaction and take it to the next level. So there is a data aspect to a society role here. So you're seeing sports teams going beyond marketing their club to having an impact. Can you share any color on that? Do you agree? Do you guys have anything that you're showing? >> Floyd: Well, I agree. I think that much like racing is for the auto industry to bring innovations to the consumer side, or you could even say masses and states that comes into all of our lives. I think that this work is going to push the envelope, even harder than other areas, simply because they know that hundredths of a second is the difference between winning and losing. You know, we've gone with McLaren for years, working with them on tracking their race cars and building dashboards and giving them information. And now to be able to bring that type of technology to the stadium and bend the way that you actually have that interactive experience, it actually makes it that you want to go to the stadiums. Which is, you know, people are, it's a little bit of a hassle. You got the traffic, you got the people, it's like you can sit on your couch and watch it on your 4K television and be happy. I think that people need a way to actually draw the crowds in there. And I think that the interactions, especially with the work that we're doing with Apple and building native applications using our Fiori Technology and our UI Technology, it's starting to really bring together those classical back-end systems with all that rich data and bring it forward so people can actually experience what that data means and use it a different way. So I definitely agree with you. I enjoy working with the sports teams, 'cause they're willing to try anything that gives them a competitive advantage, and it's interesting how to take that technology and then apply it to the consumer and the business world. [Interviewer] Well, you know, we love to be called the ESPN of Tech, so we love sports here. So anytime you have a great sports event you can invite us to, we'd be happy to accept your invitation in advance. Appreciate that. Floyd, of course, great coverage. I'll give you the final word, and next we have a minute or two left. I'll say SAP big announcement with the Apple software development kit, the IOS general availability now. You got native developer support. That's classic bringing cloud native developers into the SAP fold which dominates the enterprise and business base from sports firms to large enterprises. Great marketplace behind that. But you guys are doing a lot more with IoT, AI and machine learning. Share, just take a minute to talk about the key things that SAP is doing for the folks watching. Because losing the name HANA Cloud really emphasizes that SAP is SASifying their entire business, which includes things like microservices, and having kind of IoT as a service and managing workloads dynamically in realtime with a consumer front-end feel to it. Take a minute to describe the key important points of what you guys announced and are impacting. >> Floyd: I would say the biggest thing that we have going really is two-fold. One, it's the elevation of this brand. SAP protects our brand. It's a very, very noticeable and valuable brand. To elevate the platform to a top-tier brand, basically it's signaling to everybody, our customers, our partners, independent software vendors, our competitors, anyone else out there that SAP is serious about building a platform in the cloud that is world-class, enterprise grade and has the capabilities that our customers need to make this digital transformation and we're coming. We're going to innovate at a fast clip and we're not that old SAP that people think about. I think the partnership with Apple further shows that. I mean Apple is very choosy about who they work with. They're at our booth. They're helping us They're showing the demonstrations. They're working on the SDK. And that realization that, hey, to build these world-class native applications, using Swift and this SDK and the capabilities that would bring, are now elevating that game in the mobile space for our customers, which is key. And I think it's a very powerful partnership because we're both such recognizable brands and we both have a really solid enterprise presence and a large ecosystems. On the services, you know, the big thing I would just say, is the IoT services is ready for people to use now in the Beta fashion. It's combining all the access so we can build a device cloud with the Symantec data model that's a little bit different than other people are doing. And combining that with our Leonardo applications which give you a good idea of what's possible on the cloud. And to be able to keep pushing that forward, I think is key. We have the big data services which was the alpha scale announcement, acquisition now being fully integrated into the platform is huge. It basically gives us world-class Spark Services, which we need to be able to compete in this world. You know and I think that the service improvements are there. There's some good service improvements incremental and some things that our enterprises really want from us, like workflow and the ability to put a little infrastructure in there with virtual machines. And our data center build out. You know, friends don't let your friends build data centers, but some companies have to build data centers, so having the ability to have a data center now in Japan and in China, is key to our customers, especially with all this legal wrangling that's going on in clouds. So I think all in all for SAP, it's been a great show. A great place to showcase that we're doing stuff differently and watch out for