hello and welcome to the cube i'm dave nicholson chief technology officer at thecube and we're here for a very special cube conversation with andy brown from broadcom andy welcome to the cube tell us a little about yourself a little bit my about myself my name is andy brown i'm currently the senior director of software architecture and performance analysis here within the data center solutions group at broadcom i've been doing that for about seven years prior to that i held various positions within the system architecture systems engineering and ic development organization but ultimately as well i spent some time in our support organization and managing our support team but ultimately have landed in the architecture organization as well as performance analysis great so a lot of what you do is around improving storage performance tell us more about that so let me give you a brief history of uh storage from from my perspective um you know i as i mentioned i go back about 30 years in my career and that would have started back in the ncr microelectronics days and originally with parallel scuzzy so that would be if anyone would remember the 5380 controller which was one of the original parallel scuzzy controllers that existed and built by ncr microelectronics at the time i've i've seen the advent of parallel scuzzy a stint of fiber channel ultimately leading into the serialization of those of the scuzzy standard into sas as well as sata and then ultimately leading to nvme protocols and the advent of flash moving from hard drives into a flash based media and as well on on that's on the storage side on the host side moving from parallel interfaces isa if everybody could remember that moving to pci pci express that's where we land today so andy we're square in the middle of the era of both nvme and sas what kinds of challenges does that overlap represent well i think you know obviously we've seen sas around for a while it was the conversion from parallel into a serial attached scuzzy and that really sas brings with it the ability to uh connect on really a high number of devices um and uh was was kind of the original scaling of devices and and really uh also enabled uh was was one of the things that enabled flash based media given the the speed and performance that came to the table of course nvme came in as well with the promise of of even higher speeds and as we saw flash media really really take a strong role in storage uh nvme came around and and really was focused on trying to address that whereas sas originated with hard drive technology nvme was really born out of how do we how do we most efficiently deal with flash based media you know sas with its but sas still carries a benefit on scalability nvme maybe has i don't want to say challenges there but it's definitely was not designed as much to be broadly scalable across many many say hundreds or thousands of devices but definitely addressed some of the performance issues that were coming up as flash media was becoming so uh uh was was increasing the overall storage performance that we could experience if you will let's talk about host interfaces like pcie what's the significance there um really uh the all the storage in the world all of the performance in the world and on the storage side is not of much use to you unless you can really feed it into the into the beast if you will into the cpu and into this the rest of the server subsystem and that's really where pci comes into play pci uh originally was in parallel form and then moved to serial with pci express as we know it today and and really has created a pathway to to to enable not not only storage performance but any other adapter or any other networking or other other types of technologies to just open up that pathway and feed the processor if and as we've moved through from pci to pci express pci 2.0 3.0 4.0 and just opening up those pipes has really enabled just a tremendous amount of flow of data into into the compute engine allowing it to be analyzed sorted used to analyze data big data uh ai type applications just those pipes are critical in those types of applications we know we've seen dramatic increases in performance going from one generation of pcie to the next but how does that translate into the worlds of sas sata and nvme um so from a performance perspective when we look at these different types of media whether it be sata sas or nvme um of course there are performance difference inherent in that media sata being probably the lowest performing with nvme uh topping out at higher performing although sas can perform quite well as a flash based you know as a protocol connected to flash based media and of course nvme from us an individual device scaling from a by one to a by four interface really that is where nvme kind of has enabled a bigger pipe directly to the storage media uh being able to scale up to buy four whereas sas is kind of limited to buy one maybe buy two in some cases although most servers only connect the sas device by one so from a difference perspective then you're really wanting to create a solution or or enable the infrastructure to be able to consume that performance that nvme is going to give you and i think that you know that is something where our solutions have really in in the recent generations shine at their ability to really now uh keep up with uh storage performance in nvme uh as well as provide that connectivity back down into the sas and sata world as well let's talk about your perspective on raid today so uh there's been a lot of uh views and opinions on raid over the years it's been a and those have been changing over time raid has been around for a very very long time uh probably about as long as again going back over my 30-year career uh it's been around for almost the entire time obviously raid originally was viewed as as something that was uh very very necessary uh devices fail they don't last forever but the data that's on them is very very important and people care about that so raid was brought about you know knowing that individual devices that are storing that data are going to fail and really took hold as a primary mechanism of protection but as time went on uh and and as performance moved up uh both in the server and both in in the media itself if we start talking about flash uh raid really took on people people started to look at traditional server storage raid uh but with maybe a more of a negative connotation i think that because uh to be quite honest it fell behind a little bit if you look at things like parity raid raid five and rate six very very effective and efficient means of protecting your data very storage efficient but ultimately had some penalties a primarily around wright performance random rights in raid 5 volumes was not keeping up with what really needed to be there and um i think that really shifted uh opinions of raid that hey it's just it's just not it's not going to keep up and we need to move on to other avenues and and we've seen that we've seen disaggregated storage and other solutions pop up to protect your data obviously in cloud environments and things like that it's shown up and uh and they have been successful so one of the drawbacks with raid is always the performance tax associated with generating parity for parity rate what has broadcom done to address those potential bottlenecks we've really solved the raid performance issue the right performance issue we're we're in our latest generation of controllers we're exceeding a million rate five right iops which is enough to satisfy many many many applications as a matter of fact even in virtual environments aggregated solutions we have multiple applications and then as well in the rebuild arena we really have through our architecture through our hardware automation have been able to move the bar on that to where the rebuild not only the rebuild times have been brought down dramatically in sas based or in i'm sorry in flash based solutions but the performance that you can observe while those rebuilds are going on is almost immeasurable so in most applications you would almost observe no performance deficiencies during a rebuild operation which is really night and day compared to where things were just a few short years ago so the fact that you've been able to dramatically decrease the time necessary for a raid rebuild is obviously extremely important but give us your overall performance philosophy from broadcom's point of view you know over the years we have recognized that performance is is obviously critically important for our products and the ability to analyze performance from many many angles is critically important there are literally infinite ways you can look at performance in a storage subsystem what we have done in our labs and in our solutions through not only hardware scaling in our in our in our labs but also through automation scripts and things like that allowed us to collect a substantial amount of data to look at the performance of our solutions from every angle you know iops bandwidth application level performance small topologies large topologies just just many many aspects it's still honestly only scratches the surface of all the possible uh performance points that you could gather but it it has we have moved the bar dramatically in that regard and and it's something that our customers really demanded of us um you know storage technology has gotten more complex and you have to look at it from a lot different angles especially on the performance front to make sure that there are no holes there that somebody's going to run into so based on specific customer needs and requests you look at performance from a variety of different angles um what are some of the trends that you're seeing specifically in storage performance today and moving into the future yeah emerging trends within the storage industry i think that to look at the emerging trends you really need to go back and look at where we started we started uh in compute where people were you would have basically your uh your server that would be under the desk in a small business operation and individual uh businesses would have their own uh set of set of servers and and the storage would really be localized to those obviously the industry has recognized that um that to some extent disaggregation of that we we see that obviously in what's happening in cloud uh in hyper-converged storage and things like that those afford a tremendous amount of flexibility uh and and are obviously uh great players in the storage world today but what with that flexibility is come some sacrifice in performance and actually quite substantial sacrifice and what we're observing is almost uh it comes back full circle the uh the need for inbox high performing server storage that is well protected uh and and with people with confidence that people have confidence that their data is protected and that they can uh extract the performance that they need for the demanding database applications that still exist today and they still operate in in the offices around the country and around the world that really need to protect their data on a local basis in the server and i think that from a trend perspective that's what we're seeing also from the standpoint of nvme store nvme itself is really started out with hey we'll just software rate that we'll just we'll just wrap software around that we can protect the data we had so many customers come back to us saying you know what