>> live from London, England. It's the queue covering a ws summat. London twenty nineteen, brought to you by Amazon Web services. >> Welcome back to London, Everybody. This is David Lamont and you watch the Cube. The leader and live tech coverage has been a incredible week for the Cube. Three events this week in London that we had six events worldwide. We started out yesterday with a public sector session. Special mini session We did for Teresa Carlson at eight of US headquarters. And we did it impact investor event last night, Of course. All day here at the eight of US Summit in London at Excel Centre. Twelve thousand people. We're going to wrap up now. My good friend Kim Myers here is the managing director of M. C. I experience Kim. Thanks for coming on. My pleasure. First time on the Cube You got to give you a sticker. >> Thank you. Make you know, great to see you is also great to be here >> to have you. So you are branding expert. We've had a lot of conversations about this. You and I go way back. Do you brand Is everything every touch point? I mean, you would tell me a story last night and I let you pick it up from here of Apple. You see the apple logo, but so why is Brandon so important? What's M. C I experience and how are you helping brands? >> Yeah, Well, Dave, I think it's really amazing, like this event today. You know, we have a lot of technology out there today. We're really digitally enabled, and that's great. I mean, it's amazing what we can do now with technology, but, you know, it also is a little distracting. And and some in fact, there was a recent study that said that kids air haven't developed social skills because there is, they feel more comfortable communicating online, you know? So I think the technology is really great and it's important. But that human human connection is really the thing that makes the difference. And I think brands are starting to recognize that that actually live experiences do cut through the clutter, the digital clutter and getting people together with common interests, getting them engaged. Letting them participate really makes a difference in terms of their affinity and loyalty and even advocacy for your brand. >> So M. C. I experience does that. >> Yeah, that's were essentially work with companies across a lot of industries, but certainly the tech industry. But helping companies, um, developed ways of engaging with their audiences and more meaningful ways. And actually, it's a very human centric approach. So basically the way we look at it is it's not so much about logistics. That's important. Of course, right. You gotta register people. You're gonna have so many breakout rooms got over that gotta, gotta thank you guys. But it's really more about understanding your audience on DH, where they drive benefit and making sure that you're meeting that need. And that's really where your band, your brand, starts to benefit. So we use a design thinking methodology. We're really very focused on the audience using empathy and ideation and you know, just really, really getting to know who those guys are like this crowd and making sure that every touch point of the experience, how it smells the temperature, the lighting, everything smells house. No, seventy percent of your memory is from smell, you know, and yet we never even think about >> it. It's weird when you run a defense, >> you don't even think about it. really. It's just like Exactly. So it's, uh, that sort of multi sensory, engaging aspect of what we do is what m. C. A Experienced specializes in and working with clients to help them sort of look at new ways of creating experiences that really engaged their audiences and really create community around those audiences in terms of loyal fans and customers. >> So we hear it at Amazon. You see this audience? Obviously a developer crowd? Yeah. Um what, do your thoughts here just walking around? >> Well, as I was saying, I think you know, we were talking about this earlier. You know, developer crowd doesn't like flashy marketing because they're suspicious of it, right? You think I like you? David Tyree? Exactly. Uh, Mrs Perfect Tone. I think the tone created here is great. It's a little rough and ready, and that's great. And that's how it should be because that's ah, developers and warranted in the content than the show. And I think it's got the audience bang on. >> So how do you use data to inform this brand experience? >> Yeah, so date is becoming obviously really important, and event technology is you know, it's amazing today the kinds of things we can do. I mean, we can track people and monitor them and take their temperature. I mean, if we want to, you know, you could do an amazing number of things, see >> how they smell >> exactly. And the thing about it is, that date is important. Of course it is. But insights even more important. And that means using data in the right way the right analytics asking the right questions, not just relying on demographics, but really getting to know people on building personas and understanding who your audience is. And I think it's the two things need to fit hand in hand in hand. >> Data is plentiful, actionable insights, you're saying are not necessary, >> not necessarily, not necessarily, and that that that, I think, is really, really important. You know, we call an empathy planning, but it's kind of like walking in the shoes of your audience like, would you like this? Would you be happy with this, or would you find this long queue to register annoying? You know, you have to sort of, you know, actually get in there, get in their shoes and and feel it just like you're going to feel it. >> Well, it's sometimes it's hard to predict it. It is. This is a pretty large venue. But it was packed today, but I don't think they could hold many more people. So I guess you have to say sorry. We've got to cut it off of this because of the experience. I mean, making hard decisions like that. Is that what you recommend? Yeah, >> I think of you. Well, the other thing, too, is, you know, our our attention span time. Someone told me recently that our attention spans like less than a gold fish. I don't know, I don't know anymore, but, you know, it's ah, you know what I want. One thing about the audience now is that they don't need to be polite, and they don't need to pay attention to boring content. And they don't need to do any of that because they're in power, right? Exactly. You know how many bent So I've been to where the entire audience is like looking at their phones with their ipads or the computers on DH checking out on the content, you know. So if you really want to engage people, you need to make sure that the experience really resonates with them. And having said that, you need to use technology because we live in this kind of on live world and people say to me like What's on line like you ever drive was sat Now you know you're driving, but you're being instructed by an application and a lot of what we do today, whether you're finding the bank on your phone, your dentist or your phone or you're doing this or that, we're connected in both ways. And so I think that's really important that we recognize that you can't tell people to turn their phones off. You can't necessarily, you know, use technology and interruptive way. It needs to be part of how people live their lives around this. >> So I have observed that we do a lot of these events and that's it becomes like rock concerts, and sometimes you say, Wow, this is a little over the top Now that's not from inferring right. That's not necessarily a bad thing. If your audience is into it, if your audience is, you know, some guy who provisions lungs, you know every day and gets out to Las Vegas once a year. Maybe that's an OK thing. I think it is. It's really understanding the audience. >> It is understanding the audience. And I think it is a good okay thing. And, you know, you want to have your audience entertained, engaged and, you know, have fun. And I want to tell people about it. Like I'm in Las Vegas. You're not, You know, they're like, you want people to get really fired up about what you're doing. And and and by the way, they're going to give your brand credit for that. They're going to say, you know, bam. I was at this event. Was it rocked? It was amazing. There was great entertainment. There is also a great content. There was great networking, you know, And the beer wasn't all that cheap. So, you know, you get all that stuff together and you have a really great time. >> So you're built your now building out a team? Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about tell me about the team and your vision. >> Okay, So, m c. I is a big company. We're in sixty three countries around the world, so we're not small fry. But the truth is, you know, the A big part of our business had been P. C. A. Is PCO professional. Congress organizes a lot of association events, and that's something and meetings, planning. And that's one thing. And of course, today experiences. They're changing. And it's not about just the logistics. It's really about again. Understand your audience, using strategy and creative to create compelling experiences. And that's what I'm CIA experience is doing. And we're doing it here in the UK we're getting set up, and it's going really, really well, and we're going to roll it out, you know, it's going to It's going to go around the world. So, um, we're working with some Fantastic brand's doing some fantastic project so we're all really excited. >> So what? Follow up question. But other than that, you're awesome. You are. You really have been an expert at this. You've You've worked. You know, I'd G worked G p j worked at Freeman, and I'm not on. Yeah, yeah. You've seen it around too much. You've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. And now you've taken that experience and you're bringing it to M. C. I experience no pun intended and you're trying to build out a sort of a next generation experience from Butt. But other than the fact that you're awesome, why should I work with you? >> Well, I tell you, you know, I think that the most of the clients that we work with come to us saying, You know, we don't know. We don't know And I think that's really, really important. I always tell this story. It's called the It's called the Drunkards Paradox, where a drunk man is underneath the lamppost pounding the ground and another man walks by. And so So what do you doing? And he says, I'm looking for my keys. And so the other guy gets down on his hands and knees. He's padding around. And then he said, Did you drop your keys right here under the lamppost? Because no, I dropped them across the street in the dark. Well, then why are you looking here? Because the light is much better here. And I have I tell you that I have a lot of experience in this business and events professionals on DH. Even some experience agencies tend to look where the light is better not where the breakthrough ideas are, and I think we are committed to making sure that we were really closely replying to really understand their brand, really understand who they're trying to build relationships with and and beg, borrow and steal from other disciplines, you know, in an intersectional way to create new kinds of opportunities for engagement. >> One of the things that mantra inside one of the many monsters inside of Amazon has raised the bar. I was at their UK headquarters yesterday, and she raised the bar signs all over the place. It's not a rinse and repeat culture. That's really what you're saying here that is easy to rinse and repeat. It's easy to look for the keys where the light the light is better, right? But that's not transformational. That's not transformation. It's really awesome. Having I'LL give you the last word the conference >> are Well, I think the conference was It was a great day here, and I think, you know, just just testimony to that is how long people stayed and stayed till the very end. You know, they were they were engaged and lots of great conversations were going on, you know, so fantastic. Well done. A WS and Amazon Web services and, um, yeah. More to come. >> Pleasure having you. Thanks for coming. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. That's a wrap here from London. Check out silicon angle dot com for all the news. The cube dot net is where all you find all these videos. Wicked bond dot com for the research Is David Dante signing out from London? Thanks for watching.

>> From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from "theCUBE" and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> There are very few political issues that get bipartisan support these days, nevermind consensus spanning geopolitical boundaries. But whether we're talking across the aisle or over the pond, there seems to be common agreement that the power of big tech firms should be regulated. But the government's track record when it comes to antitrust aimed at big tech is actually really mixed, mixed at best. History has shown that market forces rather than public policy have been much more effective at curbing monopoly power in the technology industry. Hello, and welcome to this week's "Wikibon CUBE" insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in frequent "CUBE" contributor Dave Moschella, author and senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Dave, welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks Dave, good to be here. >> So you just recently published an article, we're going to bring it up here and I'll read the title, "Theory Aside, Antitrust Advocates Should Keep Their "Big Tech" Ambitions Narrow". And in this post you argue that big sweeping changes like breaking apart companies to moderate monopoly power in the tech industry have been ineffective compared to market forces, but you're not saying government shouldn't be involved rather you're suggesting that more targeted measures combined with market forces are the right answer. Can you maybe explain a little bit more the premise behind your research and some of your conclusions? >> Sure, and first let's go back to that title, when I said, theory aside, that is referring to a huge debate that's going on in global antitrust circles these days about whether antitrust should follow the traditional path of being invoked when there's real harm, demonstrable harm to consumers or a new theory that says that any sort of vast monopoly power inevitably will be bad for competition and consumers at some point, so your best to intervene now to avoid harms later. And that school, which was a very minor part of the antitrust world for many, many years is now quite ascendant and the debate goes on doesn't matter which side of that you're on the questions sort of there well, all right, well, if you're going to do something to take on big tech and clearly many politicians, regulators are sort of issuing to do something, what would you actually do? And what are the odds that that'll do more good than harm? And that was really the origins of the piece and trying to take a historical view of that. >> Yeah, I learned a new word, thank you. Neo-brandzian had to look it up, but basically you're saying that traditionally it was proving consumer harm versus being proactive about the possibility or likelihood of consumer harm. >> Correct, and that's a really big shift that a lot of traditional antitrust people strongly object to, but is now sort of the trendy and more send and view. >> Got it, okay, let's look a little deeper into the history of tech monopolies and government action and see what we can learn from that. We put together this slide