>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage here. New York city for AWS Amazon web services summit 2022. I'm John furrier, host of the cube with Dave ante. My co-host. We are breaking it down, getting an update on the ecosystem. As the GDP drops, inflations up gas prices up the enterprise continues to grow. We're seeing exceptional growth. We're here on the ground floor. Live at the Summit's packed house, 10,000 people. Eric Bradley's here. Chief STR at ETR, one of the premier enterprise research firms out there, partners with the cube and powers are breaking analysis that Dave does check that out as the hottest podcast in enterprise. Eric. Great to have you on the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate the collaboration always. >>Yeah. Great stuff. Your data's amazing ETR folks watching check out ETR. They have a unique formula, very accurate. We love it. It's been moving the market. Congratulations. Let's talk about the market right now. This market is booming. Enterprise is the hottest thing, consumers kind of in the toilet. Okay. I said that all right, back out devices and, and, and consumer enterprise is still growing. And by the way, this first downturn, the history of the world where hyperscalers are on full pumping on all cylinders, which means they're still powering the revolution. >>Yeah, it's true. The hyperscalers were basically at this two sun system when Microsoft and an AWS first came around and everything was orbiting around it. And we're starting to see that sun cool off a little bit, but we're talking about a gradient here, right? When we say cool off, we're not talking to shutdown, it's still burning hot. That's for sure. And I can get it to some of the macro data in a minute, if that's all right. Or do you want me to go right? No, go go. Right. Yeah. So right now we just closed our most recent survey and that's macro and vendor specific. We had 1200 people talk to us on the macro side. And what we're seeing here is a cool down in spending. We originally had about 8.5% increase in budgets. That's cool down is 6.5 now, but I'll say with the doom and gloom and the headlines that we're seeing every day, 6.5% growth coming off of what we just did the last couple of years is still pretty fantastic as a backdrop. >>Okay. So you, you started to see John mentioned consumer. We saw that in Snowflake's earnings. For example, we, we certainly saw, you know, Walmart, other retailers, the FA Facebooks of the world where consumption was being dialed down, certain snowflake customers. Not necessarily, they didn't have mentioned any customers, but they were able to say, all right, we're gonna dial down, consumption this quarter, hold on until we saw some of that in snowflake results and other results. But at the same time, the rest of the industry is booming. But your data is showing softness within the fortune 500 for AWS, >>Not only AWS, but fortune 500 across the board. Okay. So going back to that larger macro data, the biggest drop in spending that we captured is fortune 500, which is surprising. But at the same time, these companies have a better purview into the economy. In general, they tend to see things further in advance. And we often remember they spend a lot of money, so they don't need to play catch up. They'll easily more easily be able to pump the brakes a little bit in the fortune 500. But to your point, when we get into the AWS data, the fortune 500 decrease seems to be hitting them a little bit more than it is Azure and GCP. I >>Mean, we're still talking about a huge business, right? >>I mean, they're catching up. I mean, Amazon has been transforming from owning the developer cloud startup cloud decade ago to really putting a dent on the enterprise as being number one cloud. And I still contest that they're number one by a long ways, but Azure kicking ass and catching up. Okay. You seeing people move to Azure, you got Charlie bell over there, Sean, by former Amazonians, Theresa Carlson, people are going over there, there there's lift over at Azure. >>There certainly is. >>Is there kinks in the arm or for AWS? There's >>A couple of kinks, but I think your point is really good. We need to take a second there. If you're talking about true pass or infrastructure is a service true cloud compute. I think AWS still is the powerhouse. And a lot of times the, the data gets a little muddied because Azure is really a hosted platform for applications. And you're not really sure where that line is drawn. And I think that's an important caveat to make, but based on the data, yes, we are seeing some kinks in the armor for AWS. Yes. Explain. So right now, a first of all caveat, 40% net score, which is our proprietary spending metric across the board. So we're not like raising any alarms here. It's still strong that said there are declines and there are declines pretty much across the board. The only spot we're not seeing a decline at all is in container, spend everything else is coming down specifically. We're seeing it come down in data analytics, data warehousing, and M I, which is a little bit of a concern because that, that rate of decline is not the same with Azure. >>Okay. So I gotta ask macro, I see the headwinds on the macro side, you pointed that out. Is there any insight into any underlying conditions that might be there on AWS or just a chronic kind of situational thing >>Right now? It seems situational. Other than that correlation between their big fortune 500, you know, audience and that being our biggest decline. The other aspect of the macro survey is we ask people, if you are planning to decline spend, how do you plan on doing it? And the number two answer is taking a look at our cloud spend and auditing it. So they're kind say, all right, you know, for the last 10 years it's been drunken, sail or spend, I >>Was gonna use that same line, you know, >>Cloud spend, just spend and we'll figure it out later, who cares? And then right now it's time to tighten the belts a little bit, >>But this is part of the allure of cloud at some point. Yeah. You, you could say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna dial it down. I'm gonna rein it in. So that's part of the reason why people go to the cloud. I want to, I wanna focus in on the data side of things and specifically the database. Let, just to give some context if, and correct me if I'm, I'm a little off here, but snowflake, which hot company, you know, on the planet, their net score was up around 80% consistently. It it's dropped down the last, you know, quarter, last survey to 60%. Yeah. So still highly, highly elevated, but that's relative to where Amazon is much larger, but you're saying they're coming down to the 40% level. Is that right? >>Yeah, they are. And I remember, you know, when I first started doing this 10 years ago, AWS at a 70%, you know, net score as well. So what's gonna happen over time is those adoptions are gonna get less and you're gonna see more flattening of spend, which ultimately is going to lower the score because we're looking for expansion rates. We wanna see adoption and increase. And when you see flattening a spend, it starts to contract a little bit. And you're right. Snowflake also was in the stratosphere that cooled off a little bit, but still, you know, very strong and AWS is coming down. I think the reason why it's so concerning is because a it's within the fortune 500 and their rate of decline is more than Azure right >>Now. Well, and, and one of the big trends you're seeing in database is this idea of converging function. In other words, bringing transaction and analytics right together at snowflake summit, they added the capability to handle transaction data, Mongo DB, which is largely mostly transactions added the capability in June to bring in analytic data. You see data bricks going from data engineering and data science now getting into snowflake space and analytics. So you're seeing that convergence Oracle is converging with my SQL heat wave and their core databases, couch base couch base is doing the same. Maria do virtually all these database companies are, are converging their platforms with the exception of AWS. AWS is still the right tool for the right job. So they've got Aurora, they've got RDS, they've got, you know, a dynamo DV, they've got red, they've got, you know, going on and on and on. And so the question everybody's asking is will that change? Will they start to sort of cross those swim lanes? We haven't seen it thus far. How is that affecting the data >>Performance? I mean, that's fantastic analysis. I think that's why we're seeing it because you have to be in the AWS ecosystem and they're really not playing nicely with others in the sandbox right now that now I will say, oh, Amazon's not playing nicely. Well, no, no. Simply to your point though, that there, the other ones are actually bringing in others at consolidating other different vendor types. And they're really not. You know, if you're in AWS, you need to stay within AWS. Now I will say their tools are fantastic. So if you do stay within AWS, they have a tool for every job they're advanced. And they're incredible. I think sometimes the complexity of their tools hurts them a little bit. Cause to your point earlier, AWS started as a developer-centric type of cloud. They have moved on to enterprise cloud and it's a little bit more business oriented, but their still roots are still DevOps friendly. And unless you're truly trained, AWS can be a little scary. >>So a common use case is I'm gonna be using Aurora for my transaction system and then I'm gonna ETL it into Redshift. Right. And, and I, now I have two data stores and I have two different sets of APIs and primitives two different teams of skills. And so that is probably causing some friction and complexity in the customer base that again, the question is, will they begin to expand some of those platforms to minimize some of that friction? >>Well, yeah, this is the question I wanted to ask on that point. So I've heard from people inside Amazon don't count out Redshift, we're making, we're catching up. I think that's my word, but they were kind of saying that right. Cuz Redshift is good, good database, but they're adding a lot more. So you got snowflake success. I think it's a little bit of a jealousy factor going on there within Redshift team, but then you got Azure synapse with the Synap product synapse. Yep. And then you got big query from Google big >>Query. Yep. >>What's the differentiation. What are you seeing for the data for the data warehouse or the data clouds that are out there for the customers? What's the data say, say to us? >>Yeah, unfortunately the data's showing that they're dropping a little bit whose day AWS is dropping a little bit now of their data products, Redshift and RDS are still the two highest of them, but they are starting to decline. Now I think one of the great data points that we have, we just closed the survey is we took a comparison of the legacy data. Now please forgive me for the word legacy. We're gonna anger a few people, but we Gotter data Oracle on-prem, we've got IBM. Some of those more legacy data warehouse type of names. When we look at our art survey takers that have them where their spend is going, that spends going to snowflake first, and then it's going to Google and then it's going to Microsoft Azure and, and AWS is actually declining in there. So when you talk about who's taking that legacy market share, it's not AWS right now. >>So legacy goes to legacy. So Microsoft, >>So, so let's work through in a little context because Redshift really was the first to take, you know, take the database to the cloud. And they did that by doing a one time license deal with par XL, which was an on-prem database. And then they re-engineered it, they did a fantastic job, but it was still engineered for on-prem. Then you along comes snowflake a couple years later and true cloud native, same thing with big query. Yep. True cloud native architecture. So they get a lot of props. Now what, what Amazon did, they took a page outta of the snowflake, for example, separating compute from storage. Now of course what's what, what Amazon did is actually not really completely separating like snowflake did they couldn't because of the architecture, they created a tearing system that you could dial down the compute. So little nuances like that. I understand. But at the end of the day, what we're seeing from snowflake is the gathering of an ecosystem in this true data cloud, bringing in different data types, they got to the public markets, data bricks was not able to get to the public markets. Yeah. And think is, is struggling >>And a 25 billion evaluation. >>Right. And so that's, that's gonna be dialed down, struggling somewhat from a go to market standpoint where snowflake has no troubles from a go to market. They are the masters at go to market. And so now they've got momentum. We talked to Frank sluman at the snowflake. He basically said, I'm not taking the foot off the gas, no way. Yeah. We, few of our large, you know, consumer customers dialed things down, but we're going balls to the >>Wall. Well, if you look at their show before you get in the numbers, you look at the two shows. Snowflake had their summit in person in Vegas. Data bricks has had their show in San Francisco. And if you compare the two shows, it's clear, who's winning snowflake is blew away from a, from a market standpoint. And we were at snowflake, but we weren't at data bricks, but there was really nothing online. I heard from sources that it was like less than 3000 people. So >>Snowflake was 1900 people in 2019, nearly 10,000. Yeah. In 2020, >>It's gonna be fun to sort of track that as a, as an odd caveat to say, okay, let's see what that growth is. Because in fairness, data, bricks, you know, a little bit younger, Snowflake's had a couple more years. So I'd be curious to see where they are. Their, their Lakehouse paradigm is interesting. >>Yeah. And I think it's >>And their product first company, yes. Their go to market might be a little bit weak from our analysis, but that, but they'll figure it out. >>CEO's pretty smart. But I think it's worth pointing out. It's like two different philosophies, right? It is. Snowflake is come into our data cloud. That's their proprietary environment. They're the, they think of the iPhone, right? End to end. We, we guarantee it's all gonna work. And we're in control. Snowflake is like, Hey, open source, no, bring in data bricks. I mean data bricks, open source, bring in this tool that too, now you are seeing snowflake capitulate a little bit. They announce, for instance, Apache iceberg support at their, at the snowflake summit. So they're tipping their cap to open source. But at the end of the day, they're gonna market and sell the fact that it's gonna run better in native snowflake. Whereas data bricks, they're coming at it from much more of an open source, a mantra. So that's gonna, you know, we'll see who look at, you had windows and you had apple, >>You got, they both want, you got Cal and you got Stanford. >>They both >>Consider, I don't think it's actually there yet. I, I find the more interesting dynamic right now is between AWS and snowflake. It's really a fun tit for tat, right? I mean, AWS has the S three and then, you know, snowflake comes right on top of it and announces R two, we're gonna do one letter, one number better than you. They just seem to have this really interesting dynamic. And I, and it is SLT and no one's betting against him. I mean, this guy's fantastic. So, and he hasn't used his war chest yet. He's still sitting on all that money that he raised to your point, that data bricks five, their timing just was a little off >>5 billion in >>Capital when Slootman hasn't used that money yet. So what's he gonna do? What can he do when he turns that on? He finds the right. >>They're making some acquisitions. They did the stream lit acquisitions stream. >>Fantastic >>Problem. With data bricks, their valuation is underwater. Yes. So they're recruiting and their MNAs. Yes. In the toilet, they cannot make the moves because they don't have the currency until they refactor the multiple, let the, this market settle. I I'm, I'm really nervous that they have to over factor the >>Valuation. Having said that to your point, Eric, the lake house architecture is definitely gaining traction. When you talk to practitioners, they're all saying, yeah, we're building data lakes, we're building lake houses. You know, it's a much, much smaller market than the enterprise data warehouse. But nonetheless, when you talk to practitioners that are actually doing things like self serve data, they're building data lakes and you know, snow. I mean, data bricks is right there. And as a clear leader in, in ML and AI and they're ahead of snowflake, right. >>And I was gonna say, that's the thing with data bricks. You know, you're getting that analytics at M I built into it. >>You know, what's ironic is I remember talking to Matt Carroll, who's CEO of auDA like four or five years ago. He came into the office in ma bro. And we were in temporary space and we were talking about how there's this new workload emerging, which combines AWS for cloud infrastructure, snowflake for the simple data warehouse and data bricks for the ML AI, and then all now all of a sudden you see data bricks yeah. And snowflake going at it. I think, you know, to your point about the competition between AWS and snowflake, here's what I think, I think the Redshift team is, you know, doesn't like snowflake, right. But I think the EC two team loves it. Loves it. Exactly. So, so I think snowflake is driving a lot of, >>Yeah. To John's point, there is plenty to go around. And I think I saw just the other day, I saw somebody say less than 40% of true global 2000 organizations believe that they're at real time data analytics right now. They're not really there yet. Yeah. Think about how much runway is left and how many tools you need to get to real time streaming use cases. It's complex. It's not easy. >>It's gonna be a product value market to me, snowflake in data bricks. They're not going away. Right. They're winning architectures. Yeah. In the cloud, what data bricks did would spark and took over the Haddo market. Yeah. To your point. Now that big data, market's got two players, in my opinion, snow flicking data, bricks converging. Well, Redshift is sitting there behind the curtain, their wild card. Yeah. They're wild card, Dave. >>Okay. I'm gonna give one more wild card, which is the edge. Sure. Okay. And that's something that when you talk about real time analytics and AI referencing at the edge, there aren't a lot of database companies in a position to do that. You know, Amazon trying to put outposts out there. I think it runs RDS. I don't think it runs any other database. Right. Snowflake really doesn't have a strong edge strategy when I'm talking the far edge, the tiny edge. >>I think, I think that's gonna be HPE or Dell's gonna own the outpost market. >>I think you're right. I'll come back to that. Couch base is an interesting company to watch with Capella Mongo. DB really doesn't have a far edge strategy at this point, but couch base does. And that's one to watch. They're doing some really interesting things there. And I think >>That, but they have to leapfrog bongo in my >>Opinion. Yeah. But there's a new architecture emerging at the edge and it's gonna take a number of years to develop, but it could eventually from an economic standpoint, seep back into the enterprise arm base, low end, take a look at what couch base is >>Doing. They hired an Amazon guard system. They have to leapfrog though. They need to, they can't incrementally who's they who >>Couch >>Base needs to needs to make a big move in >>Leap frog. Well, think they're trying to, that's what Capella is all about was not only, you know, their version of Atlas bringing to the cloud couch base, but it's also stretching it out to the edge and bringing converged database analytics >>Real quick on the numbers. Any data on CloudFlare, >>I was, I've been sitting here trying to get the word CloudFlare out my mouth the whole time you guys were talking, >>Is this another that's innovated in the ecosystem. So >>Platform, it was really simple for them early on, right? They're gonna get that edge network out there and they're gonna steal share from Akamai. Then they started doing exactly what Akamai did. We're gonna start rolling out some security. Their security is fantastic. Maybe some practitioners are saying a little bit too much, cuz they're not focused on one thing or another, but they are doing extremely well. And now they're out there in the cloud as well. You >>Got S3 compare. They got two, they got an S3 competitor. >>Exactly. So when I'm listening to you guys talk about, you know, a, a couch base I'm like, wow, those two would just be an absolute fantastic, you know, combination between the two of them. You mean >>CloudFlare >>Couch base. Yeah. >>I mean you got S3 alternative, right? You got a Mongo alternative basically in my >>Opinion. And you're going and you got the edge and you got the edge >>Network with security security, interesting dynamic. This brings up the super cloud date. I wanna talk about Supercloud because we're seeing a trend on we're reporting this since last year that basically people don't have to spend the CapEx to be cloud scale. And you're seeing Amazon enable that, but snowflake has become a super cloud. They're on AWS. Now they're on Azure. Why not tan expansion expand the market? Why not get that? And then it'll be on Google next, all these marketplaces. So the emergence of this super cloud, and then the ability to make that across a substrate across multiple clouds is a strategy we're seeing. What do you, what do you think? >>Well, honestly, I'm gonna be really Frank here. The, everything I know about the super cloud I know from this guy. So I've been following his lead on this and I'm looking forward to you guys doing that conference and that summit coming up from a data perspective. I think what you're saying is spot on though, cuz those are the areas we're seeing expansion in without a doubt. >>I think, you know, when you talk about things like super cloud and you talk about things like metaverse, there's, there's a, there, there look every 15 or 20 years or so this industry reinvents itself and a new disruption comes out and you've got the internet, you've got the cloud, you've got an AI and VR layer. You've got, you've got machine intelligence. You've got now gaming. There's a new matrix, emerging, super cloud. Metaverse there's something happening out there here. That's not just your, your father's SAS or is or pass. Well, >>No, it's also the spend too. Right? So if I'm a company like say capital one or Goldman Sachs, my it spend has traditionally been massive every year. Yes. It's basically like tons of CapEx comes the cloud. It's an operating expense. Wait a minute, Amazon has all the CapEx. So I'm not gonna dial down my budget. I want a competitive advantage. So next thing they know they have a super cloud by default because they just pivoted their, it spend into new capabilities that they then can sell to the market in FinTech makes total sense. >>Right? They're building out a digital platform >>That would, that was not possible. Pre-cloud >>No, it wasn't cause you weren't gonna go put all that money into CapEx expenditure to build that out. Not knowing whether or not the market was there, but the scalability, the ability to spend, reduce and be flexible with it really changes that paradigm entire. >>So we're looking at this market now thinking about, okay, it might be Greenfield in every vertical. It might have a power law where you have a head of the long tail. That's a player like a capital one, an insurance. It could be Liberty mutual or mass mutual that has so much it and capital that they're now gonna scale it into a super cloud >>And they have data >>And they have the data tools >>And the tools. And they're gonna bring that to their constituents. Yes, yes. And scale it using >>Cloud. So that means they can then service the entire vertical as a service provider. >>And the industry cloud is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean, that's really a way that people are delivering to market. So >>Remember in the early days of cloud, all the banks thought they could build their own cloud. Yeah. Yep. Well actually it's come full circle. They're like, we can actually build a cloud on top of the cloud. >>Right. And by the way, they can have a private cloud in their super cloud. Exactly. >>And you know, it's interesting cause we're talking about financial services insurance, all the people we know spend money in our macro survey. Do you know the, the sector that's spending the most right now? It's gonna shock you energy utilities. Oh yeah. I was gonna, the energy utilities industry right now is the one spending the most money I saw largely cuz they're playing ketchup. But also because they don't have these type of things for their consumers, they need the consumer app. They need to be able to do that delivery. They need to be able to do metrics. And they're the they're, they're the one spending right >>Now it's an arms race, but the, the vector shifts to value creation. So >>It's it just goes back to your post when it was a 2012, the trillion dollar baby. Yeah. It's a multi-trillion dollar baby that they, >>The world was going my chassis post on Forbes, headline trillion dollar baby 2012. You know, I should add it's happening. That's >>On the end. Yeah, exactly. >>Trillions of babies, Eric. Great to have you on the key. >>Thank you so much guys. >>Great to bring the data. Thanks for sharing. Check out ETR. If you're into the enterprise, want to know what's going on. They have a unique approach, very accurate in their survey data. They got a great market basket of, of, of, of, of data questions and people and community. Check it out. Thanks for coming on and sharing with. >>Thank you guys. Always enjoy. >>We'll be back with more coverage here in the cube in New York city live at summit 22. I'm John fur with Dave ante. We'll be right back.

