>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's first day of coverage of MWC 23 from Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. I'm literally in between two Daves. We've had a great first day of coverage of the event. There's been lots of conversations, Dave, on disaggregation, on the change of mobility. I want to be able to get your perspectives from both of you on what you saw on the show floor, what you saw and heard from our guests today. So we'll start with you, Dave V. What were some of the things that were our takeaways from day one for you? >> Well, the big takeaway is the event itself. On day one, you get a feel for what this show is like. Now that we're back, face-to-face kind of pretty much full face-to-face. A lot of excitement here. 2000 plus exhibitors, I mean, planes, trains, automobiles, VR, AI, servers, software, I mean everything. I mean, everybody is here. So it's a really comprehensive show. It's not just about mobile. That's why they changed the name from Mobile World Congress. I think the other thing is from the keynotes this morning, I mean, you heard, there's a lot of, you know, action around the telcos and the transformation, but in a lot of ways they're sort of protecting their existing past from the future. And so they have to be careful about how fast they move. But at the same time if they don't move fast, they're going to get disrupted. We heard some complaints, essentially, you know, veiled complaints that the over the top guys aren't paying their fair share and Telco should be able to charge them more. We heard the chairman of Ericsson talk about how we can't let the OTTs do that again. We're going to charge directly for access through APIs to our network, to our data. We heard from Chris Lewis. Yeah. They've only got, or maybe it was San Ji Choha, how they've only got eight APIs. So, you know the developers are the ones who are going to actually build out the innovation at the edge. The telcos are going to provide the connectivity and the infrastructure companies like Dell as well. But it's really to me all about the developers. And that's where the action's going to be. And it's going to be interesting to see how the developers respond to, you know, the gun to the head. If you want access, you're going to have to pay for it. Now maybe there's so much money to be made that they'll go for it, but I feel like there's maybe a different model. And I think some of the emerging telcos are going to say, you know what, here developers, here's a platform, have at it. We're not going to charge you for all the data until you succeed. Then we're going to figure out a monetization model. >> Right. A lot of opportunity for the developer. That skillset is certainly one that's in demand here. And certainly the transformation of the telecom industry is, there's a lot of conundrums that I was hearing going on today, kind of chicken and egg scenarios. But Dave, you had a chance to walk around the show floor. We were here interviewing all day. What were some of the things that you saw that really stuck out to you? >> I think I was struck by how much attention was being paid to private 5G networks. You sort of read between the lines and it appears as though people kind of accept that the big incumbent telecom players are going to be slower to move. And this idea of things like open RAN where you're leveraging open protocols in a stack to deliver more agility and more value. So it sort of goes back to the generalized IT discussion of moving to cloud for agility. It appears as though a lot of players realize that the wild wild west, the real opportunity, is in the private sphere. So it's really interesting to see how that works, how 5G implemented into an environment with wifi how that actually works. It's really interesting. >> So it's, obviously when you talk to companies like Dell, I haven't hit HPE yet. I'm going to go over there and check out their booth. They got an analyst thing going on but it's really early days for them. I mean, they started in this business by taking an X86 box, putting a name on it, you know, that sounded like it was edged, throwing it over, you know, the wall. That's sort of how they all started in this business. And now they're, you know, but they knew they had to form partnerships. They had to build purpose-built systems. Now with 16 G out, you're seeing that. And so it's still really early days, talking about O RAN, open RAN, the open RAN alliance. You know, it's just, I mean, not even, the game hasn't even barely started yet but we heard from Dish today. They're trying to roll out a massive 5G network. Rakuten is really focused on sort of open RAN that's more reliable, you know, or as reliable as the existing networks but not as nearly as huge a scale as Dish. So it's going to take a decade for this to evolve. >> Which is surprising to the average consumer to hear that. Because as far as we know 5G has been around for a long time. We've been talking about 5G, implementing 5G, you sort of assume it's ubiquitous but the reality is it is just the beginning. >> Yeah. And you know, it's got a fake 5G too, right? I mean you see it on your phone and you're like, what's the difference here? And it's, you know, just, >> Dave N.: What does it really mean? >> Right. And so I think your point about private is interesting, the conversation Dave that we had earlier, I had throughout, hey I don't think it's a replacement for wifi. And you said, "well, why not?" I guess it comes down to economics. I mean if you can get the private network priced close enough then you're right. Why wouldn't it replace wifi? Now you got wifi six coming in. So that's a, you know, and WiFi's flexible, it's cheap, it's good for homes, good for offices, but these private networks are going to be like kickass, right? They're going to be designed to run whatever, warehouses and robots, and energy drilling facilities. And so, you know the economics I don't think are there today but maybe they can be at volume. >> Maybe at some point you sort of think of today's science experiment becoming the enterprise-grade solution in the future. I had a chance to have some conversations with folks around the show. And I think, and what I was surprised by was I was reminded, frankly, I wasn't surprised. I was reminded that when we start talking about 5G, we're talking about spectrum that is managed by government entities. Of course all broadcast, all spectrum, is managed in one way or another. But in particular, you can't simply put a SIM in every device now because there are a lot of regulatory hurdles that have to take place. So typically what these things look like today is 5G backhaul to the network, communication from that box to wifi. That's a huge improvement already. So yeah, my question about whether, you know, why not put a SIM in everything? Maybe eventually, but I think, but there are other things that I was not aware of that are standing in the way. >> Your point about spectrum's an interesting one though because private networks, you're going to be able to leverage that spectrum in different ways, and tune it essentially, use different parts of the spectrum, make it programmable so that you can apply it to that specific use case, right? So it's going to be a lot more flexible, you know, because I presume the needs spectrum needs of a hospital are going to be different than, you know, an agribusiness are going to be different than a drilling, you know, unit, offshore drilling unit. And so the ability to have the flexibility to use the spectrum in different ways and apply it to that use case, I think is going to be powerful. But I suspect it's going to be expensive initially. I think the other thing we talked about is public policy and regulation, and