what we're going to be doing in the future. Because we got a lot more stuff coming, and we're going to be a player in this space. And we're ready. [Interviewer] All right, Floyd Strimling, global vice president with SAP Cloud Platform. Final question, I mean I got to ask you. How's the food? How's the tapas? Are you going to take a nap and then stay out 'til four in the morning then doing it all over again? Barcelona style? >> Floyd: It is Barcelona-style right now. I got to go get some Sangria, some tapas and then we'll hit the places that the tourists don't go to, and have some real good time with the locals. You can't come to Barcelona and go to sleep, that's not allowed. [Interviewer] All right. You're not allowed. Hey, spread the CUBE love for us out there. Really appreciate your taking the time. Thanks, Floyd. We'll talk to you later. Thanks so much. >> Floyd: Thanks. [Interviewer] Okay, Floyd Strimling on the ground in Barcelona here on theCUBE by remote coverage from Palo Alto. We're going to be going wall-to-wall 'til six o'clock tonight, 8 a.m. tomorrow morning, and again, we'll have reaction from folks on the ground in Barcelona. Hopefully we'll get some folks late night and hopefully it might be a little bit lubricated up a little bit, socially lubricated, get to share some good dirt. That's where all the action's happening, up in Barcelona and this is theCUBE. We'll be right back with more coverage, more analyses. We've got Tom Joyce coming in, industry executive to help me break down from his perspectives, the horses on the track. Who's going to win, who's going to lose, and what's going on with NFV? Because NFV certainly now has a bigger opportunity with 5G connecting all these devices together. That's the big story as well as the big devices and the new upgrades. Be back with more after this short break.

>> Transactions, totally on track with the original schedule, we're getting all the regulatory approvals, everything is kind of lined up. Financing 100%, fully committed. You know, we're going to only accelerate that. >> Announcer: Cube coverage of the EMC World 2016 continues in a moment. (techno beat sounds) Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Hello and welcome to theCube here live in Palo Alto studios for a special two days of coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. The hashtag is MWC17. Get on Twitter, tweet us at theCube. We'll be answering questions. I'm John Furrier, with Peter Burris, the next two days breaking down Mobile World Congress. We've got a great bunch of guests coming in. We'll be covering all the action here in Palo Alto. 8:00 a.m. through the whole day. As the day winds down in Barcelona, we'll be covering all the top news, all the analysis here on theCube, so stay with us, multiple days. Go to thecube365.net/mwc17. If you're watching this, that's where the live broadcast will be. Also we'll be on Twitter. Peter, good to see you, two days, getting geared up. Mobile World Congress is changing as a show from phone to IOT, AI, autonomous vehicles. Certainly a lot of action to talk about. Saturday and Sunday. The pre show releases is all phone, it's all the time. They're kind of getting the phone stuff out of the way earlier and now they're in the throws of the show and it should be exciting. >> Well yeah, because the usecases that the industry is following right now are, require or presume that significant amounts of processing can happen virtually anywhere. The Internet of things and people, which kind of brings together the idea of what can you do on your phone if you're a human being, and what can you do with a device or a machine somewhere with a bunch of censors demands that we have very high speed, secure low latency networks. And that's what 5G is promising. >> Well we're super excited. For the folks watching, we are now going to be having our new studio here in Palo Alto. We just moved in in January, 4500 square feet. Now we can cover events, we don't have to be there with theCube. We will not be there, there's not enough room in Barcelona, a it's a long flight, but we do have people on the ground, and we'll be covering it here in the studio, and we'll be calling folks on the ground this morning and tomorrow morning to get the lay of the land. They'll be coming back from their dinners, from their parties, and find out what the vibe. But certainly we have all the action at theCube365.net/mwc17, so check it out there. And again, the top news, again this is all sponsored by Intel, want to give a shot out to Intel. This would not be possible without Intel's sponsorship. They're certainly on the ground, as well as support from SAP Cloud with their news that they're being renamed HANA Cloud. So I want to give a shout out and thank Intel and thank SAP, check them out. They've got huge transformational demos. Intel really leading the charge out there, so I want to make sure that we give a thanks to Intel. Peter, the big story, I want to get your thoughts on this. Just jump right in. Saturday and Sunday, you saw a combination of the tone setting up leading into the weekend, and through the weekend. One was 5G, the 5G is the key enabler for wireless, bringing in gigabits of speed to the phone. Are the apps ready? That's the questions we're going to find out, and we're going to dig into. Is 5G ready for prime time? And certainly all the glam and sizzle was the new phones. LG had a good announcement. Samsung had a big announcement, although they're not going to be at the show, but surprisingly Nokia and Blackberry, two old guard phone guys, kind of rebooting. Blackberry trying to put out their keynote product, and also with Nokia, they