welcome everybody to this cube conversation my name is dave vellante and we're joined today by richard goodwin who's the group director of i.t at ultraleap and abhishek kumar who manages dell's power store product line just directs that product line along with several other lines for the company gentlemen welcome to the cube hey dave hi that's me so richard ultra leap very cool company tracks hand movements and so forth tell us about the company and the technology are really interested in how it's used yeah we have many uh product lines uh obviously we're very innovative uh innovative um and the organization was spun up from phd a number of phd students who were the co-founders for ultra leap and initially with mid-air haptics as many people may have seen but also hand tracking mid-air touch uh sense and feel uh so yeah it's it's it's quite impressive um what we have produced and the number of sectors and markets that we are in um and obviously to to push us to where we are we have relied upon lots of the dell technology both software and hardware and what's your role at the company i'm the group i t director and i'm responsible for the it and business platforms um all infrastructure network hardware software um and also the transition of those platforms to ensure that we're scalable and we are able to develop our software and hardware um as rapidly as possible awesome yeah a lot of data behind that too i bet um okay avashek you direct a number of products at dell across the portfolio unity extreme io the sc series and of course power vault it's quite the portfolio that you look after so let's get into the case study if we can a bit uh richard maybe you could paint a picture of of your environment uh some of the key applications that you're supporting and maybe what your infrastructure looks like give us a high level view sure uh so um pre uh powerschool we had um quite a a disparate uh architecture so um a fairly significant split and siding on the side of uh cloud uh not as hybrid as we would like and not uh not as much as on-prem as we would have liked and hey that has changed quite significantly um so we now have a number of servers and storage and storage arrays that we have on on-premise um and then we host ourselves so we are moving quite rapidly you know as a startup and then moving to a scale-up we needed that that scalability and that versatility and also the whole op-ex versus capex and also not being driven by lots of um sas products and architecture and infrastructure where we needed to be in control because of our development cycles and our products product development so wait okay so so too much cloud i'm hearing you run a little bit a dose of on-prem explain that a little bit more the cloud wasn't doing it for you in terms of your development cycle your control can you double click on that yeah some of the some of the control and you know there's always a balance because there's certain elements of uh our development cycles and our engineering uh software engineering where we need a very high parallelism uh for some of the work that we're doing which then you know the capex investment makes things very very challenging and not commercially the right thing to do however uh there are some of our information some of our ip um some of the secure things that we do we also do not want upgrades as an example or any outages or certain types of server and spec that we need to be quite bespoke and unique and that needs to be within our control got it okay thank you for that abhishek we're going to talk about powerstor today so set it up please tell us about powerstor what it is you know why it's important to this conversation sure so power store is a product that we launched may of 2020 roughly a little bit more than a year now and it's a brand new architecture that dell technologies released and at the end of the day i'll talk about a few unique aspects of the product but at the end of the day the where we start with it's a storage platform right so uh where we see similar to what richard is saying here uh uh in terms of being able to consolidate the customer's environment whether it is block file v-balls physical virtual environments uh and and it's as i said it's a brand new architecture where we leveraged pieces of existing products where it made sense uh and it's a it's we are using all the latest and greatest technologies delivering the best performance based data reduction uh and and where we see a lot of traction is the options that it brings to the table for our customers in terms of flexibility whether they want to add capacity compute uh whether in fact uh we have a apps on dev deployment model where customers can consolidate their compute as well on the storage platform if needed so a lot of innovation from a platform perspective itself and it's not just about the platform itself but what comes along with it right so we referred it as an ecosystem part of it where we work with ansible playbook csi plug-in you name it right and it's the storage platform by itself doesn't that doesn't stand by itself in a customer's environment there are other aspects of the infrastructure that it needs to integrate with as well right so if they're using ansible playbooks we want to make sure the integration is there got it and last perhaps uh not the least is uh the intelligence built into the platform right so as we are building these capabilities into the product uh there is intelligence built into the product as well as outside the product where things like cloud iq things like uh technologies built into power store itself makes it that much easier for the pro for the customers to manage the infrastructure and go from there thank you for that so richard what was the workload so actually you started with sort of a green field on-prem if i understand it correctly what was the workload that you were sort of building around or workloads sorry we had a um a number of different applications some of which we cannot really talk about too much um and then we engaged them regarding um the storage uh issue that we had and we engaged the our account lead accounting exec and a number of solution architects were working with us to ensure that we had the optimal solution dell were selected over the competitors there's a many reasons you know the new technology the deduplication the compression the data overall data reduction um and the guarantee uh that also came uh came with that the four to one data reduction guarantee which was significant to us because of the amount of data that we hold and we have you know as i mentioned we're pulling further further data of ours back um into our hosted environments which will end up on the power store especially with the deduplication that we're now getting we've now actually hit nine to one which is you know significant we were expecting four to one maybe five to one with some of the data types and what was excellent dell where that confident that they did not even review our data types prior and they were willing to stand by that guarantee of four to one and we've excelled that you know we've got significant different data types on on that array and we've hit nine to one and that's gradually grown over the last nine months you know we were kind of at six and we moved to seven and now we're hitting nine to one ratios that's great so you get a little free storage that's interesting what you're saying richard because i just assumed that a company that's guarantees four to one is going to say okay let us let us inspect your workload first and then and then we'll do the deal uh so avashek what's the tech behind that data reduction that you're able to with such confidence not have to and pre-inspect the workload in this case anyway yes sir so it goes back to the technologies that goes behind the product right so so we stand behind the technology and we want to make it simpler for our customers as well where again we don't want to spend weeks looking at all the data scanning all the data before giving the guarantee so we stand behind the technology where we understand that as the data is coming in we are always going to duplicate it we are always going to compress it there is technology within the product where we are offloading some of that to the uh outside the cpu so it is not impacting the performance that the applications are going to see so data reduction by itself is not going good enough performance by itself is not good enough both of them have to be together right so and that's what powerstroke brings to the table yeah thank you so richard i'm interested i mean i remember the power store announcement uh i sort of saw it leading up to it and one of the big thrusts from dell the way i phrase it is essentially trying to create a cloud-like experience on-prem so really focus on simplicity so my question to you is let's start with just the deployment you know how complicated was it to install what was that process like you know how many clicks not that you have to tell me how many clicks but you know what i'm asking is is how difficult was it to get from zero to you know up and running well we actually stepped down a very difficult challenge um we were in quite a difficult situation where we'd pretty much gone off of a cliff in terms of our iops performance um so the rfp was quite rapid and then we needed to get which whoever which vendor was successful we need to get that deployed rather rapidly and on the floor in our data center and server rooms uh which we did um and it was very very simplistic within three weeks of placing the order we had that array in our server rack and we had begun the migration it was very simple to set up um and the management of that array has been we we've seen a i think 40 reduction in terms of effort to be able to manage our storage because it is very self-contained um you know even from a reporting perspective the deployment the migration was all very very very simplistic and you know we we've done some works recently where we had to also um do some work on the array and some other migrations that we were doing and the resilience came came to came to the forefront of where you know the the dual architecture and no single point of failure enabled us to do some things that we needed to do quite rapidly because of the the dual nodes and the resilience within within the unit within the power store itself was considerable where we kept performance up it will also prioritize any disk rebuilds keeps the incoming ingest rates uh high and prioritizes the you know the workloads which is you know really impressive especially when we are moving so quickly with our technology we don't really have much time to you know micromanage the estate can you can you just repeat what you said on the percent reduction i think i heard you you cut out there a little bit a potent reduction on on management on on on the labor side yeah so our uh our lead storage engineer is estimated around 40 less management wow okay so that's that's good so actually i love this conversation because uh you know in the early days of automation people like ah that's my job provisioning luns i'm really good at it but i think people are realizing that it's actually you know not something that you want to be really good at it's something that you want to eliminate so now maybe it's a he that storage engineer got his or her nights and weekends back uh but but what do they do now when they get that extra time what do you what do you put them on you know more strategic initiatives or you know other other things in the to-do list what's that like the last thing uh you know any of my team whether it's the the storage leads or some of the infrastructure team that are also involved and engaged because you know the organization we have to be quite versatile as a team in our skill sets we don't want to be doing those bau uh mundane tasks even the storage engineer does not want to be you know allocating luns and allocating storage to physical servers vms etc we want all of that to be automated and that you know those engineers are now working on you know some of the cutting edge things that we're trying to do with machine learning is as an example um which is much more interesting it's what they want to be doing um you know that aids the obvious things like retention interest and personal development we don't want to be you know that base i.t infrastructure management is is not not where you know any of the engineers want to be in terms of the decision to go with dell power store i'm definitely hearing there was a relationship there was an existing relationship with dell i'm sure that played into it um there were many things so you know the relationship wasn't really part of this even though i mentioned the end user compute you know in any sector or anything that we're procuring we want best of breed and you know a best of set and that was done on you know cost is definitely a driver the technology you know is of interest to us we're a tech company new technology to us is also fascinating not only our own uh but also the storage guarantee the simplicity um the resilience with it within the uh unit also the ability which was key to us because of what we're trying to do with our hybrid model and bring bring back and repatriate some of the data as it were from the cloud we needed that ability to with ease to be able to scale up and scale out and the uh power stall gave us that when you say cost uh i want to dig into that price or you know the the the price tag or the the cost i mean when you do the business case and i wonder if we could add a little color to that yeah there's two elements to this so they're not either the cost and the price tag uh but then also cost of ownership and the comparisons that we were running against the other vendors but also the comparisons that we were running from a capex investment against opex and what we have in the cloud and also the performance you know the performance that we get from um the cloud and our cloud storage and the resilience within that and then also the initial price tag and then comparing the capex investment to the opex were all elements that were key to us making our decision and you know that there has to be some credit taken by the dow account team and that their relationship towards the final throws of that rfp you know were key initially not all we were just looking for the best possible storage uh solution for ultralite and to to determine that on your end was that like a feature because it's sometimes fuzzy what the business impact is going to be like that 40 you mentioned or the data reduction at nine to one when there's a promise of four to one did you what did you do did you kind of do a feature function analysis and sort of line that up and and say okay i'm gonna map that to our business pro our processes our i.t processes and try to predict what the impact would be is that how you did it or did you take a different approach we did so we did that obviously between vendors as you'd expect in an rfp but then also mapping to how that would impact the business and that that is not an easy and easy process to go through and we've seen more games even comparing one vendor to another some of that because of the the technology the terminology is very very different and sometimes you have to bring that upper level and also gain a much more detailed understanding which at times can be challenging but we did a very like for like comparison um and also lots of research but you're quite right the the the business analysis to what we needed um we had quite a good forecast uh and from some of our historical information and data and also our engineering and business and strategic roadmap we were able to map those two together not the easiest of experiences not one that i want to repeat but we got yeah a little bit of art and science involved avishak maybe you could talk about power store what you know give us the commercial what makes it different from other products in the market uh things like cloud iq uh maybe you could talk about that a little bit sure so uh so again from uh it's music to my ears when richard talks about the ease of deployment and the management because there is a lot of focus on that but even as i said earlier from a technology perspective a lot of goodness built in in terms of being able to consolidate uh customers environment into onto the platform so that's more from a storage point of view give the best performance give the best data reduction storage efficiencies uh the second part of course the the flexibility the options that power store gives to the customers in terms of sort of disaggregating the storage and the compute aspects of it so if as a customer i want to start with different points in terms of what our customer requirements are today but going forward as your requirements change from a compute capacity perspective you can use the scale up and scale out capabilities um and and then the intelligence built in right so as you scale out your cluster being able to move storage around right as needed uh being able to do that non-disruptively so instead of saying that mr customer your uh your storage is going to you're at 90 capacity being able to say that based on your historical trending uh we expect you run out of capacity in six months some small things like that right and of course uh if the uh the dial home the support assist capabilities are enabled cloud iq brings a lot of intelligence to the table as well in addition to that as i mentioned earlier there is apps on capability that gives another level of flexibility to the customers to integrate your storage infrastructure into a virtual environment if the customer chooses to do that and last but not the least it's not just about the product right so it's about the the programs that we have put around it anytime upgrade is a big differentiator for us where it's an investment protection program for customers where if they want to have the peace of mind in terms of three months nine months three years down the line if we come out with new technologies being able to be upgrade to that non-destructively is a big part of it as well so it's a peace of mind for the customers that yes i'm getting into the power store architecture today but going forward i am i'm protected from that point of view so anytime upgrade it's a new business program that we put around leveraging the architectural benefits of power store uh whether your computer requirement your storage requirements change your your you're covered from that point of view so again a very quick overview of uh of what power store is why it is different and again that's where that comes from thank you for that richard are you are you actively using cloud iq do you get what kind of value do you get from it not currently um however we have we have had plans to to do that the um uptake and how basically our our internal work node is not allowed us to to do that but one of the other key reasons for selecting powersupport was the the non-disruptive element you know with other sas products other providers and other issues that we have experienced that was one that was a a key decision for us from a um a power store perspective one of the other you know i i to go back to the conversation slightly with in terms of performance you know we are getting getting now you know there's a 400 percent speed of improvement of publishing uh we've got 80 percent faster code coverage and our firmware built 1 300 quicker than they were previously and the time savings of the storage engineer and you know as a director of it i often ask for certain reports from from the storage array when we're working out for um storage forecasts performance forecasts and you know when we're coming close to product releases and code drops um that we're trying to manage the the reporting on the power store is is impressive whereas previously my storage engineer would not be the uh the most happiest of people when i would be trying to pull you know month-end quarterly reports etc uh whereas now it's it's ease and we have live dashboards running we can easily extract that information i love that uh because you know so often we talk about the 40 reduction in it labor uh which okay that that's cool but then your cfo's gonna say yeah but it's not like we're getting rid of people we you know we're still spending that money and okay they're getting you're now into soft dollars but when you talk about 400 percent 18 1300 percent you're talking about business impact and that's telephone numbers to a cfo so i i love those metrics thank you for sharing yeah but when they obviously some of our dashboards when they're visualized that they are very hard-hitting you know the impact you know you're quite right to see if it does chase down you know the availability and the resource profile however we're on a huge upward trajectory so having the right resilience and infrastructure in places is exactly what we need and as i mentioned before those engineers are all reallocated to much more interesting work and you know the areas that will actually drive our business forward speaking of resilience are you doing any replication uh not currently however there uh we've actually got a meeting regarding this today with some of the dell's enterprise and some of their storage specialists in a couple of hours time actually because that is very high on the agenda for us to be able to replicate and have a high availability um cluster and another uh potentially power stone made because so i was going to ask you kind of where you want to take this thing i'm hearing you you're looking at cloud iq really try to exploit that so you got some headroom here in terms of the value that you can get out of this platform uh to to do replication faster recovery etc maybe protect against you know events guys thanks so much for your time really appreciate your insights and thank you for watching this cube conversation this is dave vellante and we'll see you next time you