it's San Ji Choha brought up the point, is telcos have been highly regulated. They don't just do something and ask for permission, you know, they have to work within the confines of that regulated environment. And there's a lot of these greenfield companies and private networks that don't necessarily have to follow those rules. So that's a potential disruptive force. So at the same time, the telcos are spending what'd we hear, a billion, a trillion and a half over the next seven years? Building out 5G networks. So they got to figure out, you know how to get a payback on that. They'll get it I think on connectivity, 'cause they have a monopoly but they want more. They're greedy. They see the over, they see the Netflixes of the world and the Googles and the Amazons mopping up services and they want a piece of that action but they've never really been good at it. >> Well, I've got a question for both of you. I mean, what do you think the odds are that by the time the Shangri La of fully deployed 5G happens that we have so much data going through it that effectively it feels exactly the same as 3G? What are the odds? >> That's a good point. Well, the thing that gets me about 5G is there's so much of it on, if I go to the consumer side when we're all consumers in our daily lives so much of it's marketing hype. And, you know all the messaging about that, when it's really early innings yet they're talking about 6G. What does actual fully deployed 5G look like? What is that going to enable a hospital to achieve or an oil refinery out in the middle of the ocean? That's something that interests me is what's next for that? Are we going to hear that at this event? >> I mean, walking around, you see a fair amount of discussion of, you know, the internet of things. Edge devices, the increase in connectivity. And again, what I was surprised by was that there's very little talk about a sim card in every one of those devices at this point. It's like, no, no, no, we got wifi to handle all that but aggregating it back into a central network that's leveraging 5G. That's really interesting. That's really interesting. >> I think you, the odds of your, to go back to your question, I think the odds are even money, that by the time it's all built out there's going to be so much data and so much new capability it's going to work similarly at similar speeds as we see in the networks today. You're just going to be able to do so many more things. You know, and your video's going to look better, the graphics are going to look better. But I think over the course of history, this is what's happening. I mean, even when you go back to dial up, if you were in an AOL chat room in 1996, it was, you know, yeah it took a while. You're like, (screeches) (Lisa laughs) the modem and everything else, but once you were in there- >> Once you're there, 2400 baud. >> It was basically real time. And so you could talk to your friends and, you know, little chat room but that's all you could do. You know, if you wanted to watch a video, forget it, right? And then, you know, early days of streaming video, stop, start, stop, start, you know, look at Amazon Prime when it first started, Prime Video was not that great. It's sort of catching up to Netflix. But, so I think your point, that question is really prescient because more data, more capability, more apps means same speed. >> Well, you know, you've used the phrase over the top. And so just just so we're clear so we're talking about the same thing. Typically we're talking about, you've got, you have network providers. Outside of that, you know, Netflix, internet connection, I don't need Comcast, right? Perfect example. Well, what about the over the top that's coming from direct satellite communications with devices. There are times when I don't have a signal on my, happens to be an Apple iPhone, when I get a little SOS satellite logo because I can communicate under very limited circumstances now directly to the satellite for very limited text messaging purposes. Here at the show, I think it might be a Motorola device. It's a dongle that allows any mobile device to leverage direct satellite communication. Again, for texting back to the 2,400 baud modem, you know, days, 1200 even, 300 even, go back far enough. What's that going to look like? Is that too far in the future to think that eventually it's all going to be over the top? It's all going to be handset to satellite and we don't need these RANs anymore. It's all going to be satellite networks. >> Dave V.: I think you're going to see- >> Little too science fiction-y? (laughs) >> No, I, no, I think it's a good question and I think you're going to see fragments. I think you're going to see fragmentation of private networks. I think you're going to see fragmentation of satellites. I think you're going to see legacy incumbents kind of hanging on, you know, the cable companies. I think that's coming. I think by 2030 it'll, the picture will be much more clear. The question is, and I think it's come down to the innovation on top, which platform is going to be the most developer friendly? Right, and you know, I've not heard anything from the big carriers that they're going to be developer friendly. I've heard "we have proprietary data that we're going to charge access for and developers are going to have to pay for that." But I haven't heard them saying "Developers, developers, developers!" You know, Steve Bomber running around, like bend over backwards for developers, they're asking the developers to bend over. And so if a network can, let's say the satellite network is more developer friendly, you know, you're going to see more innovation there potentially. You know, or if a dish network says, "You know what? We're going after developers, we're going after innovation. We're not going to gouge them for all this network data. Rather we're going to make the platform open or maybe we're going to do an app store-like model where we take a piece of the action after they succeed." You know, take it out of the backend, like a Silicon Valley VC as opposed to an East Coast VC. They're not going to get you in the front end. (Lisa laughs) >> Well, you can see the sort of disruptive forces at play between open RAN and the legacy, call it proprietary stack, right? But what is the, you know, if that's sort of a horizontal disruptive model, what's the vertically disruptive model? Is it private networks coming in? Is it a private 5G network that comes in that says, "We're starting from the ground up, everything is containerized. We're going to go find people at KubeCon who are, who understand how to orchestrate with Kubernetes and use containers in microservices, and we're going to have this little 5G network that's going to deliver capabilities that you can't get from the big boys." Is there a way to monetize that? Is there a way for them to be disrupted, be disruptive, or are these private 5G networks that everybody's talking about just relegated to industrial use cases where you're just squeezing better economics out of wireless communication amongst all your devices in your factory? >> That's an interesting question. I mean, there are a lot of those smart factory industrial use cases. I mean, it's basically industry 4.0 use cases. But yeah, I don't count the cloud guys out. You know, everybody says, "oh, the narrative is, well, the latency of the cloud." Well, not if the cloud is at the edge. If you take a local zone and put storage, compute, and data right next to each other and the cloud model with the cloud APIs, and then you got an asynchronous, you know, connection back. I think that's a reasonable model. I think the cloud guys figured out developers, right? Pretty well. Certainly Microsoft and, and Amazon and Google, they