we really need hardware raid on nvme and when they came to us we were ready we had a solution ready to go and we're able to provide that and now we're seeing going on demand we are we are complementary to other storage solutions out there server storage is not going to necessarily rule the world but it is surely has a place in the broader storage spectrum and we think we have the right solution for that speaking of servers and server-based storage why would for example a dell customer care about the broadcom components in that dell server so uh uh let's say you're configuring a dell server and you're going why does why does hardware raid matter what what what's important about that well i think when you look at today's hardware raid uh first of all you're going to see dramatically better performance you're going to see dramatically better performance in it's going to enable you to put raid 5 volumes a very effective and efficient mechanism for protecting your data a storage efficient mechanism you're going to use raid 5 volumes where you weren't able to do that before because when you're in the millions of iops range you really uh can satisfy a lot of application needs out there and and then you're going to also going to have rebuilt times that are lightning fast your performance is not going to degrade when you're when you're running those application especially database applications but not not only database but streaming applications uh bandwidth uh to to protected raid volumes is is almost almost imperceptibly different from just raw bandwidth to the media so the rate rate configurations in today's dell servers really afford you the opportunity to make use of that storage where you you may not have uh you may have already written it off as well ray just doesn't is not going to get me there quite frankly uh into this in in the storage servers that dell is providing uh with with raid technology uh there are huge windows open and what you can do today with applications well all of this is obviously good news for dell and dell customers thanks again andy for joining us for this cube conversation i'm dave nicholson for the cube [Music]

>>The cube presents. Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante. The cube is live at Dell technologies world 2022. Dave, hope you say live, live <laugh>. We are live. We are in person. We are three-D. We are also here on the first day of our coverage with an eight time, right? Eight time cube alum, GA Norris joins us the senior vice president of edge portfolio solutions at Dell technologies. Welcome back our friend. >>Thank you. It's great to be here in this forum with live people, you know, and 3d, >>Isn't it. We're amazing. We're not, we're not via a screen. This is actually real. So Gill a a lot, a lot of buzz, great attendance at this first event, since 20, lot's been going on since then, we're talking a lot about edge. It's not new, but there's a lot changing what's going on there. >>Well, you know, edge has been around for a while. Um, actually since, you know, the beginning of time people were doing, you know, compute and, and applications, they in the, um, in the physical space where data it, but more and more, um, data is based on sensors in cameras and machine vision. And if you wanna make real time decisions, there's a few reasons why you can't just send everything back to a data center or a cloud. Maybe you don't have the right latency, maybe, um, you it's too costly. Maybe you don't have the right end with maybe you have security challenges, maybe have compliance challenges. So the world's moving more and more resources towards where the data is created and to make real time decisions and to generate new business values, things are changing and they're becoming much more, um, um, involved than before, much more. Um, so basically that that's, what's changing. You know, we need to deal with distributed architectures much more than we needed before. >>I think one of the things we've learned in the last very dynamic two years is that access to realtime data is no longer a nice to have it's table stakes for whether we're talking about retail, healthcare, et cetera. So that the, the realtime data access is critical for everybody to these days. >>Right? And it, it could be a real time decision, or it could even be data collection either way. You need to place some device, some comput next to the source. And then, you know, you have a lot of them and you just multiply by multiple use cases and you be, you basically, you have a very complex problem to solve. And if you ask me what's new is that complexity is big coming more and more, um, critical to solve >>Critical. >>Oh, go ahead, please. >>I was just gonna say, talk to me about some of the, from a, from a complexity resolution perspective, what are some of the things that Dell is doing to help organizations as they spread out to the edge more to meet that consumer demand, but reduce that complexity from an infrastructure standpoint. >>So we focus on simplifying. I think that's what people need right now. So there are two things we do. We, we optimize our products, um, whether they need regularization or different temperature envelopes or, uh, management capability, remote management capability, and we create solutions. And so we develop, um, solutions that look at specific, um, outcomes and we size it and we create deployment guides. Um, we do everything we can, um, to simplify the, uh, the edge uses for our customers. >>You know, you guys is talking about, it's not new. I, and I know you do a lot in retail. I think of like the NCR cash register as the, the original edge, you know, but there's other use cases. Uh there's you Gil, you and I have talked about AI inferencing in, in real time, there was a question today in the analyst forum, uh, I think it went to Jeff or nobody wanted to take it. No, maybe it was Michael, but the metaverse, but that there's edge space is the edge industrial I OT. So how do you, I mean, the Tam is enormous. How do you think about the use cases? Are there ones that, that aren't necessarily sort of horizontal for you that you don't go after, like EVs and TA the cars? Or how are you thinking about >>It? Depends. I agree that the, uh, edge business is very verticalized. Um, at the same time, there are very, uh, there is, there are themes that emerge across every industry. Um, so we're trying to solve things horizontally being Dell, we need to solve for, um, repeatability and scale, but we do package, you know, vertical solutions on top of them because that's what people need. Um, so for example, you know, you said, um, NCR being the, uh, the original edge. If I asked you today, name how many applications are, are running in a retail store to enable your experience? You'd say, well, there's self checkout. Maybe there is a, um, fraud detection, >>Let's say a handful >>It's handful. The fact is it's not, it's about 30 different applications, 30 that are running. So you have, you know, digital labels and you have, you know, a curbside delivery and you have inventory management and you have crowd management and you have safety and security. And what happens today is that every one of those solar is purchased separately and deployed separately and connected to the network separately and secured separately. Hence you see the problem, right? And so I know what we do, and we create a solution. For example, we see, okay, infrastructure, what can we consolidate onto an infrastructure that could scale over time? And then we look at it in the context of a solution. So, you know, the solution we're announcing, or we announced last week does just that on the left side, it looks at a consolidated infrastructure based on VxRail and VMware stack. So you can run multiple applications on the right side, it working with a company called deep north for Inso analytics and actually people that, um, and the show they can go and see this in action, um, in our, um, you know, fake retail store, uh, back at the edge booth. Um, but the point is those elements of siloed applications and the need to consolidate their true for every industry. And that's what we're trying to solve for. >>I was just wondering, you said they're true for every industry. Every industry is facing the same challenges there. What, what makes retail so prime for transformation right now? >>That's a great question. So, you know, using my example from before, if you are faced with this set, have a shopper that buys online and they now are coming back to the stores and they need to, they want the same experience. They want the stuff that they search for. They want it available to them. Um, and in fact, we research that 80% of people say, if they have a bad experience will not come back to a retail store. So you've got all of those use cases that you need to put to, you've got this savvy shopping that comes in, you've got heightened labor costs. You've got a supply chain problem in most of those markets, labor >>Shortages as >>Well. It's a perfect storm. And you wanna give an experience, right? So CIOs are looking at this and they go, how do I do all of that? Um, and they, they, as I said before, the key management, the key problem is management of all of those things is why they can innovate faster. And so retail is in this perfect storm where they need to innovate and they want to innovate. And now they're looking for options and we're here to help them. >>You know, a lot of times we talk about the in industrial IOT, we talk about the it and the OT schism. Is there a similar sort of dissonance between it, your peeps, Dell's traditional market, and what's happening, you know, at the near edge, the retail infrastructure sort of different requirements. How are you thinking about that and managing that >>About, um, 50% of edge projects today are, are somehow involving it. Um, usually every project will involve it for networking and security, so they have to manage it either way. And today there's a lot of what we used to call shadow it. When we talked about cloud, this has happens at the edge as well. Now this happened for a good reason because the expertise are the OT people expertise on the, the specific use case. It's true for manufacturing. It's also for true for, for retail. Um, our traditional audience is the it audience and, and we will never be able to merger two worlds unless it was better able to service the OT buyers. And even in the show, I I've had multiple conversations today. We, with people to talk about the divide, how to bring it together, it will come together when it can deliver a better service to the OT, um, constituents. And that's definitely a job for Dell, right? This is what we do. If we enable our it buyer to do a better job in servicing the OT crowd or their business crowd in retail, um, more innovation will happen, you know, across the, those different dimensions. So I'm happy you asked that because that's actually part of the mission we're taking on. >>Where is one of the things I think about when you, you talk about that consumer experience and we're very demanding as consumers. We wanna ha as you described, we wanna have the same experience we expect to have that regardless of where we are. And if that doesn't happen, you, you mentioned that number of 80% of people's survey said, if I have a bad experience with a merchant, I'm out, I'm going somewhere else. Right. So where is the rest of the Csuite in the conversation? I can think of, um, a COO the