>> Narrator: Live, from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in our nation's capital. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Co-hosting along side John Furrier. We are joined by Jamil Jaffer, he is the VP Strategy and Partnerships at IronNet. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me Rebecca. >> Rebecca: I know you've been watching us for a long time so here you are, soon to be a CUBE alumn. >> I've always wanted to be in theCUBE, it's like being in the octagon but for computer journalists. (laughing) I'm pumped about it. >> I love it. Okay, why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about IronNet and about what you do there. >> Sure, so IronNet was started about 4 1/2 years ago, 5 years ago, by General Kieth Alexander, the former director of the NSA and founding commander of US Cyber command. And essentially what we do is, we do network traffic analytics and collective defense. Now I think a lot of people know what network traffic analytics are, you're looking for behavioral anomalies and network traffic, trying to identify the bad from the good. Getting past all the false positives, all the big data. What's really cool about what we do is collective defense. It's this idea that one company standing alone can't defend itself, it's got to work with multiple companies, it's got to work across industry sectors. Potentially even with the governments, and potentially across allied governments, really defending one another. And the way that works, the way we think about that, is we share all the anomalies we see across multiple companies to identify threat trends and correlations amongst that data, so you can find things before they happen to you. And so the really cool idea here is, that something may not happen to you, but it may happen to your colleague, you find about it, you're defended against it. And it takes a real commitment by our partners, our companies that we work with, to do this, but increasingly they're realizing the threat is so large, they have no choice but to work together, and we provide that platform that allows that to happen. >> And the premise is that sharing the data gives more observational space to have insights into that offense, correct? >> That's exactly right. It's as though, it's almost like you think about an air traffic control picture, or a radar picture, right? The idea being that if you want to know what's happening in the air space, you got to see all of it in real time at machine speed, and that allows you to get ahead of the threats rather than being reactive and talking about instant response, we're talking about getting ahead of the problems before they happen so you can stop them and prevent the damage ahead of time. >> So you're an expert, they're lucky to have you. Talk about what you've been doing before this. Obviously a lot of experience in security. Talk about some about some of the things you've done in the past. >> So I have to admit to being a recovering lawyer, but you have to forgive me because I did grow up with computers. I had a Tandy TRS-80 Color computer when I first started. 4K of all more RAM, we upgraded to 16K, it was the talk of the rainbow computer club, what are you doing, 16K of RAM? (laughing) I mean, it was-- >> Basic programming language, >> That's right. (laughing) Stored on cassette tapes. I remember when you used to have to punch a hole in the other side of a 5 1/4 floppy disc to make it double sided. >> Right, right. >> John: Glory days. >> Yeah, yeah. I paid my way through college running a network cable, but I'm a recovering lawyer, and so my job in the government, I worked at the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then the Bush administration on the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, both the Justice Department and the White House. >> You've seen the arc, you've seen the trajectory, the progress we're making now seems to me slower than it should be, obviously a lot of inertia as Amy Chasity said today about these public sector government agencies, what not. But a real focus has been on it, we've been seeing activity. Where are we with the state of the union around the modernization of cyber and awareness to what's happening? How critical are people taking this threat seriously? >> Well I think I variety of things to say on that front. First, the government itself needs modernize its systems, right? We've seen that talked about in the Obama administration, we've seen President Trump put out an executive order on modernization of federal infrastructure. The need to move to the cloud, the need to move to shared services, make them more defensible, more resilient long-term. That's the right move. We've seen efforts at the Department of Defense and elsewhere. They aren't going as fast as the need to, more needs to happen on that front. IT modernization can really be accelerated by shifting to the cloud, and that's part of why that one of the things that IronNet's done really aggressively is make a move into the cloud space, putting all of our back end in the cloud and AWS. And also, ability, capability to do surveillance and monitoring. When I say surveillance I mean network threat detection not surveillance of the old kind. But network threat detection in the cloud, and in cloud-enabled instances too. So both are important, right? Classic data centers, but also in modern cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, one of the things people want to know about is what your enemy looks like, and now with the democratization with open source, and democratization of tools, the enemies could be hiding through obscure groups. The states, the bad actors and the state actors can actually run covert activities through other groups, so this is kind of a dynamic that creates confusion. >> No, in fact, it's their actual mode of operating, right? It's exactly what they do, they use proxies, right? So you'll see the Russians operating, looking like a criminal hacker group operating out of the eastern Europe. In part because a lot of those Russian criminal rings, in actuality. You see a lot of patriotic hackers, right? I would tell most people, if you see a patriotic hacker there's probably a government behind that whole operation. And so the question becomes, how do you confront that threat, right? A lot of people say deterrence doesn't work in cyberspace. I don't believe that. I think deterrence can and does work in cyberspace, we just don't practice it. We don't talk about our capabilities, we don't talk our red lines, we don't talk about what'll happen if you cross our red lines, and when we do establish red lines and they're crossed, we don't really enforce them. So it's no surprise that our enemies, or advisories, are hitting us in cyberspace, are testing our boundaries. It's cause we haven't really give them a sense of where those lines are and what we're going to do if they cross them. >> Are we making an progress on doing anything here? What's the state of the market there? >> Well the government appears to have gotten more aggressive, right? We've seen efforts in congress to give the Department of Defense and the US Intelligence Committee more authorities. You can see the stand up of US Cyber Command. And we've seen more of a public discussion of these issues, right? So that's happening. Now, is it working? That's a harder question to know. But the real hard question is, what do you do on private sector defense? Because our tradition has been, in this country, that if it's a nation-state threat, the government defends you against it. We don't expect Target or Walmart or Amazon to have service to air missiles on the roof of your buildings to defend against Russian Bear bombers. We expect the government to do that. But in cyberspace, the idea's flipped on its head. We expect Amazon and every company in America, from a mom and pop shop, all the way up to the big players, to defend themselves against script kiddies, criminal hacker gangs, and nation-states. >> John: And randomware's been taking down cities, Baltimore, recent example, >> Exactly. >> John: multiple times. Hit that well many times. >> That's right, that's right. >> Talk about where the US compares. I mean, here as you said, the US, we are starting to have these conversations, there's more of an awareness of these cyber threats. But modernization has been slow, it does not quite have the momentum. How do we rate with other countries? >> Well I think in a lot of ways we have the best capabilities when it comes to identifying threats, identifying the adversary, the enemy, and taking action to respond, right? If we're not the top one, we're in the top two or three, right? And the question, though, becomes one of, how do you work with industry to help industry become that good? Now our industry is at the top of that game also, but when you're talking about a nation-state, which has virtually unlimited resources, virtually unlimited man-power to throw at a problem, it's not realistic to expect a single company to defend itself, and at the same time, we as a nation are prepared to say, "Oh, the Department of Defense should be sitting on "the boundaries of the US internet." As if you could identify them even, right? And we don't want that. So the question becomes, how does the government empower the private sector to do better defense for itself? What can the government do working with industry, and how can industry work with one another, to defend each other? We really got to do collective defense, not because it makes sense, which it does, but because there is no other option if you're going to confront nation-state or nation-state enabled actors. And that's another threat, we've seen the leakage of nation-state capabilities out to a lot broader of an audience now. That's a problem, even though that may be 2013 called and wants it's hack back, those things still work, right? What we saw in Baltimore was stuff that has been known for a long time. Microsoft has released patches long ago for that, and yet, still vulnerable. >> And the evolution of just cyber essential command, and Cyber Command, seems to be going slow, at least from my frame. Maybe I'm not in the know, but what is the imperative? I mean, there's a lot of problems to solve. How does the public sector, how does the government, solve these problems? Is cloud the answer? What are some of the things that people of this, the top minds, discussing? >> Well and I think cloud is clearly one part of the solution, right? There's no question that when you move to a cloud infrastructure, you have sort of a more bounded perimeter, right? And that provides that ability to also rapidly update, you could update systems in real time, and in mass. There's not going around and bringing your floppy disc and loading software, and it sounds like that's sort of a joke about an older era, but you look at what happened with NotPetya and you read this great Wired article about what happened with NotPetya, and you look at Maersk. And the way that Maersk brought its systems back up, was they had domain controller in Africa that had gone down due to a power surge, where they were able to recover the physical hard drive and re-image all their world-wide domain controls off of that one hard drive. You think about a major company that runs a huge percentage of the world's ports, right? And this is how they recovered, right? So we really are in that, take your disc and go to computers. In a cloud infrastructure you think about how you can do that in real time, or rapidly refresh, rapidly install patches, so there's a lot of that, that's like a huge part of it. It's not a complete solution, but it's an important part. >> Yeah, one of the things we talk about, a lot of tech guys, is that this debate's around complexity, versus simplicity. So if you store your data in one spot, it's easy to audit and better for governing compliance, but yet easier for hackers to penetrate. From an IQ standpoint, the more complex it is, distributed, harder. >> Yeah I think that's right. >> John: But what's the trade off there? How are people thinking about that kind of direction? >> No that's a great question, right? There's a lot of benefits to diversity of systems, there's a lot of benefit to spreading out your crown jewels, the heart of your enterprise. At the same time, there's real resilience in putting it in one place, having it well defended. Particularly when it's a shared responsibility and you have partial responsibility for the defense, but the provider to, I mean, Amazon, and all the other cloud providers, Microsoft and Google, all have it in their own self interest to really defend their cloud really well. Because whether or not you call it shared