know developers. I don't see any reason why they can't bring their model to the edge. So, and that's really disruptive to the legacy telco guys, you know? So they have to be careful. >> One step closer to my dream of eliminating the word "cloud" from IT lexicon. (Lisa laughs) I contend that it has always been IT, and it will always be IT. And this whole idea of cloud, what is cloud? If AWS, for example, is delivering hardware to the edge where it needs to be, is that cloud? Do we go back to the idea that cloud is an operational model and not a question of physical location? I hope we get to that point. >> Well, what's Apex and GreenLake? Apex is, you know, Dell's as a service. GreenLake is- >> HPE. >> HPE's as a service. That's outposts. >> Dave N.: Right. >> Yeah. >> That's their outpost. >> Yeah. >> Well AWS's position used to be, you know, to use them as a proxy for hyperscale cloud. We'll just, we'll grow in a very straight trajectory forever on the back of net new stuff. Forget about the old stuff. As James T. Kirk said of the Klingons, "let them die." (Lisa laughs) As far as the cloud providers were concerned just, yeah, let, let that old stuff go away. Well then they found out, there came a point in time where they realized there's a lot of friction and stickiness associated with that. So they had to deal with the reality of hybridity, if that's the word, the hybrid nature of things. So what are they doing? They're pushing stuff out to the edge, so... >> With the same operating model. >> With the same operating model. >> Similar. I mean, it's limited, right? >> So you see- >> You can't run a lot of database on outpost, you can run RES- >> You see this clash of Titans where some may have written off traditional IT infrastructure vendors, might have been written off as part of the past. Whereas hyperscale cloud providers represent the future. It seems here at this show they're coming head to head and competing evenly. >> And this is where I think a company like Dell or HPE or Cisco has some advantages in that they're not going to compete with the telcos, but the hyperscalers will. >> Lisa: Right. >> Right. You know, and they're already, Google's, how much undersea cable does Google own? A lot. Probably more than anybody. >> Well, we heard from Google and Microsoft this morning in the keynote. It'd be interesting to see if we hear from AWS and then over the next couple of days. But guys, clearly there is, this is a great wrap of day one. And the crazy thing is this is only day one. We've got three more days of coverage, more news, more information to break down and unpack on theCUBE. Look forward to doing that with you guys over the next three days. Thank you for sharing what you saw on the show floor, what you heard from our guests today as we had about 10 interviews. Appreciate your insights and your perspectives and can't wait for tomorrow. >> Right on. >> All right. For Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's day one wrap from MWC 23. We'll see you tomorrow. (relaxing music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in our Palo Alto studios, COVID is still going on, so all of the interviews continue to be remote, but we're excited to have a Cube alumni, he hasn't been on for a long time, and this guy has been in the weeds of the storage industry for a very very long time and we're happy to have him on and get an update because there continues to be a lot of exciting developments. He's Phil Bullinger, he is the SVP and general manager, data center business unit from Western Digital joining us, I think for Colorado, so Phil, great to see you, how's the weather in Colorado today? >> Hi Jeff, it's great to be here. Well, it's a hot, dry summer here, I'm sure like a lot of places. But yeah, enjoying the summer through these unusual times. >> It is unusual times, but fortunately there's great things like the internet and heavy duty compute and store out there so we can get together this way. So let's jump into it. You've been in the he business a long time, you've been at Western Digital, you were at EMC, you worked on Isilon, and you were at storage companies before that. And you've seen kind of this never-ending up and to the right slope that we see kind of ad nauseum in terms of the amount of storage demands. It's not going anywhere but up, and please increase complexity in terms of unstructure data, sources of data, speed of data, you know the kind of classic big V's of big data. So I wonder, before we jump into specifics, if you can kind of share your perspective 'cause you've been kind of sitting in the Catford seat, and Western Digital's a really unique company; you not only have solutions, but you also have media that feeds other people solutions. So you guys are really seeing and ultimately all this compute's got to put this data somewhere, and a whole lot of it's sitting on Western Digital. >> Yeah, it's a great intro there. Yeah, it's been interesting, through my career, I've seen a lot of advances in storage technology. Speeds and feeds like we often say, but the advancement through mechanical innovation, electrical innovation, chemistry, physics, just the relentless growth of data has been driven in many ways by the relentless acceleration and innovation of our ability to store that data, and that's been a very virtuous cycle through what, for me, has been 30 years in enterprise storage. There are some really interesting changes going on though I think. If you think about it, in a relatively short amount of time, data has gone from this artifact of our digital lives to the very engine that's driving the global economy. Our jobs, our relationships, our health, our security, they all kind of depend on data now, and for most companies, kind of irrespective of size, how you use data, how you store it, how you monetize it, how you use it to make better decisions to improve products and services, it becomes not just a matter of whether your company's going to thrive or not, but in many industries, it's almost an existential question; is your company going to be around in the future, and it depends on how well you're using data. So this drive to capitalize on the value of data is pretty significant. >> It's a really interesting topic, we've had a number of conversations around trying to get a book value of data, if you will, and I think there's a lot of conversations, whether it's accounting kind of way, or finance, or kind of good will of how do you value this data? But I think we see it intrinsically in a lot of the big companies that are really data based, like the Facebooks and the Amazons and the Netflixes and the Googles, and those types of companies where it's really easy to see, and if you see the valuation that they have, compared to their book value of assets, it's really baked into there. So it's fundamental to going forward, and then we have this thing called COVID hit, which I'm sure you've seen all the memes on social media. What drove your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, the board, or COVID-19? And it became this light switch moment where your opportunities to think about it are no more; you've got to jump in with both feet, and it's really interesting to your point that it's the ability to store this and think about it now differently as an asset driving business value versus a cost that IT has to accommodate to put this stuff somewhere, so it's a really different kind of a mind shift and really changes the investment equation for companies like Western Digital about how people should invest in higher performance and higher capacity and more unified and kind of democratizing the accessibility that data, to a much greater set of people with tools that can now start making much more business line and