chief marketing officer from brand value, brand reputation perspective. Are you talking with those folks as well to help make the connective so reality? >>Um, I, I, I don't know that we're having those conversation with those business owners. We we're a, um, a system, an infrastructure company. So, you know, we get involved once they understand, you know, what they want to do. We just look at it in. And so if you solve it one way, it's gonna be one outcome. Maybe there is a better way to look at it. Maybe there's an architecture, maybe there's a more, you know, thoughtful way to think about, you know, the problems before they happen. And, um, but the fact that they're all looking shows you, that their business owners are very, very concerned with, with this reality, their >>Key stakeholders. Can >>We come back to your announcement? Can you, can we unpack that a little bit, uh, for those who might not be familiar with it? What, what, what is it called again? And give us a peel, the onion a little bit Gil. Yeah. >>So, so we call it a Dell technologies validated design. Um, it is essentially reference architecture. Um, we take a use case, we size it. So we, you know, we, um, we save customers, the effort of, of testing and sizing. We document the deployment step by step. We just make it simpler. And as says, before we look for consolidation, so we took a VXL, which is our leading ACI product based on VMware technology with a VMware application management stack with Tansu. Um, and then we, we, we look at that as the infrastructure, and then we test it with a company called deep north and deep north, um, are, um, store analytics. So through machine vision, they can tell you where people are queuing up. If there is somebody in the store that needs help and nobody's approaching, if there is a water spill and somebody might, you know, slip and hurt themselves, if a fridge is open and something may get spot. >>And so all of those things together through machine vision and realtime decisions can have this much better experience. So we put all of this together, we created a design and now it's out there in the market for our partners to use for our customers to use. Um, this is an extension of our manufacturing solutions, where we did the same thing. We partner with a company called PTC. I know of obviously in a company called Litmos, um, to create, um, industrial and the leading solution. So this whole word of solutioning is supposed to look at the infrastructure and a use case and bring them together and document in a way that simplifies things for >>Customers. Do you ever see that becoming a Aku at some point in time or, >>Um, personal, if you ask me? I don't think so. And the reason is there's still a lot of variability in those and skewing, but that's a very formal, you know, internal discussion. Yeah. Um, the point is we are, we want people to buy as much of it as they need to, and, and we really want to help them if Aku could help them, we will get there, but we need to see repeatability before creating skews. >>Can you give us an example of a, of a retail or a manufacturing customer that's using this Dell validated design, this DVD, and that really has reduced or eliminated that complexity that was there before. >>So this solution is new. I mean, it's brand new, we just announced it. So, no, but, um, I don't know what names I can call out, cuz referenceability is probably examples though about generic, but I will tell you that most of the large retailers in the us are based in their stores on Dell technologies. Um, a lot of the trail is in, in those stores and you're talking about thousands of locations with remote management. Um, what we're doing here is we're taking it to the next step by looking at new use cases that they have not been implementing before and saying, look, same infrastructure is valid. You know, scalable is it's scalable. And here are the new use cases with machine vision and other things that here is how you do that. But we're seeing a lot of success in retail in the last few years. >>So what should we expect looking forward, you know, any gaps that customers are asking for trying to fill? What, what two to three years out, what should we expect? >>Um, I think we're gonna stay very true to our simplification message. We want to help people simplify. So if it's simplifying, um, maintenance, if it's simplifying management, if it's simplifying through solutioning, you're gonna see us more and more and more, um, investing in simplification of edge. Um, and that's through our own IP, through our partnerships. Um, there, there is a lot more coming if, if I may say it myself, but, but it's, it's a little too early to, uh, to talk about it. >>So for those folks that are here at the show that get to see it and play with it and touch it and feel it, what would you say some of the biggest impacts are that this technology can deliver tomorrow? >>Well, first of all, it's enabling to do what they want. See, we don't have to go and, and tell people, oh, you probably really need to move things through the edge. They know they need to do it. Our job is to tell them how to do it in a secure way, in a simplified way. So that's, that's a nice thing about this, this market it's happening, whether we want it or not. Um, people in this show can go see some things in action. They can see the solution in action. They can see the manufacturing solution in action and even more so. And I forgot to say part of our announcement was a set of solution centers in Limerick island and in Singapore, that was just open. And soon enough in Austin, Texas saw that, and we will have people come in and have the full experience of IOT OT and edge device devices in action. So AR and VR, I T IEN technology and scanning technology. So they could be, um, thinking about the art of the possible, right? Thinking about this immersive experience that will help them invent with us. And so we're expecting a lot of innovation to come out of those conversations for us and for them. >>So doing a lot of testing before deployment and really gleaning that testing >>Before deployment solution architecture, just ideation, if they're not there yet. So, and I've just been to Singapore in one of those, um, they asked me to, um, pretend I was a, um, retail ski enter in a distribution center and I didn't do so well, but I was still impressed with the technology. So, >>Well, eight time Q alumni. Now you have a career to fall back on if you need to. Exactly. >><laugh> >>GA it's been great to have you. Thank you so much for coming back, talking to us about what's new on day one of Dell technologies world 22. Thank >>You for having me again, >>Our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin, coming to you live from the Venetian in Las Vegas at Dell technologies world 2022. This is day one of our coverage stick around Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE. I'm Dave Nicholson, Chief Technology Officer at theCUBE and we are here for a very special Cube Conversation with Andy Brown from Broadcom. Andy, welcome to theCUBE, tell us a little about yourself. >> Well, a little bit about myself, my name is Andy Brown, I'm currently the Senior Director of Software Architecture and Performance Analysis here within the Data Center Solutions Group at Broadcom. I've been doing that for about seven years prior to that, I held various positions within the system architecture, systems engineering, and IC development organization, but ultimately as well as spent some time in our support organization and managing our support team. But ultimately have landed in the architecture organization as well as performance analysis. >> Great, so a lot of what you do is around improving storage performance, tell us more about that. >> So let me give you a brief history of storage from my perspective. As I mentioned, I go back about 30 years in my career and that would've started back in the NCR Microelectronics days. And originally with Parallel SCSI, so that would be, if anyone would remember the the 5380 Controller, which was one of the original Parallel SCSI controllers that existed in built by NCR Microelectronics at the time, I've seen the advent of Parallel SCSI, a stint of fiber channel, ultimately leading into the serialization of the SCSI standard into SaaS, as well as SATA, and then ultimately leading to NVMe protocols and the advent of flash moving from hard drives into a flash based media and as well on that's on the storage side on the host side, moving from parallel interfaces, ISA if everybody could remember that, moving to PCI, PCI Express and that's where we land today. >> So Andy, we are square in the middle of the era of both NVMe and SaaS. What kinds of challenges does that overlap represent? >> Well, I think obviously we've seen SaaS around for a while, it was the conversion from parallel into a serial attached SCSI and that really SaaS brings with it, the ability to connect really a high number of devices and was kind of the original scaling of devices. And really also enabled was one of the things that enabled flash based media, given the the speed and performance that came to the table. Of course NVMe came in as well with the promise of even higher speeds. And as we saw flash media really, really take a strong role in storage. NVMe came around and really was focused on trying to address that, whereas SaaS originated with hard drive technology. NVMe was really born out of how do we most efficiently deal with flash based media, SaaS with its. But SaaS still carries a benefit on scalability and NVMe maybe has, I don't want to say challenges there, but it's definitely was not designed as much to be broadly scale across many, many, say high hundreds or thousands of devices. But definitely addressed some of the performance issues that were coming up as flash media was becoming. So it was increasing the overall storage performance that we could experience if you will. >> Let's talk about host interfaces, PCIe. What's the significance there? >> Really all the storage in the world, all the performance in the world on the storage side, is not of much use to you unless you can really feed it into the beast, if you will, into the CPU and into the the rest of the service subsystem. And that's really where PCI comes into play. PCI originally was in parallel form and then moved to serial with the PCI Express as we know it today, and really has created a pathway to enable not only storage performance but any other adapter or any other networking or other types of technologies to just open up that pathway and feed the processor. And as we've moved through from PCI to PCI Express PCI 2.0 3.0 4.0, and just opening up those pipes has really enabled just a tremendous amount of flow of data into the compute engine, allowing it to be analyzed, sorted used to analyze data, big data, AI type applications. Just those pipes are critical in those types of applications. >> We know we've seen dramatic increases in performance, going from one generation of PCIe to the next. But how does that translate into the worlds of SaaS, SATA and NVMe? >> So from a performance perspective when we look at these different types of media whether it be SATA, SaaS or NVMe, of course, there are performance difference inherent in that media, SATA being probably the lowest performing with NVMe topping out at higher performing although SaaS can perform quite well as a flash based as protocol connected to flash based media. And