rolled out the three, the six, three, five, and six products for new phones to try to get into the Apple game. And now the 3310, which is the old school phone. So you saw the phones. And then the other player that announced a phone and watch was Huawei, and they're also in the infrastructure game. So 5G wireless connectivity and phones, and then in the middle we have yet to hear some of the things, so as you look at the market and your research that you're covering, digital business, the business value of technology, what's your take on this? >> Well, John, the industry for the past probably 15, 20 years has been driven by what you do in the consumer markets. That's where you get the volumes that drive down or generate economies, that drive down costs, that make new volumes possible. And so 5G is going to be, the Mobile World Congress is a representation of that symbiotic relationship between the consumer and the enterprise world. So that on the one hand you have the consumer markets with the phones driving a lot of the volumes that are going to dictate the rate at which a lot of this stuff happens. On the other hand, you have enterprises which are aggressively considering those new use cases about IOT and as we say IOT and P. And other considerations that are in many respects really worth where some of those first adoptions are going to be, so it's an interesting dance between consumer and enterprise now where one fuels the growth in the other. Even if the actual applications are not linked. By that I mean we do say IOT and P, internet of things and people, which presumes that there's going be a lot of sensors on your phone. There's going to be a lot of sensors on your body that are tied to your phone, et cetera. But that's not necessarily the thing that's going to dictate the new application architectures that happen within the enterprise around some of these other things. That's going to be driven by what we call the edge. >> I love this IOT and P, p for people, but things are people, so Internet of things is the big trend. And for the mainstream people IOT is kind of a nuance, it's kind of industry discussion. But AI seems to encapsulate that people see the autonomous vehicles. They see things like smart cities. That kind of gives folks a touch point, or mental model for some of the real meat on the bone, the real change that's happening. Talk about the IOT piece in particular because when you talk about the people aspect of it, the edge of the network used to be an IT or technology concept, a device at the edge of the network. You talk to it, data gets sent to it, but now you've got watches, you have more of an Apple-esque like environment, mention the consumer. But there's still a lot of stuff in between, under the hood around IOT that's going to come out. It's called network transformation and industry parlance. Where's the action there, what's your take on that? You guys do a lot of research on this. >> Well the action is that data has real costs. And data is a real thing. Just very quickly, on the distinction between IOT and IOT and P, the only reason why we draw that distinction, and this is important, I think about what happens in that middle, is that building thing for people and building things for machines is two very, very different set of objectives. So the whole notion of operational technology and SCADA which is driven what's been happening a lot in IOT over the last 20 years. There's a legacy there that we have to accommodate. Has been very focused on building for machines. The building for people I think is going to be different, and that's what the middle is going to have to accommodate. That middle is going to have to accommodate both the industrial implications, or the industrial use cases, as well as the more consumer or employee or human use cases. And that's a nontrivial challenge because both of those can be very, very different. One you're focusing a little bit more on brutal efficiency. The other one more on experience and usability. I don't know the last time that anybody really worried about the experience that a machine had, you know the machine experience of an application. But we have to worry about that all the time with people. So when we think about the edge, John, there's a number of things that we've got to worry about. We have to worry about physical realities, it takes time to move something from point A to point B, even information. The speed of light is a reality. And that pushes things out more to the edge. You have to worry about bandwidth. One of the things that's interesting about IOT, or about 5G as it relates to IOT, while we may get higher bandwidth speeds sometimes, for the most part 5G is going to provide a greater density of devices and things, that's probably where the bandwidth is going to go. And so the idea is we can put a lot more sensors onto a machine or into a phone or into some use case and drive a lot more sources of data, that then have to get processed somewhere, and increasingly that's going to be processed at the edge. >> So Peter, I want to get your thoughts, and one of the things for the folks watching, is I spent a lot of time this week with you talking about the show and looking at the outcome of what we wanted to do and understand the analysis of what is happening at Mobile World Congress. Yes, it's a device show, it's always been about the phones, 4G, and there's been this you know inch by inch move the ball, first and ten, move the chains, and use the football analogy, but now it seems to be a whole new shift. You go back 10 years, iPhone was announced in 2007, we seem to be at a moment with we need to step up function to