in-line decisions than just the data scientist kind of on Mahogany Row. >> Yeah, as you mentioned, Jeff, here at Western Digital, we have such a unique kind of perch in the industry to see all the dynamics in the OEM space and the hyperscale space and the channel, really across all the global economies about this growth of data. I have worked at several companies and have been familiar with what I would have called big data projects and fleets in the past. But at Western Digital, you have to move the decimal point quite a few digits to the right to get the perspective that we have on just the volume of data that the world has just relentless insatiably consuming. Just a couple examples, for our drive projects we're working on now, our capacity enterprise drive projects, you know, we used to do business case analysis and look at their lifecycle capacities and we measured them in exabytes, and not anymore, now we're talking about zettabyte, we're actually measuring capacity enterprise drive families in terms of how many zettabyte they're going to ship in their lifecycle. If we look at just the consumption of this data, the last 12 months of industry TAM for capacity enterprise compared to the 12 months prior to that, that annual growth rate was north of 60%. And so it's rare to see industries that are growing at that pace. And so the world is just consuming immense amounts of data, and as you mentioned, the COVID dynamics have been both an accelerant in some areas, as well as headwinds in others, but it's certainly accelerated digital transformation. I think a lot of companies we're talking about, digital transformation and hybrid models and COVID has really accelerated that, and it's certainly driving, continues to drive just this relentless need to store and access and take advantage of data. >> Yeah, well Phil, in advance of this interview, I pulled up the old chart with all the different bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, and zettabytes, and just per the Wikipedia page, what is a zettabyte? It's as much information as there are grains of sand in all the world's beaches. For one zettabyte. You're talking about thinking in terms of those units, I mean, that is just mind boggling to think that that is the scale in which we're operating. >> It's really hard to get your head wrapped around a zettabyte of storage, and I think a lot of the industry thinks when we say zettabyte scale era, that it's just a buzz word, but I'm here to say it's a real thing. We're measuring projects in terms of zettabytes now. >> That's amazing. Well, let's jump into some of the technology. So I've been fortunate enough here at theCUBE to be there at a couple of major announcements along the way. We talked before we turned the cameras on, the helium announcement and having the hard drive sit in the fish bowl to get all types of interesting benefits from this less dense air that is helium versus oxygen. I was down at the Mammer and Hammer announcement, which was pretty interesting; big heavy technology moves there, to again, increase the capacity of the hard drive's base systems. You guys are doing a lot of stuff on RISC-V I know is an Open source project, so you guys have a lot of things happening, but now there's this new thing, this new thing called zonedd storage. So first off, before we get into it, why do we need zoned storage, and really what does it now bring to the table in terms of a capability? >> Yeah, great question, Jeff. So why now, right? Because I mentioned storage, I've been in storage for quite some time. In the last, let's just say in the last decade, we've seen the advent of the hyperscale model and certainly a whole nother explosion level of data and just the veracity with which they hyperscalers can create and consume and process and monetize data. And of course with that, has also come a lot of innovation, frankly, in the compute space around how to process that data and moving from what was just a general purpose CPU model to GPU's and DPU's and so we've seen a lot of innovation on that side, but frankly, in the storage side, we haven't seen much change at all in terms of how operating systems, applications, file systems, how they actually use the storage or communicate with the storage. And sure, we've seen advances in storage capacities; hard drives have gone from two to four, to eight, to 10 to 14, 16, and now our leading 18 and 20 terabyte hard drives. And similarly, on the SSD side, now we're dealing with the capacities of seven, and 15, and 30 terabytes. So things have gotten larger, as you expect. And some interfaces have improved, I think NVME, which we'll talk about, has been a nice advance in the industry; it's really now brought a very modern scalable low latency multi-threaded interface to a NAM flash to take advantage of the inherent performance of transistor based persistent storage. But really when you think about it, it hasn't changed a lot. But what has changed is workloads. One thing that definitely has evolved in the space of the last decade or so is this, the thing that's driving a lot of this explosion of data in the industry is around workloads that I would characterize as sequential in nature, they're serial, you can capture it in written. They also have a very consistent life cycle, so you would write them in a big chunk, you would read them maybe in smaller pieces, but the lifecycle of that data, we can treat more as a chunk of data, but the problem is applications, operating systems, vial systems continue to interface with storage using paradigms that are many decades old. The old 512 byte or even Forte, Sector size constructs were developed in the hard drive industry just as convenient paradigms to structure what is an unstructured sea of magnetic grains into something structured that can be used to store and access data. But the reality is when we talk about SSDs, structure really matters, and so what has changed in the industry is the workloads are driving very very fresh looks at how more intelligence can be applied to that application OS storage device interface to drive much greater efficiency. >> Right, so there's two things going on here that I want to drill down on. On one hand, you talked about kind of the introduction of NAND and flash, and treating it like you did, generically you did a regular hard drive. But you could get away and you could do some things because the interface wasn't taking full advantage of the speed that was capable in the NAND. But NVME has changed that, and now forced kind of getting rid of some of those inefficient processes that you could live with, so it's just kind of classic next level step up and capabilities. One is you get the better media, you just kind of plug it into the old way. Now actually you're starting to put in processes that take full advantage of the speed that that flash has. And I think obviously prices have come down dramatically since the first introduction, where before it was always kind of a clustered off or super high end, super low latency, super high value apps, it just continues to spread and proliferate throughout the data center. So what did NVME force you to think about in terms of maximizing the return on the NAND and flash? >> Yeah, NVME, which we've been involved in the standardization, I think it's been a very successful effort, but we have to remember NVME is about a decade old, or even more when the original work started around defining this interface, but it's been very successful. The NVME standard's body is very productive cross company effort, it's really driven a significant change, and what we see now is the rapid adoption of NVME in all of data center architectures, whether it's very large hyperscale to classic on prem enterprise to even smaller