that we can reference. It shows the three historical targets in the tech business and now the new ones. In 1969, the DOJ went after IBM, Big Blue and it's 13 years later, dropped its suit. And then in 1984 the government broke Ma Bell apart and in the late 1990s, went after Microsoft, I think it was 1998 in the Wintel monopoly. And recently in an interview with tech journalist, Kara Swisher, the FTC chair Lena Khan claimed that the government played a major role in moderating the power of tech giants historically. And I think she even specifically referenced Microsoft or maybe Kara did and basically said the industry and consumers from the dominance of companies like Microsoft. So Dave, let's briefly talk about and Kara by the way, didn't really challenge that, she kind of let it slide. But let's talk about each of these and test this concept a bit. Were the government actions in these instances necessary? What were the outcomes and the consequences? Maybe you could start with IBM and AT&T. >> Yeah, it's a big topic and there's a lot there and a lot of history, but I might just sort of introduce by saying for whatever reasons antitrust has been part of the entire information technology industry history from mainframe to the current period and that slide sort of gives you that. And the reasons for that are I think once that we sort of know the economies of scale, network effects, lock in safe choices, lot of things that explain it, but the good bit about that is we actually have so much history of this and we can at least see what's happened in the past and when you look at IBM and AT&T they both were massive antitrust cases. The one against IBM was dropped and it was dropped in as you say, in 1980. Well, what was going on in at that time, IBM was sort of considered invincible and unbeatable, but it was 1981 that the personal computer came around and within just a couple of years the world could see that the computing paradigm had change from main frames and minis to PCs lines client server and what have you. So IBM in just a couple of years went from being unbeatable, you can't compete with them, we have to break up with them to being incredibly vulnerable and in trouble and never fully recovered and is sort of a shell of what it once was. And so the market took care of that and no action was really necessary just by everybody thinking there was. The case of AT&T, they did act and they broke up the company and I would say, first question is, was that necessary? Well, lots of countries didn't do that and the reality is 1980 breaking it up into long distance and regional may have made some sense, but by the 1990 it was pretty clear that the telecom world was going to change dramatically from long distance and fixed wires services to internet services, data services, wireless services and all of these things that we're going to restructure the industry anyways. But AT& T one to me is very interesting because of the unintended consequences. And I would say that the main unintended consequence of that was America's competitiveness in telecommunications took a huge hit. And today, to this day telecommunications is dominated by European, Chinese and other firms. And the big American sort of players of the time AT&T which Western Electric became Lucent, Lucent is now owned by Nokia and is really out of it completely and most notably and compellingly Bell Labs, the Bell Labs once the world's most prominent research institution now also a shell of itself and as it was part of Lucent is also now owned by the Finnish company Nokia. So that restructuring greatly damaged America's core strength in telecommunications hardware and research and one can argue we've never recovered right through this 5IG today. So it's a very good example of the market taking care of, the big problem, but meddling leading to some unintended consequences that have hurt the American competitiveness and as we'll talk about, probably later, you can see some of that going on again today and in the past with Microsoft and Intel. >> Right, yeah, Bell Labs was an American gem, kind of like Xerox PARC and basically gone now. You mentioned Intel and Microsoft, Microsoft and Intel. As many people know, some young people don't, IBM unwillingly handed its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft by outsourcing the micro processor and operating system, respectively. Those two companies ended up with IBM ironically, agreeing to take OS2 which was its proprietary operating system and giving Intel, Microsoft Windows not realizing that its ability to dominate a new disruptive market like PCs and operating systems had been vaporized to your earlier point by the new Wintel ecosystem. Now Dave, the government wanted to break Microsoft apart and split its OS business from its application software, in the case of Intel, Intel only had one business. You pointed out microprocessors so it couldn't bust it up, but take us through the history here and the consequences of each. >> Well, the Microsoft one is sort of a classic because the antitrust case which was raging in the sort of mid nineties and 1998 when it finally ended, those were the very, once again, everybody said, Bill Gates was unstoppable, no one could compete with Microsoft they'd buy them, destroy them, predatory pricing, whatever they were accusing of the attacks on Netscape all these sort of things. But those the very years where it was becoming clear first that Microsoft basically missed the early big years of the internet and then again, later missed all the early years of the mobile phone business going back to BlackBerrys and pilots and all those sorts of things. So here we are the government making the case that this company is unstoppable and you can't compete with them the very moment they're entirely on the defensive. And therefore wasn't surprising that that suit eventually was dropped with some minor concessions about Microsoft making it a little bit easier for third parties to work with them and treating people a little bit more, even handling perfectly good things that they did. But again, the more market took care of the problem far more than the antitrust activities did. The Intel one is also interesting cause it's sort of like the AT& T one. On the one hand antitrust actions made Intel much more likely and in fact, required to work with AMD enough to keep that company in business and having AMD lowered prices for consumers certainly probably sped up innovation in the personal computer business and appeared to have a lot of benefits for those early years. But when you look at it from a longer point of view and particularly when look at it again from a global point of view you see that, wow, they not so clear because that very presence of AMD meant that there's a lot more pressure on Intel in terms of its pricing, its profitability, its flexibility and its volumes. All the things that have made it harder for them to A, compete with chips made in Taiwan, let alone build them in the United States and therefore that long term effect of essentially requiring Intel to allow AMD to exist has undermined Intel's position globally and arguably has undermined America's position in the long run. And certainly Intel today is far more vulnerable to an ARM and Invidia to other specialized chips to China, to Taiwan all of these things are going on out there, they're less capable of resisting that than they would've been otherwise. So, you thought we had some real benefits with AMD and lower prices for consumers, but the long term unintended consequences are arguably pretty bad. >> Yeah, that's why we recently wrote in Intel two "Strategic To Fail", we'll see, Okay. now we come to 2022 and there are five companies with anti-trust targets on their backs. Although Microsoft seems to be the least susceptible