of course, NVMe from an individual device scaling, from a by one to a by four interface, really that is where NVMe kind of has enabled a bigger pipe directly to the storage media, being able to scale up to by four whereas SaaS can limit it to by one, maybe by two in some cases, although most servers only connect the SaaS device of by one. So from a different perspective then you're really wanting to create a solution or enable the infrastructure to be able to consume that performance at NVMe is going to give you. And I think that is something where our solutions have really in the recent generation shined, at their ability to really now keep up with storage performance and NVMe, as well as provide that connectivity back down into the SaaS and SATA world as well. >> Let's talk about your perspective on RAID today. >> So there've been a lot of views and opinions on RAID over the years, it's been and those have been changing over time. RAID has been around for a very, very long time, probably about as long as again, going back over my 30 year career, it's been around for almost the entire time. Obviously RAID originally was viewed as some thing that was very, very necessary devices fail. They don't last forever, but the data that's on them is very, very important and people care about that. So RAID was brought about knowing that individual devices that are storing that data are going to fail, and really took cold as a primary mechanism of protection. But as time went on and as performance moved up both in the server and both in the media itself if we start talking about flash. RAID really took on, people started to look at traditional server storage RAID, well, maybe a more of a negative connotation. I think that because to be quite honest, it fell behind a little bit. If you look at things like parity RAID 5 and RAID 6, very, very effective efficient means of protecting your data, very storage efficient, but ultimately had some penalty a primarily around right performance, random rights in RAID 5 volumes was not keeping up with what really needed to be there. And I think that really shifted opinions of RAID that, "Hey it's just not, it's not going to keep up and we need to move on to other avenues." And we've seen that, we've seen disaggregated storage and other solutions pop up and protect your data obviously in cloud environments and things like that have shown up and they have been successful, but. >> So one of the drawbacks with RAID is always the performance tax associated with generating parody for parody RAID. What has Broadcom done to address those potential bottlenecks? >> We've really solved the RAID performance issue the right performance issue. We're in our latest generation of controllers we're exceeding a million RAID 5 right IOPS which is enough to satisfy many, many, many applications as a matter of fact, even in virtual environments aggregated solutions, we have multiple applications. And then as well in the rebuild arena, we really have through our architecture, through our hardware automation have been able to move the bar on that to where the rebuild not only the rebuild times have been brought down dramatically in SaaS based or in I'm sorry in flash based solutions. But the performance that you can observe while those rebuilds are going on is almost immeasurable. So in most applications you would almost observe no performance deficiencies during a rebuild operation which is really night and day compared to where things were just few short years ago. >> So the fact that you've been able to, dramatically decrease the time necessary for a RAID rebuild is obviously extremely important. But give us your overall performance philosophy from Broadcom's point of view. >> Over the years we have recognized that performance is obviously a critically important for our products, and the ability to analyze performance from many many angles is critically important. There are literally infinite ways you can look at performance in a storage subsystem. What we have done in our labs and in our solutions through not only hardware scaling in our labs, but also through automation scripts and things like that, have allowed us to collect a substantial amount of data to look at the performance of our solutions from every angle. IOPS, bandwidth application level performance, small topologies, large topologies, just many, many aspects. It still honestly only scratches the surface of all the possible performance points that you could gather, but we have moved them bar dramatically in that regard. And it's something that our customers really demanded of us. Storage technology has gotten more complex, and you have to look at it from a lot different angles, especially on the performance front to make sure that there are no holes there that somebody's going to run into. >> So based on specific customer needs and requests, you look at performance from a variety of different angles. What are some of the trends that you're seeing specifically in storage per performance today and moving into the future? >> Yeah, emerging trends within the storage industry. I think that to look at the emerging trends, you really need to go back and look at where we started. We started in compute where people were you would have basically your server that would be under the desk in a small business operation and individual businesses would have their own set of servers, and the storage would really be localized to those. Obviously the industry has recognized that to some extent, disaggregation of that, we see that obviously in what's happening in cloud, in hyper-converged storage and things like that. Those afford a tremendous amount of flexibility and are obviously great players in the storage world today. But with that flexibility has come some sacrifice and performance and actually quite substantial sacrifice. And what we're observing is almost, it comes back full circle. The need for inbox high performing server storage that is well protected. And with people with confidence that people have confidence that their data is protected and that they can extract the performance that they need for the demanding database applications, that still exists today, and that still operate in the offices around the country and around the world, that really need to protect their data on a local basis in the server. And I think that from a trend perspective that's what we're seeing. We also, from the standpoint of NVMe itself is really started out with, "Hey, we'll just software rate that. We'll just wrap software around that, we can protect the data." We had so many customers come back to us saying, you know what? We really need hardware RAID on NVMe. And when they came to us, we were ready. We had a solution ready to go, and we're able to provide that, and now we're seeing ongoing on demand. We are complimentary to other storage solutions out there. Server storage is not going to necessarily rule a world but it is surely has a place in the broader storage spectrum. And we think we have the right solution for that. >> Speaking of servers and server-based storage. Why would, for example, a Dell customer care about the Broadcom components in that Dell server. >> So let's say you're configuring a Dell server and you're going, why does hardware where RAID matter? What's important about that? Well, I think when you look at today's hardware RAID, first of all, you're going to see a dramatically better performance. You're going to see dramatically better performance it's going to enable you to put RAID 5 volumes a very effective and efficient mechanism for protecting your data, a storage efficient mechanism. You're going to use RAID 5 volumes where you weren't able to do that before, because when you're in the millions of IOPS range you really can satisfy a lot of application needs out there. And then you're going to also going to have rebuilt times that are lightning fast. Your performance is not going to degrade, when you're running those application, especially database applications, but not only database, but streaming applications, bandwidth to protected RAID volumes is almost imperceptively different from just raw bandwidth to the media. So the RAID configurations in today's Dell servers really afford you the opportunity to make use of that storage where you may not have already written it off as well RAID just doesn't, is not going to get me there. Quite frankly, into this in the storage servers that Dell is providing with RAID technology, there are huge windows open in what you can do today with applications. >> Well, all of this is obviously good news for Dell and Dell customers, thanks again, Andy for joining us, for this Cube Conversation, I'm Dave Nicholson for theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>Oh, welcome back to the cubes coverage of coop con cloud native con 2021. I'm John is the Cuba, David Nicholson, our cloud host analyst, and it's exciting to be back in person in event. So we're back. It's been two years with the cube con and Linux foundation. So scrape, it was a hybrid event and we have a great guest here, Cuban London, Nick Dirk, and CT field CTO of harness and harness.io. The URL love the.io. Good to see you. >>Thank you guys for having me on. I genuinely appreciate >>It. Thanks for coming on. You were a part of our AWS startup showcase, which you guys were featured as a fast growing mature company, uh, as cloud scales, you guys have been doing extremely well. So congratulations. But now we're in reality now, right? So, okay. Cloud native has kind of like, okay, we don't have to sell it anymore. People buying into it. Um, and now operationalizing it with cloud operations, which means you're running stuff, applications and infrastructure is code and it costs money. Yeah. Martine Casada at Andreessen Horowitz. Oh, repatriated from the cloud. So there's a lot of, there's some cost conversations starting to happen. This is what you guys are in the middle of. >>Yeah, absolutely. What's interesting is when you think about it today, we want to shift left. When you want to empower all the engineers, we want to empower people. We're not giving them the data they need, right. They get a call from the CFO 30 days later, as opposed to actually being able to look at what change I did and how it actually affected. And this is what we're bringing in. Allowing people to have is now really empowering. So throughout the whole software delivery life cycle from CGI continuous integration, continuous delivery feature flagging, and even bringing cost modeling and in cloud cost management. And even then being able to shut down, shut down the services that you're not using, how much of that is waste. We talk about it. Every single cloud conference it's how much is waste. And so being able to actually turn those on, use those accordingly and then take advantage of even the cheapest instances when you should. That's really what >>It's so funny. People almost trip over dollars to pick up pennies in the cloud business because they're so focused on innovation that they think, okay, we've got to just innovate at all costs, but at some point you can make it productive for the developers in process in the pipeline to actually manage that. >>That's exactly it. I mean, if you think about it to me in order to breach state continuous delivery, we have to automate everything. Right. But that doesn't mean stop at just delivering, you know, to production. That means to customer, which means