applications, it's just a very efficient interface mechanism for connecting SSDs into a server. So we continue to see evolution at NVME, which is great, and we'll talk about ZNS today as one of those evolutions. We're also very keenly interested in NVME protocol over fabrics, and so one of the things that Western Digital has been talking about a lot lately is incorporating NVME over fabrics as a mechanism for now connecting shared storage into multiple post architectures. We think this is a very attractive way to build shared storage architectures of the future that are scalable, that are composable, that really have a lot more agility with respect to rack level infrastructure and applying that infrastructure to applications. >> Right, now one thing that might strike some people as kind of counterintuitive is within the zoned storage in zoning off parts of the media, to think of the data also kind of in these big chunks, is it feels contrary to kind of atomization that we're seeing in the rest of the data center, right? So smaller units of compute, smaller units of store, so that you can assemble and disassemble them in different quantities as needed. So what was the special attribute that you had to think about and actually come back and provide a benefit in actually kind of re-chunking, if you will, in these zones versus trying to get as atomic as possible? >> Yeah, it's a great question, Jeff, and I think it's maybe not intuitive in terms of why zoned storage actually creates a more efficient storage paradigm when you're storing stuff essentially in larger blocks of data, but this is really where the intersection of structure and workload and sort of the nature of the data all come together. If you turn back the clock maybe four or five years when SMR hard drives host managers SMR hard drives first emerged on the scene. This was really taking advantage of the fact that the right head on a hard disk drive is larger than the read head, or the read head can be much smaller, and so the notion of overlapping or shingling the data on the drive, giving the read head a smaller target to read, but the writer a larger write pad to write the data could actually, what we found was it increases aerial density significantly. And so that was really the emergence of this notion of sequentially written larger blocks of data being actually much more efficiently stored when you think about physically how it's being stored. What's very new now and really gaining a lot of traction is the SSD corollary to SMR on the hard drive, on the SSD side, we had the ZNS specification, which is, very similarly where you'd divide up the name space of an SSD into fixed size zones, and those zones are written sequentially, but now those zones are intimately tied to the underlying physical architecture of the NAND itself; the dyes, the planes, the read pages, the erase pages. So that, in treating data as a block, you're actually eliminating a lot of the complexity and the work that an SSD has to do to emulate a legacy hard drive, and in doing so, you're increasing performance and endurance and the predictable performance of the device. >> I just love the way that you kind of twist the lens on the problem, and on one hand, by rule, just looking at my notes here, the zoned storage device is the ZSD's introduce a number of restrictions and limitations and rules that are outside the full capabilities of what you might do. But in doing so, an aggregate, the efficiency, and the performance of the system in the whole is much much better, even though when you first look at it, you think it's more of a limiter, but it's actually opens up. I wonder if there's any kind of performance stats you can share or any kind of empirical data just to give people kind of a feel for what that comes out as. >> So if you think about the potential of zoned storage in general and again, when I talk about zoned storage, there's two components; there's an HDD component of zoned storage that we refer to as SMR, and there's an SSD version of that that we call ZNS. So we think about SMR, the value proposition there is additional capacity. So effectively in the same drive architecture, with roughly the same bill of material used to build the drive, we can overlap or shingle the data on the drive. And generally for the customer, additional capacity. Today with our 18, 20 terabyte offerings that's on the order of just over 10%, but that delta is going to increase significantly going forward to 20% or more. And when you think about a hyperscale customer that has not hundreds or thousands of racks, but tens of thousands of racks. A 10 or 20% improvement in effective capacity is a tremendous TCO benefit, and the reason we do that is obvious. I mean, the economic paradigm that drives large at-scale data centers is total custom ownership, both acquisition costs and operating costs. And if you can put more storage in a square tile of data center space, you're going to generally use less power, you're going to run it more efficiently, you're actually, from an acquisition cost, you're getting a more efficient purchase of that capacity. And in doing that, our innovation, we benefit from it and our customers benefit from it. So the value proposition for zoned storage in capacity enterprise HDV is very clear, it's additional capacity. The exciting thing is, in the SSD side of things, or ZNS, it actually opens up even more value proposition for the customer. Because SSDs have had to emulate hard drives, there's been a lot of inefficiency and complexity inside an enterprise SSD dealing with things like garbage collection and right amplification reducing the endurance of the device. You have to over-provision, you have to insert as much as 20, 25, even 28% additional man bits inside the device just to allow for that extra space, that working space to deal with delete of data that are smaller than the block erase that the device supports. So you have to do a lot of reading and writing of data and cleaning up. It creates for a very complex environment. ZNS by mapping the zoned size with the physical structure of the SSD essentially eliminates garbage collection, it reduces over-provisioning by as much as 10x. And so if you were over provisioning by 20 or 25% on an enterprise SSD, and a ZNS SSD, that can be one or two percent. The other thing I have to keep in mind is enterprise SSD is typically incorporate D RAM and that D RAM is used to help manage all those dynamics that I just mentioned, but with a much simpler structure where the pointers to the data can be managed without all the D RAM. We can actually reduce the amount of D RAM in an enterprise SSD by as much as eight X. And if you think about the MILA material of an enterprise SSD, D RAM is number two on the list in terms of the most expensive bomb components. So ZNS and SSDs actually have a significant customer total cost of ownership impact. It's an exciting standard, and now that we have the standard ratified through the NVME working group, it can really accelerate the development of the software ecosystem around. >> Right, so let's shift gears and talk a little bit about less about the tech and more about the customers and the implementation of this. So you talked kind of generally, but are there certain types of workloads that you're seeing in the marketplace where this is a better fit or is it just really the big heavy lifts where they just need more and this is better? And then secondly, within these hyperscale companies, as well as just regular enterprises that are also seeing their data demands grow dramatically, are you seeing that this is a solution that they want to bring in for kind of the marginal kind of next data center, extension of their data center, or their next cloud region? Or