move the industry. So I want to get your thoughts for the folks that you're talking to, IT folks, or even CXOs or architects on the service provider side. There's a collision between IT, traditional business, and service providers who have been under the gun, the telecoms who have been trying to figure out a business model for competing against over the top and moving from the phone business model to a digital business model. So your business value of technology work that Wikibon has been doing, is very relevant. I want to get your thoughts on what does it take, is the market ready for this business value of technology because 5G gives that step up function. Are the apps ready for prime time? Are the people who are putting solutions in place for the consumers, whether it's for business or consumers themselves, service providers, telecoms or businesses with IT in the enterprise, is the market ready? Is this a paradigm shift? What's your thoughts and how do you tease that out for the folks that are trying to implement this stuff? >> Well is it a paradigm shift? Well yeah, as the word should be properly used, but the paradigm shift is, there is a lot of things that go into that. So what we like to say, John, when we talk to our users about what's happening, we like to say that the demarkation point, we're in the middle of right now. Now is a period of maximum turbulence, and before this it was I had known processes, accounting, HR, even supply chains, somewhat falls into that category, but the technology was unknown. So do I use a mainframe, do I use a mini computer? What kind of network do I use? What software base do I use? What stack do I use? All of these are questions, and it took 50 years for us to work out, and we've got a pretty good idea what that technology set's going to look like right now. There's always things at the margin, so we know it's going to be Cloud. We know it's going to be very fast networks like 5G. We know there's going to be a range of different devices that we're using, but the real question is before was known process, unknown technology, now it's unknown technology, or unknown process and known technology, because we do know what that base is going to look like. What those stacks are broadly going to look like. But the question is how are we going to apply this? What does it mean to follow a consumer? What does it mean from a privacy standpoint to collect individual's information? What does it mean to process something in a location and not be able to move data or the consequences of that processing somewhere else? These are huge questions that the industry is going to have to address. So when we think about the adoption of some of this stuff, it's going to be a real combination of what can the technology do, but also what can we do from a physical, legal, economic, and other standpoint. And this is not something that the computing industry has spent a lot of time worrying about. Computing has always focused not on what should do, but what can we do. And the question of what should we do with this stuff is going to become increasingly important. >> And the turbulence point is even compounded by the fact that even the devices themselves and the networks are becoming more powerful. If you look at what Cloud is doing with compute. If you look at some of the devices, even just the chip wars between Intel and say Qualcomm for instance. Intel had a big announcement about their new radio chip. Qualcomm has the Snapdragon, we know Qualcomm is in the Apple iPhone. Now Intel has an opportunity to get that kind of business. You got Huawei trying. >> I think they're both in the Apple iPhone right now, but I think your point is. >> Huawei is trying to be on Apple. In their announcements, they're going very Apple like, and they have network gear, so we know them from the infrastructure standpoint, but everyone wants to be, Apple seems to be the theme. But again the devices also have power, so you have process change, new value chains are developing and the device will be more popular. So again this is a big turbulent time, and I want to get your thoughts on the four areas that are popping out of Mobile World Congress. One, autonomous vehicles, two, entertainment and media. Smart cities and smart homes seem to be the four areas that have this notion of combining the technologies and the power that are going to generate these new expectations by consumers and users, and create new value opportunities for businesses and telcom's around the world, your thoughts? >> Those are four great use cases, John. But they all come back to a single notion, and the single notion, this is something that you know. We've been focused on it at Wikibon for quite some time. What is digital business? Digital business is the application of data to differentially sustain and create customers. So what you just described, those four use cases, are all how are we going to digitize, whether it be the city, the home, the car, or increasingly entertainment, and what will that mean from a business model, from a consumer standpoint, from a loyalty standpoint, et cetera? As well as a privacy and legal obligation standpoint. So, but all of them have different characteristics, right. So the car is going to have an enormous impact because it is a self contained unit that either does or does not work. It's pretty binary. Either you do have an autonomous car that works, or you don't, you don't want to see your 'yes it works' in a ditch somewhere. Entertainment is a little bit more subtle because entertainment is already so much digital content out there, and there's only going to be more, but what does that mean? Virtual