we've got to make them happy, but then ultimately all of those resources in dev and QA and staging and UAT, we've sticker those as well. And if we're not being mindful of it, the costs are astronomical, right. And we've seen it time and time again with every company you see, you've seen every article about how they've blown through all their budgets. So bring it to the people that can affect change. That's really the difference, making it visible, looking at it. In-depth not just at the cloud level and all the spend there, but also even at the, uh, thinking about it, the Kubernetes level down to the containers, the pods and understanding where are the resources even inside of the clusters and bringing that as an aggregate, not just for visibility and, and giving recommendations, but now more importantly, because part of a pipeline start taking action. That's where it's interesting. It's not just about being able to see it and understand it and hope, right? Hope is not a strategy acting upon it is what makes it valuable. And that's part of the automate everything. >>Yeah. We'll let that at the Dawn of the age of DevOps, uh, there was a huge incentive for a developer just to get their job done, to seize control of infrastructure, the idea of infrastructure as code, you know, and it's, it's, you know, w when it was being born, it's a fantastic, I've always wondered though, you know, be careful what you wish for. Do you really want all of that responsibility? So we've got responsibility from a compliance and security perspective and of course cost. So, so where do we, where do we go from here, I guess is the question. Yeah. So >>When we look at building this all together, I think when we think about software delivery, everybody wants to go fast. We start with velocity, right? Everybody says, that's where I want to go. And to your point with governance compliance, the next roadblock to hit is weight. In order to go fast, I have to do it appropriately. I've got governing bodies that tell me how this has to work. And that becomes a challenge. >>It slows it down too. It doesn't, I mean, basically people are getting pissed off, right? This is, this general sentiment is, is that developers are moving fast with their code. And then they have to stop. Compliance has to give the green light sometimes days, correct? Uh, it used to be weeks now. It's days, it's still unacceptable. So there's like this always been that tension to the security groups or say it, or finance was like slow down and they actually want to go faster. So that has to be policy-based something. Yep. This is the future. What is your take on that? >>Take on, this is pretty simple. When everybody talks about people, process and technology, it's kind of bogus, right? It's all about confidence. If you're confident that your developers can deploy appropriately and they're not going to do something wrong, you'll let them to play all the time. Well, that requires process. But if you have tooling that literally guarantees your governance, make sure that at no point in time, can any of your developers actually do something wrong. Now you have, >>That's the key. That's the key. That's the key because you're giving them a policy-based guardrails to execute in their programs >>And that's it. So now you can free up all those pieces. So all those bottlenecks, all those waiting all those time, and this is how all of our customers, they move from, you know, change advisory boards that approve deployments. >>Can you give us some, give us some, give us some, uh, customer anecdotal examples of this inaction and kind of the love letters you get, or, or the customer you take us through a use case of how it all. >>So this is one of my favorites. So NCR national cash register. If you slide a credit card at like a Chick-fil-A or a Safeway, right? Um, traditional technology. But what was interesting is they went from doing PCI audit, which would take seven days to go to a PCI audit right now with harness, because, >>And by the way, when you and the seventh, six day, the things that you did on day one change. >>Exactly, exactly. And so now, because of using harness and everything's audited, and all the changes are, are controlled to make sure that developers again, can only do what they're allowed. They only get to broadcast two per production. If they've met all their security requirements, all their compliance, permits, all their quality checks. Now, because of that, they literally gave a re read only view of harness to their auditor. And in three hours it was over. And it's because now we're that evidence file from code commit through to production. Yeah. It's there for point of sale compliant. >>So what is the benefits to them? What's the result saves them time, saves the money. What's the good, the free up more times. I'll see the chops it down. That's the key. >>Yeah. It's actually something we didn't build in like our ROI calculators, which was, we talked to their engineers and we gave them their nights and their weekends back, which I thought was amazing. But Thursday night, when we're doing that deploy, they don't have to be up. Harness is actually managing and understanding, using machine learning to understand what normal looks like. So they don't have to, they don't have to sit and look at the knock or sit in the war room and eat the free pizza. Yeah. Right. And then when those things break, same concept rates aren't as good. So >>I got to ask you, I got you here. You know, as the software development delivery lifecycle is radically being overhauled right now, which people generally agree that that's the case, the old models are, are different. How do you see your vision around AI and automation playing into this? Because you could say, okay, we're going to have different kinds of coding styles. This batch has got an AI block here. It's very Lego block. Like yep. Okay. Services and higher level services in the cloud. What's your reaction to how this impacts automation and >>Sure. So throughout our entire platform, we've designed our AI to take care of the worst parts of anyone's job as Guinea dev ops person. If they love babysitting deployments, they don't harness handles that for them, ask your engineers that they love sitting there waiting for their tests to run. Every time they build, they go get coffee, right. Because we're waiting for all of our tests to run. Y yeah. Right. The reality >>Is sometimes they have to wait days and >>That's it. But like, if I change the gas cap on, uh, on your car, would you expect me to check every light switch and every electronic piece? No. Well, why do we do that with code? And so our AI, our ML is designed to remove all the things that people hate. It's not to remove people's jobs. It's actually to make their jobs much better. >>How do you guys feed the data? What's the training algorithm for that? How does that work? Yeah, >>Actually, it's interesting. A lot of people think it's going to take a ton of time to figure this out. The good news is we start seeing this on the second deployment. On the second bill, we have to have a baseline of what good looks like, and that's where it starts. And it goes from there. And by the way, this isn't a lot of people say AI, and this AML, I teach a class on this because ML is not standard deviation. It's not some checks. So we use a massive amount of machine learning, but we have neural networks to think about things like engineers do. Like if we looked at a log and I saw the same log with two different user IDs, you and I would know, well, it's the same thing. It's just different users, but machine learning models. Don't so we've got to build neural networks to actually think like humans. So that, >>So that's the whole expectation maximization kind of concept of people talk about, >>Well, and that's it because at the end of the day, we're like I said, I'm not trying to take people's jobs. I want to meet. >>Yeah. You want to do the crap work out of the way. And I had to do other redundant, heavy lifting that they have to do every single time we use the cloud way. We've >>Built mechanical muscle in, in the early 19 hundreds. Right. And it made everyone's jobs easier, allowed them to do more with their time. That's exactly what we're doing here. >>I mean, we've seen the big old guys in the industry trying to evolve. You got the hot startups coming out. So you got, you know, adapt or die as classic thing. We've been saying for many years, David on the cube, you know that. So it's like, this is a moment of truth. We're going to see who comes out the other side. How do you, Nick, what would you be your, your kind of guess of when that other side is, when are we gonna know the winners and the losers truly in the sense of where we are now? >>So I think what I've found is that in this space specifically, there's a constant shift and this is something with software. And the problem is, is that we see them come in ebbs and flows, right. And very few times are there businesses that actually carry the model? And what you find is that when they focus on one specific problem, it solves it. Now, if I was working on VMs a few years ago, great, but now we're, we're here at coop con, right? And that's because it's eaten, uh, that side of the world. And so I think it's the companies that can actually grow the test of time and continue to expand to where the problems are. Right. And that's one of the things that I traditionally think about harness and we've done it. We cover our customers where they were, I think the old mainframes, if you had to, where they were, where they are at their traditional, their VM. >>I mean, if you think about it, Nick, it's one of those things where it's like, that's such a common sense way to look at it evolves with a problem. So I ride the right with tech ways. But if you think about the high order bit, here is just applications. We ended the day. Companies have applications that they want to write modern. The applications of their business is going to be codified so that you just work backwards from there. Then you say, okay, what is the infrastructure as code working for me? That's an ethos of dev ops. And that's where we're at. So that's why I think that the cloud need is kind of one already, but we still have the edge devices, more complexity. This is a huge next level conversation at one point is that we just put a hard and top on the complexity. When is that coming? Because the developers are clear. They want to go fast. They want to go shift left and have all that data, get the right analytics, the telemetry and the AI. But it's too complicated still. That is a big problem. >>It's too complicated. You ask for a full-stack developer to also know infrastructure, to also know edge computing. Like it's impossible, right? And this is where tooling helps, right? Because if you can actually parameterize that and make it to the engineers and have to care, they can do what they're best at. Hey, I'm great at turning code in artifact, let them do that and have tooling take care of the rest. This is where our goal is. Again, allow people >>We'll do what they love. And this is kind of the new roles that are changing. What SRE has done. Everyone talks about the SRE and some states just as he had dev ops guy, but it's not just that there's also, uh, different roles emerging. It's, it's an architectural game. At this point, we would say, >>I'd say a hundred percent. And this is where the decisions that you make on are