are they doing lift and shift and ripping stuff out? Or do they enough data growth organically that there's plenty of new stuff that they can put in these new systems? >> Yeah, I love that. The large customers don't rip and shift; they ride their assets for a long lifecycle, 'cause with the relentless growth of data, you're primarily investing to handle what's coming in over the transom. But we're seeing solid adoption. And in SMRS you know we've been working on that for a number of years. We've got significant interest and investment, co-investment, our engineering, and our customer's engineering adapting the application environment's to take advantage of SMR. The great thing is now that we've got the NVME, the ZNS standard gratified now in the NVME working group, we've got a very similar, and all approved now, situation where we've got SMR standards that have been approved for some time, and the SATA and SCSI standards. Now we've got the same thing in the NVME standard, and the great thing is once a company goes through the lift, so to speak, to adapt an application, file system, operating system, ecosystem, to zoned storage, it pretty much works seamlessly between HDD and SSD, and so it's not an incremental investment when you're switching technologies. Obviously the early adopters of these technologies are going to be the large companies who design their own infrastructure, who have mega fleets of racks of infrastructure where these efficiencies really really make a difference in terms of how they can monetize that data, how they compete against the landscape of competitors they have. For companies that are totally reliant on kind of off the shelf standard applications, that adoption curve is going to be longer, of course, because there are some software changes that you need to adapt to enable zoned storage. One of the things Western Digital has done and taken the lead on is creating a landing page for the industry with zoned storage.io. It's a webpage that's actually an area where many companies can contribute Open source tools, code, validation environments, technical documentation. It's not a marketeering website, it's really a website built to land actual Open source content that companies can use and leverage and contribute to to accelerate the engineering work to adapt software stacks to zoned storage devices, and to share those things. >> Let me just follow up on that 'cause, again, you've been around for a while, and get your perspective on the power of Open source. And it used to be the best secrets, the best IP were closely guarded and held inside, and now really we're in an age where it's not necessarily. And the brilliant minds and use cases and people out there, just by definition, it's more groups of engineers, more engineers outside your building than inside your building, and how that's really changed kind of a strategy in terms of development when you can leverage Open source. >> Yeah, Open source clearly has accelerated innovation across the industry in so many ways, and it's the paradigm around which companies have built business models and innovated on top of it, I think it's always important as a company to understand what value ad you're bringing, and what value ad the customers want to pay for. What unmet needs in your customers are you trying to solve for, and what's the best mechanism to do that? And do you want to spend your RND recreating things, or leveraging what's available and innovating on top of it? It's all about ecosystem. I mean, the days where a single company could vertically integrate top to bottom a complete end solution, you know, those are fewer and far between. I think it's about collaboration and building ecosystems and operating within those. >> Yeah, it's such an interesting change, and one more thing, again, to get your perspective, you run the data center group, but there's this little thing happening out there that we see growing, IOT, in the industrial internet of things, and edge computing as we try to move more compute and store and power kind of outside the pristine world of the data center and out towards where this data is being collected and processed when you've got latency issues and all kinds of reasons to start to shift the balance of where the compute is and where the store and relies on the network. So when you look back from the storage perspective in your history in this industry and you start to see basically everything is now going to be connected, generating data, and a lot of it is even Opensource. I talked to somebody the other day doing kind of Opensource computer vision on surveillance video. So the amount of stuff coming off of these machines is growing in crazy ways. At the same time, it can't all be processed at the data center, it can't all be kind of shipped back and then have a decision and then ship that information back out to. So when you sit back and look at Edge from your kind of historical perspective, what goes through your mind, what gets you excited, what are some opportunities that you see that maybe the laymen is not paying close enough attention to? >> Yeah, it's really an exciting time in storage. I get asked that question from time to time, having been in storage for more than 30 years, you know, what was the most interesting time? And there's been a lot of them, but I wouldn't trade today's environment for any other in terms of just the velocity with which data is evolving and how it's being used and where it's being used. A TCO equation may describe what a data center looks like, but data locality will determine where it's located, and we're excited about the Edge opportunity. We see that as a pretty significant, meaningful part of the TAM as we look three to five years. Certainly 5G is driving much of that, I think just any time you speed up the speed of the connected fabric, you're going to increase storage and increase the processing the data. So the Edge opportunity is very interesting to us. We think a lot of it is driven by low latency work loads, so the concept of NVME is very appropriate for that, we think, in general SSDs deployed and Edge data centers defined as anywhere from a meter to a few kilometers from the source of the data. We think that's going to be a very strong paradigm. The workloads you mentioned, especially IOT, just machine-generated data in general, now I believe, has eclipsed human generated data, in terms of just the amount of data stored, and so we think that curve is just going to keep going in terms of machine generated data. Much of that data is so well suited for zoned storage because it's sequential, it's sequentially written, it's captured, and it has a very consistent and homogenous lifecycle associated with it. So we think what's going on with zoned storage in general and ZNS and SMR specifically are well suited for where a lot of the data growth is happening. And certainly we're going to see a lot of that at the Edge. >> Well, Phil, it's always great to talk to somebody who's been in the same industry for 30 years and is excited about today and the future. And as excited as they have been throughout their whole careers. So that really bodes well for you, bodes well for Western Digital, and we'll just keep hoping the smart people that you guys have over there, keep working on the software and the physics, and the mechanical engineering and keep moving this stuff along. It's really just amazing and just relentless. >> Yeah, it is relentless. What's exciting to me in particular, Jeff, is we've driven storage advancements largely through, as I said, a number of engineering disciplines, and those are still going to be important going forward, the chemistry, the physics, the electrical, the hardware capabilities. But I think as widely