(happy techno music) >> Welcome everybody to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're joined today by Richard Goodwin. Who's the group director of IT at Ultra Leap and Avishek Kumar who manages Dell's power store product line and directs that product line along with several other lines for the company, gentlemen, welcome to the cube. >> Hi Dave >> Hi >> So Richard ultra leap, very cool company tracks, hand movements, and so forth. Tell us about the company and the technology, I'm really interested in how it's used. >> Yeah, we've had many product lines, obviously. We're at very innovative, um and the organization was spun up from PhD, a number of PhD students who were the co-founders for ultra leap. um And initially with mid-air haptics, um as you, as many people may have seen, but also hand tracking, mid-air had such a sense and feel. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's quite impressive what we have produced and the number of sectors and markets that we're in. Um And obviously to push us to, to where we are, we have relied upon lots of the Dell technology, both software and hardware. >> And what's your role at the company. >> Uh, I'm the group IT director, uh, I'm responsible for the it and business platforms or infrastructure network hardware software, and also the transparency of those platforms to ensure that we're scalable. And we are able to develop our software and hardware as rapidly as possible. >> Awesome. Yeah, a lot of data behind that too. I bet. Um okay Avishek, you direct a number of products at Dell across the portfolio, unity, extreme IO, the SC series, and of course, power vault. It's, it's quite the portfolio that you look after. So let's get into the case study. If we can, a bit, Richard, maybe you could paint a picture of, of your environment, some of the key applications that you're supporting and maybe what your infrastructure looks like. Give us a high level view. >> Sure. So pretty power store. We had quite a disparate architecture, so a fairly significant split and siding on the side of cloud, not as hybrid as we would like, and not, not as much as our on-prem as we would have liked and Hey, that, that has changed quite significantly. So we now have a number of servers and storage and storage arrays that we have on, on premise. And then we host ourselves. So we are moving quite rapidly, you know, as a, as a startup and then moving to a scale-up we needed that, that scalability and that versatility, and also the whole OPEX versus CapEx and, um, and also not being driven by lots of SaaS products and architecture and infrastructure where we needed to be in control because of our development cycles and our products, product development. >> So wait, oh okay. So, so too much cloud, you wanted to run a little bit of a dose of on-prem explain that a little bit more the cloud wasn't doing it for you in terms of your development cycle, your control, can you double click on that? >> Yeah. Some of the, some of the control and, you know, there's always a balance because there are certain elements of our development cycles and our engineering software engineering, where we need a very high parallelism for some of the work that we're doing, which then, you know, the CapEx investment makes things very, very challenging, not commercially that the right thing to do. However, there are some of our information, some of IP, some of the secure things that we do, we also do not want upgrades as an example, or any outages or certain types of server and spec that we need to be quite bespoke and unique, and that needs to be within our control. >> Got it, okay. Thank you for that. Avishek, we're going to talk about power store today. So set it up, please tell us about power store, what it is, you know, why it's important to this conversation. >> Sure, so power store store is a product that we launched may of 2020, roughly a little bit more than a year now. And it's a brand new architecture that Dell technologies released. And at the end of the day, I'll talk about a few unique aspects of the product, but at the end of the day, the, where we start with it's a storage platform, right? So where we see similar to what Richard is saying here, in terms of being able to consolidate the customer's environment, whether it is blog file, weevils, physical virtual environments, and, and it's, as I said, it's a brand new architecture where we leveraged pieces of existing products, where it makes sense and it's, we are using all the latest and greatest technologies delivering the best performance based data reduction and, and where we see a lot of traction is the options that it brings to the table for our customers in terms of flexibility, whether they want to add capacity compute, whether in fact, we have apps on the current model where customers can consolidate their compute as well on the static storage platform if needed. So a lot of innovation from a platform perspective itself, and it's not just about the platform itself, but what comes along with it, right? So we refer to it as an ecosystem, part of it, where we work with Ansible playbooks, CSI plugin, you name it, right. And it's, the storage platform by itself. Doesn't that, doesn't stand by itself in a customer's environment there are other aspects of the infrastructure that it needs to integrate with as well. Right? So if they're using Ansible playbooks, we want to make sure the integration is there. >> Got it. >> And last but not the least is the intelligence built into the platform, right? So as we are building these capabilities into the product, there is intelligence built into the product, as well as outside the product where things like cloud IQ, things like uh, um, technologies built into power suit itself makes it that much easier for the customers to manage the infrastructure and go from there. >> Thank you for that, so, Richard, what was the workload? So it actually, you started with sort of a Greenfield on prem. If I understand it correctly, what was the workload that you were sort of building around or workloads? >> Sorry, we had a, a number of different applications. Some of which we cannot really talk about too much, but we had, we had a VxRail, we had a, a smaller Dell array, and we have lots of what we classes, runners, cubeanetics cluster that we that we run and quite a few different VMs that run on our, on-prem server infrastructure and storage rates and the issues that we began to hit because of the high IO, from some of our, um, workloads that we were hitting very high latency, which rapidly stopped, began to cause us issues, especially with some of our software engineering teams. And that is when we embarked upon a competitive RFP for uh, Dell power store. Dell were already engaged from an end-user compute where they'd been selected as the end-user compute provider from a previous competitive RFP. And then we engaged them regarding the storage issue that we had, and we engaged the, our account leading count exec, and a number of solution architects were working with us to ensure that we have the optimal solution. Dell were selected over the competitors because of many reasons, you know, the, the, the new technology, the DG plication, the compression, that data overall data reduction, and the guarantee that also came, uh, came with that, with the four to one data reduction guarantee, which was significant to us because of the amount of data that we hold. Um, And we have, you know, as I mentioned, we're pulling further, further data of ours back into our hosted environments, which will end up on the power store, especially with the duplication that we're now getting. We've actually hit nine to one, which is significant. We were expecting four to one, maybe five to one with some of the data types. And what was excellent Dale were that confident that they did not even review our data types prior. And they were willing to stand by that guarantee of four to one and we've excelled that we've got different data types on, on that array, and we've hit nine to one and that's gradually grown over the last nine months. You know, we were kind of six them we moved to seven and now we're hitting nine to one ratios. >> That's great. So you get a little free storage. That's interesting what you're saying, Richard, cause I just assumed that a company that's guaranteed four to one is going to say, okay, let us, let us inspect your workload first and then we'll do the deal. So Avishek, what's the tech behind that data reduction that you're able to with such confidence, not have to pre inspect the workload in this case anyway. >> Yeah. So, so it goes back to the technologies that goes behind the product, right? So, so we, we stand behind the technology and we want to make it simpler for our customers as well. Where again, we don't want to spend weeks looking at all the data, scanning all the data before giving the guarantee. So we stand behind the technology where we understand that as the data is coming in, we are always going to be duplicated. We are always going to compress it. There is technology within the product where we are offloading some of that to the outside the CPU. So it is not impacting the performance that the applications are going to see. So a data reduction by itself is not going to get enough performance by itself is not good enough. Both of them have to be together. Right. So, and that's what powers to brings to the table. >> Yeah. Thank you. So Richard, I'm interested. I mean, I remember the power store announcement, sort of saw it leading up to it. And one of the big thrusts from Dell was the way I phrase it is essentially trying to create a cloud-like experience on-prem. So really focused on simplicity. So my question to you is, let's start with just the deployment. You know, how complicated was it to install? What was that process like? How many clicks, I mean, not that you have to tell me how many clicks, but you know, what I'm asking is, is how difficult was it to get from zero to, you know, up and running? >> Well, we actually sat down with a very difficult challenge. We were in quite a difficult situation where we'd pretty much got off of a cliff in terms of IOPS performance. So the RFP was quite rapid. And then we needed to get which, whoever, which vendor was successful, we need to get that deployed rather rapidly and on the floor in our data center and server rooms, which we did. And it was very, very simplistic within three weeks of placing the order. We had that array in our server rack and we'd begun the migration that it was very simple to set up. And the management of that array has been, we we've seen say 40% reduction in terms of effort it took to be able to manage our storage because it is very self-contained, you know, even from a reporting perspective, the deployment, the migration was all very, very, very simplistic. And, you know, we we've done some work recently where we had to also do some work on the array and some other migrations that we were doing and the resilience came, came to, came to the forefront of where the whole architecture and no single point of failure enabled us to do some things that we needed to do quite rapidly because of the, the jole notes and the resilience within, within the unit and within the power store itself was considerable where we, we kept performance up. People also prioritize any discreet rebuilds, keeps the incoming ingest rates high and prioritizes that, you know, the workloads, which is really impressive, especially when we are moving so quickly with our technology. We don't really have much time to, you know, micromanage the estate. >> Can you, can you just repeat what you said on the percent reduction? I think I heard you cut out there a little bit, a percent reduction on, on, on management, on, on, on the labor side. >> So our lead storage engineer is estimated around 40% less management. >> Wow. Okay. So that's, that's good. So actually, I, I love this conversation because, you know, in the early the days of automation, people are like, ah, that's my job provisioning, LUNs. I'm really good at it. But I think people are realizing that it's actually not something that you want to be really good at. It's something that you want to eliminate. So it now maybe it's a, that, storage engineer got his or her nights and weekends back, uh, but, but what do they do now when they get that extra time, what do you, what do you put them on? You know, no more strategic initiatives or, you know, other, other tech things in the to-do list, what's that like? >> You know, any of my team, whether it's the storage leads or some of the infrastructure team that are also involved in engaged, cause you know, the organization, we have to be quite versatile as a team in our skillsets. We don't want to be doing those BAU mundane tasks. Even the storage engineer does not want to be, you know, allocating Luns and allocating storage to physical servers, VMs, et cetera. We want all of that to be automated. And the, you know, those engineers, are they working on some of the cutting edge things that we're trying to do with machine learning as a, as an example, which is much more interesting, it's what they want to be doing. Um, you know, that aides, the obvious things like retention interest and personal development, we don't want to be, you know, that base IT infrastructure management is, is, is not, not where any of the engineers wants to be. >> In terms of the decision to go with Dell power store. I, I, I'm definitely hearing there was a relationship. There was an existing relationship with Dell. I'm sure that played into it. And you, you mentioned a couple of times that RFP, so, so you kind of lined up various various vendors. What can you tell us about that in, in addition to the relationship, what was it that led you to power store? >> Uh, there were many things saying, you know, the relationship wasn't really part of this, even though I've mentioned the end user compute in any sets or anything that we're procuring, we want best of breed and best of set, but, and there were four vendors that were engaged in the RFP and it was down selected to, two, and that was done on the cost is definitely a driver. The technology, you know, is a big trust to us. We're a tech company. New technology to us is also fascinating, not only our own but also the, the storage guarantee, the simplicity, the resilience within, within the unit. Also the, the ability which was key to us because of what we're trying to do with our hybrid model and bring, bring back and repatreize some of the data as it were um, from the client, we needed that ability to, with ease, to be able to scale up and scale out, and the power store gave us that. >> When you say cost of, I want to dig into that price or, you know, the, the, the, the price tag or the, the cost. I mean, when you do the business case, and I wonder if we could add a little color to that. >> Yeah, the, the, there there's two elements to this, so there's not even the cost of the price tag, but then also cost of ownership and the comparisons that we were running against the other vendors, but also the comparisons that we were running from a CapEx investment against OPEX and what we have in the cloud, and also the performance and performance that we get from the cloud and our cloud storage and a resilience within that, and then also the initial price tag, and then comparing the CapEx investments to the OPEX were all elements that were, were key to us making our decision. And you know that there has to be some credit taken by the Dell account team and their relationship towards the final phrase of that RFP, you know, were key, initially, not at all, we were just looking for the best possible storage solution for ultra-leap. >> And to, to determine that on your end, was that like a feature, because it's sometimes fuzzy what the business impact is going to be like that 40% you mentioned, or the data reduction at nine to one, when there's a promise of four to one, did you, what did you do? Did you kind of do a feature function analysis and sort of line that up and, and say, okay, I'm going to map that to our business, our processes, our IT processes, and try to predict what the impact would be. Is that how you did it, or did you take a different approach? >> We did. So we did that, obviously between vendors as you'd expected in RFP, but then also mapping to how that would impact the business. And that that is not an easy process to go through. We've seen more gains, even comparing one vendor to another, some of that because of the technology, the terminology is very, very different and sometimes you have to bring that up a level and also gain a much more detailed understanding, which at times can be challenging, but we did a very like-for-like comparison and, and also lots of research, but you're quite right. The, the, the business analysis to what we needed. We had quite a good forecast and from my supplier stock and information data, and also our engineering and business and strategic roadmap, we were able to map those two together, not the easiest of experiences, not one that I want to repeat, but we got through it. >> Yeah, a little bit of art and science involved. Avishek, maybe you could talk about power store, what, you know, give us the commercial. What makes it different from other products in the market? Things like cloud IQ, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Sure, so, so again, from a, a it's music to my ears, when Richard talks about the ease of deployment and the management, because there is a lot of focus on that. But even as I said earlier, from a manned technology perspective, a lot of goodness built in, in terms of being able to consolidate a customer's environment into, onto the platform. So that's more from a storage point of view that will give the best performance, give the best data reduction, storage efficiencies. Um, the second part, of course, the flexibility, the options that power store it gives to the customers in terms of sort of desegregating the storage and the compute aspects of it. So if, as a customer, I want to start with different points in terms of what our customer requirements are today, but going forward as requirements changed from a compute capacity perspective, you can use a scale up and scale out capabilities, and then the intelligence built in, right? So as you scale out your cluster, being able to move storage around right, as needed being able to do that non-disruptively. So instead of saying that Mr. Customer you're, you're storage is going to, you're at 90% capacity, being able to say that based on your historical trending, we expect you run out of capacity in six months, some small things like that. Right. And of course, if the, the dial home, the support assist capabilities that are enabled, cloud IQ brings a lot of intelligence to the table as well. In addition to that, as they mentioned earlier, there is apps on capability that gives another level of flexibility to the customers to integrate your storage infrastructure into a virtual environment. If the customer chooses to do that. And last but not the least, it's not just about the product right? So it's about the programs that we have put around it. Any anytime I'll create is a big differentiator for us, where it's an investment protection program for customers, where if they want to have the peace of mind, in terms of three months, nine months, three years down the line, if we come out with new technologies, being able to be upgrade to that non-disruptively is a big part of it as well. It's a peace of mind for the customers that, yes, I'm getting into the power store architecture today, but going forward, I am I'm protected from that point. So anytime I upgrade, it's a new business program that we put around leveraging the architectural benefits of power stool, whether your compute requirements, your storage requirements change you're, you're, you're covered from that point of view. So again, very quick a overview of, of what power store is, why it is different, and again, that's where that comes from. >> Thank you for that. Richard, are you, are you actively using cloud IQ? Do you get, what kind of value do you get from it? >> Not currently. However, we have, we have had plans to do that. The uptake and BCR, our internal workload has not allowed us to do that, but one of the other key reasons for selecting power source was the, the non-disruptive element, you know, with other SaaS products, other providers, and other issues that we have experienced. That was one, that was a, a key decision for us from a, a power store perspective. One of the other, you know, I would like to go back to the conversation slightly, in terms of performance, we are getting, getting now, you know, there's a 400% speed of improvement of publishing. We've got an 80% faster code coverage. So our firmware builds a 1300% quicker than they were previously and, and the time savings of the storage engineer and, you know, as a, as director of IT, I often asked for certain reports from, from the storage array, when we're working out for, um, storage forecast, performance forecast. And, you know, when we're coming close to product releases, code drops that we're trying to manage, the reporting or the power stories is impressive. Whereas previously my storage engineer would not be the, the most happiest of people when I would be trying to pull, you know, monthly and quarterly reports, et cetera. Whereas now it's, it's easy and we have live dashboards running, and we can easily extract that information. >> I love that, because, you know, so often we talk about the 40% reduction in IT, labor, uh, which, which, okay, that's cool. But then your CFO's going to say, yeah, but it's not like we're getting rid of people. We, you know, we're still spending that money and you, okay. They're getting you're now into soft dollars, but when you talk about 400%, 18%, 1300% of what you're talking about, business impact and that's telephone numbers to a CFO. So I love those metrics. Thank you for sharing. >> Yeah. But what would, they, obviously, in some of our dashboards when they visualize that they are very hard hitting, you know, the impact that you're quite right that the CFO does chase down, you know, the availability and the resource profile, however, we're on a huge upward trajectory. So having the right resilience and infrastructure in places is exactly what we need. And as I mentioned before, those engineers are all reallocated to much more interesting work. And, you know, the, the areas that will actually drive our business forward. >> Speaking of resilience, are you doing any replication? >> Not currently. However, there, uh, we've actually got a meeting regarding this today with some of that was a surprise that some of their storage specialists in a couple of hours time, actually, because that is a very high on the agenda for us to be able to replicate and have a high availability cluster and another potentially power store name. >> So I was going to ask you kind of where you want to take this thing. I'm hearing you, you're looking at cloud IQ, really try to exploit that. So you've got some headroom here in terms of the value that you can get out of this platform to, to do replication, faster recovery, et cetera, maybe protect against, you know, events. Any other things that you would identify as things you would either want from Dell or things that you'd like