responsibility, it's your stock price that matters if you get hit, right? And so, instead of you, Amazon, and all the other cloud players have an incentive to do the right thing and do it really well. And so this shared responsibility can work to both side's benefits. That being said, there's an ongoing debate. A lot of folks want to do there stuff on-prem in a lot of ways. You know, a lot of us are old school, right? When you touch it, you feel it, you know it's there. And we're working through that conversation with folks, and I think that at the end of the day, the real efficiency gains and the power of having super computing power at your fingertips for analytics, for consumer purposes and the like. I really think there's no way to avoid moving to a cloud infrastructure in the long run. >> I know you said you were a recovering lawyer, but you are the founding director of the National Security Institute at the Antonin Scalia School of Law. How are you thinking about educating the next generation of lawyers who could indeed become policy makers or at least work on these committees, to think about these threats that we don't even know about yet? >> That's a great question. So one of the things we're doing, is we're working through the process with the state commission on establishing a new LLM and cyber intelligence national security law. That'll be a great opportunity for lawyers to actually get an advanced degree in these issues. But we're also training non-lawyers. One of the interesting things is, you know, One of the challenges DC has, is we make a lot of tech policy, a lot of it not great, because it's not informed by technologists, so we've got a great partnership with the Hewlett Foundation where we're bringing technologists from around the country, mid-career folks, anywhere from the age of 24 to 38. We're bringing them to DC and we're educating them on how to talk to policy makers. These are technologists, these are coders, data scientists, all the like, and it's a real opportunity for them to be able to be influential in the process of making laws, and know how to involve themselves and talk that speak. Cause, DC speak is a certain thing, right? (laughing) And it's not typically consistent with tech speak, so we're trying to bridge that gap and the Hewlett Foundation's been a great partner in that effort. >> On that point about this collaboration, Silicon Valley's been taking a lot of heat lately, obviously Zuckerberg and Facebook in the news again today, more issues around irresponsibility, but they were growing a rocket ship, I mean, company's only 15 years old roughly. So the impact's been significant, but tech has moved so fast. Tech companies usually hire policy folks in DC to speak the language, educate, a little bit different playbook. But now it's a forcing function between two worlds colliding. You got Washington DC, the Silicon Valley cultures have to blend now. What are some of the top minds thinking about this? What are some of the discussions happening? What's the topic of conversations? >> Well look, I mean, you've see it in the press, it's no surprise you're hearing this talk about breaking up big tech companies. I mean, it's astounding. We used to live in world in which being successful was the American way, right? And now, it seems like at least, without any evidence of anti-trust concerns, that we're talking about breaking up companies that have otherwise hugely successful, wildly innovative. It's sort of interesting to hear that conversation, it's not just one party, you're hearing this in a bipartisan fashion. And so it's a concern, and I think what it reveals to tech companies is, man, we haven't be paying a lot of attention to these guys in DC and they can cause real trouble. We need to get over there and starting talking to these folks and educating them on what we do. >> And the imperative for them is to do the right thing, because, I mean, the United States interest, breaking up, say, Facebook, and Google, and Apple, and Amazon, might look good on paper but China's not breaking up Alibaba anytime soon. >> To the contrary. They're giving them low-interest loans and helping them all to excel. It's crazy. >> Yeah, and they have no R&D by the way, so that's been- >> Jamil: Right, because they stole all of our IP. >> So the US invests in R&D that is easily moving out through theft, that's one issue. You have digital troops on our shores from foreign nations, some will argue, I would say yes. >> Jamil: Inside the border. >> Inside the border, inside the interior, with access to the power grids, our critical infrastructure, this is happening now. So is the government now aware of the bigger picture around what we have as capabilities and criticalities that were needed now for digital military? What is that conversation like? >> Well I think they're having this conversation, right? I think the government knows it's a problem, they know that actually in a lot of ways a partnership with tech is better than an adversary relationship. That doesn't change the fact that, for some reason, in the last three, four years, we really have seen what some people are calling a "techlash", right? A backlash against technology. It kind of strikes me as odd, because of course, the modern economy that we've so benefited from is literally built on the back of the innovations coming out of the Silicon Valley, out of the west coast, and out of the DC metro area, where a lot these tech companies are developing some of the most innovative new ideas. Now they're, frankly, helping government innovate. So Amazon's a key part of that effort, right? Here in the public sector. And so I'm hoping that education will help, I know that the arrival of tech companies here to really have that conversation in an open and sensible way, I hope will sort of waft back some of this. But I worry that for too long the tech and the policies have ignored on another. And now they're starting to intersect as you say, and it has the possibility of going wrong fast, and I'm hoping that doesn't happen. >> You know, one of the things that Rebecca and I were talking about was this talent gap between public sector and private sector. These agencies aren't going to go public anytime soon, so maybe they should get equity deals and get a financial incentive. (laughing) You know what I mean? Shrink down the cost, increase the value. But as you get the collaboration between the two parties, the cloud is attracting smart people, because it gives you an accelerant of value. So people can see some entry points to land, some value out of the gate, verus giving up and abandoning it through red tape, or in other processes. So you starting to see smart people get attracted to cloud as a tool for making change. How is that working? And how is that going to work? Cause this could be coming to the partnership side of it. People might not want to work for the government, but could work with the government. This is a dynamic that we see as real. What's your thoughts? >> I think that's exactly right. Having these cloud infrastructures gives the ability to one, leverage huge amounts of computing power, but also to leverage insights and knowledge from the private sector in ways that you never could have imagined. So I really do think the cloud is an opportunity to bring real benefits from private sector innovation into the public sector very rapidly, right? So, broad-clouded option. And that's part of why John Alexander, my boss, and I have been talking a lot about the need for broad-clouded option. It's not just innovative in technology, it's benefits to the war fighter, Right? I mean, these are real, tangible benefits pushing data in real time, the war fighter, You know John Alexander had one of the biggest innovations in modern war fighting, where he's able to take civil intelligence down from weeks and months, down to minutes and seconds, that the naval and our war fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan to really take the fight to the enemy. The cloud brings that power scaled up to a huge degree, right? By orders of magnitude. And so the government recognizes this and yet today we don't see them yet moving rapidly in that direction. So I think the EO was a good move, a good first step in that direction, now we got to see it implemented by the various agencies down below. >> Well we'll kep in touch, great to have you on. I know we're wrapping up the day here, they're breaking down, we're going to pull the plug literally. (laughing) We'll keep in touch and we'll keep progress on you. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Rebecca: Jamil, you are now a CUBE alumn, >> I love it, thank you. >> Rebecca: So congrats, you've joined the club. >> I love it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier you have been watching theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (electronic music)

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE! Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019! Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here with Keith Townsend, two days, wall-to-wall coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Keith and I have been geeking out for two full days now, and speaking of geeking out, I think its going to continue because Christian Reilly is here, back on theCUBE, the vice president and CTO of Citrix. Christian, welcome back! >> Thank you so much, it's been a while. >> It has! >> It really has. >> Well, we hope to make it fun. We have had, like I said, such great conversations with your executives, customers, analysts, everybody is so excited about this obvious pivot that Citrix is making towards the general user. You know, the power users being that 1 percent, and what you guys started off yesterday showing, resonates with everybody. I get it. I want my work day to be far more productive. I want apps and actions brought to me, so I can actually get down to the business of what I was hired to do. And we also are hearing over and over again, how employee experience is now elevated to a c-suite imperative, that is so critical because it directly affects the customer experience. >> Yeah, it's super exciting, isn't it? You know, it's great to watch it all come to life, because, you know, we've been working on this for a number of years behind the scenes and, you know, it's just so great to see all the effort that goes in come out on the big stage. And your right, I mean, we've been very calculated about the approach here. We do a lot of research in trying to understand these problems and these challenges. And, you know, quite frankly, customers are looking for more innovation from Citrix, looking for better ways to work, and, you know, I think we've got a very privileged position in being so important in customer application delivery over the decades that Citrix has been around. And so the, you know, the move, even though it seems like it's a quantum leap, is actually a really natural thing for us to go do, because we've won the trust over three decades of being, you know, the vendor to deliver mission critical apps so this is just an extension of that, but it's, yeah, it's super exciting. >> Yeah, so we've talked about that for the past couple of days. Citrix is a verb within IT. You know, "I'm going to Citrix into the application," or, "Is that on Citrix?" Or, "Is it Citrixed yet?" It is, we commonly understand what it means to be Citrix. But that's something that you guys have built over 30 years, and I think what's really interesting, Dana Gardner, we had him on earlier, he said Citrix is much too modest, there should be a Citrix inside for so many SaaS offerings, so that end-users in end-users understand that the foundational technology for this SaaS service, whether it's some payroll software, or some other third party healthcare solution, is being brought to you. The underlying application didn't have to be rewritten because of Citrix. I think we're at another foundational moment now. What you guys announced yesterday was foundational. I tweeted out as David was talking, saying, "You know what? Citrix is going to be the future of work." Like you know what? We'll follow doing automation. Citrix can't possibly be the- be the future of work. And he announced it, but, I want to try and get you- get this in one answer, hopefully, because it's big, you've been working on this for years, it shows, it's natural for Citrix to say that they're going to go to the next step of integrating different applications because you've been there already. What's the foundational technology? As, you know, when Frame back in 1995 was the foundational technology for virtual applications, what's the foundational capability that you're giving businesses today, that