architecturally. If you don't know how to then roll them out, this is what we've seen. Time and time again, you go to these large companies, I've got these great architectures on planning four years later, we haven't reached it because to that point process, >>The process killed them four >>Different new tools throughout the process. Well, yeah. >>So when do we hit peak Kubernetes peak >>Kubernetes? I think we have a bit to go in and I'm excited about the networking space and really what we're doing there and, and bringing that holistic portion of the network, like when Istio was originally released, I thought that was one of the most amazing things, uh, to truly come to it. And I think there's a vast space in networking. Um, and, and so I think in the next few years, we're going to see this, you know, turn into that a hundred percent utilized across the board. This will be that where everyone's workloads continue to exist. Um, somewhat like VMs we're in >>And, and, and no, no fear of developers as code in the very near future. You're talking about automating the mundane. Correct. Uh, there have been stories recently about the three-day workweek, you know, as a, as a fan of, um, utopian science fiction, myself, as opposed to dystopian. Absolutely. I think that, you know, technology does have the opportunity to lift all boats and, uh, and it's, it's not nothing to be afraid of. You know, the fact that I put my dishes in the dishwasher and they run by themselves for three hours. It's a good thing. It's a great thing. >>I don't need to deal with that. Yeah, I agree. No, I think that's, and that's what I said in the beginning. Right. That's really where we can start empowering people. So allow them to do what they're good at and do what they're best at. And if you look at why do people quit? We don't have to go so hard to find. Yeah. Why? Because they're secondary to babysit and implement and they're told everywhere they go, they're not going to have to >>That's the line. And that's all right. We got a break, but it's great insight to have you on the Q one final question for you. Um, I got to ask about the whole data as code something that I've been riffing on for a bunch of years now. And as infrastructures could we get that, but data is now the resource everyone needs, and everyone's trying to, okay, I have the control plane for this and that, but ultimately data cannot be siloed. This is a critical architectural element. How does that get resolved in the land of the competitive advantage and lock in and whatnot? What's your take on that? >>So data's an interesting one because it has, it has gravity and this is the problem. And as we move, as I think you guys know, as you move to the edge as remove, move it places there's insights to be taken at the edge there's insights to be taken as it moves through. And I think what you'll see honestly, going forward is you'll see compute done differently to your point. It needs to be aggregated. It needs to be able to be used together, but I think you'll see people computing it on its way through it. So now even in transport, you'll start seeing insights gained in real time before you can have the larger insights. And I see that happening more and more. Um, and I think ultimately we just want to empower that >>Nick, great to have you on CTO of field CTO of harness and harness.io is a URL. Check it out. Thanks for the insight. Thank you so much. Great comments. Appreciate it. Natural cube analysts right here, Nick, of course, we've got our, our analysts right here, David Nicholson. You're good on your own. I'm John for a, you know, we have the host. Thanks for watching. Stay with two more days of coverage. We'll be back after this short break.

>> from Santa Clara, California It's the Cube covering techno ovation World Pitch Summit 2019 Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Now here's Sonia to Gari. >> Hi. And welcome to the Cube. I'm your host, Sonia to Gari and we're hearing oracles Agnew's campus in Santa Clara, California covering techno vacations world its Summit 2019 a pitch competition in which girls from around the world developed mobile lapse in order to create positive change in the world with us. Today we have team tech witches from India with a nun. You Grover said in there. Um, when she got the other, um, and Anushka Sharma. Welcome to the Cube. And congratulations on being finalists. Thank you. So your app is called May 3. Can you tell us more about that? >> Yeah. App is an android application which connects old age homes with orphanages so that senior citizens can spend time with orphan children on individuals like you and I and everyone else can volunteer and donate to old age homes and orphanages through our app. >> Okay. And so how would someone used the Afghanis? Oh, go through Step by step >> s O as an individual. If you log into the app usually do lis. So if you press on connect, you could either press on connect to an old age home or connect to. And often it's so. For instance, I want to connect to an old age home. I press that button I would see a list off old age homes. On that list is a list of organizations that have signed up on the APP. So I press on their arranged on the order off proximity to my location. So I pressed on. Whichever one I want is a view, and then I see all of their details. I could contact them, connect to them by messaging them, calling them up, viewing their website or even navigating to their location using who will maps. Then I could also press on, see what donations they require and see exactly what they need. For instance, if an organization requires clothes or blankets, I would be able to view that on donate accordingly. Okay, >> so it's not just introducing older people to orphans, it's it's more about like, just like what can we do as a society to like donate to exactly >> on as the administrator? Often old days home, you can connect to an orphanage on organized meetings between senior citizens on children so they can spend time together and have fun activities. For instance, we have already conducted two activities in which people mingo together on the children were singing songs and they were even, you know, sharing stories. They were dancing together. It was really heartwarming. >> Wow. And do you have any other success stories from what's happened so far? >> So yeah said the two meetings that have been conducted already were huge successes in our opinion. So we had children from an often it's called cyber ball creep are going to an old age home on dhe. They spent time with the elders there, talk to them, mingled with them, learned about their life experiences on DDE up in the other meeting to reverse singing songs on Theo. Elders and children were sort of having fun together, and it was amazing. >> So I visited your instagram page and which looks amazing, by the way, thank you. And I noticed that there were a list of activities for every for for them to do when they meet each other. So can you tell us more about those activities? >> Yes, so some of the activities I already talked about them, but they could also sort of have a picnic together, get some food for each other or the children could make drawings, write poems for the elders. And those can be put up in the old age home itself so that even after the children leave, it's like a reminder and a token of love for the elders that reminds them that they are loved on the you are cared for Andi. They could also have other activities, like yoga sessions together, maybe read books to each other. There was other kinds of activities that are listed on. How did >> you come up with this idea? >> Oh, well, the initial inspiration. Or I wouldn't say inspiration. It was a bus, the incident that happened to me. So I lost both of my grandparent's. Within the span of failure, I lost my grandmother, too, can't cancer. And then after her, she passed away. My grandfather sort of felt like really lonely and that he had lost all purpose in life. On I could see firsthand the effects that loneliness could have on someone's mental and social well being on that lead to health problems that he never, ever had before. And we lost him in, unfortunately in January this year, so I really wanted to work on senior care on. Then. My teammate Basseterre suggested that we should also include orphans within this. Since you know we in India especially, we have a very strong familial bond between children and grand parents, and the's children do not have that same connection. They grew up without that kind of nurturing love that only parents or grandparents can provide to a child on. So we felt that we should be solving both of these problems and bridging them together in some in some way on. That's how we came up with this idea. >> It sounds like it's an amazing idea, and it also sounds like it could help more than just the community that you're in. But it could really help the whole world because so many people deal with loneliness, especially in old age or orphans who want love from a grand parent or parents, so it just sounds like it could be really useful. It's a lot of people, thank you. So how has your experience a techno nation been >> It has bean an amazing Johnny. We want expecting to make hated this level and is just phenomenal on the huge honor to be standing here on We began by just Regis formed We are all classmates on We have known each other for a while and so we just found out about this competition formed a team started working towards that on We were really passionate about this car. So working and taking time out of school to work on this just came naturally simply because how important this cause, boss, for us personally on then. So 12 The deactivation journey we kept on learning new things. Not all of us were aware off how to court applications. So we used Tekken ovations or curriculum on other online resources to teach ourselves those skills along the way and developed our entire project submission on DDE. Yeah, it's just amazing to be here now, sitting in front of such a huge audience. >> Absolutely. It's such a huge success for all of you. So can you tell us more about how how you all met your said your classmates, right? >> Yeah. So the four of us are classmates on Anushka is in another class within the stools, so be already sort of knew each other. Andi, I found out about the competition online and techno vacation seemed really ins like, Ah, create platform, especially because it's like, if specifically wants to empower women to court and going to make a stone. Male dominated fields that computer science on entrepreneurship. So the four of us off science students and she studies Commerz on. That's how we came together and started walking. >> That's amazing. So where do you have to see this app? You know, if you get the funding if you win today, where do you hope to see it in five years? >> Right now? Are up has already been launched in the play store, and we have about 1000 plus downloads in the future. We would like to know just to expand out of the Delhi nCr reason by We're currently working on a go pan in there and hopefully in the future in about 10 years. Maybe spread this throughout the world because I feel like communities across the work and benefit from >> men. Three. >> That's amazing. Best of luck to all of you and good luck for your pitch tonight. And congratulations. Once again. Thank you so much. So this has been team tech witches from India. You're watching the cube staging for more.