to see this platform direction you'd like to see it take in the future? >> Uh, yeah. We, we actually had some discussions recently and we are actively involved in some of the power store roadmap, which is, which is really good for us because we get visibility. And we also get to feed back to Dell on some of the features that we would like to see. So one of the things that we're discussing is a virtual kind of power store is what we would like to see. So some of that resilience would be really useful for us to be able to fail over quite rapidly and have live access to you are sick of data rather than potentially having hole sites. And we're looking at some of the Dell service offerings, which are quite impressive and is currently ticking. You know, we're very early in the, in the stages of the discovery, but there's quite a few boxes being ticked. Currently. >> Guys, we got to leave it there. I love this example of where you've got infrastructure, really connecting directly to a fast growth company, helping it scale, guys, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate your insights. >> Thank you >> And thank you And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Volante, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE, our coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Digital Experience continues. I have a long-time guest coming back, joining me in the next segment here. Jon Siegal is back, the Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Jon, it's good to see you, welcome back to the program. >> Thanks Lisa, always great to be on. >> We last spoke about six months ago and here we are still at home. >> I know. >> But there has been no slowdown whatsoever in the last year. We were talking to you a lot about Edge last time but we're going to talk about PowerStore today. It's just coming up on its one year anniversary. You launched it right when the pandemic happened. >> That's right. >> Talk to me about what's happened in the last year with respect to PowerStore. Adoption, momentum, what's going on? >> Yeah, great, listen, what a year it's been, right? But certainly for PowerStore especially, I mean, customers and partners around the world have really embraced PowerStore, specifically really it's modern architecture. What many people may not know is this is actually the fastest ramping new architecture we've had in all of Dell's history, which is quite a history of course. And we saw 4 X quarter over quarter growth in the most recent quarter. And you know, in terms of shipments, we've shipped well over 400 petabytes of PowerStore, you know, so special thanks to lots of our customers around the world and industries like education, gaming, transportation, retail. More than 60 countries, I think 62 countries now. They include customers like Columbia Southern University, Habib Bank, Real Page, the University of Pisa and Ultra Leap, just to name a few. And to give you a sense of how truly game changing it's been in the market is that approximately 20% of the customers with PowerStore are new to Dell, new to Dell Technologies. And we've tripled the number of wins against some of our key competitors in just the last quarter as well. So look, it's been quite a year, like you said and we're not stopping there. >> Yeah, you must have to wear a neck brace from that whiplash of moving so quickly. (both laughing) But that's actually a good problem to have. >> It is. >> And curious about, is it 20% of the PowerStore customers are net new to Dell? >> Yeah. >> Interesting that you've captured that much in a very turbulent year. Any industries in particular that you see as really being transformed by the technology? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I think just like we're bringing a disruptive technology to market, there's a lot of industries out there that are disrupting themselves as well, right, and how they transform, particularly with, you know, in this new era during the pandemic. I think, I can give you a great example. One of the new capabilities of PowerStore is AppsON just for those that aren't familiar. AppsON is the ability for PowerStore to run apps directly on the appliance, good name, right? And it's thanks to a built-in VMware ESXi hypervisor. And where we've seen really good traction with AppsON, is in storage intensive applications at the edge. And that brings me to my example. And this one's in retail. And you know, of course just like every industry I think it's been up-ended in the past year. There's a large supermarket chain in northern China that is new to Dell. During the pandemic they needed to fast-track the development of a smart autonomous retail system in all their stores, so that their customers could make their purchases via smartphone app. And again, just limiting the essentially the person to person interaction during the pandemic and this required a significant increase in transaction processing to get to the store locations that they didn't have equipment for before, as well as support for big data analytics applications to understand the customer behavior that's going on in real-time. So the net result is they chose PowerStore. They were new to Dell and they deployed it in their stores and delivered a seamless shopping experience via smartphone apps. The whole shopping experience was completely revolutionized. And I think this is really a great example of again, how the innovations that are in PowerStore are enabling our customers to really rethink how they're transacting business. >> Well, enabling the supermarkets to be the edge but also in China where everything started, so much, the market dynamics are still going on, but how quickly were they able to get PowerStore up and running and facilitate that seamless smartphone shopping experience? >> It was only weeks, only weeks, weeks from beginning to getting them up to speed. I mean, we've had great coverage, great support. And again, they embraced, I mean, they happened to leverage the AppsON capabilities, so they were able to run some of their applications directly on the appliance and they were able to get that up and running very quickly. And they were already a VMware customer as well. So they were already familiar with some of the tools and the integration of the VMware. And again, that's also been a sweetspot for this particular offer. >> Okay, got it. So a lot in it's first year. You said 4 X growth, over 60 countries, 400 petabytes plus shipped, a lot of new net new customers. What is new? What are you announcing that's new and that's going to take that up even a higher level? >> That's right. We're always going to up the ante, right? We're always going to, we can't rest on our laurels for too long. Look, we're very excited to share what's new for PowerStore. And that is one of the reasons we're here of course. I can break it down into two key highlights. First is a major software update that brings more enterprise innovation, more speed, more automation in particular to both new and existing customers. And we're also excited to announce a new lower cost entry model for the PowerStore family called the PowerStore 500. And this offers an incredible amount of enterprise class storage capabilities, much of which I have talked about and will talk more about today, for the price. And the price itself is what's going to surprise some folks. It starts as low as 28,000 US street price which is pretty significant, you know, in terms of a game changer, we think, in this industry. >> So let's talk about the software update first. You've got PowerStore 2.0, happy birthday to your customers who are going to take advantage of this. >> That's right. >> Kind of talk me through what some of the technological advancements are that your customers are going to be able to leverage? >> That's a great point. Yeah, so from a software perspective I like how you said that, happy birthday, yeah so all of our, just to be clear from a software update perspective, all of our existing customers are going to get this as a simple free non-disruptive update. And this is a commitment we've had to our customers for some time. And really it's the mantra if you will, of PowerStore, which is all about ensuring that our customers can encounter our very flexible platform that will keep giving them the latest and greatest. So really a couple of things I want to highlight from PowerStore that are brand new. One is we're giving a speed boost to the entire PowerStore lineup. Customers now, existing customers, you get up to 25% faster, mixed workload performance which is incredible, right off the bat. Secondly, we're enabling our customers to take full advantage of NVME now across the data center with the option of running NVME over fiber channel. And this again requires just a simple software update and no additional hardware if they already have 32 gig capable switches and HBAs on-prem. We've also made our unique AppsON feature, which I just talked about in the China example, we've made that more powerful and with scale out. This means more aggregate power, more aggregate capacity and it makes it even more ideal now for storage intensive apps to run at the edge with PowerStore. Another capability that's been very popular with our customers is our data reduction specifically our intelligent Dido which is always on and automated. And now what it does is it enables customers to boost performance while still guaranteeing the four to one data reduction that we have, at the same time. So just to give a quick example, when the system is under extreme IO, duress if you will, it automatically prioritize that IO versus the DDUP itself and provides a 20% turbo boost if you will, of performance boost for the applications running. All this is done automatically, zero management effort, zero impact to the data reduction guarantee of four to one that we already have in place. And then the last highlight I'd like to bring up is, last but not least, is one we're really proud of is the ability for our customers to now take more cost advantage, if you will, cost effective advantage of SCM or storage class memory. PowerStore now differentiates between SCM drives and NVME drives within the same chassis. So they can use SCM as a high-performance layer, if you will with as few as one drive, right? So they don't have to populate the whole chassis, they can use just one SCM drive for cost-effectiveness, for embedded data access. And this actually helps reduce the workload latency by up to 15%. So, another great example on top of NVME that I already mentioned, of how PowerStore is leading the practical adoption of next generation technologies. >> Are you seeing with the lower cost PowerStore 500, is that an opportunity for Dell to expand into the midsize market and an opportunity for those smaller customers to be able to take advantage of this technology? >> Absolutely, yeah. So the PowerStore finder, which we're really excited about introducing does exactly what you just said, Lisa. It is going to allow us to bring PowerStore and the experience of PowerStore to a broad range of businesses, a much broader range of edge use cases as well. And we're really excited about that. It's an incredible amount of enterprise storage class performance, as I mentioned, and functionality for the price that is again, 28,000 starting. And this includes all of the enterprise software capabilities I've been talking about. The ability to cluster, four to one data reduction guarantee, anytime upgrades. And to put this in context, a single 2U appliance, the PowerStore 500 supports up to 2.4 million SQL transactions per minute. I mean, this thing packs a punch, like no other, right? And it's a great fit for stand-alone or edge deployments in virtually every industry, we've mentioned retail already also healthcare, manufacturing, education and more. It's an offering that's really ideal for any solution that requires an optimization of price/performance, small footprint and effortless automation. And I can tell you, it's not just customers that are excited about this, as you can imagine our channel partners, they can't wait to get their hands on this either. >> Was just going to ask you about the channel. >> It is going to help them reach new sets of customers that they never had before. You mentioned midsize, but also in addition to that, it's just going to open it up to all new sets of use cases as well. So I'm really excited to see the creativity from our channel partners and customers and how they adopt and use the PowerStore 500 going forward. >> Tell me about some of those new use cases that it's going to open up. We've seen so many new things in the last year and such acceleration. What are some of the new use cases that this is going to help unlock value for? >> Yeah, again, I think it's going to come down a lot to the edge in particular, as well as mid-size, it can run, again, this can run storage, intensive applications. So it's really about coming down to a price point that I think the biggest example will be mid-sized businesses that now, it's now affordable to. That they weren't able to get this enterprise class capabilities in the past more than anything else. Cause it's all the same capabilities that I've mentioned but it allows them to run all types of things. It could be, they could run, new next-generation intensive data, intensive databases. They can run VDI, they can run SQL, it does, essentially more than anything else makes existing use cases more accessible to mid-sized businesses. >> Got it, okay. So, so much momentum going on in the first year. A lot of that you're souping it up with this your new software, we talked about the new mid-size enterprise version PowerStore 500. What else can we expect from PowerStore, the rest of calendar 2021? >> Yeah, I think lots of things. So first of all we're so pleased at the amount of commitment to innovation that we've had over the past year. We're going to continue to work very closely with VMware to drive more and more innovation and enhancements with capabilities like AppsON that I talked about, and VM-ware or (indistinct) which is a key enabler for that. We're also committed to continuing to lead the industry in the adoption of modern technologies. I gave some good examples today of NVME and AppsON and SCM, storage class memory, and customers can expect that continued commitment. Look, we've designed PowerStore from the ground up to be very flexible so that it can be enhanced and improved non-disruptively. And I think we did that with this release. We proved that and no one can predict the future, clearly, it's been a crazy year. And so businesses need storage that's going to be flexible with them and grow with them and evolve with them. And customers can expect that from PowerStore. And we plan on doing just that. >> So customers can, that are interested can go direct to Dell. They can also go through your huge channel, you said, in terms of those customers that are thinking about it maybe adding to the percentage of new customers. What's your advice on them in terms of next steps? >> Yeah, next steps is, you know, I got to say this, we've done, it's crazy, we've done over 20,000 demos of PowerStore in one year, no joke. And you know, it's a new world. And so the next step is to reach out to Dell. We'd love to showcase this through a demo, give them whether it's a remote experience that way or remote proof of concept but yeah, reach out to Dell, your local rep or local channel partner and we'd love to show you what's possible more than anything else and look, we're really proud of what we've accomplished here. Just as impressive as these updates, I must say, is that in many instances, the team that brought this to market, the engineering team, they did this just like we're doing today, right? Over Zoom, remotely, while balancing life and work. So I just also want to thank the team for their commitment to delivering innovation to our customers. It hasn't wavered at all and I want to thank our top notch team. >> Right, an amazing amount of work done. You've had a very busy year and glad that you're well and healthy and been as successful with PowerStore. We can't wait to see in the next year those numbers that you shared even go up even more. Jon, thank you for joining us >> Looking forward to it. and sharing what's new with PowerStore. We appreciate your time. >> Always a pleasure, Lisa. >> Likewise >> Look forward to talking to you soon. >> Yeah >> Take care. >> For Jon Siegal, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, a Digital Experience. (slow upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are having a very special Cube conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil, if you will, of the new VMware vSphere seven dot O. We're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep-dive here today and we're excited to have a longtime CUBE alumni. Kit Colbert here is the VP and CTO of Cloud platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. >> Yeah, happy to be here. And new to theCUBE, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management of VMware and I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board. >> Thanks, feels pretty great, great to be here. >> All right, so let's just jump into it. From kind of a technical aspect, what is so different about vSphere 7? >> Yeah, great. So vSphere 7 bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. >> So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming with the acquisition of the Heptio team. So really exciting news, and I think Kit, you teased it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud, so this really is the realization of that vision. >> It is, yeah. So we talked at VMworld about Project Pacific, right, this technology preview. And as Jared mentioned of what that was, was how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere? As you know, we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible? Now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio. And you know, as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud, on premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question of how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> Right. All right, so I think he brought some pictures for us, a little demo. So why don't we, >> Yeah. Why don't we jump over >> Yeah, let's dive into it. to there and let's see what it looks like? You guys can cue up the demo. >> Jared: Yeah, so we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation four and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is the developer's actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The self-eating watermelon, right? So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes API's and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so, that's not just provisioning workloads though, this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed. So go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed? On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a Container Registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And you know, one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint, now, the developer's infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view, where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application. And on the left hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names. And so this means when a developer calls, their IT department says, hey, I got a problem with my database. We don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name, they see the same information. So what we're going to do is that, you know, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And you know, what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter, vSphere namespaces. And so, these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications, like the whole distributed system now is a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions, and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my Active Directory infrastructure. So I can use the same corporate credentials to access the system. I tap into all my existing storage. So this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS, right? So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory, and all of that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere. But to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now, vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides seeing the VMs and things the developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created. The compute, network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data's invaluable. It often saves hours just in trying to figure out what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue. So as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot. We get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, where's the Kubernetes? And they're surprised, they like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer, storage, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. >> Well that's a, that's pretty wild, you know. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined, Kit, teased out it at VMworld which was the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but devs see Kubernetes. And really bringing those together in a unified environment so that, depending on what your job is, and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see and that's kind of unified environment. >> Yep. Yeah, as the demo showed, it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere. The Kubernetes based one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as a traditional vSphere interface, APIs, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> Right. And then, and really, it was interesting too. You teased out a lot. That was a good little preview if people knew what they were watching, but you talked about really cloud journey, and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are running in their classic VMs and then kind of the modern, you know, cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will. And this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps. >> Yeah, no. I think we think a lot about it like that. That we look at, we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go. Their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud, it involves modernizing applications. And you know, as you mentioned, it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of, these two extremes. Either you're here where you are, with kind of the old current world, and you got the bright nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other. That you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming and very error-prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really, to your point, is you call it the messy middle, I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap, we had to invest all this time and resources. How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost? >> Right. And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about it but one of the fundamental things is where now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the application can do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense, as you said, not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey. So you see that? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from looking historically at how we managed infrastructure, one of the things we enable in vSphere 7 is how we manage applications, right? So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure. You talk about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is going to have this Firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management. So you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU. Or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level. >> Jeff: Right. >> Yeah, and like, I would kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say, you know, if you look back, one thing we did with something like VSAN, before that, people had to put policies on a LUN, you know, an actual storage LUN and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, it inherited certain policies, right? And so VSAN really turned that around and allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared's talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workload's not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. We got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some in the cloud, and so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere, it's a really powerful and very simplifying one. >> Right. And why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications, and more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace? >> Yeah, well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance, right? So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down, and hardened, and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that, and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. You know, if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is a few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before because we automate so much of that operation. >> And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e., building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security, performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction, it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other but in fact now, they can both get what they need to get done, done, and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance and so forth. >> Right. So there's a lot more to this. This is a very significant release, right? Again, lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant, you know, kind of re-architecture of many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, you know, kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? >> Yeah, that's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere, and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so instead of a demo here, let's pull up some slides and we'll take a look at what's there. So outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first one is simplified lifecycle management. And then really focus on security is the second one, and then applications as well, but both including the cloud native apps that couldn't fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying lifecycle. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology, vSphere life cycle management, vLCM, and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, life cycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative with a single image that you can now specify for an entire cluster. We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of in and outs today, it's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well. >> Right. So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, right? Because upgrading to the seven is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing, you know, as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great vSphere functionality at a more rapid clip, how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well? >> Right. Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep. >> And we just got back from RSA, thank goodness we got that show in before all the madness started. >> Yep. >> But everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. So talk about kind of the changes in the security. >> So, done a lot of things around security. Things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, you know, dramatic simplifications there across the board. One I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust authority. And so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted? And obviously if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them but you know, how do you implement the concept of lease privilege? Right? >> Right. >> Jeff: Or zero trust, right, is a very hot topic >> Yeah, exactly. in security. >> So the idea with trust authority is that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and ensure are fully secure. Those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very locked down, only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay, this untrusted host haven't been modified, we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. >> Right. And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, you know, just better leveraging, you know, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know, >> Yeah. kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed, so you've done a lot of work there as well. >> Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space. As you mentioned, all sorts of accelerateds coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3-D rendering. But you know, FPGAs and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw on the very early days of virtualization. I.e., silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And you know, what you find is all things we found before. You find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, put in security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see at most customers. And it's funny because, and so much you think, well wow, shouldn't we be past this? As an industry, shouldn't we have solved this already? You know, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute, and then storage and network, but now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this Bitfusion technology that we're including now with vSphere really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide we're showing here, the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if you go to the, if we go to the next slide what we see is that with Bitfusion, you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization. You can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can, you know, have multiple people sharing a GPU. We can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it. In fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause of the classifications of the assets now are much larger, much varied, and much more workload specific, right? That's really the opportunity slash challenge that you guys are addressing. >> They are. >> A lot more diverse, yep. And so like, you know, a couple other things just, now, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities. Things around DRS and VMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right? So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA, or Oracle Databases. And how do we ensure that VMotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else there. Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth. >> Jeff: Right. >> So a lot of the stuff is not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core apps people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> Right. All right, so Jared, I give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while, there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them, what should they be excited about, what are you excited for them in this new release? >> I think what I'm excited about is how, you know, IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps, right? I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT's infrastructure, right? And so now I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's, you know, there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team, make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery, and these kinds of capabilities. >> Awesome. Well, Jared, congratulation, again both of you, for you getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep-dive. I'm sure there's a ton more resources for people that even want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in the Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix dot next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix dot next. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight co-hosting along with Stu Miniman. We're joined by Christo du Raan, he is the COO IT Hardware and Infrastructure at Trustco Holdings. Thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> All right, thanks. And thanks for having me. >> Direct from Namibia. So we keep hearing there are customers from 50 countries. And you represent Namibia here. >> Yeah I come from far down in Africa. (laughs) >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Trustco, what you do down there? >> Trustco's a financial services company firstly, we look after all our Namibian customers in the insurance industry, as well as in the banking industry. We've been busy building our banking industry now for the last five years. And we're almost to that point where we can start serving people. Then we've got also educational services that we give to our customers and we've got roughly about 15,000 students, all doing distance learning, and of that 15,000 we've got about 80 to 90 percent of them that we also do finance, not just for the course material but also the technology, that we finance for them, so to give them the capabilities to do their studies through us. Then we've got also natural resources, it's quite a new business unit for us, where we dabble a little in diamond mining, we've got two mines currently, one in Namibia itself, where we produce probably one of the best diamonds in the world, clear cut diamonds, and then also in Sierra Leone we've recently acquired a mining license there as well. Then in Namibia, the other stuff that we do is in Shared Services, where we have our own radio station that we broadcast in Namibia, and then we do a little bit of in-house marketing and media and those type of things. >> Just a few things! >> Well luckily Christo, your IT staff, they have it easy, they don't have, you know, I walk through the Expo floor, it's like oh well how many verticals do you need to go to all of them, to be able to learn what you're doing. So give us if you can just, a little bit of a snapshot of your IT environment, what your team's responsible for, and if you can, kind of bring us even back before you began the journey onto Nutanix. >> So we're very centralized in Namibia, all our stuff gets run out of one data center, or one common area in our area offices, and then we expand to the six branches out in Namibia and in South Africa and now of late we'll be in Sierra Leone. IT team pretty much look after everything, we've got a saying at the office, "If it's got a plug on, it's IT's problem". (laughing) So yeah, so we do everything from the infrastructure, the networking, the servers, the storage, well, now it's Nutanix, everything is already built into one solution, so that the spurred systems have now fallen away, and we only look after it. >> Bring us back to that move to Nutanix, was there an upgrade that you were looking to do? Was there a pain point? What was the impetus to look at Nutanix? >> So our business has expanded quite quickly and the old way of doing things, with the separate SANs, separate switches, separate servers, those type of things became a little bit slumbersome, and difficult to manage because you had to have all these different kind of vendors that's got specific software solutions and specific training that you have to do and it just became a little bit too much for us and we decided that, let's step back a little bit, and see if there's any solutions out there that makes it firstly easier, that we can manage with less people and do more and at that stage hyperconvergence was just on the peak of becoming a thing, if you want to call it that, and we had done our research and found that Nutanix at that stage was the best fit for us and also the most mature in the hyperconverged space. So, that's basically where we got to the Nutanix solution, obviously like everyone else, we started with a Community Edition, dabbled our hand a little bit in there, and saw that's actually doable, it's easy and something that we can build on. >> So, you've been with them for about two years now, so still a relatively new relationship but talk about the beginning in particular and relationships are hard. Every relationship is hard. There are inevitable stumbling blocks. What were some of the challenges you faced and how did you work with Nutanix to overcome them? >> Challenges, I can say, luckily we haven't had a lot of them. Our business is not nearly as big as the Europeans and the Americans, so it is not that complex a system. We had our challenges in the beginning, hypervisor specifically, 'cause we made a huge move, we went totally 180 degrees from our Hyper-V environment, we said we going to go right over to AHV, don't want to do deal licensing, let's just jump in on AHV and go Nutanix fully. So, obviously we had a few challenges with a couple of our services and servers. But other than that, I must say, it was actually a pretty easy move for us. >> It's interesting that you say going from Hyper-V 'cause I've talked to the customers, oh there's a saving from moving from VMware, oh Microsoft, Hyper-V's all included, if you're doing Windows and you've got Hyper-V, I'm sure you've got a Windows application, so was there an application change or what was the driver to move? >> There were some of our applications that were very specific, especially on the network drivers side of things, moving from the normal Windows drivers, to the IO drivers in Linux. We had a couple of challenges with our in-house apps as well, but again, it was a reasonably painless move over to Nutanix. >> One of things we keep hearing about at this conference is how Nutanix is evolving as customer needs and demands are changing. You gave us the overview of your company, you are getting into new businesses and still continuing in established businesses, what are some of the needs that your IT is experiencing and how is Nutanix meeting those needs? >> Like I say, in the old infrastructure days, provisioning was probably the biggest hurdle, if the Dev guys wanted stuff, you first had to go and buy some more hardware, because you need to adapt to them. When we reversed over to Hyper-V eventually, it became easier, but it was still not the right fit. You still had to tweak it and play with it etc etc. So, the biggest challenge was to get our DevOp guys quicker access to what they need. And then also our customers as well. We've moved from where there's a person that needed to provision storage, needed to provision networking, needed to provision server and VMs, that's now all basically done by one person and most of those things we've already automized, so it is five, ten minutes, and then they've got what they need. I think it made us a little bit more agile because we pride ourselves on being quick thinkers, deploying stuff fast and that was always Trustco's main advantage in the Namibian market, we didn't go through all the other rigamarole that other companies have of tendering and doing things in a certain way and by the time that you get there it's not relevant anymore, now we need to do something else again. That brought us quick to market and made it so that we can deliver quicker solutions to our customers. >> So, Christo, was there any impact organizationally for rolling out Nutanix, you mentioned DevOps there, the goal of course is that they shouldn't have to worry about the infrastructure and hopefully Nutanix is delivering that, but there's some retraining or moving inside the organization, what's the impact been on your organization? >> On the customer side, none. They don't even know we've moved over. >> But from the IT side? >> From our customer side, they've not seen anything. From the IT side of things, we had a phased approach, so we started off with the Community Edition, where we basically just dabbled in it, saw what we could do on it and then also, let's call it training for the IT guys, so that they're comfortable in how the product works. So by the time that we got to deploying it in production, it was actually a very smooth transaction. We had all the kinks sorted out beforehand and made sure that everything will work, again, being in the finance industry, in the banking industry, downtime is an absolute no no, and we wanted to get to a point where we say we're not going to move over production sites, production environments, in the evenings from twelve to four in the morning because we've all got families so we'll either plan it properly ahead of time and yes we did it and actually, dare I say, in production time, we moved across almost seamlessly. We've got a lot of redundancies built in obviously so it gave us the opportunity to actually move in place if you want to call it that. >> So what does the future hold for this relationship? Where do you see your partnership with Nutanix evolving and where do you think you'll be, say, five years from now? >> So, we've got a roadmap set out with Nutanix and where we're now only in the baby phase, where we've done the infrastructure, we're happy everything is working, so now we're in the POC stage of exploring the software suite in its entirety. We've started now with Leap and Bolt ADR scenario and tested it extensively and we're now in that process, probably when I get back in Namibia, we'll have the licenses hopefully to start deploying it in our production environment. More closer to the future, in the next I would say, six to nine months, we're going to take on Frame, 'cause part of our business scenario, because we were Microsoft, was the Remote Desktop Service, and that was what kept us so lean. There are some challenges now with Remote Desktop Services where our Dev guys are moving into some Linux and there's different things coming up now where we move away from the traditional monolithic applications to more agile applications and then we'll start dabbling our hands in Frame. For us the holdback was when Frame came out, that it was only in the cloud and for us in Namibia, Africa, the internet is not as stable as we would like, so that was totally off the cards for us. Now that it moved back into on-prem and we can run Frame on-prem, that will probably be our biggest project going forward for the next year and year and a half. >> Excellent. Well thank you so much for coming on theCube Christo. It was a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, stay tuned for more of theCube's live coverage of dot next. [Urgent Music]