to US government ironically intervention at this this point, but maybe not and we show "The Cincos Comas Club" in a homage to Russ Hanneman of the show "Silicon Valley" Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all with trillion dollar plus valuations. But meta briefly crossed that threshold like Mr. Hanneman lost a comma and is now well under that market cap probably around five or 600 million, sorry, billion. But under serious fire nonetheless Dave, people often don't realize the immense monopoly power that IBM had which relatively speaking when measured its percent of industry revenue or profit dwarf that of any company in tech ever, but the industry is much smaller then, no internet, no cloud. Does it call for a different approach this time around? How should we think about these five companies their market power, the implications of government action and maybe what you suggested more narrow action versus broad sweeping changes. >> Yeah, and there's a lot there. I mean, if you go back to the old days IBM had what, 70% of the computer business globally and AT&T had 90% or so of the American telecom market. So market shares that today's players can only dream of. Intel and Microsoft had 90% of the personal computer market. And then you look at today the big five and as wealthy and as incredibly successful as they've been, you sort of have almost the argument that's wrong on the face of it. How can five companies all of which compete with each other to at least some degree, how can they all be monopolies? And the reality is they're not monopolies, they're all oligopolies that are very powerful firms, but none of them have an outright monopoly on anything. There are competitors in all the spaces that they're in and increasing and probably increasingly so. And so, yeah, I think people conflate the extraordinary success of the companies with this belief that therefore they are monopolist and I think they're far less so than those in the past. >> Great, all right, I want to do a quick drill down to cloud computing, it's a key component of digital business infrastructure in his book, "Seeing Digital", Dave Moschella coined a term the matrix or the key which is really referred to the key technology platforms on which people are going to build digital businesses. Dave, we joke you should have called it the metaverse you were way ahead of your time. But I want to look at this ETR chart, we show spending momentum or net score on the vertical access market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. We show this view a lot, we put a dotted line at the 40% mark which indicates highly elevated spending. And you can sort of see Microsoft in the upper right, it's so far up to the right it's hidden behind the January 22 and AWS is right there. Those two dominate the cloud far ahead of the pack including Google Cloud. Microsoft and to a lesser extent AWS they dominate in a lot of other businesses, productivity, collaboration, database, security, video conferencing. MarTech with LinkedIn PC software et cetera, et cetera, Googles or alphabets of business of course is ads and we don't have similar spending data on Apple and Facebook, but we know these companies dominate their respective business. But just to give you a sense of the magnitude of these companies, here's some financial data that's worth looking at briefly. The table ranks companies by market cap in trillions that's the second column and everyone in the club, but meta and each has revenue well over a hundred billion dollars, Amazon approaching half a trillion dollars in revenue. The operating income and cash positions are just mind boggling and the cash equivalents are comparable or well above the revenues of highly successful tech companies like Cisco, Dell, HPE, Oracle, and Salesforce. They're extremely profitable from an operating income standpoint with the clear exception of Amazon and we'll come back to that in a moment and we show the revenue multiples in the last column, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, just insane. Dave, there are other equally important metrics, CapX is one which kind of sets the stage for future scale and there are other measures. >> Yeah, including our research and development where those companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars over the years. And I think it's easy to look at those numbers and just say, this doesn't seem right, how can any companies have so much and spend so much? But if you think of what they're actually doing, those companies are building out the digital infrastructure of essentially the entire world. And I remember once meeting some folks at Google, and they said, beyond AI, beyond Search, beyond Android, beyond all the specific things we do, the biggest thing we're actually doing is building a physical infrastructure that can deliver search results on any topic in microseconds and the physical capacity they built costs those sorts of money. And when people start saying, well, we should have lots and lots of smaller companies well, that sounds good, yeah, it's all right, but where are those companies going to get the money to build out what needs to be built out? And every country in the world is trying to build out its digital infrastructure and some are going to do it much better than others. >> I want to just come back to that chart on Amazon for a bit, notice their comparatively tiny operating profit as a percentage of revenue, Amazon is like Bezos giant lifestyle business, it's really never been that profitable like most retail. However, there's one other financial data point around Amazon's business that we want to share and this chart here shows Amazon's operating profit in the blue bars and AWS's in the orange. And the gray line is the percentage of Amazon's overall operating profit that comes from AWS. That's the right most access, so last quarter we were well over a hundred percent underscoring the power of AWS and the horrendous margins in retail. But AWS is essentially funding Amazon's entrance into new markets, whether it's grocery or movies, Bezos moves into space. Dave, a while back you collaborated with us and we asked our audience, what could disrupt Amazon? And we came up with your detailed help, a number of scenarios as shown here. And we asked the audience to rate the likelihood of each scenario in terms of its likelihood of disrupting Amazon with a 10 being highly likely on average the score was six with complacency, arrogance, blindness, you know, self-inflicted wounds really taking the top spot with 6.5. So Dave is breaking up Amazon the right formula in your view, why or why not? >> Yeah, there's a couple of things there. The first is sort of the irony that when people in the sort of regulatory world talk about the power of Amazon, they almost always talk about their power in consumer markets, whether it's books or retail or impact on malls or main street shops or whatever and as you say that they make very little money doing that. The interest people almost never look at the big cloud battle between Amazon, Microsoft and lesser extent Google, Alibaba others, even though that's where they're by far highest market share and pricing power and all those things are. So the regulatory focus is sort of weird, but you know, the consumer stuff obviously gets more appeal to the general public. But that survey you referred to me was interesting because one of the challenges I sort of sent myself I was like okay, well, if I'm going to say that IBM case, AT&T case, Microsoft's case in all those situations the market was the one that actually minimized the power of those firms and therefore the antitrust stuff wasn't really necessary. Well, how true is that going to be again, just cause it's been true in the past doesn't mean it's true now. So what are the