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

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering Google Cloud Next 17. >> Hey welcome back everyone. We are here live in Palo Alto for two days of coverage of Google Next 2017 special coverage brought to you by Intel. I want to thank Intel for sponsoring our editorial coverage of Google Next. It's a cloud service provider. This is a huge opportunity, cloud is changing the digital transformation and I want to thank Intel for that. Breaking down the coverage going into the realities of cloud, our next guest is Pedram Abrari, who's with Pramata, Chief Technology Officer, you guys do a customer digitization of cloud platform based in Silicon Valley. You're a veteran former entrepreneur, welcome to theCUBE coverage of Google Next. >> Thank you John. >> First tell us about what you guys do as a company. I know you guys have an interesting story because you're in the heart of the cloud game relative to operationalizing it-- >> Pedram: Yep. >> It's complicated in being an enterprise cloud solution. There's nuances there. There's some tripwires. There's some landmines, whatever you want to call that. >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> What do you guys do, let's do a quick background. >> What Pramata does is we are a B to B platform for large enterprises, such as NCR, HP, CenturyLink who have hundreds of, in some cases thousands of customer contracts and don't have a handle on their contracts. We digitize those contracts and those customer relationships and we layer intelligence on top to allow key decision makers in those businesses to have a single unified and up-to-date view of this data of each customer relationship at any point in time. Layering on top, building data and CRM data and MDM data. >> What's interesting why I liked that you're here is that it really hits the theme of Google Next which is data, datasets, machine learning, AI are pointing to a new model of how software's changing applications, right. >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> So you guys are at the middle of this digital transformation-- >> Pedram: Yeah, yeah. >> It's a whole new paradise, not like the classic, you know, linear thinking of supply chain or CRM kind of thinking. You guys are truly data driven and this teases out the complexities-- >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> What's your thoughts because again Google is clearly going down to the enterprise level. >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> As is Amazon, little bit ahead of them in terms of progress, but this is the trick everyone is doing in the digital transformation. I want to leverage my data, I want to move to a cost effective infrastructure. >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> Or it could be a startup saying, hey I want to get into the game and I want to innovate on a feature, and then there they are. They could be the next Snapchat out there watching. This is important, but it's also hard. What's your thoughts on the landscape of this opportunity? >> Well, cloud computing definitely changed the game for high tech startups, in a big way. When infrastructure as a service first rolled out with AWS, that's kind of the tip of the spear. The virtualization of hardware was a big game changer because as a startup to even get in the game, you had to have millions of dollars worth of investment in just hardware and software. In every two or three years, you had to renew all your hardware and software because they were out of date. So before you could even focus on your core competency, there was all these layers of investment and all the talent that you had to attract, just to deal with getting a cloud software up and running. With cloud computing, particularly with infrastructure as service, it changed that game. Virtualized hardware, and it allowed a lot more companies to have access and the ability to get into the game that couldn't previously, but the story doesn't end there, that's just the beginning of the story. Because to get a class software really up and running, you still have to have a team, traditionally it used to be IT teams, but the evolution has come now we have devops teams for good reason, who have to build a lot of initial plumbing on top of the infrastructure as a service until your cloud can be up and running in a scalable, cost effective, elastic fashion if you want. Yeah. >> Tell about the scale piece, because what is interesting is you have a lot of experience in scaling with the cloud. >> Mm-hmm. >> This is the main thing that people are leveraging with the cloud is that I can scale up pretty quickly. >> Mm-hmm. >> Scale up and scale out and then the complexity is the digitization piece, which is more specific to the enterprise. What are some of the challenges that you see with scale, because this is something that needs to be factored in on the design side. >> Mm-hmm. >> So digitize, oh yeah I want to digitize my entire company. Okay, sounds easy-- (laughter) But the scale piece is important because you now have scalable stuff. >> Right. >> How does it all work? >> Cloud software, early on in the cloud days, you know we had IT teams and we had developers who were really enterprise developers and they looked at the world with those glasses on. Very shortly thereafter, as soon as the first cloud software was up and running, people realized, what a minute, the old way of building software just doesn't work anymore, you have to rethink, this is where devops developed where it was a culture of developers and operations all working in concert, always designing software for scale in the cloud. It's a very different paradigm. Things such as transition from stateful services to stateless services to microservices, it all continued to turn services into things that could run and spun up and run across a large cluster of servers, as opposed to something that only scales vertically on a single box. If you think you have a service that you can throw on the cloud and you can magically get the benefits of that, and costs get lowered, I'm here to tell you that if you don't play your cards right, it blows up in your face very quickly. >> Give an example, cuz this is the trade-off, back to the trade-off conversation, right. >> Yeah, yeah. An example is if you have software that doesn't scale horizontally, that is not elastic, it doesn't scale and it only scales vertically, and you throw it in the cloud, and the more load gets on that software and that service, the only way to go is to keep getting bigger and bigger boxes that are available on a AWS or on Google or on Acer. The larger the box, the more expensive it becomes. The whole premise of cloud computing was commodity boxes (laughs) and things that could scale this way, and you really are basically going back to the same old problem you had on the enterprise side. Having to get bigger and bigger and bigger boxes. That can really blow up in your face in terms of the cost, that people would be shocked the kinds of bills that they can receive from some of the cloud vendors if they don't manage and contain their problem effectively. >> We're with Pedram Abrari who's the CTO of Pramata. They bring up an interesting point, I want to jump in and just kind of double down on that because the classic IT enterprise conversation in the heyday of enterprises it was developing was the sharp thin, the tip of the iceberg. What you don't see under the water, is the hidden costs, right. >> Pedram: It was massive. (laughs) >> The total cost of ownership has always been a big issue and if you look at things like OpenStack, for instance, great on paper, great philosophy, but-- >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> The total cost of ownership has really kind of crippled that from being, other than anything more than infrastructure as a service. So there's trade-offs for an enterprise-- >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> When the look at the total cost of ownership saying, I'm just going to throw in the cloud and run multicloud and everything's going to be managed perfectly and there's manageability and the security, I'm all set. No. >> Pedram: No. >> Or is that, I mean-- >> So first of all-- >> John: Why is that so important, because there's some trade-offs specifically here. >> There is ... First of all multicloud, cloud neutrality in theory sounds great, but it comes at a very expensive price. If I'm running on Google, or if I'm running on AWS and if I commit to running only on AWS or on Google or Acer, for that matter, I have the opportunity to leverage some of the managed services that are offered up by the vendor and they have the world's foremost experts at running some of theses services. Let's say your software requires a relational database, if you're going to be cloud neutral, you have to host that database, deal with backup recovery, scalability, fail overs, all of that overhead associated with that, which means you have to hire world's foremost experts at doing these things and you have to attract them, you have to pay them and on top of everything else that's associated with having to anticipate the heaviest load of your system, and always planning for that, if you can leverage the Google Cloud SQL, or if you can leverage AWS RDS-- >> Google only runs MySQL, they don't run anything else. >> That's true, that's true, but AWS does. >> Yeah. >> They have a plethora of different databases. >> It was good to go to AWS in that case. >> Well, if you're starting from ground up, and you're a startup, committing to MySQL is just fine. (laughs) >> John: Yeah. >> If you already-- >> Which is why Google's doing really well in the cloud narrative piece. >> Exactly, exactly. >> Enterprises who have other databases, other relational databases. >> And so if you're already sitting on top of a legacy that you have to support, then going to AWS might be easier. But AWS has its own complexities because it is a massive service, a massive ... Has a lot of APIs, it has a lot of complexities so you have to deal with all of that complexity. Even the billing side of AWS has a whole economy all to itself, there's all these vendors that exist just for managing AWS cost, so having a model like Google, >> John: Yeah. >> which is just a lot more simplified and kind of reduces the explosion of complexity that you potentially deal with on AWS side, may work just well for a lot of startups. >> This is really an important point I think, because this is something that's not being covered much in the press or in the analysts community is that everyone certainly talks about lock-in, oh the roach motel, you can check-in, but you can't check out. Now I've heard that-- >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> Been called to Amazon and everyone else, the lock-in, but if you at what you're saying is interesting. You say lock-in actually in contrast to say the opportunity of leveraging, say manageability-- >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> And security. >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> It not a big deal given the fact that you don't want to build