recognized in the industry, it's a diminishing curve. I mean, the amount of energy, the amount of engineering effort, investment, that cost and complexity of these products to get to that next capacity step is getting more difficult, not less. And so things like zoned storage, where we now bring intelligent data placement to this paradigm, is what I think makes this current juncture that we're at very exciting. >> Right, right, well, it's applied AI, right? Ultimately you're going to have more and more compute power driving the storage process and how that stuff is managed. As more cycles become available and they're cheaper, and ultimately compute gets cheaper and cheaper, as you said, you guys just keep finding new ways to move the curve in. And we didn't even get into the totally new material science, which is also coming down the pike at some point in time. >> Yeah, very exciting times. >> It's been great to catch up with you, I really enjoy the Western Digital story; I've been fortunate to sit in on a couple chapters, so again, congrats to you and we'll continue to watch and look forward to our next update. Hopefully it won't be another four years. >> Okay, thanks Jeff, I really appreciate the time. >> All right, thanks a lot. All right, he's Phil, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.

(energetic music) >> Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Lynn Lucas. She is the CMO of Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on the program, Lynn. >> Oh, just so excited to be here with you guys and host you in the Cohesity booth for the first time at Microsoft Ignite. >> It's been a lot of fun. There's a lot of buzz around here, and it's fun to be right, to be your neighbor. Exactly. >> Great. >> So today, there's been a lot of news, some new exciting announcements of integrations with Microsoft. I wonder if you can walk our viewers a little bit through what Cohesity announced today. >> Absolutely. So, we have been partners with Microsoft for some time, and today, we announced extensions to our capabilities with Microsoft Azure and Office 365. So Cohesity now extends data protection and backup for Office 365, including granular recovery of mailboxes and granular search for discovery purposes. We also have extended our integration with the Azure data box, and we also are increasing our DR capabilities for our customers with Azure so we now have fail back from the Azure Cloud for disaster recovery purposes. So, just continuing to see tremendous growth, hundreds of Microsoft customers with Cohesity, and these new capabilities are going to expand the possibilities for them. >> Lynn, it's an interesting conversation these days 'cause, you know, in our research, and we've talked about this, data's at the center of everything, and the challenge for customers is data's everywhere. You look here at the Microsoft show, well, I've got all my traditional stuff, I've got my SaaS stuff, my PubliCloud stuff, now Edge with the data box things there. Microsoft plays across there, and it sounds like Cohesity is playing in all of these areas, too. >> Absolutely, and I thought, you know, Sacha did such a good job in the keynote yesterday of really laying out the imperative for digital transformation, data being at the heart of it, but also laying out one of the key challenges which he pointed out, which is the data silos. And, I think Cohesity is right smack in the center of that conversation because we've always been about consolidating secondary data silos. And, you know, our partnership with Microsoft, really, I think, reinforces what they've been talking about, which is also a hybrid strategy that the bulk of customers that we talk to see that their data is going to be on premise, it's going to be in the cloud, and increasingly, it's goinna at the Edge, and we span all of those locations to create this one operating environment so that things like the new open data initiative, I think, will be much easier for customers because they won't be wondering, well, is my data all in one place to be operated on? >> So, talk about the problem of the data silos, because, as you said, it's one of the biggest challenges that companies face today. They are data rich and yet, this data's here and this data's here. Can you describe a little bit about what kind of problems this is for companies, and why this matters? >> So, I think it's just something folks are starting to really get a handle on. As I talked to individual folks here at the show, you'd be surprised at how many aren't even really sure, maybe, how many islands they have, you know, so, even mapping where is all my data, I think, is a capability that many organizations are still getting their arms around. And the challenge, of course, is that in today's world, it's very expensive to move large data sets, and so you want to bring compute to the data, which is what a hyper-convergence in Cohesity is about. And, when you look at the imperatives at the board level, the CEO level, they increasingly see that data becomes really the true competitive advantage for most organizations, and yet, if they can't operate or bring compute to that data and do something with it, they're really at a handicap. We call, you know, some of the newer companies are kind of data-centric or data natives, the Air BNB's, the, maybe, Netflixes of the world, not everyone aspires to be them. As well, not everyone has the resources that those companies may have had or just stay short period of time. Most organizations have the benefit of years of data. We want to level the playing field and allow them to become competitive with their data by providing that single foundation. >> Yeah, Lynn, it's a big show here. They said thirty thousand people and a really diverse ecosystem. What really surprised me is the spectrum of customers that you have here. I mean, we know Microsoft has a long history in higher education. We spoke to one of your customers, Brown University, and of course, long history they have with Microsoft. What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers, maybe, what's different at this show than some of the other, cloud and kind of younger shows that we might go to. This show's been around about almost thirty years now, so. >> Yeah, you know, isn't it, you know, I hate to give our ages but, I think we've been doing this for a while now, right? And Microsoft has been part of the IT ecosystem in a major way, and it's great to see the vibrancy here and how they're talking about AI and ML and moving forward with it. You know, what strikes me here is that a lot of the organizations here are now really understanding the pragmatism of having a hybrid strategy of what makes sense in the cloud as well as what may continue to be on prem for them. I think we complement that well. I'm really excited, too, about the idea that we are going to be using machine learning to be doing a lot more that humans simply can't keep up with in terms of the data growth and then doing something productive with that. And I think that's a conversation that we're just tapping the surface of here at this show. >> Yeah, you've said something that really resonated with me. You know, we have people that have been in the industry a while and, I look at you, your founder, Mohit, and this isn't his first rodeo. He'd been looking at data back from a couple of generations of solutions, and people are very excited. Machine learning, as you said, we used to talk about automation and intelligence around this environment. Now, I lived in the storage industry for quite a while, and we've talked about it but it feels more real when I talk to the architects and the people building this stuff. They are just so excited about what we will be able to do today that