possible scenarios over the 2020s that might make it all happen again? And so each of those were sort of questions that we put out to others, but the ones that to me by far are the most likely I mean, they have the traditional one of company cultures sort of getting fat and happy and all, that's always the case, but the more specific ones, first of all by far I think is China. You know, Amazon retail is a low margin business. It would be vulnerable if it didn't have the cloud profits behind it, but imagine a year from now two years from now trade tensions with China get worse and Christmas comes along and China just says, well, you know, American consumers if you want that new exercise bike or that new shoes or clothing, well, anything that we make well, actually that's not available on Amazon right now, but you can get that from Alibaba. And maybe in America that's a little more farfetched, but in many countries all over the world it's not farfetched at all. And so the retail divisions vulnerability to China just seems pretty obvious. Another possible disruption, Amazon has spent billions and billions with their warehouses and their robots and their automated inventory systems and all the efficiencies that they've done there, but you could argue that maybe someday that's not really necessary that you have Search which finds where a good is made and a logistical system that picks that up and delivers it to customers and why do you need all those warehouses anyways? So those are probably the two top one, but there are others. I mean, a lot of retailers as they get stronger online, maybe they start pulling back some of the premium products from Amazon and Amazon takes their cut of whatever 30% or so people might want to keep more of that in house. You see some of that going on today. So the idea that the Amazon is in vulnerable disruption is probably is wrong and as part of the work that I'm doing, as part of stuff that I do with Dave and SiliconANGLE is how's that true for the others too? What are the scenarios for Google or Apple or Microsoft and the scenarios are all there. And so, will these companies be disrupted as they have in the past? Well, you can't say for sure, but the scenarios are certainly plausible and I certainly wouldn't bet against it and that's what history tells us. And it could easily happen once again and therefore, the antitrust should at least be cautionary and humble and realize that maybe they don't need to act as much as they think. >> Yeah, now, one of the things that you mentioned in your piece was felt like narrow remedies, were more logical. So you're not arguing for totally Les Affaire you're pushing for remedies that are more targeted in scope. And while the EU just yesterday announced new rules to limit the power of tech companies and we showed the article, some comments here the regulators they took the social media to announce a victory and they had a press conference. I know you watched that it was sort of a back slapping fest. The comments however, that we've sort of listed here are mixed, some people applauded, but we saw many comments that were, hey, this is a horrible idea, this was rushed together. And these are going to result as you say in unintended consequences, but this is serious stuff they're talking about applying would appear to be to your point or your prescription more narrowly defined restrictions although a lot of them to any company with a market cap of more than 75 billion Euro or turnover of more than 77.5 billion Euro which is a lot of companies and imposing huge penalties for violations up to 20% of annual revenue for repeat offenders, wow. So again, you've taken a brief look at these developments, you watched the press conference, what do you make of this? This is an application of more narrow restrictions, but in your quick assessment did they get it right? >> Yeah, let's break that down a little bit, start a little bit of history again and then get to Europe because although big sweeping breakups of the type that were proposed for IBM, Microsoft and all weren't necessary that doesn't mean that the government didn't do some useful things because they did. In the case of IBM government forces in Europe and America basically required IBM to make it easier for companies to make peripherals type drives, disc drives, printers that worked with IBM mainframes. They made them un-bundle their software pricing that made it easier for database companies and others to sell their of products. With AT&T it was the government that required AT&T to actually allow other phones to connect to the network, something they argued at the time would destroy security or whatever that it was the government that required them to allow MCI the long distance carrier to connect to the AT network for local deliveries. And with that Microsoft and Intel the government required them to at least treat their suppliers more even handly in terms of pricing and policies and support and such things. So the lessons out there is the big stuff wasn't really necessary, but the little stuff actually helped a lot and I think you can see the scenarios and argue in the piece that there's little stuff that can be done today in all the cases for the big five, there are things that you might want to consider the companies aren't saints they take advantage of their power, they use it in ways that sometimes can be reigned in and make for better off overall. And so that's how it brings us to the European piece of it. And to me, the European piece is much more the bad scenario of doing too much than the wiser course of trying to be narrow and specific. What they've basically done is they have a whole long list of narrow things that they're all trying to do at once. So they want Amazon not to be able to share data about its selling partners and they want Apple to open up their app store and they don't want people Google to be able to share data across its different services, Android, Search, Mail or whatever. And they don't want Facebook to be able to, they want to force Facebook to open up to other messaging services. And they want to do all these things for all the big companies all of which are American, and they want to do all that starting next year. And to me that looks like a scenario of a lot of difficult problems done quickly all of which might have some value if done really, really well, but all of which have all kinds of risks for the unintended consequence we've talked before and therefore they seem to me being too much too soon and the sort of problems we've seen in the past and frankly to really say that, I mean, the Europeans would never have done this to the companies if they're European firms, they're doing this because they're all American firms and the sort of frustration of Americans dominance of the European tech industry has always been there going back to IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and all of them. But it's particularly strong now because the tech business is so big. And so I think the politics of this at a time where we're supposedly all this great unity of America and NATO and Europe in regards to Ukraine, having the Europeans essentially go after the most important American industry brings in the geopolitics in I think an unavoidable way. And I would think the story is going to get pretty tense over the next year or so and as you say, the Europeans think that they're taking massive actions, they think they're doing the right thing. They think this is the natural follow on to the GDPR stuff and even a bigger version of that and they think they have more to come and they see themselves as the people taming big tech not just within Europe, but for the world and absent any other rules that they may pull that off. I mean, GDPR has indeed spread despite all of its flaws. So the European thing which it doesn't necessarily get huge attention here in America is certainly getting attention around the world and I would think it would get more, even more going forward. >> And the caution there is US public policy makers, maybe they can provide, they will provide a tailwind maybe it's a blind spot for them and it could be a template like you say, just like GDPR. Okay, Dave, we got to leave it there. Thanks for coming on the program today, always appreciate your insight and your views, thank you. >> Hey, thanks a lot, Dave. >> All right, don't forget these episodes are all available as podcast, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, "Breaking Analysis Podcast". Check out ETR website, etr.ai. We publish every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @davevellante. Comment on my LinkedIn post. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Michelle for "theCUBE Insights" powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (slow tempo music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody this is Dave lotta a and this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage this cube conversation I'm really excited Craig Hibbert is here he's a vice president of infinite at and he focuses on strategic accounts he's been in the storage business for a long time he's got great perspectives correct good to see you again thanks for coming on good to say that good to be back so there's a there's a saying don't fight fashion well you guys fight fashion all the time you got these patents you got this thing called neuro cache you're your founder and chairman mo che has always been - cutting against the grain and doing things his own way but I'd love for you to talk about some of those things the patents that you have some architecture the neuro cache fill us in on all that sure so when we go in we talk to customers and we say we have a hundred and thirty-eight patents a lot of them say well that's great but you know how does that relate to me a lot of these are and or gates and certain things that they don't know how it fits into the day to day life so I think this is a good opportunity to talk about several of those that do and so obviously the neural cache is something that is is dynamic instead of having a key in a hash which all the other vendors have just our position in that table allows us to determine all the values and things we need from it but it also monitors this is an astounding statement but from the moment that array is powered on every i/o that flows through it we track data for the life of the reins for some of these customers it's five and six years so you know those blocks of data are they random are they sequential are they hot are they cold when was the last time was accessed and this is key information because we bring intelligence to the lower level block layer where everybody else has just done they just ship things things come into acutely moving they have no idea what they are we do and the value around that is that we can then predict when workloads are aging out today you have manual people writing things in in things like easy tier or faster or competing products or two stories right and all these things that that manage all these problems are the human intervention we do it dynamically and that feeds information back into the Ray and helps to determine which virtual ray group it should reside on and where on the discipline Dalls based upon the age of the the application how it's trending the these are very powerful things in a day where we need eminent information send in to a consumer in a store I'd it's all all this dynamic processing and the ability to bring that in so that's that's one of the things we do another one is that the catalyst for our fast rebuilds we can rebuild two failed full 12 terabyte drives in under 80 minutes if those drives are half full then it's nine minutes and this is by understanding where all the data is and sharing the rebuild process from the drives that's another one of our patterns perhaps one of the most challenging that we have is that storage vendors tend to do error correction at the fibre channel layer once that data enters into the storage array there is no mechanism to check the integrity of that data and a couple of vendors have an option to do this but they can only do it for the first right and they also recommend you to turn that feature off because it slows down the box so we're infinite out is unique and I think this is for me one of the the most important paths that we have is that every time we ride a 64k slice in the system we assign some metadata to that and obviously it has a CRC check sum but more importantly it has the locality of reference so if we subsequently go back and do a reread and the CRC matches but the location has changed we know that corruption has happened sometimes a bit flipped on right all of these things that constitute sound data corruption that's not just the impressive part what we do at that point is we dynamically deduce that the data has been corrupt and using the parity in the quorum where it were a raid 6 like a dual parity configuration we rebuild that data on the fly without the application or the end-user knowing that there was a problem and that way served back the data that was actually written we guarantee that were the only array that does that today there's massive for our customers I mean the time to rebuild you said 12 terabyte drive I mean I yeah I would have thought I mean they always joke how long do you think it takes to rebuild a 30 terabyte drive because eventually you know sure you know it's like a month with us it's the same so if you look at our three terabyte drives it was 18 minutes the four terabyte drives 18 minutes the 618 minutes 812 will be good all the way up to 20 terabyte drives figuration we have no what I came back to a conversation we've had many many times we've shown you guys we were early on in the flash storage trend and we saw the prices coming down we done like high-speed spinning disks were there days were numbered and sure correct in that prediction but then you know disk drives have kept that distance yeah you guys have a skewed going all flash because the economics but help us understand this because you've got this mechanical device and you yet you guys are able to claim performance that's equal to or oftentimes much much better than a lot of your all flash competitors and I want to understand that a little bit it suggests to me that there's so much other overhead going on and other ball necks in the system that you guys are dealing with both architectural II and through your intelligence software can you talk about that absolutely absolutely the software is the key right we are a software company and we have some phenomenal guys that do the software piece so as far as the performance goes the the backend spinning discs are really obfuscated by two layers of virtualization and we ensure that because we have massive amounts of DRAM that all of that data flows into DRAM it will sit in DRAM for an astonishing five minutes I say astonishing because most of our vendors try to evict cache straight away so they've got room for the next one and that does not facilitate a mechanism by which you can inspect those dumb pieces of data and if you get enough dumb data you can start to make him intelligent right you can go get discarded data from cell phone towers and find out we know where people go to work and what time they worker because of that what demographic at the end and you know now you're predicting the election based upon discarding itself on talladega so so if you can take dumb data and put patterns around it and make it sequential which we do we write out a log structured right so we're really really fast at the front-end