we're going to look back 20 years from now and say, "Obviously, that was the innovation"? >> Yeah, so that's a great question, I think there's a of couple things really, you know, We talked about it in the keynote extensively yesterday about the analytics piece. So, I wouldn't say that analytics is the only thing, but certainly when you think about the way we lined up the analytics conversation around security performance and then productivity. So that's the foundational element, and we're going to look back at that in a few years time and realize that we were very privileged to be in the path of user transactions, and the more you're in the path, the more transactions you get. The more transactions you get, the more source data you get. The more source data you get, the more you can feed the machine learning model, and the more accurate you can be about delivering the context of the workspace, so I think that's super important. The next bit, of course, would be the acquisition that we made of the Sapho technology back in November of 2018. And I think, you know, what you see there in the micros and the micro work flows, is really that big shift from the version 1 of the workspace, which was still very much about the traditional applications, traditional desktops, and then bringing together web and SaaS applications, but we sort of always knew that there was a bigger play, which was really to try and, as PJ talked about yesterday, how do we take work and break it down into atomic units? So we don't think about just the application, we think about the why. Why do people use applications? What is it that they do? And if you think about how that plays out with analytics, the more intelligence that we gather, the more intelligent we make the workspace. So I think with a couple of things, we'll look back at the Sapho acquisition as a key technology piece, but we'll look back at analytics as maybe the thing that helped to be the flywheel to deliver that intelligence within the workspace environment itself. >> And the power that that intelligence has to deliver a personalized experience to each user is huge. If we look at the consumerization and the expectations that we all bring to our business lives we want things to be smart enough to serve up just what I'm looking for. To make my life easier, so that the intelligence and the analytics has huge implications on being able to help companies use their applications better. If I'm having to go in and learn sales floors and try to talk glamor and all these things that as a marketer, I don't need to do, but if I could have technology that's under the covers- under the bonnet, is evaluating that and going to learn, "this is all that she needs to do for her role," how much happier am I going to be? How much more productive am I going to be? It's game-changing. >> Yeah, absolutely, and I think that the most important thing to remember about the whole of the the strategy around analytics, is it's constantly learning, so it's not like we just do it once. And if you think about where that goes along the term, you know, we're talking about, obviously, gathering user transaction data that I talked about. That will help us to generate the most valuable micro applications. But then if you think about that a little bit further on, you know, how do we actually then begin to get analytics on the micros themselves, and even begin to free up more productivity. So there's a continuum here that we see. You know, automation, as you mentioned, will be critical, you know, and if you think about what's happening and the industry in general. You know, robotic process information has skyrocketed to the game as organizations look to kind of do exactly what we're talking about, which is to free up the very scarce human capital to work on things that really matter, not on these mundane tasks. And you know, we talked to lots of customers about this, you know, the notion of how much application do you really use, and you know, it's been quite common, and one of the foundation- I guess foundational components that we talked about of why we did what we did was, we looked at enterprise applications that we were delivering through our traditional technologies, and they were really complex for some things that were really actually quite simple. And of course the Pareto thing holds true there that the 80% of people only want to get something out and 20% of people put something in. So that was obviously a key decision point for us to move ahead with, with the intelligent workspace, the micros that you saw. The other thing that's really interesting that we don't really talk about so much is that from a security perspective as well, being able to deliver just a part of the application actually minimizes the entire sort of attack surface, if you like. Whether that's for, you know, nefarious employees internally, or for true people who want to come in or sort of hack into your systems. The less that we can expose generally, then I think that's better overall. So there's actually some other upsides that we don't necessarily talk about in the context of intelligence, but when we talk to CIOs and we talk to the people in the business who really are interested in these technologies and these solutions, then we tend to expand the conversation a little bit into some things that we don't necessarily talk about all the time. >> Yeah, it's surprising how many questions you guys have answered for me today. I was at SAP, sapphire a couple weeks ago, and they were talking about X data, O data, X data being experienced data, and this is the output of digital transformation, and I was having a really tough time wrapping my head around the concept of X data. And I think this is hopefully something you could further along the discussion. When I think of just the access that Citrix has to this raw data, maybe the only other company that has more user data, or more access to user data, would be Microsoft via Windows. But Citrix presents SAP, which 80% of the world's transactions run through, is presented via Citrix a good majority of the time. Your CRM solutions and cloud-based options and sales forces presented again, through Citrix, so you're collecting a ton of data, as customers, you know, say, "okay, what's the account balance out of SAP, let me put it into this CRM solution and sales force". You're capturing that x data. How do you make sense of it? I think is the question, this is where the AI comes in. From a person looking at the process, and they come to Citrix and say, "Christian, you guys have the X data. Help us understand how that X data translates into business productivity. How do I personalize the experience for a individual use?" >> Yeah, absolutely, so I'll give you an example, you know, CTOs like to have a vision, right? So we'll talk a little about the vision. So I'll give you a relatively straight- forward example. So, we tend to see used cases around reviews and approvals and those kinds of things, whether it's expense reports or PTO requests, all the things that we've typically shown in the keynotes and the various demos that we've done as we've grown the solution. So here is what we kind of think about, so let's say, for example, that you have an employee. That employee submits expense reports on a fairly frequent basis and they tend to submit them for under $500. You may get to the point where you say, "actually, why do I keep approving these, because my level of trust with the employee is high, the dollar values of the individual reports is relatively low". So why would the system not just handle that and automatically approve them, until something was an anomaly. So if one came in that was $750, $1000, then I would get an alert. So I think when you talk about the X data, absolutely. The interaction with the X data is really where we see the value from the Citrix perspective, because we can learn how you actually deal with those notifications and those actions. So if there's an example of a micro application which gives you an expense report from let's say SAP Concur, and you never actually open it, you just click the approve button, then is there a real reason for you to continue to see the opportunity to open it? Because, you know, as I've said, the level of trust is high, the dollar value is low, and I could get productivity back that way, by actually looking at it from a sort of, "why should I actually approve this in the traditional way? I'll let the system take care of it until there's something that exceeds the threshold that I've learned that you're comfortable with". >> What- oh, sorry Keith, I was going to say, on that front though, where are enterprise companies in terms of letting that control go to the intelligence in the system? I mean how many times have we all submitted expense reports and maybe some of us like me go to Starbucks twice on the same day, hey, it happens, and you get rejection because it's the exact same dollar amount, and it's wasting all these cycles. But where is the appetite and maybe the trust from some of those larger organizations that culturally say somebody in procurement or finance has to click on every single funding and evaluate every single line item? >> Yeah, so I think the, sort of the beauty of what we've built here, certainly with what you saw yesterday and what we've been talking about at the show here. We're not actually changing any existing business rules or business work flow and gen components, right? So I think that's a really interesting point for us to bring up and to make sure that everybody understands, you know, right now, in the version that we're talking about for release later this year, you know, we're actually honoring most of the business rules and the work flows that are in the system of records. So that could be, you know, the HR system, the finance system, all the ERP system or whatever. So you know, I think when audit perspective, then we're good from that perspective, because you know, when we actually submit things back into the system of record from the micro apps, we're doing it on behalf of the user. So the transactions are still valid as if they were coming from the native experience. So I think that's great that we don't mess with any of that, because I think the higher, you know, we kind of make the hurdles for people to adopt by, and then, you know, whether it's cultural or whether it's regulatory, that obviously, you know, there's a downside to that. So, I think that's a good sort of first pass for us. I would suspect that as we go through this a little bit later though, there's going to be some potentially interesting questions that come up about, certainly of highly regulated environments about, you know, the legality of a robot, or digital assistant, or some kind of, you know, ancillary system being able to submit and do things on your behalf. So, you know, that's- this is not a GDPR thing by the way, or anything of that nature, it's more a, you know, if something was to happen in the system that wasn't intended, who's responsible? Is it the robot or is it the individual that's allowed the robot to work on their behalf? So I think there will be some interesting questions that come up along those lines, but I think, you know, in the v1 we're honoring the business rules, we're honoring the business logic and the work flow. And so, you know, I'm expecting that most customers will look at this and say, "yeah, I kind of get it," and you know, it's more valuable than it is a problem. That's certainly the goal. >> So let's talk about scale of this new foundational capability. Like I can easily see this working inside of your existing set of VDI products. You have visibility into the analytic data, but at some point, you're going to have enough data that the VDI isn't needed to create these work flows and these solutions. I can see this actually freeing up desktops for some employees where the only reason why they ever needed a desktop because they had to go on to Concur or the time management solution. If I do 40 hours every week for 52 weeks, I don't need to log into a portal to do that. How tied to your existing set of products is this capability? Is this something that, from a total addressable market that you- whether it's a mobile app or mobile first app that you guys can ingest this type of capability into? >> Yeah, so you know, as you know well, Kieth, we've been talking about the death of the PC in the industry for a decade, right? And it's- the reality is that most customers have an application portfolio that's heavily reliant on Windows. Now, having said that, there are obviously cases- and we look at sort of, some of the, what we call the customer jobs to be done, okay? Which is a Harvard