we talked about a decade or so ago but now really can make reality for customers. >> No, absolutely, and I think, you know, we have our own investment in that. Helios, which we announced just last month, you know, provides that machine learning capability because what we hear from our customers is what they love is the ability to have simplicity because, let's face it, IT environments continue to grow in complexity. They're looking for ways to subtract that complexity so they can apply their talents to solving the primary mission, as I call it, of their organization, whether that be public sector or private sector, adoing that in a simpler way. You know, look, one of the great stories that one of our customers is talking about here is how Cohesity helped him with a standard thing that most IT organizations have, which is, we're going to do a power shut down and we've got to perform a DR failover, and this particular organization, University of Pennsylvania Annenberg, had a set of twelve websites which, the professors and the students rely on, and it was going to take them literally almost a month to try to move them, and they didn't have that kind of time, and with Cohesity, with our DR capabilities, he was able to do that literally with a few clicks, kept the community of professors and students happy, and didn't spend, more importantly, twenty days trying to rebuild websites for a standard IT event, right? That's the kind of real life story in terms of what IT gets back that they can invest in other more important focus areas for their business. >> Well, for their business and also, just for their lives giving people their time back, their weekends back, their time at night >> Weekends and nights, right? >> With their families, yeah. >> We all need that. >> Satya Nadella is such a proponent of an improving workplace productivity, even five percent, he says, can make this big difference. Can you talk a little bit about how you view that workplace productivity at Cohesity and your approach to giving people either time to concentrate on more value for their companies or just their lives? >> So, again, a super story that we have from another customer that is here at Microsoft, and is an Azure customer, and a Cohesity customer. HKS, one of the world's most respected architectural firms, designed AT&T Stadium, there's a new major pediatric hospital going in in Dubai. They operate in ninety-four countries with remote designers and architects, and because of their inefficient backup processes and archive processes, they literally were having their associates have to work weekends as well as losing time on their projects, and time is money, and they, you know, in some cases, are penalized if they don't make certain dates. And so, I think, these are really pragmatic examples. On average here, pulling some of the folks here, I've heard that they can get a day a week back, sometimes for their administrator who now doesn't have to do repetitive manual tasks anymore. >> One of the things we always love digging into is, you talk about people's jobs and some of the new careers that are happening. We talked to one guest earlier this week. He said, if you're a customer and you learn Azure as what you're doing, like, you're resume is gold. We've talked to, and the really early Edge, like site reliability engineering, he said, don't put SRE on your resume or every recruiter will be calling you up and you won't even be able to answer your phone. Cohesity, you're doing a bit of hiring also. Maybe you could talk about- >> We are! >> What are you seeing from customers and what are you looking for internally? >> We have tremendous good fortune, we grew three hundred percent in revenues year over year, we're hiring in our RTP offices, in our San Jose, in India, around the globe. You know, we look for the best and the brightest, a lot of engineering talent, marketing talent as well, really, across the board but, you know, I think to the point you just made for the IT folks that are here, looking forward as to how you are going to help your business with your data infrastructure or data flows throughout their organization is, to me, where some of the career movement is happening when you hear the talk about how important it is to so many aspects of the business. >> And what are the sort of challenges that you're having with hiring, or are you? I mean, you're a red hot company, but, are you finding it difficult to find the kind of skills, the kind of talent that you want? I mean, what is, what's the candidate pool like? >> You know, so, I think what's really interesting, we are red hot, we have a lot of applicants so, I'd say, in general, no, we're very blessed that way. I think, though, more businesses, including ours, are finding it's difficult to get, say, those data scientists, right? Some of these also front end or back end developers, you know, it's not just the technical companies that are recruiting for that anymore. It's not just the Cohesitys and the Microsofts that are looking for that talent, but it's now also the Netflixes or, you know, the eBays, et cetera, right? They are all looking for the type of talent that we are and so, in general, I think that this bodes well for young people or folks really anywhere in their career watching about, thinking about, where the talent needs are, and there's a lot of activity and interest in people with those kinds of skills. >> You know, let me just follow up on that. So, Cohesity is a Silicon Valley-based company but, as you mentioned, you've got an RTP location. We've seen quite a lot of Silicon Valley-based companies that are starting to do a lot more hiring outside 'cause it's, I'm going to be honest, really expensive to live in the valley these days. So, any commentary on that dynamic? >> Well, you know, I think you're in Boston, not the lowest cost market either in the country. >> True, it's true! >> Yeah, you know, I think with a lot of the technology that's out there, you know, people don't have to be co-located, and we certainly also look to develop and invest in other communities around the globe, so we're not looking solely in San Jose but also in RTP, we've got headquarters in Europe as well as, of course, in India. So we look for talent everywhere, and, my own personal team, you know, I have folks basically around the US as well as across parts of the globe because talent, in many cases, is what matters and where you are physically, you know, some of the great technology that's out there can help break down those barriers of time and distance. >> Finally, this conference, it's thirty thousand people from five thousand different companies around the world. What is going to be, I mean, we're only on day two, but, what's been your big take-away so far? What's the vibe you're getting here at Ignite? >> You know, the vibe has been one of energy, of excitement. I've talked to a lot of folks from around the globe. I've been actually, pretty amazed at some of the people from different countries around the globe that are here, which is fantastic to see that draw in, and I feel like there's a general sense of excitement that technology and what Microsoft's doing can help solve some of the bigger challenges that are here, in the world, and for their own businesses, and we really look forward to Cohesity helping them lay that great data infrastructure foundation, consolidate their silos and help them build a foundation for, you know, doing more with their data. >> Great. Lynn Lucas, thank you so much for coming on theCube. It was great, great talking to you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite and theCube's live coverage coming up in just a little bit. (electronic music)

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