those services. >> Pedram: Exactly. >> If you go hey, I'm fully neutral cloud where I'm going to have multiple workloads, then it's on me and IT to build the software fabric for manageability. >> That's exactly right. >> So the risk is if it's not available, (laughs) if there's no software that does that, that's the risk. >> It is the risk. As a serial entrepreneur who has done numerous startups, one of the key aspects of doing a startup is focusing on your core IP and your core differentiation. Your core IP is not how to run a cloud software, it's other peoples IP and you should leverage that. Platform as a service is a way to leverage that and you give up some control, you fall into a platform as a service, and for that matter if you want to fall into a platform as a service, you can fall into a platform as a service on AWS or you can do it with the Google app engine or you can do it on Acer, but you can basically see which one fits your needs and your profile and your software best and just give up control for productivity and for cost reductions and also you gain from all the expertise and best practices they have developed around security and audit and all the ramifications around. Basically making sure that you take care of your customer data safely and securely, you don't expose them to risk. >> This is interesting because it makes the cloud argument more about the beauty's in the eye of the beholder or whatever the enterprise thinks is best. >> Mm-hmm. >> If it's cloud native, that might be Google, but then it's an opportunity for the vendors to differentiate-- >> Mm-hmm. >> On some certain services. So I get that, but the question I want to ask you is for the folks watching who are in the enterprise trying to squint through all the complexities, hey I'm on a digital transformation, I don't know what's what, I'm seeing Google say this, Amazon says this, this is apples to oranges, what's in for me, I have my own enterprise. So that's an interesting conversation, so the question is what would you advise enterprises to evaluate when to go with Google, when to go with AWS, when to go with Oracle or IBM. There's a variety of different choices. When do you evaluate that trade-off factor of with the leverage, how do you advice that? >> It's a tough nut to crack. Before you even move to the cloud, you can still do some soul searching internally and look at the good, bad or ugly of your own software. What are strengths? What are scalability issues? Can it scale horizontally? Can it only scale vertically? With that in mind, then you go and evaluate the options that are available out there. If you're never going to leverage any of the native cloud services that are offered out by AWS or Google or Acer, and you only wanted ... Let's say you want to be completely doctorize and containerize and you really want to kind of follow that model, maybe these services don't matter to you and you're willing to take on all the other responsibility and manage all the services. So you really have to ... I would strongly advise that you gain and go to cloud experts, who have done it before time and again, and seek their incites and advice and not jump into the deep end of the pool thinking that oh, it's just cloud, anybody can do it. >> Question for you on, say Google, for instance, say that you and I were called into that Diane Greene's office and they said, "Hey Pedram and John I want you "to advise me. We really have good dev developer empathy," we talk about this in our last segment, developer empathy-- >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> "But we don't have a lot of empathy for enterprises. "You guys are experts in the enterprise, what should we do "to empathize with the enterprise better?" What would we advise them? What would we go in and say to her and her team? >> I would say start with the pain points of the enterprise, right. Before the enterprise can even consider moving to the cloud, their biggest and primary concern is security. They have to make sure that they can trust you and of course that has really over the years has been chipped away at, the old obstacles are following one at a time. But really being able to speak their language and get them to be comfortable that they're following best practices in their very solid and secure environment. On top of that, help them with all of their audit needs. Everybody wants to get certified. (laughs) And a lot of that when you actually move to the cloud, if you have a Google or AWS on a checkbox, a lot of those questions that auditors ask, go right out the window. So that is a helpful factor. But helping them along those lines and also cost factor. A lot of people don't know what it's going to cost. >> Yeah. >> Cost calculators and all that stuff are good and great, but they only go so far cuz there's a lot of hidden costs that you don't associate with it. A lot of it can come in the form of talented expertise. A lot of it comes in the form of just paying for services. >> John: SLA too. >> SLA, yet. >> SLA is a huge one. I would say to Diane, "Look at being a price leader, "and certainly you have great pricing, "but I don't think the enterprise is price sensitive, "I think they're SLA sensitive." >> Pedram: They are, right. >> That's kind of their weak spot, a little bit here. >> It is, and of course now Google has a little bit of advantage to bring to the table with what happened to AWS last week-- >> John: Yes. >> But again if you take the big picture of the SLAs that are offered up by any of these cloud platforms, compared to what you could do internally hosting your own services, with your own IT team, I'll bet you they'll beat your IT team every day of the week, twice on Sunday-- >> Yeah. >> In terms of SLA. So I wouldn't be afraid of moving to the cloud and again hiccups happen to everybody an anybody, but-- >> Pedram one of the things that we say clearly this year at Adibus, we've done all the live broadcasts at Adibus for years. But this year it what was clear is that the speed of which Amazon has been innovating services, and Google needs to match this cadence as well on their side for their architecture, is one of those cases where they're doing it faster than the IT guys can do it. So it's the same argument that open source is a great value because open source is moving the needle faster-- >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> Than homegrown teams could do on IT, so that's an opportunity to leverage that to focus on the core competency of the Internet. >> Absolutely. And then one of the other things that people overlook, when you leverage an AWS RDS service, what you gain is not just what they have at the time, what you also gain all the improvements that happen over time, on their behalf, on their side, where they keep increasing their throughput and performance and scalability. AWS just came out with the Aurora Service, which is effectively like a ... It acts like an elastic relational database, which is a concept unheard of. Imagine trying to replicate that internally. I mean it is things that the level of expertise they bring to bear, and the level of resources that they bring to bear to really solve these complex problems, far outweigh anything that we would have in our company to be able to address those same challenges. >> Pedram, great to breakdown some of these trade-offs, this is the nuances of the enterprise, being empathetic is to really understand. The buy to build kind of concept versus when do you want to leverage your core competency, when do you want to shift that-- >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> Capability to a cloud or certain clouds certainly the criteria. Really appreciate you taking the time. Take a minute to talk about your company. >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> What are you guys doing, cuz you guys are in the middle of the digitization-- (laughter) >> Physical transformation, and it's not that easy. >> No. >> What are you guys doing for customers and what's your competitive advantage? >> So what we do is, we have a lot of large enterprise customers, who typically have hundreds of thousands of customer contracts, that nobody ever looks at or reads or your only reading an army of lawyers to really comprehend and understand, and this is an obstacle to making good business decisions to grow your company. Large enterprises, much like smaller enterprises, need a up-to-date view of their customer relationships, which starts with the customer contract, which is where we come in. We digitize the customer contract and we extract key information out of it, the information, not all the legalese and noise, but really-- >> John: But the core data. >> The core data, the core key decision making data that you need to have to interface with a customer. We extract that out and make it available to you in an environment that is accessible by anybody, not just lawyers. On top of that we bring in data from across your enterprise about that customer, whether it's your billing systems, your CRM systems, or MDM systems, you name it, we can bring all of that data, layer it on top of your contract data, and on top of that, introduce additional layers of intelligence where it tells you what is the most up-to-date aspect of your customer relationship information, and that allows you to make real-time important decisions that over time your finance teams and sales ops teams can really maximize the relationship. >> This is classic data-driven, where you're taking core data about the customer and contract, they pay for stuff they haven't ... Key data in their system of record, if you will. >> Pedram: Mm-hmm. >> And kind of sharing it into other systems, sounds like it's perfectly poised for machine learning and AI, is that where-- >> That is our secret. That is our secret sauce. Trying to ingest and digitize hundreds of thousands of contracts, cannot just be done manually (laughs) clearly. >> It's not just the sales thing, but renewals, more of operationally-- >> Renewals is a big issue. There's massive operational impact, there's upsell impact, there's a lot of ... Our customers gain after adopting us, millions of dollars in lost revenue potential where they are thrilled to tell us about it, like we have found all this money we didn't know we have. It's kind of like having on top a knowledge base of data and big data, everybody knows there's information there that we could use, but to tap it, you got machine learning-- >> Cross-pollinating core data and making it addressable for other apps. >> Precisely right. >> Okay Pedram, thanks so much for coming and sharing your perspective. Breaking down the two days of special coverage of Google Next, this is theCUBE, live at Palo Alto we've got folks on the ground. Our reporters, our analysts will be calling in and of course we've got an exclusive scoop with SAP, we have one of their top executives who runs the Palo Alto entire facility, all the folks who came in from Germany. Had a chance to sit down with SAP, that's coming up shortly. Stay tuned for more coverage live from Palo Alto for Google Next 2017 in our studio. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)