business thing that came from Clayton Christianson. And it's a really interesting way of making sure that the innovations that we bring are actually addressing things that customers need to get done within their own environments. So if you take a used case, let's say it was a field technician. So you're going out, you're going to fix a faulty gas meter, or you're going to go out and perform some kind of maintenance work. It's highly likely that you're going to use a mobile device. And so, what we showed yesterday with the mobile version of the intelligent experience, what we show with the work space assistant, absolutely. I see used cases where we can give them instant productivity. So you know to pull and to push data into the systems of record, where the underlying operating system on the mobile device is kind of academic. But there will certainly be used cases where VDI or physical Windows desktops will be around for a very long time. So I think the value that we have is making sure that all those user transactions go through the workspace one way or another, so that helps us with the analytics piece. But I think I'll look a little bit further out, you know, again, we showed some demos of it yesterday, in one of the CTO breakout sessions that we had. The real ultimate goal is to think about the work space overall as more of an experience that will evolve. It's not necessarily an app, an app is one way to consume it, but we want to build a platform that can consume and be consumed by other things. So whether that's Microsoft teams that we showed yesterday, whether that becomes slack, Facebook for work, or whether it's an integrated voice assistant within, you know, an Apple device, or a Microsoft device, or a Google device, or a Samsung device. See, the value of that from a choice perspective is that we really then don't demand what the customers use, and ultimately their end use. So I think when we get a little bit further along in the thinking on the platform itself, it opens up endless possibilities to interact with the information you need. And it's not predicated upon any operating system because hopefully we can be ubiquitous. >> So, Citrix has over 400,000 customers worldwide. I think I read 98-99% of the Fortune 500, the Fortune 100, intelligence experience goes generally available later on this year, there's some customers in beta. What are you looking forward to as 2019 continues, coming off the high that is Citrix Synergy 2019? >> Well, you know, so like I said at the start here, I've been working on this thing with, frankly, the brilliant team we have here at Citrix for just about three years, so I wouldn't say it was quite stealth, but we've gone through these kind of programmatic changes internally. I'm looking for- I'm most looking forward to when customers understand the power of what we're going to give them with the builder. So the builder, again, is something we showed yesterday, but, you know, you think about the approach that we have is that we're going to, obviously, help customers to get productive and to get going with the intelligent experience by creating these out with the box micro apps and micro work flows for many of the most popular SaaS applications. The real big thing I'm looking forward to is when people can actually take the builder that we've developed and give it to their line of business people and say, "hey, you can create as many micro apps as you think are necessary within the constructs of your business process to enable your people". So that, to me, is kind of like, going to be the ultimate wow, when people say, "actually, I can give this to a person who is capable of creating a Pivot Table in Microsoft Excel," as an example. And they can then actually use the technologies that we provide to create the micros and micro work flows for their own part of the business without the help of traditional development. I think that's going to be huge and I can't wait until we've got, you know, the first examples of people who have said, "hey, you've made my life easier, I can't work without Citrix". >> While businesses can be built on that, the new Excel uh, Citrix builder, the new Excel. >> I hope so, I hope so. >> Well, we'll all be excited to- and be watching with close eyes. Christian, thank you for joining Kieth and me on theCUBE, but Synergy 2019! >> Thank you so much. >> Our pleasure. For Kieth Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching! (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana it's the Cube, covering Dot Next Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman here at the Cube in New Orleans, the Nutanix Dot Next Conference. Joining me is Keith Townsend, going wall-to-wall with interviews for two days. And going to dig into some really geeky techy stuff, Micro segmentation and the like. Happy to welcome to the program two first-time guests, Harjot Gill, who is the Senior Director of product and engineering at Nutanix and Rajiv Mirani, who's the CTO of Cloud Platform. Thank you both for joining us. >> Both: Thanks, thanks for having us. >> Alright, so Rajiv you've been with Nutanix for a bit, so we're going to get Harjot first. So we beat four acquisitions that Nutanix has made in the software space in the last year or so. One of them was Netsil. >> Harjot: Yes. >> So bring us back. You were and are the CEO of the Netsil Group. Tell us, kind of, a why of the company, size of the team, things like that. >> That's good yeah, so previously, as I was co-founder and CEO of Netsil, which I don't know whether you noticed, is listen spelled backwards. And, essentially, it was like microservices analytics platform and the core technology of Nexus was, where designers at University of Pennsylvania in the research group. That's where most of my team came from. It's a really small team, like just 10 engineers, who took on this like very interesting challenge in the industry as micro services were taking off, applications were, like, ported to modern platforms, like kubernetes. We saw an opportunity to take, like, a network centric approach in doing performance analysis and liability analysis. And the product that we built is very interesting. It can be thought of as, like, Google Maps for your cloud applications just like Splunk, in the past, was Google search for data center. So we came up with this concept where you can, like, visualize different abstractions and different virtualization layers of your application delivery. And that was our product. >> Alright, Rajiv, we've been talking about the, really, expansion of services that you're offering. You know, security and networking, obviously a big space. So first of all, not not a Stanford team that you brought in but University of Pennsylvania. Explain a little bit for us justification, how Netsil fits in with the Nutanix portfolio. >> Yeah, the Netsil Technology is unique in many different ways and we actually see a lot of different applications for it. The core product that they have today, the way they do performance monitoring by staying just on the network, not installing any host agents. It's pretty unusual. It's something that we really liked about the technology. The fact that they can do this at layer seven can actually look at application data to deep packet inspection at line speed. It's even more impressive. And they really build at the scale out architecture based on Harjot's research work. We looked at that and we said, "hey look, this can be used for performance monitoring, it can be used for application discovery, it can be used for security operations." There's just so many different directions we can take this in. And it's a great team that's built it with a relatively small number of people. We want these guys to be working with us not not as a separate company. And it moved very quickly. The acquisition happened quite quickly. We talked a little bit this morning about how they're going to use it for micro segmentation but there's many other use cases we see coming down the pike. >> So let's talk a little bit about the enterprise of applicability. You know, when you guys looked at it, you mainly looked at containers and the challenges of a micro, i'm sorry, of multi services and basically twelve fact applications. >> Harjot: Yeah. >> How is that applicable to the typical enterprise, which 90% of their applications are modern lifts. Same capability? What what capabilities are you bringing to Bear for traditional application? >> It's pretty applicable everywhere because network is a very stable source of truth, like what remains constant in the legacy as well as in the new world is your TCP/IP stack. And it's a very stable source of truth to tap into. So one of the value proposition that Netsil had with an offer very, like, the early enterprise customers that we signed up, was helping them migrate from this monolithic architectures to micro services. And their existing tools on the market, if you look at APM tools or even the logging tools, were inadequate when taking them on this journey. And you can think of Netsil as a very pervasive solution. I mean, the analogy that I usually give people is, like drones versus troops on the ground. Where Netsil can quickly set up, like a breadth of coverage in any environment, whether it's like Legacy or micro services, you are covered. And and then once you find issues in your environment with security issues or performance issues, you can systematically drill in. Either add more instrumentation creating or add policies with micro segmentation. That was the whole idea. So there was a gap in the market for this kind of a tool. >> So let's talk about integration of Nutanix. One of the, what I'm calling, first principles for Nutanix is, push button one click easy. >> [Harjot And Rajiv] Yes. >> What does the Netsil application look like in a Nutanix environment to the Nutanix administrator? >> So let's take the micro segmentation example again, right. So today, if you were to micro segment an existing application, it's pretty hard to know where to begin. So Netsil described it as a hairy problem but we know he likes hair. But what Netsil does is it takes all the data it's gathering from the network and it gives you all this visibility into how every part of your application is interacting with each other. You can group it in different ways, so it's not just about VMs talking to Vms. If you have a micro services based application, that's actually very little value. You really want, which services are talking to each service or even more, which service tiers are talking to which service tiers. But gathering all that data, we can actually fully automate the creation of micro segmentation policies for existing applications. So today what we saw was more of a manual thing. We've set it up previously. It's just that we haven't enough time to do integration yet. You expect that to become completely automated. Similarly with the remediation stuff, the troubleshooting stuff. We have it integrated with the Netsil technology, with the machine learning things that we have been working on. Once we do that, we can explain a lot more automated insights into your applications, integrated alert system, integrated with our metrics and stat systems. So a lot of work to do but a lot of potential for this technology, I think. >> So yeah, so it actually does solve this chicken and an egg problem, as Rajiv said, with actually making micro segmentation operational by first discovering these ground field apps and then suggesting policies, right? And all the goodness of Netsil will be brought on to, like, products like Prism, where out-of-the-box, Netsil can provide visibility and metrics for workloads such as VDI and all the packaged applications and all the Mongo Db and all of the stuff that is hosted on top of Nutanix platform and selling it to the same ID ops. >> Harjot, the space you're playing in is really changing so so fast. >> Harjot: Yes it is. >> Talk about micro segmentation and containers and serverless and the like. What, at its core, will allow your product to be able to stay up with the pace of change? >> So the code of the product, as I mentioned, I mean, it's network based, so one of the things, like, you get with that is, like, it's a very stable source of truth. So your languages keep evolving. So in if you look at the, I mean, this mind-boggling introduction of, like, open source technologies into enterprise environments, which you don't control what languages they are written in. And your developers are like picking up the latest and greatest tools. So in that world the core of the technology, which is like network based, still works the same and that allows us to be ,like, really future-proof this thing here. >> Languages