>> Live from London England, it's The Cube, covering .Next Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to The Cube, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Joep Piscaer. And you're watching The Cube, and actually Bear Grylls is going to be on the keynote shortly, but we're gonna talk a little bit more tech first. First of all I wanna welcome back to the program Chris Kaddaras is the senior vice president and general manager for EMEA with Nutanix, and welcome to the program for the first time, Sylvain Siou, senior director of Systems Engineering, also for EMEA with Nutanix. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright so Chris, we were thinking back, two years ago, the first European show in Vienna, I had you on the program, and you were fresh on, I always loved getting people when they're fresh into the company because they have the why they're joining in, why they think they're doing things. So, bring us up to speed. Two years, couple things have changed in Nutanix, couple things have changed in the industry, but why don't you bring us up to speed? >> Sure, no I'm happy to do that. First I'll tell you that some of the things I told you on the show two years ago actually proved true. I could see the energy in Vienna at that time in regards to what I call kind of a religious following in Nutanix because of the compelling-ness of the technology and the solution, and that hasn't stopped. One thing that I wasn't quite prepared for is just the rate of growth of this company, and how our customers really embraced us in the market. Now in the EMEA market we've had some success I would say. The team's done a really good job. When I started we had less than a thousand customers, now we have over 3,000 customers. When I started with Nutanix, in the region we had about 200 employees, now we have almost 800 employees in the region. So collectively as a region we're growing a bit faster than the rest of the world which is a good thing for us, and customers are showing their appreciation for us, so it's been a really good experience, but something like the hyper-growth that we have at Nutanix takes some getting used to when you come from other companies, but it's been a really good thing for our customers. The thing that I think I'm the most proud of is we've done that hyper-growth and we've still kept our NPS score above 90 for our customers, so our customers are getting a really good experience both from our sales teams, our product, our implementation teams, and our support teams, that it's kept everything in check for our customers which I'm really proud of. >> Well congratulations on that. Sylvain I have to think that your team has something to do with that NPS score. In my career, I have great respect for the SEs, they're the one that have to not only know the product inside and out, but they need to be working closely with the customers, have a good viewpoint on the customers. Being here at a European show, I wanna get your viewpoint. Tell us, what's different here compared to what you hear from people back at Corporate, what are some of the differences here your team sees? >> So we have a very good relationship with Corporate, so we're really aligned and we're involved in the project in same way as any other region. I think we were faster on some very big accounts, and that was really surprising and also the, I think the timing for the need of the customer to solve situation after virtualization was the exact timing when we start in EMEA, the product was mature enough so that was exactly the right timing, it's five years ago when I joined, so really we solved this first situation and after that everything we promised in term of making this platform a true cloud platform for enterprise is there, I think all these services on top of it, who have the same kind of services you can see on public cloud, is there, we show it this morning, and now giving the ability to the customer to manage situation with this cloud from different providers and what is on premise is there, so I think all the control, the costs on the compliance and so on have done a lot to manage the situation and take you through the control everyday. >> So, what is the adoption maybe compared to the US for the core products that you have now versus the additional services? Is there a big change or a big difference between the US and Europe or, what are you seeing with your customers? >> So, we follow the same path. There is some region and maybe I will relay on Chris, some region that we invest later than the others so, of course France, Germany, UK, Northern Europe was really the beginning and after that we have more southern regions or eastern region that come after, but we are surprised sometimes because people can jump to the last technology faster than the others, so I don't think there are really rules, there is really people who is painpoint, we have the solution, and when it fits, they go faster. >> Yeah I think from a solution perspective we are thriving at the same rate our emerging technologies into the market as our other regions in the world. In some cases we're ahead, things like IoT, what was originally called Sherlock, we're ahead, we have like first customer, second customer to start coming to adopt, so we do have markets within the EMEA region that are much earlier adopters compared to other regions. Think of places like the Middle East, the Nordics, France, adopting much quicker than some other regions of the world. So we see our new products starting to roll, we're really excited about Xi Leap, I know that the first instantiation went live, I think yesterday or today within the Americas, we're looking forward to going live within London, and then moving in to mainland Europe from there, and I think that will be a huge difference-maker for us in the markets as well. >> So looking at those regions specifically, I know there's a couple of markets in Europe, especially Germany, that have such strict data sovereignty laws that it makes it really difficult to actually do business from a DR or cloud perspective. How's Nutanix dealing with that? >> I think that's where we... When we have our SAS-based products, that's a challenge. When we have our cloud-based products, that's a challenge.` So, for our cloud-based products we have a plan really quickly to go into places that have data sovereignty compliance regulations that they have to adhere to. So Germany, we have a plan to go into Germany really quickly; we obviously have a plan to go into some other markets, Amsterdam, we have a plan to go into London for cloud. For SAS, a lot of customers are consuming SAS and they're okay if there's a good security problem, parameter around SAS, and they're consuming Salesforce.com without data centers, they're consuming other products that way so, as long as we put the right security parameters in place, then their consumption model around SAS is typically gonna work, I don't see us distributing SAS data centers all throughout every market in the world to do that. Our core product right now consumption is mostly local, and it's consumed either in an appliance way or it's consumed in a software way, so that's not something that we have to worry about. >> Yeah it's interesting, you wonder if North America has a greater adoption of public cloud, if that actually gets you an advantage in the EMEA region here to get deeper with some of the core and essential offerings. >> It does; customers will adopt a private cloud because of those data sovereignty regulations. But a lot of the uber-clouds have come in and solved that, they've come in into country, they've created gov clouds, they've done it in Germany, they've done it in the UK, so they're starting to solve that, but they have to put out a lot of investment to do that. But it has given us a lead in the marketplace, but there are certain markets that are very much like the US market, so the UK, it's very similar to the US market with regards to uber-cloud or public cloud adoptions so in that market we have a lot of opportunities with somebody like Beam, because they've consumed a lot of the other uber-clouds, whether it's AWS, UCP, or... And we have that opportunity to sit down and provide them with solutions. >> Sylvain, what else are you hearing from your customers, what are some of the pain points that they're feeling that your team's able to help with? >> Clearly in the past we saw the proliferation of the VM, and we find a way to control that, but with the cloud the proliferation is without any limits. So really this is something important for the customer to take back control, take control of the shuttle IT and so on, and it's very lowly. And also I want to take a specific point really the R&D are really taken care of when we see in the field, I will take just an example, the synchronus replication, metro-culturing and stuff like this to high availability, between (inaudible) and so on, it's typically European, because we have fiber, we are really city close to each other and so on, in America, that makes no sense, and really at really early stage of the company we get the R&D taking care of that, developing specifically for our market what is needed for our market, and it means that we're a really global company and not really American company, we have also R&D in different places, we have in Serbia with Frame, we have in India, and so on, so really to be really taking care of each issue or pain point of the customer is really our main driver. >> So one of those other differences I see a lot is the scale of the organization, the size. So what is an SMB in the Americas might be an enterprise in Europe. So what are the solutions you have for those types of customers, for that problem? >> So definitely we need, so we are talking to customers we have a critical science, they need to have a minimum of VM to face the issue of the bottom neck of the storage or the management part and so on, but also we have example of small customers just need a platform that works, and don't want to have anyone taking care of it. And so now it's like you phone, you don't take care of the storage and CPU, it's just your application and that's it, could be internal, external, and so on, so really the SMB of course is not the main market for us, it's more the big account and so on, but we have all kinds of customers in any verticals, there is no specific one that we cover, and it's really because the platform is something that has become just normal to be invisible. >> Yeah I would add on that, if you don't mind, I'd say that the nice thing about the product is it's in a form factor in a pricing mechanism that can be consumed from SMB all the way up to global accounts. That's the nice thing. Now, maybe we spend a lot of our field resource on mid-market up, because that's where we get larger transactions from customers, and it's just a value conversation with regards to return on investment, but the nice thing is our product can be consumed at the smallest customer. We have just released new pricing mechanisms that allow our customers to now consume at much smaller levels, so we're not allow for SMB but for ROBO, because if you think about it if you just have a one size fits all pricing structure how does that work in the data center, that same price doesn't work in the ROBO area, so you have to give the customers the ability to look at the same experience in the remote office or the small sites compared to a data center, and that's something that we've just kinda brought to the market in the last three to four months, and I think that's a real advantage of not only the product but the pricing structure. >> Chris, we wanna give you the final word. If EMEA customers, what do you want them taking away from this week? >> Sure. I think, they've already told me, and I'll tell you, which is good, 'cause it's what I want them to take away, is just the credibility that Nutanix is here for the enterprise work load, they can look at their entire data center delivery mechanism on a Nutanix platform. But also Nutanix is a company they should be looking for for their cloud-based platform. There is a decision in the marketplace to be had right now around what do you use for your cloud, lack of a better word, orchestration layout, cloud automation layout? And there's only a few choices in the market today, some of them are more open source, some of them are specific vendors, and what I want them to take way is Nutanix is an option for that, leave it up to me and my team to prove why we think we're the best option for it, but that's really what I want them to take away, the credibIlity of tier one platforms running Nutanix in their data center, and then two, Nutanix for the cloud-based platform. >> Congratulations on the progress. I wanna say some feedback I've heard from customers is despite how fast Nutanix has been growing, they still feel that they're getting the personal touch, don't feel like just a number for some fast-growing company so congrats on that, I know a lot of effort goes into that. Alright so we're at the end of the Day 1 for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Minimn, be sure to join us tomorrow for a full day of wall-to-wall coverage. Of course go to theCube.net for all the websites to watch us live and on demand for all the shows we're doing and once again thank you for watching the cube. (digital music)

>> Live from London, England, it's the Cube, Covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, and welcome to the Excel Center in London, England, where 3500 customers, partners, and employees of Nutanix have gathered for the annual European show of Nutanix .Next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for two days of wall to wall exclusive coverage from the Cube is Joep Piscaer, our first European co-host. Joep, I first met you two years ago at the Nutanix show in Vienna. Last year was in Nice. We're now in London, and now you're not just a guest, but a host. Thanks so much for joinin' us. >> Thank you. So, it was awesome three years ago I was a customer, then I transitioned into a tech champion as well, for getting to know the technology and the people behind Nutanix, and now I'm here as a co-host, looking at Nutanix as a company. >> Well, we really appreciate you joining us. Give us, first of all, some more credibility in the European space, and also we always love to get the practitioner viewpoint. So, you have been a customer, you're part of I believe the NTC Program that Nutanix has, so you understand the technology. We're going to get to talk to some of the customers, some of those executives, and the like, so lookin' forward to havin' ya' sit with me, and dig into it, including, a first on the Cube, you're going to do one interview in your native tongue of Dutch. >> Yes, oh yeah. It's going to be completely in Nederlands, so completely Dutch, and I'm looking forward to that. >> Alright, so Dheeraj Pandey was on stage this morning, and Dheeraj, masterful, gives quite a good keynote, talking about how Nutanix is now nine years old, and so therefore he says still very young when you look at most of the technology companies out there, but they've come a long way. I've watched Nutanix since the very early days, and still kind of blows my mind. Some of the companies I've watched in their ascendancy, I remember VMware back when they were about 100 people. Nutanix, I met when they were about 30 people. Pernixdata that Nutanix bought, Soft Jamb that we're going to have on later today, introduced me to the company when it was three people and a dog, and Nutanix now, over I think 3000, 3500 people, announced last night their Q 1 2019 earnings, and some of the quick speeds would be 313 million dollars of revenue. That is up 14% year over year for the quarter, up 3% quarter over quarter from the previous quarter. Strong growth in a lot of the financials, really moving strongly along their path to be software, which is 51% of billings were from the software, and expect to read somewhere between 70 and 75% in the next four to six quarters, so aggressively meeting that, and publicly traded company, you kind of look at it and say "Wow, this Nutanix has a seven billion dollar market cap before the market opened today. We'll see what the market thinks of their earnings." What's just it that at a high level, you've been watching Nutanix for a while, so what's your take on the company? >> So, you know, I met em' a couple years ago as well. I think they were 100 people big back then. I learned from them from a technology perspective, so I just got to know the technology, got to know why they were building the startup, building this technology, and this was back in the day when it was basically a VDI product, and it was hardware. It was a thin layer of software, and they kept building that out, and building it out. At some point I became a customer of them, when their appliances were becoming so mature, that I actually saw the advantages that they were touting. Ease of management, one click for everything, and that made such a difference in the world back then, that it's just so good to see them growing and growing from the VDI product it was at some point, all to where it is now. This is not a startup anymore, this is a big company, with a portfolio that's becoming very broad, very deep as well. So seeing them grow this quickly, it's been pretty much amazing to see. I haven't seen a company go that fast in a long time. >> Yeah, well it's one of the things that really, if you look at where we are in technology today, things move fast. So the rest of the team for the Cube is at Amazon re:Invent, and the amount of announcements coming out of them is just staggering, but we're going to talk here about Nutanix. Actually the amount of announcements that Nutanix had, considering as you said they started out, really you think of that thin layer, to really simplify IT. Deeraj in the keynote talked about, "We want to achieve invisible together." was the line that he used, and simplifying things are really tough. That's really what characterized the wave of hyperconverged infrastructure in my mind. When I talk to users, why the bought it, it was simplifying it. It was not, when you think back to VMware, VMware was real easy. It was "Oh, I'm going to consolidate. I'm going to get high utilization.", and there was a clear cost savings. Well today, this hyperconverge is, if you look at building it one way, versus buying it this other way, the actual raw dollars was not that immediately compelling. It is the operational simplicity, and therefore I can allow, in many ways they say IT can now say yes to the business, and focus on things that add value to the business. Move up the stack. a line that I've used at a few of these Nutanix shows is "First, I want to modernize my platform, and then I can do things like modernize my application, modernize all my operations around that." It's catalyst to help customers along their journey for digital transformation. Is that what you've seen? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. So looking at my own experience, I've seen it so clearly that simplifying that infrastructure later, five, six years ago, that was the driver for us to move there. It's become so much more than just a simplification. It's become a story of freeing up time from the IT ops personnel to do other stuff. Just like you said, saying yes to the business, because infrastructure used to be hard. It used to be difficult. You'd need to spend a lot of time on it, and now it's really so easy, it's become a commodity. You either get it from the cloud, you get it from Nutanix or VM or whoever, and that frees up time for the IT ops personnel to do value add stuff on top of it, and I kind of see Nutanix going along that same route. They focused on the infrastructure part. They're still an infrastructure company I think, but they're expanding into that whole journey the customer's going through as well. I think we're going to here a lot more about the hybrid strategy, about cloud, about hybrid cloud, about how to manage that, instead of just the infrastructure stuff. >> Yeah, you bring a good point, that customer journey is definitely one that they talked about, and let's talk about the way you look at the Nutanix portfolio now. The way that Nutanix has framed it, is they gave, it was the customer journey of crawl, walk, run. So first, we have Core, which really is the primary product we've been thinking about, it's what the vast majority of Nutanix customers use, it's HCI, it's Prism, it's those pieces to manage that Core piece. Then, we add on top of that is Essentials, which really looked at some of the expansion areas. Files is one that they launched as an announcement about two years ago I believe it was, that they have Blocks now, which is now a highly scalable object model there, and the Prism Pro, so a bunch of pieces to add on and go beyond the Core, and then they have Enterprise, which is is ICloud's kind of the branding that they have along these, but Leap is DR as a service. They've got Frame, which is desktop as a service. They've got Era, and they've got a whole lot of other software solutions out there that make up this whole portfolio. I wouldn't say it was simple. It took me two or three times of hearing it before it started to crystallize, but if you look out from that customer lens, the customer doesn't need to worry about where these buckets have, it's the, you know, "I'm buying Core stuff, I'm probably growing to Essentials, and then there's areas where Enterprise will make sense.", and it's likely going to be a different go to market and different buying motion. Take something like Frame, who we're going to have on the program today. Frame today is not attached to the Nutanix appliance itself, it was born in the cloud, and many of the enterprise solutions are born in the cloud, multi-cloud. So what's your take on how they're splitting up and discussing the portfolio? >> Just like you said, it took me awhile to figure out what that whole portfolio was, you know, the Core, Essentials, Enterprise stuff, but I do think looking at it from a customer perspective, it does make sense. So they started out simplifying the Core infrastructure. Now they're simplifying the Essentials in the data center as well, like files, like micro-segmentation, like monitoring. Those are topics that customers still spend a lot of time on, but they don't necessarily want to. They want to have something that is readily off the shelf, it's easy to use, easy to expand upon, so I do see Essentials as a good expansion of that messaging that they have been giving for quite a number of years already. Simplifying what is already in the data center already, and then the stretch into the cloud, into the hyper-cloud, delivering services that are still so difficult to do yourself, like take VDI for example. That's still difficult. Sending up an entire environment, managing it, you have to have really specialized people to do that for you, to do the do the design, and being able to get that directly from the cloud makes that so much easier. So I do agree with the de-segmentation into three big buckets, and I do think customers are going to respond positively to it. >> Alright, so, you brought up a term hyper-cloud, that I really didn't feel that we heard a lot about in the keynote this morning. It's an area I want to poke and understand a little bit more when I hear from Nutanix. I was talkin' to one customer in prep for this, and he said a year ago, and the last couple of times, but hearin' a lot about Google. Diane Greene on the stage, I believe it was the D.C show, I didn't see Google here. I know there is updates as to where the Google relationships are going. They did mention Kubernetes. The Kubernetes offer that Nutanix has is called Karbon. I actually expect to see not only what we will have Nutanix on the program here to talk about it, but at the Kubernetes show Kubcon in Seattle in two weeks. Nutanix is one of the sponsors that we'll have on the program there. Other than Kubernetes and how that fits into the cloud native discussion, I haven't heard a good cohesive message as to Nutanix's hybrid, they talk about how Nutanix lives in a lot of environments, and many of their products live in multi-cloud, and there's some nuance there. I think VMware has a nice clear message on hybrid. Microsoft of course, and of course VMware is the partnership with Amazon is really the core of what they're doing there. They're doing more cloud native and Kubernetes. They bought Heptio. There are things going on there. Amazon is talking a lot more about hybrid. We'll see if they actually use the term hybrid when they talk about it. Nutanix's messaging, we're going to have Deeraj on today, he says "Azure Stack gets a lot of press, but there's not a lot of people using it. VMware on AWS gets a lot of press, once again, not a lot of companies using it yet". And while I agree, customers actually feel comforted by the message that they understand how do I get from where I am today, to where I need to go? And of course I'm not saying that everybody goes 100% public cloud. The hybrid multi cloud world kind of looks like where we'll be for the next five or 10 years at least, and Edge puts a whole 'nother spin on things. What do you want to hear from Nutanix? What is hybrid, customers might not care about hybrid, but the message about where they're going with cloud is I think what they want clarity on. >> Yeah, I agree. So I think Nutanix doesn't call it hybrid, they're calling it hyperconverged cloud, which makes sense from their historical background. I do think Nutanix has ways to go in developing their own hybrid. Cloud story, making a management layer on top of it, like VMware's done, like Microsoft's doing. So I do think Nutanix is only on the beginning of this journey for themselves, but you're only seeing the small acquisitions they're doing, or the small steps they're taking. Acquiring Frame is one of those unexpected things for me. I would never have thought Nutanix would go that direction, So I do think Nutanix is taking small steps in the right direction. But like you said, they're story isn't complete yet. Its not a story that customers can buy into fully just now, so they do still need a little bit of time for that. >> Yeah, well Joep, really appreciate you helpin' us break down this. We've got two days of full coverage. So much your goin' is that, right, MNA in the space, it's a software world, picking up pieces are easy, heck, one of the under riding rumors I've heard for the last couple of years is "will someone take Nutanix off the table?" Not something I expect them to specifically direct, but at a seven billion dollar market, that would be a large acquisition, but we have seen a few of those in the last couple a' years. so for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman, stay with us for two days. Wall to wall coverage. Thecube.net is of course where to see all of the live and on demand content. Thanks so much for watchin' the Cube. (contemplative music)