reality, augmented reality, when we start talking about... >> Just by the way, a big theme of the Samsung announcement is all this teasing out the VR, virtual reality and augmented reality. >> Absolutely, and that's going to, look, because it's not just about getting data in, you also have to enact the results of the AI and the analysis. We call it systems of enactment. You have to then have technologies that allow you to, like a transducer, move from the digital world back into the analog world where human beings actually spend our time. We don't have digital transducers. >> Well that's a great point. The virtual reality use case that Samsung pointed out, and the hanging fruit is in hospitals. >> Peter: Yeah. >> Doctors can look at VR and say, hey I want to have, we've heard that football players like Tom Brady, used VR to look at defenses and offenses to get a scheming kind of thing. >> And there's no question we're going to see VR and AR, augmented reality, in entertainment as well, and media as well, but a lot of the more interesting use cases, at least from my perspective, are going to be how does that apply in the world of business. When we think about connected cities, now we're starting to talk about the relationship between all three. What does it mean, where is the edge in autonomous car? Is it in the car, or is in some metropolitan area? Or some cell like technology. And the connected city in part is going to be about how does a city provide a set of services to a citizenry, so that the citizen can do more autonomous things while still under control. >> It changes the relationship between the person, consumer, and the analog metaphor. So for instance, whether it's a car or the city, a town or city has to provide services to residents. And in an analog world, that's garbage, that's street cleaning, et cetera, having good roads. Now it's going to be, paths for autonomous vehicles, and autonomous vehicles is interesting, I just shared a post on the 365, theCube365.net/MWC17, where Autoblog ran a post that said, Silicon Valley is failing in the car business. But they looked at it too narrowly. They looked at it from the car manufacturing standpoint, not from the digital services that is impacting transportation, and this is the new normal. >> Look, you and I talked about this in theCube a year ago, was the car going to be a, was the car going to be a peripheral or is a car going to be a computer? And it's become pretty clear that the car is going to be a computer. And anybody who argues that Silicon Valley has lost that, has absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Let's be honest. >> John: Yeah, it's true. >> You're going to put more processing in a car, love Detroit, love what's going on in Japan, love elsewhere in the world, but the computers and the chips are going to come from a Silicon Valley company. >> Yeah, and I would agree with that. >> And software. >> Yeah, transportation doesn't change, but the device does. So final thought I want to get before we end the segment is as we say in theCube, and as Dave Vellante used to say, just squint through the noise or all the action at Mobile World Congress, how do you advise folks and how you looking through all this action, how would you advise doers out there, people who are trying to make sense of this, what should they be squinting through? What should they be looking for for reading the tea leaves of Mobile World Congress? >> I'd say the first and most important thing is there's so much turbulence that IT professionals have built their careers on trying to have the sober, be the ones who have the sober outlook on what technology can do. When we look at the amazing things that you can do with technology, it almost looks like magic. But it's not, these are still computers that fail if you give them the wrong instructions, and that's because you build the wrong software and et cetera. And I think the real important thing that we're telling our clients is focus on the sober reality of what it means to create value out of all this technology. You have to say what's the business want to do, what's the business use case? How am I going to architect it, how am I going to build it, what's the physical realities? What's the legal realities, et cetera? So it's try to get a little bit more sober and pragmatic about this stuff even as we get wowed by what all this technology can do and ultimately will mean. >> And the sober reality comes down to putting the value equation together, synthesizing what's ready, what's prime time, and again, it's an Apple world right now. I think this show is interestingly turning into an app show for business IT enterprise and telcom service providers, so we're going to bring all the action. We've got some great guests, we've got entrepreneurs with Ruth Cohen, who is a founder of Virtustream. We got SAP coming on, we got a call in to Lynn Comp who is at Intel, she's going to be on the phone with us giving us some commentary and what's going on at Mobile World Congress. From under the hood, in the network, all the action, we have more analysis with Peter. We have the global vice-president of the Cloud platform and SAP coming in, Tom Joyce, a technology executive. Willie Lou is the chairman of the 6G, talking about the impact of the wireless and that transformation. Ensargo Li, who is former HPE executive who built out their NFE function for the communications group, commentating on what's real and what's not. Stay tuned, more Cube coverage for two days from Mobile World Congress. Here in Palo Alto, bringing you all the action and analysis. Be right back with more after this short break. (techno beat sounds)