of frameworks change. The network protocols are much more stable. >> Yet, to some people's chagrin, the protocols don't change. So let's talk a little bit about products and overlap of products. One of the, I think, confusing points, or can be confusing, is where Netsil fits in when it comes to Comm and overall to Zai. Where, where's the interaction and overlap or what's the relative? >> Yeah, so you can think of every workload in the cloud as a coup de loop, observe, orient, decide, and act. Now what Comm helps the customer is to like act faster, right. Whereas Netsil comes in and provides the observe and the orient piece. So it's all part of the same workload workflow. If you are an IT ops person, you need tools to observe and help orient, so you can decide faster. And tools like Comm and kubernetes, in the future, with one click, just a few clicks, you can make massive changes to your cloud infrastructure. But without observability you are just flying blind. That's where Netsil comes in. So that's why, as you've said, as Rajiv said, like it's going to enhance a lot of areas within Nutanix and, possibly like, even continue selling as a multi cloud monitoring solution. >> Just as we do brownfield input for micro segmentation, you can imagine that it would be a great great product for Comm as well. Being able to do brownfield import of applications and making them into Comm blueprints. >> Yeah, Rajiv, you've had some pent up demand from customers for the micro segmentation piece but give us a little bit.. You said there's other applications, what should we be expecting to see from the Netsil product line? >> So as CTU I can talk future, so let me tell you some stuff on the kubernete timelines. One great area for us to explore is around security operations. Since since Netsil is already in the net world looking at all traffic, it can easily establish a baseline, of which Vms, which containers normally talk to each other. What kind of requests to make. And it's registered at layer seven, so it can even go and look into what kind of API endpoints are normally called. And once it's base-lined this, detecting variation, selecting violations is going to be relatively simple. So we can alert on security violations, unusual behavior, services making calls to services that shouldn't be making calls to. All that kind of stuff. So that's one area for us to explore. We talked about Comm, so Comm can benefit greatly by being able to import brownfield applications into the Comm umbrella, making blueprints out of them. There's integrations with Prism Pro, which will enable the kind of metrics that Netsil is collecting and integrating it to what Prism Pro already does, putting into one single framework, adding it to capacity planning, adding in all the Prism Pro features that we have. So there's a lot of stuff we can do. >> So that's an awful lot of data. Where's this stored and what's the engine behind it? >> That's a great question. Actually, Netsil not only innovated in this unique way of collecting, we also invented a lot in-time series databases. So the back end of Netsil is powered by a database called Apache Druid, which is an OLAP time series database. So it can ingest that scale and you can run complex queries in sub-second latency XQ. So it can like summarize billions of data points at sub-second latencies. And the third thing that Netsil innovated is, in the visualizations. We are talking about, like, visualizing this complex data that is coming from these modern transforming environments. That's another area where Netsil innovated with this Maps interface to summarize and build easy-to-understand visualizations on your complex infrastructure. >> Now I'm scared that my head would explode but I would love to get you guys on with Satyam and talk through what additional data and when it comes to IOT machine learning, what additional insights. Quick question, are you guys working with Satyam at all at this point? >> We've started, like, understanding the lay of the land, so we're, like, still getting introduced to a lot of teams. As you guys know, these Nutanix is now growing very rapidly, there's so many areas to, like, learn about. And we are primarily working with a micro segmentation team right now but going forward, you will see Netsil's goodness being brought into other areas at Nutanix. >> Yeah, Rajiv one question I have from a software standpoint in general, where does AI fit into, you know, what you're doing with Zai and Comm? >> Yes, so for all of them, you know, we're using machine learning fairly extensively today to even do basic things like capacity planning, the what-if modeling that we've been doing. But to go beyond machine learning, if we actually invest in building an AI platform, I feel we can do a lot more in terms of root cause analysis and mediation, troubleshooting of applications, finding performance bottlenecks automatically. Essentially, really making that invisible infrastructure dream come true. We're close, we're not quite there yet. >> Yeah, and it's really about, like, getting quality data in without friction. So you have, like, AI is now being commoditized in the industry like all the algorithms are now like mainstream. So the biggest challenge has always been how do you go and capture the data at low friction? That's what Netsil brings onboard. >> Yeah, I'm super excited for the micro segmentation. Let's talk about what if customers... What has been the customer reaction to Netsil and just the new capability? >> We see a lot of excitement. This is micro segmentation barely been out, what, a couple of months at this point? And we already have fairly large customers deploying it out there, and a lot of demand for proof of concepts and so on at this point. It was very clear to us from the beginning that when people were looking at other SDN solutions, the number one use case they were using in the enterprise was for micro segmentation. So we took that, we made it as simple as we could. In true Nutanix fashion we said, "okay, let's make micro segmentation as one-click as we can." And it's been gratifying, I think, to see the initial reaction. In fact, some of the initial feedback we've gotten has been along the lines of, this is almost too simple. >> So one of the challenges that we've had in Enterprise is hybrid cloud. When you look at a EC2 instance and you have an internal database and the two communicate, that EC2 instance is ephemeral, we don't know how to handle that. Does Netsil address that challenge at all? >> It does, in fact, it's been designed for even a faster moving world of containers. I'll give you an example of kubernetes, it is, I mean, a similar example. So next Hill installs as a daemon set on kubernetes experiencing structure insertion. You are, like, independently inserting without developers. And as soon as it is installed, it's not just looking at packets, it's also like tapping into docker socket for metadata. So as soon as containers go up and down, new ones brought up, it actually pulls the metadata, the container IDs, the service IDs, kubernetes, pod names and whatnot. And then measures that to the metrics that we are collecting. So that in the UI, as you saw in the demo today, you're not so much slicing and dicing by IP addresses. You're slicing and dicing by that service tax, so your BMS can come and go, containers can come and go. But we are looking at the behavior of this group of cattle, and you know the cattle versus pets analogy, the whole idea in the new world is, to like, create these services as the new pets and your cattle are ephemeral, and the whole idea that Netsil can discover micro-services, discover the boundary of micro services by looking at layer 7 behavior and by smartly grouping things based on the behavior. So we know exactly what a MySQL database and different installations of MySQL look like based on the behavior and the query behavior, and group them together. >> So enforcement. And is that at the bot level or is that at the container level? >> So on the enforcement side, Netsil is mostly on the visibility. So on the micro segmentation side there is... >> Today micro-segmentation, of which for Vms as we build out our next version of container services, we are looking into building a micro segmentation for kubernetes as well, and that will be at the bot level. >> Alright Kieth, I'm looking forward to this is CTO advisor podcast, digging a little bit more into micro-segmentation. It may be Rajiv and.. >> We'll have them on for sure. >> ...and Harjot can stop by so time. But thank you gentlemen so much for coming. Congratulations on the update. Looking forward to hearing more. Keith and I have a little bit more here left of day one of Nutanix dot next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, Kieth Townsend. Thank you for watching the Cube. (Electronic Music)

(lively brass music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's the Cube covering .NEXTconference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> So, you're watching the Cube and there's 55 hundred in attendance, here at the Nutanix .NEXTconference. Getting ready for a big party this evening at Mardi Gras world, get a flavor for the local cuisine and one of the things we always love at the show is, really, being able to dig in with the practitioners. Happy to welcome to the program, first, my guest Mike Spencer, vice president of hosting and managed services at ICF Olson, thanks so much for joining us. >> Well thank you very much for having me. It's been a great event, so far. Very inspiring keynote speech this morning. >> Awesome, so Mike. First of all, it's your first time here at .NEXT, tell us what brought you here and a little bit of background of yourself and your organization. >> Yep, so one of the reasons why we came here is my team is up for an award. We've been a user of the Nutanix platform for about three and a half years and it's done a lot to help us in our position in the marketplace, and so part of this is giving a little bit back, and some of it's, you know, coming to hear about what's next, so. >> So actually, could you tell us, what does this award mean to you, your team, and everything like, some people, like there's vendor awards, there's show awards, and like what's that like? >> Well, you know, I think my team is really excited to have some sort of external validation that, you know, the last three and a half or four years that we've been working towards this, you know, journey towards dev ops and infrastructures code, that somebody externally is starting to recognize that what we've done is great, and appreciating that work, so. >> Alright, so Kieth and I, I think are, you know, excited to dig in, we hear things like dev ops and infrastructures code. Something we've been documenting and talked to a lot of customers about, kind of digital transformation. Can you tell a little bit of the story? Bring us back. What was the challenge? What'd your organization look like and walk us through what you did. >> Yeah, so I think initially, very traditional IT team. Really managing things on a per-server basis, on a per-client basis and really needing that guy there to click next or to pay attention to a server. Really kind of that old adage of treating all of our servers like a pet versus more like cattle, which is where we are today and the efficiency around it. So we had some issues around stability, performance, availability, those types of things that really drove us to take a different look at the way we were doing things and so that's kind of what kicked us off on the journey to start looking at, how do we totally rethink this whole space and bring innovation in, in a space that historically doesn't have a ton of innovation. >> So let's talk about the innovation because, you know, the whole thing, whole thing services, you buy commodity hardware as cheap as possible, let it run as long as possible. When I think of Nutanix, I don't think commodity. Help bring the story together for us. >> Yep, so, you know, as architecturally, as we looked at everything we were doing, one of the unique things that we did is we decided to look at our infrastructure as more of a service-based architecture, which is very much more of a software development look at the world, versus an infrastructure look and some of the key tenants in that space are around driving for simplicity in your environment, and the Nutanix platform helped us eliminate a lot of the specialties that we needed in our area, right? So we are very much a commodity type person when it comes to servers, right? The name on the front of the server wasn't really important but what was really important for us and what Nutanix brought to the table was, they merged together