and some customers say well how do you manage that on the backend here's something that our designers and architects did very very well the the speed of the of ddr3 is about 15k per second which is what Cindy REM right now we have 480 spindles on the backend if you say each one of them can do a hundred 100 mics per second which they can do more than that 200 that gives us a forty eight gigabit gigabyte sorry per second backplane D stage ability which is three times faster than the DRAM so when you look at it the box has been designed all the way so there is no bottleneck through flowing through the DRAM anything that still been access that comes out of that five minute window once it's D stays to all the spindles incidentally analog structured right so right now it over 480 spindles all the time and then you've got the random still on the SSD which will help to keep that response time around about 2 milliseconds and just one last point on there I have a customer that has 1.2 petabytes written on a 1.3 a petabyte box and is still achieving a 2 millisecond response time and that's unheard of because most block arrays as you fill them up to 60 70 % that the performance starts going in the tank so I go down memory lane here so the most successful you know storage array in the history of the industry my opinion probably fact it was symmetric sand mosha a designed that he eschewed raid5 everybody was on the crazy about raid 5 is dead no no just mirror it yeah and that's gonna give us the performance that we need and he would write they would write 2d ran and then then of course you'd think that the D stage bandwidth was the bottleneck because they had such a back high a large number of back-end spindles the bandwidth coming out of that DRAM was enormous you just described something actually quite similar so that I was going to ask you is it the D stage bandwidth the bottleneck and you're saying no because your D stage being what there's actually three tighter than the D rate up it is so with the symmetric some typical platforms you would have a certain amount of disk in a disk group and you would assign a phase and Fiber Channel ports to that and there'd be certain segments in cash that would dedicated those discs we have done away with that we have so many well with two layers of the virtualization at the front as we talked about but because nothing is a bottleneck and because we've optimized each component the DRAM and I talked about the SSDs we don't write heavily over those we write in a sequential pattern to the SSD so that the wear rate is elongated and so because of that and we have all the virtualized raid groups configured in cache so what happens is as we get to that five-minute window we're about 2 D state all of the raid groups the al telling the cash how to lay out the virtual raid structure based on how busy or the raid groups are at the time so if you were to pause it and ask us where it's going we can tell you it's the Machine line it's the artificial intelligence of saying this raid group just took a D stage you know or there's a lot of data in the cache that's heading for these but based upon the the prediction of the heart the cold that I talked about a few months ago and so it will make a determination to use a different virtual rater and that's all done in memory as opposed to to rely on the disk so we're not we don't have the concept of spare disk we have the concept of spare capacity it's all shared and because it's all shared it's this very powerful pool that just doesn't get bogged down and continues to operate all the way up to the full capacity so I'm struggling with this there is no bottleneck because there's always a problem that can assure them so where is the bottleneck the ball net for us is when the erase fault so if you overwrite the maximum bandwidth and that historically you know in in 2016-2017 was a roughly 12 cube per second we got that in the fall 2018 to roundabout 15 and we're about to make the announcement that we've made tectonic increases in that where will now have right bandwidth approach in 16 gig per second and also read bandwidth about 25 K per second that 16 is going to move up to 20 remember what I said we release a number and we gradually grow into it and and and maximize and tweak that software when you think that most or flash arrays can do maybe one and a half gig per second sustained writes that gives us a massive leg up over our competition instead of buying an all flash array for this and another mid-tier array for this and coal social this you can just buy one platform that services at all all the protocols and they're all access the same way so you write an API one way mark should almost as big fan of this about writing code obviously was spinnaker and some of those other things that he's been involved in and we do the same thing so our API is the same for the block as it is for the NAS as it is for the ice cozy so it's it's very consistent you write it once and you can adapt multiple products well I think you bring about customers for short bit everybody talks about digital transformation and it's this big buzzword but when you talk to customers they're all going through some kind of digital transformation oh they want to get digital right let's put it that way yeah I don't want to get disrupted they see Amazon buying grocers and while getting into the financial services and content and it's all about the data so there's a real disruption scenario going on for every business and and the innovation engine seems to be data okay but data just sitting there and a data swamp is no good so you got to apply machine intelligence for that to that data and you got to have scale mm-hmm do you guys make a big deal about about petabyte scale yeah what are your customers telling you about the importance of that and how does it fit into that innovation sandwich that I just laid out sure no it's great question so we have some very because we're so have 70 petabytes of production over those 70 yep we have a couple of those both financial institutions very very good at what they do we worked with them previously with a with another product that really kind of introduced another one of most Shea's products that was XIV that introduced the concepts of self-healing and no tuning and things like we don't even talked about that there's no tuning knobs on the infinite I probably should mention that but our customers said have said to us we couldn't scale you know we had a couple hundred terabyte boxes before there were okay you know you've brought you've raised the game by bringing in a much higher level of availability and much higher capacity we can take one of our but I'm in this process right now the customer we can take one of our boxes and collapse three vmax 20 of VMAX 40s on it we have numerous occassions gone into establishments that have 11 12 23 inch cabinets two and a half thousand spindles of the old DMC VMO station we've replaced it with one 19-inch rack of arts right that's a phenomenal state when you think about it and that was paid for you think some of these v-max 47 it's 192 ports on them Fiber Channel ports we have 24 so the fibre channel port reduction the power heating and cooling over an entire row down to one eight kilowatt consumption by the way our power is the same whether it's three four terabytes six eight twelve they all use the same power plan so as we increase the geometry capacity of the drives we decrease the cost per usable well we're actually far more efficient than all fly sharing with the most environmentally friendly hybrids been in this planet on the array so asking about cloud so miss gray on the planet that would be yeah so when cloud first sort of came out of the division Financial Services guys are like no clouds that's a bad word they're