>> Narrator: From San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017, brought to you by Samsung. (upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here, in San Francisco, for day two. We're winding down day two of two days of wall to wall coverage, The Cube's exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier the founder, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media (mumbles) the Cube our next guest Larry Cutler, co-founder and CTO of Baobab Studios. >> You got it right. >> And you're co-founder and CEO Maureen Fan was at our Grace Hopper event. >> Larry: Yes. >> Well thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you guys are doing great. Love the story-telling, gaming, tech culture coming together here at Samsung. >> Yep. >> And seeing the future. The future, if you connect the dots, is augmented reality voice-activated, headphones that can be hacked and programmed and customized. You guys are doing some interesting things, you've got some good awards. Take a minute to talk about your studios. What are you guys doing, what's the aha moment for you guys. What should people know? >> So we at Baobab Studios, we're reinventing animated storytelling using VR. And so what we've, our aha moment was feeling that you could completely immerse yourself in the world in VR. And when we started thinking about well what is so special about an animated film, it's really about transporting you to faraway worlds, and making those worlds so real that you could like reach out and touch them. And then if you think about VR, that's kind of the same thing, where VR's promise is being able to transport you to incredible places and to make you really feel like you're in those worlds and you're part of those worlds. >> And to relax and chill a little bit too. >> Well relax and chill as well. >> Or entertainment or to be thrilled. >> So in our case we wanted to take all the experience that we have telling stories at places like Pixar and Dreamworks and apply that into this new medium. And so we found that VR is an incredibly powerful medium, and it really is one that's unlike film and unlike games. So, you're talking about bringing together the expertise of people from films, and people from games. That's critical to what we're doing, and yet at the same time, the experience is something that's totally different. >> Yeah we were commenting with some of our guys in our office how Twitch was experimenting with using the comments to drive the game behavior. You start to see new kinds of game systems develop around the storytelling as more of a behavioral dynamic, not the boring game I figured out, or the multi-player game with my same friends, or whatever that's going on, you're seeing a whole new level of creativity going on, one. Two, the other question is how much does it cost to make these things, 'cause Dreamworks and these guys are spending a lot of dough to do animation. >> Larry: Yes. >> I mean it's not cheap, so how do you guys crack the code on keeping it low, not low-budget, but low-cost and also intelligent is that the secret sauce? >> Yes well that's certainly super important for us. You know we're a start-up company, so obviously we need to be able to have a pipeline that if we run efficiently and you know for us, I think what we've done is we've brought together some of the best people, you know. So we've hired our friends, we've hired people who are really experts in the field, and we're really creating a next-generation VR platform so that we can actually create these animated experiences, be able to experiment in this space. You know, sort of try out different techniques and storytelling methodologies and at the same time do it in a way that we can, you know, sort of experiment as much as possible. >> John: Talk about some of the awards you guys had, I mean, you guys done some things. Share some of the accolades you've gotten. >> Yes, so, I mean what's amazing is that we started with our first piece of content Invasion!, and we premiered it last year in April at Tribecca Film Festival, and it's really gone on to, first of all, from a consumer standpoint, it's one of the most popular downloaded pieces of content on all the VR platforms, and at the same time it's been shown at a number of different film festivals, and it recently won an Emmy, so we're very excited about that, and, you know, what we realize is that audiences just fell in love with this bunny character Chloe. So Invasion! is this story about two aliens that try to take over Earth, and they're thwarted not by humans with powerful weapons, but by cute little woodland creatures. In the first episode in Invasion! they're thwarted by this cute little bunny Chloe, and what happens is that at the very beginning of the piece, Chloe like hops up to you, and if you look down you're a little bunny in the scene, you've got bunny legs, you can hop around. And audiences, you know, the viewer just reacted in ways that you would never do in a film, like people are waving at Chloe, a lot of people reach out and try to pet Chloe, a lot of people mimic what Chloe's doing, and in short people are just treating Chloe as if she's real. And it made us realize that there's something really powerful here that is really worth kind of leaning in and digging deeper into. >> And what was the next step after that, so you went what you went, some development, was it the game, was it the character development? How do you double-down on them, I'm just kind of curious on thinking about how the, on the thinking behind it. >> It was really interesting because we, in Invasion! we were kind of the first to make you a character in the story, but at the time there really weren't hand controllers, or any of the devices so that you could actually really have sort of a more like increased role in the story. And so at the same time, people really felt that they were front and center, and they felt this sense of protecting Chloe from the aliens 'cause you're placed right in the center of the story. And so with Asteroids! when we started, we just wanted to dive deeper into that idea of you playing an active role in the story. And so in Asteroids! we focused on the two alien characters Mac and Cheez and their relationship, and you're a helper robot on the ship, so you have. >> So how do I get involved and get these stories, do I have to have a VR kit? So I don't have, I haven't bought anything yet VR-wise, so for me, how do I engage with you guys, what do I do? Do I buy Oculus Rift, or certain headsets? >> So our stuff is meant to be available for everyone. We really want to have as many people be able to see our content as possible. And so first of all, if you have a VR headset of any type, our, Invasion! is available on all those platforms, so that's the high-end headsets like the Rift and Vive, the PlayStation VR for Sony, as well as if you have a mobile phone like a Samsung phone, you can plug it into your VR. At the same time, we also have a Baobab Cardboard app, so you don't even need to have VR to see our product. So you just get an IOS or Android app, a Baobab app. >> So I'm in the market to buy a headset, I'm not price sensitive, what should I buy? What would you recommend? (Larry chuckling) >> Well there really are so many options, so you know obviously at the high >> John: What would you get? >> Well at the highest end, you know, getting a Rift or Vive really gives you the full VR experience because it's really tracking your position and orientation so you can actually walk around a space, the characters can react to you in believable ways, and it's all happening in real time. And on the other hand, the Sony PlayStation VR's are really affordable if you've got a Sony Playstation, you just buy the PSVR headset, you plug it right in and you're ready to go. I'm really excited looking forward to a world where you're not tethered to your computer, and so it's really exciting to see these stand-alone headsets that are going to come out that basically there's no tethering to a computer and yet you have that same inside-out tracking so that >> And this is the Samsung vision, right? The Samsung vision is to use their displays. >> Yes, exactly. See right now what you have, which is, which is already really exciting, is you take your Samsung phone, you plug it into a Gear VR, and the one thing that's missing is that you're not able to track both the position and orientation of where you are, and so the next generation headsets are going to have that. And the experiences will be much higher feeling. >> Alright cool, so then I, I'll actually download all of this stuff. So as the CTO of the venture, your job is to kind of look over the landscape. You have to have the 20 mile stare of the future, not screw it up, but you've got to win the present. >> Larry: Yes, we're all about being able to deliver in the present and look forward to the future. >> And that's the key, and you have that unique skill as an entrepreneur. What are you guys doing now technically and with the product, what are some of the key things that people should know about, because I mean I look at the CG and the animation world, and you see the Moore's law kind of coming that way, right, so you go wow, as someone with a live video, I would love to have a bunny and the cube set right here, right? So we see a future where I want to immerse myself with characters, not just stickers. >> We of course see that as well, so you know, obviously. >> John: Is expensive I mean it must be, 'cause in the old days what, you had the artists, monster storage, tons of compute, what's it like now? >> Well we're a really small start-up company, so we are not a, you know, 300 person organization that is producing a full animated film. We're a small team of artists and engineers working together in the same way that we had that same excitement in the early days. I started my career at Pixar in some of their earlier films, and it was that same >> John: Power work stations, you had that high-end gear. >> Yeah so it was that same excitement in those early days, like we just had to figure out like how are we going to actually create this shot, how are we going to like, you know, build this character, how are we going to like finish this on time. And we have that same exact excitement in the office. >> When were you at Pixar, were you there for the Toy Story kind of thing? >> Yeah, so I worked on the Toy Story films, and A Bug's Life and Monster's Inc., and then I went over to Dreamworks and headed up all of their character technologies on their various films. >> Okay so you guys do anything different than those guys, or are you guys more focused more simple? >> Yeah, I mean what's interesting is that this is really a new medium and it's a new skill set, because what's happened is that you are part of the world, and for us the thing that's most exciting is that by you being a character, first of all, the other characters are not just able to have, you know, sort of high-quality animation, but they're able to react to you, and so there's there A. a number of technical innovations that you need to overcome so that we can have that same high-quality character performance that I would expect from a Pixar or Dreamworks film happening, running in real time at 90 frames a second on my headset, and at the same time also be able to have those characters react to you and respond to what you're doing. And you know, so we've scratched the surface on that. So one of the things that's really interesting is how two people will actually have all these subconscious communication cues, you know, whether it's eye contact or whether it's two lovers sitting across the table and mirroring each other's behavior, that's the type of thing that we can add into our animation. And at the same time, we have stories where depending on what you do, whether you choose to participate or not, that actually affects the outcome, and affects the way that characters respond to you. And so having much smarter character performances is certainly one area that I think is really exciting. >> And that's going to be interesting for you guys because you have some structured ways to do that, and then some unstructured ways to do it with community data, machine learning, and then you can use bots in a way to help you get data, but you almost could have character developments be dynamic. >> You definitely could, and you know for us I think the thing that is always the biggest point that we come back to is story. And so on one hand we want to tell one story that's really told well, not ten different stories, and on another hand, because you're part of that story, depending on what you do, that's actually going to affect how the characters respond to you, and that could be in a really nuanced way, and so, you know, building up AI systems, and building up the smarts so that you can actually have that type of response, and yet still feel like these characters are alive and breathing. >> Well the Chloe example on Invasion! is great example, you'd love to have that automated, so when you see those magical moments, the story could evolve, you can kind of give it that programmable policy-based taping. (John laughing) >> Yeah exactly so you know, so this is the type of thing. >> We're geeking out here on the set, Larry, great to have you on, super informative content, and I love the world you're in, I think the world's changing, I think you're going to see some interesting dynamics coming, you certainly have the historical view, Pixar and Dreamworks, old school, if you call that old school. >> That's right. >> Now the new school's coming in, certainly AR looks good too. >> Yeah, we're really excited about AR as well. When we think about stories, you know, VR is about transporting you to a different world and having a story take place there. AR is about the characters being alive in your world, both are really exciting. >> Have you seen the Magic Leap demo? >> Larry: Yes, yeah. >> What's it like, can you tell us? >> I'm not allowed to tell. >> John: Is it good? >> Yes, yeah. >> So it's worth half of another half a billion, oh I can't wait. >> That I can't say, you know. I can't comment on their business, but. >> It's a freaking award chest. >> I think there's a lot of exciting things you know, AR. >> They must have a killer demo, I want to find out, I want to see this demo. Magic Leap, I want to to see your demo. All seriousness, great to have you on, and certainly come down to our Cube studios. I want to follow your story, I think you guys are on the cutting edge of a new user experience that's going to bring computer animation, computer graphics, into a new persona as a storytelling, so congratulations. Larry Cutler, how do you say the. >> Baobab. >> Baobab, B-A-O-B-A-B Studios in Redwood City, California. It's the Cube live coverage from Samsung Developer Conference, I'm John Furrier, more after this short break. (peppy music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. (electronic music) >> Welcome back everyone. Here live in San Francisco, Mascone West. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage live video here at Samsung Developer Conference, #SDC2017. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and co-host of theCUBE. My next guest is Dean Takahashi, who is the lead writer for GamesBeat for VentureBeat big blog covering business and innovation technology. Obviously, been a journalist and writer covering mobile and mobile gaming for a long time. Legend in the Silicon Valley community. Dean, great to see you. >> Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the kind intro. >> People who follow you know, you've been out there in the front line looking at the evolution of gaming obviously, from gaming and then obviously mobile gaming hit a thing. Then gen 2, gen 3. I don't know what generation we're on, but certainly Samsung is converging. That's their message here. Trying to keep these smart things, the cloud message a little bit of an IOT. Feels like an enterprise show a little bit. But, at the end of the day, it's the consumer connection. >> It's all coming together now >> It's all coming together. What's your rapport? What are you seeing? What are you reporting on? >> Well, I cover everything from the smallest startups, including the small game companies. I try to pay attention to Silicon Valley in general. And then the big companies as well. So, the relationships pertain to developers, who are on the small side to the platform owners on the big side. And, I see a really big war going on among all the platform owners. They're trying to get the hearts and minds of those developers. They're trying to bring in, trying to do what Samsung is doing. Which is integrate a lot of different things onto their platform. And, we'll see how much sort of openness is sort of left at the end of this. Or how much of a commons there is across the whole tech landscape, or the whole game industry. And I don't know who's going to win, who's going to own it all. But, everybody's trying. >> It's a war. Platform wars immediately. The device here, my new Samsung 8 is nice. It's got a big screen. It's gameable. Mobile gaming obviously hot. But again, the platform wars are interesting. Now they have the living room, they've got the kitchen, the smart family hub. All this stuff they're talking about. They had the smart TV for a while. The question that I have is, developers don't want hassles. They want the distribution and all the goodness of the big vendor, but one of the things Samsung seems to be trying to create is this unified fabric of breaking down the stovepipes within their company. Problem is, developers won't tolerate different API documentation. This is an issue we've heard from developers here in theCUBE is how does Samsung do that? Because that'll really be, that's the kryptonite for developers. That'll keep the super developers away. >> Yeah. Like the announcement they had here about the Internet of Things and trying to sort of integrate three different standards down into one is the kind of move that you have to make or you have to seek. Some of these come in through acquisitions but, yeah. The developers don't want to mess around with the multiple APIs. >> It's interesting. We cover, as you know, we cover a lot of the enterprise and the emerging tech with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, and we see the enterprise is clear, right? DevOps, the cloud native, the Linux foundation. Those worlds are exploding. Open source is exploding. And then you got companies like Intel, which cares about field programmable gate arrays and 5G. Enabling that end to end. And then you've got the consumer companies whether it's Ali Baba or Samsung or a Google or an Apple, really caring about the device side. So, everything is kind of coming into the middle where cloud is the engine, right. So, the interesting thing I'd love to get your perspective on, Are developers sensitive to the fact that they can have more compu because augmented reality, even virtual reality. We've had one VIP influencer here on theCUBE say VR is done. 1.0 is done. But we learn from it. It didn't really hunt. It didn't really go off the shelves. But augmented reality is hotter, because it's more realistic. Drones are using augmented industrial IOT. >> Augmented reality has a nice launch pad, right. It's got a long runway off of smartphones. You create your app for smartphones and eventually it's going to run on all these other new things that come out, like the glasses. Once those are established, that's great. But in the meantime, the apps and developers can sort of make this living on the smartphone. >> So it's not a big bad like a Google Glass where it just kind of crashes and burns >> Yeah. >> Kind of thing. So they can get some beach head with mobile. >> Yeah. >> So the question for you is how vet the signal from noise on companies. Obviously you look for the ones that have more of a pragmatic business model. Get in on mobile gaming. Obviously Google is on stage with Android. So you're starting to see more openness with APIs. Differentiating from Apple, ecosystem, which it is what it is. How do you see companies differentiating and being real? >> Signal from noise, you do look at everything from who their alliances are with, to how many people, do they have enough people to get the job done? Do they have the funding? It's sort of figuring out whether the team has experience at what they're doing. So, a lot of the basics of journalism. Just finding out facts about a company. >> So, Magic Leap. Have you dug into those guys? I saw the funding news yesterday. Another $500 Million. >> Yeah. >> I haven't seen the product. I haven't seen the demo. I'm not covering gaming like you are. But you have seen their demo. Have you? >> I haven't seen their demo. >> I think a half, a half a million dollars more. That's a war chest. >> Yeah. They're out in Florida. So they're a bit far from me. They are very lucky to have convinced someone to give them some additional money. When they've burned through a billion dollars plus already so, $1.4 billion >> Insane. And nothing to show for it. >> $500 million more, yeah. And they're very ambitious and that's good but, >> It better be good. >> They almost seem like they were trying to say we're going to accelerate and beat Moore's Law. We're going to do something impossible, put these things into little glasses and it's going to be amazing. It's going to be like, so you can't distinguish augmented reality from reality, right? And surprise, surprise, you can't really rush Moore's Law. >> And by the way that's, I'm surprised they're not in Silicon Valley because it seems like that's a go big or go home strategy. Certainly, a billion dollars they've burned through, another half a billion. No one can do that. It's hard to do. So, back down to the more pragmatic ecosystem, you're seeing Samsung here. I like their approach. I think that it's a good strategy. They didn't overplay their hand at the show on talking about where the data resides. That was one thing I'm still not seeing but maybe they're going to bring that out later. Maybe it's not ready yet. The cloud, I didn't really see the cloud story there as much. I don't know what that means. So, those are open discussion points for me. But, certainly leveraging the device, leveraging the distribution is what they're offering. But then they made a comment here on theCUBE, "We're open." What does that mean? I mean Android's obviously got a benefit of being open. But what does open mean to you and how do you see that? >> I think that, you could argue that for smart things where it's connecting to something like an Invidia Shield. And you can use the remote control on an Invidia Shield to change your lighting, or something like that. So, it's sort of overlapping circles of certain, you know, I don't know if that's open. But it works. If you deliver something that works, your consumers, you know, it's relatively open. >> Yeah. And the glam is obviously electronics. Consumer electronics base. You've got a little bit of the IOT. I find this fascinating story of the IOT because people are things too. I mean, you're walking around with the phones. We have the fashion tech happening. And obviously gaming. Alright, what's the big surprise for you here at the show. Give me some positive review. What you liked about it, and what critical analysis, where they need to improve. What are some of your thoughts? >> I think there is always sort of that challenge for a big company like this that has a worldwide consumer base. How much do they want to cater to or appeal to the hardcore crowd? So, say like gaming and non-gamers is a good example of that. And they're not really trying to get everybody in gaming onto their platform or onto their side. They're saying that they're welcome. They can come. We've built this as an all-purpose sort of platform. And, they're not going out to invest in a lot of the game companies. They didn't put money into Magic Leap. They're not sort of trying to pull people in and >> They're not giving the hard sell. >> Yeah. The challenge then is that other companies are. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo of course are doing it. But Amazon, Google, even Apple to some degree is embracing a lot of gamers on the game platforms. Making their platforms fairly friendly. So, I think Samsung needs to decide whether it's going to step up in that space. Other territories, yeah. It's on a very good march, I think. To continuously come out with new tech that gets widely adopted. They're doing well in VR. But I think, it almost seems like they've embraced 360 video a lot more than they have on the game side. >> We'd certainly love to get those 360 cameras here. Apple versus Samsung. Obviously, World Wide Developer Conference is legendary. Samsung 4th year now doing this event. Compare, close, getting there, leveling up? >> Well, I think Apple's event was underwhelming in a lot of ways as far as just what they announced. And say even the performance of the phones. It doesn't really, it's kind of flatish compared to the performance of Samsung phones. I think Samsung has maybe a broader following and broader base. And they have the potential to draw >> And Android's global appeal >> draw more >> is pretty interesting. >> Yeah, draw more developers over who might find it easier. >> Interesting to see the psychographic profile of developer makeup from Apple and Samsung. Dean, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Dean Takahashi here inside theCUBE. Lead writer for GamesBeat, part of VentureBeat blog in Silicon Valley. Check them out, VentureBeat.com. Of course you've got siliconangle.com and thecube.net. That's our content there. This is theCUBE live coverage from Samsung Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier, right back with more after the short break. >> And also plug our GamesBeat conference. >> GamesBeat conference. >> GamesBeat Summit in April. April 9th and 10th in Berkeley. >> Yep, get the plug in. GamesBeat Conference in April. Check it out. Dean co-chairs the committee for getting the great content. Hardcore gamers, thought leaders. Check out GamesBeat Summit in April. Of course, this is theCUBE live coverage here in San Francisco. More after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's the Cube covering South by Southwest 2017. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in the Cube coverage of South by Southwest. We're at the Intel AI Lounge, hashtag Intel AI. And the theme is AI for social good. So if you really support that, go in Twitter and use the hashtag Intel AI and support our cause. I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angle, I'm here with Robert Scoble, @Scobalizer. Just announcing this week the new formation of his new company, the Transformation Group. I've known Robert for over 12 years now. Influencer, futurist. You've been out and about with the virtual reality, augmented reality, you're wearing the products. >> Yup. >> You've been all over the world, you were just at Mobile World Con, we've been following you. You are the canary in the coalmine poking at all the new technology. >> Well, the next five years, you're going to see some mind blowing things. In fact, just the next year, I predict that this thing is going to turn into a three ounce pair of glasses that's going to put virtual stuff on top of the world. So think about coming back to South by Southwest, you're wearing a couple pairs of glasses, and you are going to see blue lines on the floor taking you to your next meeting or TV screens up here so I can watch the Cube while I walk around the streets here. It's going to be a lot of crazy stuff. >> So, we've been on our opening segment, we talked about it, we just had a segment on social good around volunteering, but what the theme is coming out is this counter culture where there's now this humanization aspect they called the consumerization of IT in the past. But in the global world, the human involvement now has these emersion experiences with technology, and now is colliding with impacting lives. >> Well, absolutely true. >> This is a Microsoft HoloLens first of all. And HoloLens puts virtual stuff on top of the real world. But at home, I have an HTC Vibe, and I have an Oculus Rift for VR, and VR is that immersive media. This is augmented reality or what we call mixed reality, where the images are put on top of the world. So I can see something pop off of you. In fact, last year at South by, I met a guy who started a company called iFluence, he showed me a pair of glasses and you look at a bottle like this and a little menu pops off the side of a bottle, tells you how much it is, tells you what's in the bottle, and lets you buy new versions of this bottle, like a case of it and have it shipped to my house all with my eyes. That's coming out from Google next year. >> So the big thing on the immersion the AR, you look at what's going on at societal impact. What are the things that you see? Obviously, we've been seeing at Mobile World Congress before Peelers came out, autonomous vehicles is game changing, smart cities, median entertainment, the world that we know close to our world, and then smart home. >> Oh yeah. >> Smart home's been around for years, but autonomous vehicles truly is a societal change. >> Yes. >> The car is a data center now. It's got experiences. And there's three new startups you should pay attention to, in the new cars that are coming in the next 18 months. Quanergy is one. They make a new kind of light R, a new sensor. In fact, there's sensors here that are sensing the world as I walk around and seeing all the surfaces. The car works the same way. It has to see ahead to know that there's a kid in front of your car, the car needs to stop, right. And Quanergy is making a focusable semiconductor light R, that's going to be one to watch. And then there's a new kind of brain, a new kind AI coming, and DeepScale is the one that I'm watching. The DeepScale brain uses a new third company called Luminar Technologies, which is making a new kind of 3D map of the world. So think about going down the street. This new map is going to know every pot hole, every piece of paint, every bridge on the street, and it's going to, the brain, the AI, is going to compare the virtual map to the real map, to the real world and see if there's anything new, like a kid crossing across the street. Then the car needs to do something and make a new decision. So 3D startups are going to really change the car. But the reason I'm so focused on mixed reality, is mixed reality is the user interface for the self-driving car, for the smart city, for the internet of things, the fields in your farm or what not, and for your robot, and for your drone. You're going to have drones that are going to know this space, and you can fly it right, I've seen drones already in the R & D labs at Intel. You can fly them straight at the wall, it'll stop an inch from the wall because it knows where the wall is. >> 'Cause it's got the software, it's got the sensors, the internet of things. We are putting out a new research report at Wikibound called IOT and P, Internet Things and People. And this is the key point. I want to get your thoughts on this because you nailed a bunch of things, and I want you to define for the folks watching what you mean by mixed reality because this is not augmented reality. >> Well it is. >> John: You're talking about mixed reality. >> It is augmented reality, it's just-- >> John: But why mixed reality? >> We came up with the new term called mixed reality because on our, we have augmented reality on phones. But the augmented reality you have on phones like the Pokemon's we've been talking about. They're not locked to the world. So when I'm wearing this, there's actually a shark right here on this table, and it's locked on the table, and I can walk around that shark. And it seems like it's sitting here just like this bottle of water is sitting on the table. This is mind blowing. And now we can actually change the table itself and make it something else. Because every pixel in this space is going to be mapped by these new sensors on it. >> So, let's take that to the next level. You had mentioned earlier in your talk just now about user interface to cars. You didn't say in user interface to cars, you didn't say just smart, you kind of implied, I think you meant it's interface to all the environments. >> Robert: Yes. >> Can you expand on what your thoughts on that? >> You're going to be wearing glasses that look like yours in about a year, much smaller than this. This is too dorky and too big for an average consumer to wear around right, but if they're three ounces and they look something like what you're wearing right now. >> Some nice Ray Bans, yup. >> And they're coming. I've seen them in the R & D labs. They're coming from a variety of different companies. Google, Facebook, Loomis, Magic Leap, all sorts of different companies are coming with these lightweight small glasses. You're going to wear them around and it's going to lay interface elements on everything. So think about my watch. Why if I do this gesture, why do I have to look at a little tiny screen right here? Why isn't the whole screen of my calendar pop up right here? They could do that, that's a gesture. This computer in here can sense that I'm doing a gesture and can put a new user interface on top of that. Now, I've seen tractors that have sensors in them. Now, using a glass like this, it shows me what the pumps are doing in the tractor on the glasses. I can walk around a factory floor and see the sensors in the pipes on the factory floor and see the sensors in my electric motors on the factory. All with a one pair of glasses. >> So this is why the Intel AI thing interests me, this whole theme. Because what you just described requires data. So one, you need to have the data available. >> Robert: Yes. >> The data's got to be a frictionless, it can't be locked in some schema as they say in the database world. It's got to be free to be addressed by software. >> Yes. >> You need software that understands what that is. And then you need horsepower, compute power, chips to make it all happen. >> Yeah, think about a new kind of TV that's coming soon. I'm going to look at TV like this one, a physical TV. But it's too small and it's in the wrong angle. So I can just grab the image off the TV and virtually move it over here. And I'll see it, nobody else will see it. But I can put that TV screen right here, so I can watch my TV the way I want to watch it. >> Alright so this is all sci-fi great stuff, which actually-- >> It's not sci-fi, it's here already. You just don't have it. I have it (laughs). >> Well, you can see it's kind of dorky, but I'm not going to say you're a dork 'cause I know you. To mainstream America, mainstream world, it's a bit sci-fi but people are grokking this now. Certainly the younger generation that are digital native all are coming in post-9/11, they understand that this is a native world to them, and they take to it like a fish to water. >> Yes. >> Us old guys, but we are the software guys, we're the tech guys. So continue to the mainstream America, what has to happen in your mind to mainstream this stuff? Obviously self driving cars is coming. It's in fleets first, and then cars. >> We have to take people on a journey away from computing like this or computing like this to computing on glasses. So how do we do that? Well, you have to show deep utility. And these glasses show that. Wearing a HoloLens, I see aliens coming out of the walls. Blowing holes in this physical wall. >> John: Like right now? >> Yeah. >> What are you smoking (laughs)? >> Nothing yet. And then I can shoot them with my fingers because the virtual things are mixing with the real world. It's a mind blowing experience. >> So do you see this being programmed by users or being a library of stuff? >> Some are going to be programmed by users like Minecraft is today on a phone or on a tablet. Most of it is going to be built by developers. So there's a huge opportunity coming for developers. >> Talk about the developer angle, because that's huge. We're seeing massive changes in the developer ecosystems. Certainly, open source is going to be around for awhile. But which friends do you see in open source, I mean, I'm sorry, in the developer community, with this new overlay of 5G connectivity, all this amazing cloud technology? >> There's a new 3D mapping and it's a slam based map. So think about this space, this physical space. These sensors that are on the front of these new kinds of glasses that are coming out are going to sense the world in a new way and put it into a new kind of database, one that we can put programmatic information into. So think about me walking around a shopping mall. I walk in the front door of a shopping mall, I cross geo fence in that shopping mall. And the glasses then show me information about the shopping mall 'cause it knows it's in the shopping mall. And then I say, hey Intel, can you show me, or Siri, or Alexa, or Cortana, or whoever you're talking to. >> Mostly powered by Intel (laughs). >> Most of it is powered by Intel 'cause Intel's in all the data centers and all these glasses. In fact, Intel is the manufacturer of the new kind of controller that's inside this new HoloLens. And when I ask it, I can say, hey, where's the blue jeans in this shopping mall? And all of a sudden, three new pairs of blue jeans will appear in the air, virtual blue jeans, and it'll say this one's a Guess, this one's a Levi's, this one's a whatever. And I'll say, oh I want the Levi's 501, and I'll click on it, and a blue line will appear on the floor taking me right to the product. You know, the shopping mall companies already have the data. They already know where the jeans are in the shopping mall and these glasses are going to take you right to it. >> Robert, so AI is the theme, it's hot, but AI, I mean I love AI, don't get me wrong. AI is a mental model in my mind for people to kind of figure out that this futuristic world's here and it's moving fast. But machine learning is a big part of what AI is becoming. >> Yes. >> So machine learning is becoming automated. >> Well it's becoming a lot faster. >> Faster and available. >> Because it use to take 70,000 images of something like a bottle to train the system that this is a bottle versus a can, bottle versus can. And the scientists have figured out how to make it two images now. So all I need is two images of something new to train the system that we have a bottle versus a can. >> And also the fact that computes available. There's more and more faster processors that this stuff can get crunched, the data can be crunched. >> Absolutely, but it's the data that trains these things. So let's talk about the bleeding edge of AI. I've seen AIs coming out of Israel that are just mind blowing. They take a 3D image of this table, they separate everything into an object. So this is an object. It's separate from the table that it's on. And it then lets me do AI look-ups on the object. So this is a Roxanne bottle of water. The 3D sensor can see the logo in this bottle of water, can look to the cloud, find all sorts of information about the manufacturer here, what the product is, all sorts of stuff. It might even pull down a CAD drawing like the computer that you're on. Pull down a CAD drawing, overlay it on top of the real product, and now we can put videos on the back of your Macintosh or something like that. You can do mind blowing stuff coming soon. That's one angle. Let's talk about medical. In Israel, I went to the AI manufacturers. They're training the MRI machines to recognize cancers. So you're going to be lying in an MRI machine and it's going to tell the people around the machine whether you have cancer or not and which cancer. And it's already faster than the doctor, cheaper than the doctor, and obviously doesn't need a doctor. And that's going to lead into a whole discussion-- >> The Christopher thing. These are societal problems by the way. The policy is the issue, not the technology. How do you deal with the ethical issues around gene sequencing and gene editing? >> That's a whole other thing. I'm just recognizing whether you have cancer on this example. But now we need to talk about jobs. How do we make new jobs in massive quantities. Because we're going to decimate a lot of peoples' jobs with these new technologies, so we need to talk about that, probably on a future Cube. But I think mixed reality is going to create millions of jobs because think about this bottle. In the future, I'm going to be wearing a pair of glasses and Skrillex is going to jump out of the bottle, on to the table, and give a performance, and then jump back into the bottle. That's only four years away according to the guy who's running a new startup called 8i. He's making a new volumetric camera, it's a camera 40 or 50 cameras around-- >> If you don't like Skrillex, Martin Garrix can come on. >> Whatever you want. Remember, this media's going to be personalized to your liking. Spotify is already doing that. Do you listen to Spotify? >> John: Yeah, of course. >> Do you listen to the discovery weekly feature on that? >> No. >> You should. It's magical. It brings you the best music based on what you've already listened and it's personalized. So your discovery weekly on your phone is different than the discovery weekly on my phone. And that's run by AI. >> So these are new collaborative filters. This is all about software? >> Yeah. Software and a little bit of hardware. Because you still need to sense the world in a new way. You're going to get new watches this year that have many more sensors that are looking in your veins for whether you have high blood pressure, whether you're a in shape for running. By the way, you're going to have an artificial coach when you go running in the morning, running next to you, just like when you see Mark Zuckerberg. He can afford to pay a real coach, I can't. So he has a real coach running with him every morning and saying hey, we're going to do some interval training today, we're going to do some sprints to get your cardio up. Well, now the glasses are going to do that for you. It's going to say, let's do some intervals today and you're going to wear the watch that's going to sense your blood pressure and your heart rate and the artificial coach running next you. And that's only two years away. >> Of course, great stuff. Robert Scoble, we have to close the segment. Quickly, how has South by changed in ten years? >> Well, 20, I've been coming for 20 years. I've been coming since it was 500 people and now it's 50,000, 70,000 people, it's crazy. >> How has it changed this year? What's going on this year? >> This is the VR year. Every year we have a year right. There was the Twitter year, there was the Foursquare year. This is the VR year, so if you're over at Capital Factory, you're going to see dozens of VR experiences. In fact, my co-author's playing the Mummy right now. I had to come on your show, I got the short straw (laughs). Sit in the sun instead of playing some cool stuff. But there's VR all over the place. Next year is going to be the mixed reality year, and this is a predictor of the next year that's coming. >> Alright, Robert Scoble, futurist right here on the Cube. Also, congratulations on your new company. You're going out on your own, Transformation Group. >> Yeah, we're helping out brands figure out this mixed reality world. >> Congratulations of course. As always, it is a transformational time in the history of our world and certainly the computer industry is going to a whole other level that we haven't seen before. And this is going to be exciting. Thanks for spending the time with us. It's the Cube here live at South by Southwest special Cube coverage, sponsored by Intel. And the hashtag is Intel AI. If you like it, tweet us at Twitter. We'll be happy to talk to you online. I'm John Furrier. More after this short break. (electronic music)