all of the pieces in the server part of the stack down to the network stack. We no longer had to deal with things like storage. I didn't need to have SMEs on staff that were specialists in that space. It helped to simplify our networks. It helped us manage things through a single pane of glass, right? And we did it all in a very cost effective way. For us, it really helped us take that 25% of our labor in that space and refocus about 25% of it into really driving forward with the infrastructures code and dev ops methodologies. >> Mike, what does this mean for your business? Funny, I look at your website. It's a customer experience agency built to help you through this digital transformation. It's like, wow, it's what we're talking about at this kind of show. What does that mean to your company and, you know, your end users? >> So ICF Olson is the marketing services wing of ICF, our parent company, which is a large consulting wing but from a customer experience agency standpoint, we span everywhere from PR, brand, all the way down the stack, including managed services and hosting. A lot of our clients say, hey, you know what, you guys are really good at designing this. Why don't you guys go and run it for us? And so that's really where my art comes into place, is not just the hosting of something but also the running of something and working with the clients. It allowed us to become more of an end to end agency, right? It allowed our clients to focus on things more important like, you know, how they were going to change their brand, how they were going to look at the market, how they were going to advertise. And so from a business perspective, itself, one of the things that it did is it helped enable, you know, frankly we want a lot more business, right? Because we were willing to take these things on. We were able to repeat those types of things with a high level of success, so. >> How do you measure success? >> Success is... In our space, in particular? Honestly it is our clients not having to interact with us. (laughing) Right? We're not the sexy part of the digital ecosystem. (laughing) >> Modernization of data center is a critical piece of it. Clients are looking to you to basically make that invisible. The data center should be just something that they consume. As Nutanix has moved, you've been a customer for three years and Nutanix has moved from a hardware, software appliance, where they're selling you the entire platform to software only solution, how has, what has that meant to your business? >> Well, I mean, it's allowed us to take our focus off being experts in the hardware space. Again, something that didn't necessarily bring value, even in our private cloud. We do manage both public and private cloud but our private cloud space, it allowed us to not have to focus on the energy there and really allowed our infrastructure team to become more of a software development team. So that's been a big, big win for us. >> Talk to us a little bit about the organizational dynamics, rolling out dev ops. What did that mean for your team? You say things are invisible now. Was there a adjustment in head count, or roles, or retraining that you can share? >> Yes to all of that. In its simplest form, yeah. So a lot of people look at the implementation of dev ops being something that's kind of done to an infrastructure team. Right, it's designed to make an infrastructure team look more like a software development team or work more fluidly with a software development team and I think those things are all true but it also helped us transform our overall SDLC for software development. There's a lot of things. As we continue to build skill and trade out skill, right, continue to move up the stack, we basically became middleware developers, to where, now, our software developers for our core products and things that we sell for our clients, and support for our clients, those developers are now working on purely code and the aesthetics of things, the UX side of it. Where we are much more managing the middleware component, which interacts nicely with the hyper-converged platform. Right, Nutanix. There was a shift in labor, without a doubt. As you mature through the process you do a lot of investment in people. Right, making sure that they're kind of keeping up with the times, understanding the new methodologies. Huge shifts from the methodologies that a traditional IT team would use to what a software development team uses, right? It wasn't only moving an infrastructure team into that methodology, it was also getting the business and the software development team we work with used to us working more like them versus more like the old IT team. And so honestly, we probably caught the software development team more off guard than we did ourselves, so. (laughing) >> There's another side of that coin. As you develop that skill, as you develop that capability, retention becomes a problem. There's a natural headcount where, you know what, you don't need as many people to come in at midnight to do firmware revisions, do the low level work, but as they skill up, you look around, you know, you look at what happens in the rest of the dev ops movements, where you have entire teams leaving the fortune 500s to go to another fortune 500 to implement their dev ops. How do you encourage your team to stay? >> So to me, it's all about culture, right? Our team can work remote. They all choose to be in the office, right? They enjoy each other. It's also investing in people and investing in their growth. So it's not always about, necessarily, the size of a paycheck. It's also about work-life balance, the willingness of the organization to invest in their people, and giving them time to innovate. I mean, when you talk to the majority of infrastructure guys or even technology guys out there, what drives them every day is not necessarily their paycheck. That's a side effect of the good work they do. It's really the challenge, the pure problem solving of IT. We give them that opportunity to be able to innovate. >> Tell us a little bit about your Nutanix solution that you have, what you started with, how much you grew, what's not on your Nutanix today? >> So private cloud, we are 100% Nutanix today. We started with a four node environment that was, really, purpose built around our analytics platforms. We were looking for some way to isolate IOPS from our production environment. More of a standard, three tier architecture (clearing throat) and we did some research out there, this is at the same time that we're rethinking the architecture of everything, really kind of looking at the way we do business, and we came across several vendors, one of them being Nutanix. It was a very young company, fairly unproven, in at least our market, but their message was exactly the same message that we had developed and so we decided to take a chance on them. We put them in. You know, we did some load testing between that platform and our traditional platform and were very pleasantly surprised to find what we found. Almost a three X increase in disc IOPS and so we went live with this analytics platform, and really did a lot of testing there, right? And then we kind of started the natural process after we got comfortable with it for about six months of hey, why don't we start working through the life cycle process and bring through, bringing in Nutanix to offset? Instead of buying, you know, a storage shelf, right? I can go get a Nutanix cluster that has the same amount of storage but also brings compute with it. (clearing throat) So once we started doing that, we started putting production workloads onto the Nutanix platform and seeing great results. We expedited our journey. Within about a year and a half, we had replaced all of our traditional stand and compute plaforms. So the infrastructure guys, once they saw it in action, once the business saw the results, even the financial side of it, (laughing) you know, we were almost asked to expedite the process of moving towards Nutanix. Which, for us, it was great because it was less to manage. >> So as you guys moved to the Nutanix infrastructure, talk about the more advanced services that they've offered over the past few years. Specifically, the hypervisor, haven't you guys embraced AHV? >> So we have in dev. We are not running it as our primary hypervisor right now. In our architecture, we run VMware today. I'm not probably supposed to say that here but we run VMware. We have been looking at Acropolis. Really, the way we look at the hypervisor is as a component in our service space architecture. We are in a position where we can replace that because it's not an important part to us. We just haven't had the cycles in our roadmap to be able to put towards the replacement of VMware, yet. But it is certainly something on our roadmap and something we're marching towards because the APIs have continued to evolve on the Nutanix platform, we work quite closely with Nutanix on that. They seem to accommodate a lot of our asks but, yeah, it really has been more of a time thing, you know? There's so many things to code in this space, right now. >> You've got the award but what were you looking to really accomplish this week? Are there sessions you're looking for, are there products you're looking to dig into for you and your team? >> A lot of it was about vision, right? How well does the Nutanix vision align with our vision? And, like I said, from the keynote speeches this morning and some of the new services we see coming out, I think they're doing a great job. Their head is where our head is. They're headed the same direction we are. You know, in a lot of places where we're doing custom development, we can actually go in and say, hey, why don't we acquire this? You know, one of the exciting announcements this morning was around Beam. The ability to do compliance across our cloud platforms. We run today about 50% public cloud, 50% private cloud just depending on what the solution is we're providing, so it gives us that one pane of glass. >> What public clouds are you using and how does that, kind of the hybrid, hybrid world that Nutanix laid out this morning fit into your vision? >> Well, so. The right answer for me should be it shouldn't matter what cloud I'm running. But we are running Azure as well as AWS, just depending on the solution. So we have partnerships on both sides. But we don't necessarily look at them as being a long running relationship because, you know, this is a very, this space is changing at a very rapid pace. You know, who knows who the next person is that's going to stand up that we need to support. So we're very platform-agnostic when you look at it. When we deploy something, it really doesn't matter if it's on private cloud, public cloud, doesn't really matter. To us, it's just all building blocks that we plug in together and let code do its job. So, in that model, you guys do 50% public, 50% private. Nutanix has an opinionated view of cloud. How does that impact your business and services? >> Nutanix's approach? >> Yeah they're vision versus the...? >> Yeah, well I think their vision's great, right? Because it is a fairly agnostic vision. With them being, obviously, wanting the private cloud side of that but understanding that there is no 100%, you know, private cloud and 100% public cloud in today's world. It is all hybrid cloud environment and that certain workloads are better on prim, and certain workloads are better in the public cloud. I think that was in total alignment with everything we do. Our primary job is web hosting. So we deal with geographic workloads all the time. >> Well, Mike Spencer. I wish best of luck to the ICF Olson team. >> Yeah, thank you very much for having me. >> On the award this afternoon. You're a big winner in our books either way. Kieth Townsend, I'm Stuart Miniman. Thanks so much for watching the Cube. We'll be back with lots more. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Cube special coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. This is the Cube Silicon Angle's flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is our eighth year of covering EMC World, but now called Dell EMC World. I'm John Furrier, your co-host on our set one and with my co-host Paul Gillin this week as well as Kieth Townshend and John Walls and Rebecca Knight on set two. Double barrel shotgun of content here at Dell EMC World with you. Thanks for joining us for three days of wall to wall coverage. Paul, so much to talk about here this week. Digital transformation, little bit boring theme, it's being played out in real time. But this is a historic moment because one, the Cube started at EMC World in 2010, eight years ago. But, this is the first official EMC World where it's Dell EMC World, kind of a mini event in Austin, but since Michael Dell took over, or I'm sorry, merger of equals, a combination. >> Paul: Combination, as they call it. >> (chuckling) Combination. This is the first instantiation of EMC World as Dell EMC World. Jeremy Burton's now the CMO of Dell Technologies which is the holding company for all the companies. It's the same EMC World flair, now the integrated content. Notable absent Cube alumni and executives from EMC. We'll talk about that in the EMC Mafia segment shortly, but (chuckling) your thoughts because now Michael Dell's puttin' the rubber to the road. Kind of nothing earth shattering in his keynote, but certainly private company, all guns blaring, smiling and dialing, he's got the swagger on stage. >> Well, Michael is nothing if not an optimist. He's always good at seeing a brighter future, and at his keynote this morning, as you said it was blissfully free of content, but it did talk a lot about digital transformation which is of course the buzzword of the year in the IT industry. Little surprised that Dell adopted the same buzzword that HP and Cisco and all these other big companies are adopting. What happened in the keynote is less interesting than how the mood changes here, and this is the coming out party for Dell EMC. Yeah, there was a conference last October, a month after the merger, but this is really, things have finally settled out, now six months later and it's a chance for customers and for the partners to get a sense of how well this is all working out. >> And one of the things I'm watching is how the story's unfolding 'cause now you're starting to see the big companies, certainly in the consolidation side of the business market of infrastructure and data center and enterprise IT, it's a consolidating mature market. It is transforming, there is a cloud story requirement, there are new software requirements, software defined data center, as well as new growth opportunities, so what I'm looking at is what is the story? What is Michael packaging and how does that compare to the competition? We're going to hear from HPE at HPE Discover coming up, the Cube will be covering that for the seventh consecutive year. We're seeing Amazon's story playing out in real time. Oracle's story, everyone's got their story. And it's certainly digital transformation but what's interesting is Michael's got the packaging. He's packaging it up, your thoughts. >> And Michael kind of dissed the cloud this morning, actually in his presentation. He said, you can't have a successful business, or your business is not going to grow as quickly if you're 100% cloud based. He was very much making a pitch for data center infrastructure. Really not surprising coming from Michael. One thing that will be a sub-theme here I think is how this merger is working out, and as we wrote on Silicon Angle this week, if you go back to the history of big mega mergers, particularly in the hardware industry, going back to Burroughs Sperry, DEC Compaq, HP Compaq, Wellfleet Synoptics and NCR AT&T. I mean, it goes on and on and on. Pretty much all disasters, and we really haven't seen a merger anywhere near this scale between two IT companies that has worked well. All indications are now that they're doing the right things, they even have some people on board with Dell EMC who went through some of those mergers. But it's going to be interesting to see how they break a pattern that has been decidedly negative. >> Great point, I loved your post by the way, and I would add that interesting observation, at least from my perspective is, as we sit down with these billionaires and interview them one-on-one on the Cube is, you look at Amazon, Andy Jasse and Jeff Bezos, Bezos in particular. Larry Ellison and Michael Dell, you have essentially captains of industry at the helm. Michael Dell is no spring chicken, but he's also not over the hill either, he's 51 years old. >> Paul: He's a kid relative to most leaders in this industry. >> You know, you hear Jeff Bezos talk and I was watching his talk in DC just this week, he's saying we're taking the long view. If you look at Amazon.com's CEO, Bezos, look at Michael Dell, look at what Ellison's doing, they're all playing the long game card. Now I don't know if that's a hedge against we don't have our story right, or give us more time to bake out our stuff, but I think what's different about Dell Technologies is, Michael's 33 years into the business, one trillion dollars later in sales and he's young, so I think that is a wild card. Ellison's still running the show, Bezos is still running the show, Dell's certainly running the show. I think the wild card on this is the fact that you got a strong founder, and a privately held company. >> And Ellison, it's questionable how long Ellison will be able to run the show, I mean he is over 70 at this point. Dell certainly will be around for a long time. You have to take a long term strategy. If you're not Amazon, you have to take a long term strategy 'cause what other choice do you have? You've lost in the short term, so it's not surprising to hear these guys going that way. I'll be interested to hear from Michael and from his team about the cloud and how they really design and differentiate its strategy. I think IBM has staked its position in cloud out pretty well. Even HPE has got a differentiated position. HPE of course has the configurable hardware, that's a point that Dell I think has to come back on, and the big question is software. John, as you pointed out the other day, VMware is worth more than HPE, by a substantial margin at this point. They've got this huge asset in VMware, not to mention Virtuestream and Pivotal and the other good software assets they acquired. What are they going to do with them? Are they just going to let 'em go free like Michael has done in the past, or are they going to try to mold these into some kind of coordinated whole? >> Well, great point one is on the HPE valuation thing market cap, VMware's actually worth more on market cap and public markets than HPE. Interesting, but not significant in my mind yet, but it does point to the fact that Michael Dell's rhetoric on stage today, he didn't take any shots at HP. Last year he took a big shot at HPE. It's been his rival from day one. I used to work at HP when he was just a mail order company selling white boxes and then he grew that business, obviously the rest is history, but no shot at HP because VMware has to work with HP. Right, (chuckling) so that's interesting. Two is, on the software side, Dell is a hardware company, let's face it. But they have more software now than they've ever had before so that is a good point, we're going to be getting into this date software defined data center to find out how much they actually have. A couple core themes that I see already popping out of the keynote, one, Pivotal. Pivotal and Cloud Foundry's instrumental in the keynotes. NSX was mentioned, Pat Gelsinger's going to be on tomorrow. NSX is VMware's secret play. If you look at what NSX is doing with the Amazon public cloud deal that they did recently this year, NSX could be the real lever in that intellectual property, that lock in, that kind of differentiation. The cloud is not a place, it's a way of doing IT is another message we heard all day today. To me, and your point about bashing cloud, I actually think that's a stake in the ground to kind of hold the line, because they have no cloud strategy. Now, their cloud strategy is kind of hand waiving right now with multi-cloud, which I buy, but multi-cloud is still a fantasy in my mind. Latencies are too low, there just isn't the kind of plumbing yet in place on the clouds for multi-cloud, but certainly hybrid-cloud I think will be multi-cloud roll, so those are the key things and then I'm going to ask Michael directly. You blew 60 billion dollars on this deal. Is there any cash left for M&A? >> Paul: Acquisitions, yeah. >> M&A right now is hot market, you can do some nice tuck ins, fill in the white spaces on the products. Get those software assets and really start cobbling together a growth strategy. There's no doubt in my mind, Paul, that they're going to win the mature, classic business school move of consolidated market. Own the consolidated market, and try to get a growth strategy. To me, that's going to be the big question. What is Dell Technologies and Dell EMC's growth strategy? >> And you would have to think it's either through M&A, perhaps an acquisition of HPE if the valuation continues to go down. Or it's in software It's a good point you made about VMware. Vmware also has a strategic alliance with IBM, so if you're Michael Dell, it's hard to give a compelling keynote speech these days because you can't really offend anybody. His companies now are in cahoots with all these other firms, and of course dissing the cloud is even dangerous because Cloud Foundry is such a critical part of the Pivotal strategy. I think it's an important point, you've got a company that is almost trying to reassemble the old IBM, the old IBM of the '80s which dominated every segment that was important Dell is almost doing that now, I mean the only piece they really don't have is networking. To make a big play, to become the mongo IT company in the world, can they raise the kind of funds for that? >> Yeah, and we're also going to talk about the cloud transition as well as what I'm calling the EMC mafia, folks that have been on the Cube and big executives at EMC. We'll get to that in a minute, but I just want to talk about that cloud play, because you're right, the growth strategy has to come from software. I just don't see the cloud growth yet for these guys, although Michael, in the hallway, conversations are growth in the cloud is doing really well for EMC, not sure. But on the growth strategy, Pivotal, Boo-Mee, Vmware, Virtuestream, and Software Converge Infrastructure are interesting plays, so I think that's where we have to look here. I still think there's a lot of holes in the product line. To me that's important. Now, trends so far, and what we're expecting to hear at the show is, some of my notes Paul, I'll share with you, and get your reaction on. All flash arrays are going to be big, continuing to grow that. Hyperconverge VX rail, we heard that on stage today, claiming to be number one. Power edge 14G. Again, back to speeds and feeds, (chuckling) you know. Storage. Storage is the bread and butter of EMC and now Dell EMC I still think is going to be a real critical beachhead that they going to continue to expand, storage is not going away. Obviously the ice lawn all flash is coming out, and then SSD's, data protection in the cloud. You're starting to see them going where their roots are. Cloud stuff is coming out of the data domain, kind of their core storage first, make sense strategy wise, while they buy their time to fill in the cloud. >> Well, it's a good point about storage. They have a comfortable lead in storage. According to the latest IDC figures, they're a good 15 points ahead of their next biggest competitor. They have a comfortable lead in the hyper converge infrastructure. Four different product lines in that area. These are beachheads that they have to shore up. They have to be sure that their market share doesn't erode in those areas. The question is where does the growth come from? You look at a company that's going through a very similar transition right now, Cisco, which has finally really bought in to software defined networking and is remaking its company around it. That company is having to change the whole culture in response to a technology trend. Now the same thing's going on in the data center. Everything's being remade as virtualized and Vmware is at the center of that, so Michael Dell has the asset to be able to lead that conversion, but are they psychologically going to get there? >> Great point. One, I would agree with you that the whole Cisco example proves the same channel that Dell EMC is. Can they move up the stack? In this case, they're hardware guys, can they add software. Cisco, they're transforming themselves to be more cloud native. The classic move's happening. Cisco have been trying to move up the stack for over a generation. They're plumbing guys, they're networking guys. These guys are hardware guys. Can they get the DNA to truly become software providers, not in the sense of selling software, just providing a software fabric that's going to be the key differentiators, because digital transformation is about IT transformation. That is certainly the reality, what we're seeing when you start to peel back the onions. And that to me is going to be the big discussion because as David Gooldun said on stage, apps