definitely you know leaning into that adopting it more but still there's a lot of workloads that they're gonna leave on Prem they want to that cloud experience to the data what are you hearing from the financial services customers in particular and I and I've single them out because they're they're very advanced they're very demanding they are they a lot of dough and so what do you see in terms of them building cloud hybrid cloud and and what it means for for them and specifically the storage industry yeah so I'm actually surprised that they've adopted it as much as they have to be honest with you and I think the the economics are driving that but having said that whenever they want to get the data back or they want to bring it back home prime for various reasons that's when they're running into problems right it's it's like how do I get my own data back well you've got to open up the checkbook and write big checks so I think infini debt has a nice strategy there where we have the same capabilities that you have on prime you having the cloud don't forget nobody else has that one of the encumbrances to people move into the cloud has been that it lacks the enterprise functionality that people are used to in the data center but because our cost point is so affordable we become not only very attractive or four on Prem but for cloud solutions as well of course we have our own new tricks cloud offering which allows people to use as dr or replications and so however you want to do it where you can use the same api's and code that your own dis and extrapolate that out to the cloud I was there which is which is very helpful and so we have the ability if you take a snapshot on Amazon it may take four hours and it's been copied over to an s3 device that's the only way they can make it affordable to do it and then if you need that data back it's it's not it's not imminent you've got to rehydrate from s3 and then copy it back over your snapshot with infinite data its instantaneous we do not stop i/o when we do snapshots and another one the patterns we use the time synchronous mechanism every every AO the rise has a timestamp and we when we take a snapshot we just do a point in time and in a timestamp that's greater than that instantiation point is for the volume and previous is for the snapshot we can do that in the cloud we can instantly recover hundreds of terabytes worth of databases and make them instantly available so our story again with the innovation our innovation wasn't just for for on pram it was to be facilitated anyway you are and that same price point carries forward from here into the cloud when Amazon and Microsoft wake up and realized that we have this phenomenal story here I think they'll be buying from us in leaps and bounds it's it's the only way to make the cloud affordable for storage vendors so these are the things you talk about you know bringing bringing data back and bringing workloads back and and there are tool chains that are now on Prem the kubernetes is a great example that our cloud like and so when you bring data back you want to have that cloud experience so automated operations plays into that you know automation used to be something that people are afraid of and they want to do do manual tearing member they wanted their own knobs to turn those days are gone because people want to drive digital transformations they don't want to spend time doing all this heavy lifting I'm talk about that a little bit and where you guys fit yeah I mean you know I say to my customers to not to knock our competition but you can't have a service processor as the inter communication point between what the customer wants and it deciding where it's going to talk to the Iranian configure it's going to be instantaneous and so we all we have we don't have any Java we don't have any flash we don't have any hosts we don't have massive servers around the data center collecting information we just have an html5 interface and so our time to deployment is very very quick when we land on the customer's dark the box goes in we hook up the power we put the drives in we're Haiti's the word V talk because it brings back memories for a lot of course I am now we're going back in time right knowing that main here and so we're very dynamic both in how we forward face the customers but also on the backend for ourselves we eat our own dog food in the sense that we are we have an automation team we've automated our migration from non infinite out platforms towards that uses some level of artificial intelligence we've also built a lot of parameters around things like going with ServiceNow and custom sites because well you can do with our API what other people take you know page and page of code I'll give you an example one of our customers said I need OC i the the let-up management product we called met up and they said hey listen you know it usually takes six months to get an appointment and that it takes at least six months to do the comb we said no no we're not like any other storage render we don't have all these silly raid groups and spare disk capacity you know this weave three commands we can show in the API and we showed them the light Wow can you send us an array we said no we can do something better we were designed SDS right when when infinite out was coded there was no hardware and the reason we did that is because software developers will always code to the level of resilience of the hardware so if you take away that Hardware the software developers have to code to make something to withstand any type of hardware that comes in and at the end of the coding process that's when we started bringing in the hardware pieces so we were written STS we can send vendors and customers a an OVA a virtual appliance of our box they were able to the in a week they told the custom we have to go through full QA no reason why it wouldn't work and they did it for us and got it was a massive customer of theirs and ours that's a powerful story the time to deployment for your homegrown apps as well as things like ServiceNow an MCI incredible infinite out three API calls we were done so you guys had a little share our partnership with met up in the field we did yeah I mean was great they had a massive license with this particular customer they wanted our storage on the platform and we worked very very quickly with them they were very accommodating and we'd love to get our storage qualified behind their behind their heads right now for another customer as well so yeah there's definitely some sooner people realize what we have a Splunk massive for us what we're able to do was plunk in one box where people the competitors can't do in a row so it so it's very compelling what we actually bring in how we do it and that API level is incredibly powerful and we're utilizing that ourselves I would like to see some integration with canonical Marshall what these guys have done a great job with SDS plays we'd like to bring that here do spinnaker do collect if I could do some of those things as well that we're working on the automation we just added another employee another FTE to the automation team and infinite out so we do these and we engage with customers and we help you get out of that trench that is antiquity and move forward into the you know into the vision of how you do one thing well and it permeates the cloud on primary and hybrid all those guys well that API philosophy that you have in the infrastructure is code model that you just described allows you to build out your ecosystem in a really fast way so Greg thanks so much for coming on thank you and doing that double click with this really I'd love to have you back great thanks a lot Dave all right thank you welcome thank you for watching you're watching the cube and this is Dave Volante we'll see you next time