provide the value. As the enterprises build more apps, you got to have a platform, you got to have a cohesive horizontal end to end software fabric, and the question is, do they have it? >> Well, they certainly have the foundation for it, I mean they have Pivotal, there's a whole developer community around Pivotal. Dell itself doesn't have a developer community, nor does EMC but they have elements of that to build upon. The interesting thing about the conversion to software, about software defined infrastructure, is that it requires thinking from an application perspective and that's not something hardware companies have ever been inclined to do. So, how does Michael Dell make that transition, has he made it himself, is there other leadership he's going to have to bring in who are going to make it for him? The whole leadership of the Dell EMC company right now is ex-Dell and EMC people, it's hardware guys. >> I'm going to put pressure on Dell, the question on software. But you wrote a two part series on SiliconAngle.com, worth checking out, getting a lot of viral buzz around open source and the value of open source, because if you look at say Cisco for instance, what they're doing with the cloud native strategy, they have actually pivoted and Chuck Robbins, the CEO has acknowledged, actually re-tweeted one of my tweets the other day, with as we were talking about this new program called DevNet Create. They're taking the developer program from Cisco and moving it into an open community model, which basically is the toe in the water for saying, we have to figure out open source. All the critical, big vendors that are transforming from called the old guard, as Amazon calls 'em, Amazon Web Services, Andy Jasse. Dell's an old guard guy, but still young, but they got to get to open source. What are you finding is the success parameters there because you got to play in the open source, be a contributing member. Again, back to the DNA of the culture, and two, there's real value there. >> Well, there's no question that open source has won when it comes to infrastructure. I mean, the biggest IT companies in the world which are Google and Facebook, are both built on open source platforms. Game over. This is where IT infrastructure is headed. Cisco, interesting case because they are an infrastructure company, and they are being eroded, their traditional market is being eroded by open source, they've chosen to embrace it through their developer community. Cisco is one company I would never bet against. They're such a great company. If anyone's going to make the transition, they will. Open source is still an infrastructure play. I don't see open source in the applications area being a major driver, but Dell is an infrastructure company, so you have to assume that everything they're doing in managing, in securing storage and servers is going to be under pressure from open source at some point. They have to embrace that as Cisco is doing. >> Paul, we had thought leader chat with some experts on our digital panel, software crowd chat, everyone knows crowdchat.net, check it out. And comment and conversation was taking place among the influential folks saying, what is a software company? You go back to the web, shrink wrapped, download software, to now fully SAS based and Saas now platform, what is a software company? So, the question was, is Facebook a software company? Or are they an app company? Which begs the question, you have to be a software company, but it's not the classic software company category, business model. You need software (chuckling) to run stuff, so you can be a hardware guy, like Michael Dell, and have Dell Technologies. You can be a network company like Cisco, but you've got to be a software company in the new way. >> Well, I spoke to a Forester analyst in writing that piece on open source who had a great point, he said Facebook and Google are two big successful software companies, neither of which makes. >> Any money. >> Any money, a little bit in Google's case licensing software. They created business models that have nothing to do with the traditional software model, but that have leveraged their expertise in the software that they've developed. And maybe that is the business model, ultimately the business model is building software in order to do something else with it that customers will pay for. >> I think you're on to something. I think your post illuminates that. I think that this is going to be one of those things where in the history books of the tech generation, as we're on our whatever wave of open source generation, this is it, it's not about the business model of the software, it's how the software's being used in the business model of the transformation. That is really really key. Paul, I want to just talk about, really quickly about my observation at EMC. A little bit of editorial moment here. Because, Dell took over. Dell EMC. We've interviewed now eight years, pretty much all the executives at EMC over the years, but there's an EMC mafia developing. There's a lot of people who have left EMC, that we know, we're friends with. Guy Churchwood, CJ DeSai, Josh Conn, Rich DePellatano, Brian Gallagher, BJ Jenkins, Sanjay Murchandani, and many more have left because of the consolidation. Certainly you can't, EMC's going to get consolidated down, but no major layoffs but still enough that some eagles have flown from the nest, as they say and are running other companies. So you have this EMC culture out there of very sales oriented, very customer centric, now running other companies, and I want to give a shout out to all those EMC alumni and mafia out there. Good luck on your new ventures, but the impact here to Dell is a mashup of the two cultures. What's your observation, what's your reaction of that. Have you heard anything? I have some thoughts, but I want to get your reaction because okay, some eagles fly away, you still got the worker bees inside EMC, and now Dell coming together. Thoughts on the culture clash. >> Well, I live in Boston, and so I've been through the acquisition of Prime Computer, through EMC acquiring Data General, through the DEC acquisition by Compaq. All of which were disasters, and all of which where the cultural issues were much bigger than the technology issues. So, I think that that is something that Dell has to be front and center for Michael Dell, is how do you mash up these two cultures. As you pointed out, EMC, very aggressive, take no prisoners, enterprise-oriented sales force. Their sales people make a lot of money. I used to live in a neighborhood where everyone was EMC salespeople. >> John: Buying new houses. >> They were making a million dollars a year. And you've got Dell with its direct model, with its channeled model, and without a particularly strong roots in enterprise sales force and how do you coordinate those. It's not surprising to see people leaving. Of course, in the early days after an acquisition, choices get made, people get promoted and moved in new positions. Those who lose out tend to leave the company. But, I think the sales issue would be something to delve into too. Does Dell want to adopt EMC's sales style, or the other way around? Or is there some way that they can live both in harmony? >> You know, I follow a lot of companies in Silicon Valley as well, I'm out there on the west coast, left coast, as they say. Where all the crazy ones are, as they say. But I got to say, there's been some shrinkage on EMC, but for the most part, I haven't really heard any really negative horror stories. Actually, it's been going pretty well, and I think you bring up an issue of effectiveness with the sales folks. Dell's an efficiency guy, right so you got effectiveness and efficiency coming together. But I think they've handled it well. I really haven't heard any real horror stories. Again, I think that has to do with the founder being actively involved, they're a private company, so they have some room. And I think they've invested in making that happen, so I think generally, props to EMC folks and for the Dell folks on the acquisition. Still not clear the woods yet, it's going to surely be in the products and the revenue, but for the most part, we're going to unpack that. So Paul. >> But you can't, I just wanted to jump in just quickly. You can't minimize customer touch, and EMC was always a high touch company. Outstanding service, they put people on a plane in the middle of the night, charter a private jet in the middle of the night to get someone on site at a customer to fix a problem. As you mentioned, Dell is an efficiency company. That's not a very efficient way to operate. Can they absorb the best of EMC and the best of Dell at the same time? >> Yeah, well we'll certainly tell, I mean they got a lot of competition, Michael Dell saying on stage. (mumbling) startups, essentially what's he's saying is Amazon, there in my opinion, although that's not probly what he really meant but that's my interpretation. But I'm expecting to see the same old EMC world with a twist, and that is, we're doin' good, the messaging's out there, we're going to see how the products compare vis a vis the competition. I'm interested in Vmware piece. Paul, what are you looking forward to? >> I'm looking forward to hearing how this is all going, how this company is culturally, what kind of a cultural chimera they're putting together here that's going to make sense, that the market is going to understand. I also want to hear how they're going to differentiate in cloud, internet of things, we just heard a little bit about that this morning. That's something where I think you're seeing Cisco. The way Cisco's dealing with the cloud these days is to say, don't worry about it, it's all going IOT. It's all going to distributed intelligent devices, the cloud is already history, is what they're saying. So, does Dell have a similar differentiated position on that. I'm least interested in hearing about the new products because it's speeds and feeds. But really, how is this company going to dominate an industry, how is it going to get over some of the speed bumps that we've been talking about for the last 20 minutes that have foiled so many merger attempts in the past. >> One of the tell signs that I look at a conference when I see a lot of AI washing. The good news is, there's not a lot of AI being talked about here, 'cause usually that's just lipstick on the pig, as they say. Except for the case of Google and Amazon Web Services, they do have some AI story, with some real products to back it up. For the most part, you're not seeing EMC glob on the whole machine learning, rah rah. They did talk about it but it wasn't like a big theme. I think they really talked about the packaging of the value. Of the brands together, comments around costs for public cloud, nice little ding there. I'm going to dig into the story. I'm going to really test the story, and I'm going to look at the customer traction. I really want to see who they have on stage, I really want to hear who's really going down the road, how that growth strategy, 'cause I think they're going to win the data consolidation market pretty handily, and the question between HPE and Dell, for instance, 'cause that's really to me the two big horses on the track. Who's going to win the growth. Who's going to be able to lock in their beachhead on the core market, traditional market, and have access to the growth of what cloud will bring and IOT and among other things. >> I think at this point, HP has a better story in that area with their configurable infrastructure, with their pay as you go on site model, really interesting models. I was at HP World in Europe in December, and I came away from that feeling like these guys have some unique talking points here. At least they have a strategy that I think I understand and that is different. Dell is still working through this huge merger and that's a big catch. >> Bottom line is, Dave Donatelli, who's an executive at Oracle told me, he also was an EMC executive, and HPE. The business of provisioning servers and storage (laughing) is not going to be the growth strategy. Now, it might be a component of the overall business model, like software, but ultimately, that business is in decline, and that's a fact. Okay, this is the Cube, bringing you all the coverage of the kickoff from day one at Dell EMC World 2017. Our eighth year, three days of wall to wall coverage. We have two sets, the blue set and the white set. Go to SiliconAngle.tv to find the coverage, also go on Twitter, follow us on the Cube, I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillin, kickin' off Dell EMC World 2017, back with more, stay with us after this short break. (atmospheric instrumental music)