(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2. This is Dave Vellante. We're here exploring the intersection of data and analytics in the future of cloud and data. In this segment, we're going to look deeper into the life sciences business with Jesse Cugliotta, who leads the Healthcare and Life Sciences industry practice at Snowflake. And Nicholas Nick Taylor, who's the executive director of Informatics at Ionis Pharmaceuticals. Gentlemen, thanks for coming in theCUBE and participating in the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us- >> Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome, okay, we're go really try to look at data sharing as a use case and try to understand what's happening in the healthcare industry generally and specifically, how Nick thinks about sharing data in a governed fashion whether tapping the capabilities of multiple clouds is advantageous long term or presents more challenges than the effort is worth. And to start, Jesse, you lead this industry practice for Snowflake and it's a challenging and vibrant area. It's one that's hyper-focused on data privacy. So the first question is, you know there was a time when healthcare and other regulated industries wouldn't go near the cloud. What are you seeing today in the industry around cloud adoption and specifically multi-cloud adoption? >> Yeah, for years I've heard that healthcare and life sciences has been cloud diverse, but in spite of all of that if you look at a lot of aspects of this industry today, they've been running in the cloud for over 10 years now. Particularly when you look at CRM technologies or HR or HCM, even clinical technologies like EDC or ETMF. And it's interesting that you mentioned multi-cloud as well because this has always been an underlying reality especially within life sciences. This industry grows through acquisition where companies are looking to boost their future development pipeline either by buying up smaller biotechs, they may have like a late or a mid-stage promising candidate. And what typically happens is the larger pharma could then use their commercial muscle and their regulatory experience to move it to approvals and into the market. And I think the last few decades of cheap capital certainly accelerated that trend over the last couple of years. But this typically means that these new combined institutions may have technologies that are running on multiple clouds or multiple cloud strategies in various different regions to your point. And what we've often found is that they're not planning to standardize everything onto a single cloud provider. They're often looking for technologies that embrace this multi-cloud approach and work seamlessly across them. And I think this is a big reason why we, here at Snowflake, we've seen such strong momentum and growth across this industry because healthcare and life science has actually been one of our fastest growing sectors over the last couple of years. And a big part of that is in fact that we run on not only all three major cloud providers, but individual accounts within each and any one of them, they had the ability to communicate and interoperate with one another, like a globally interconnected database. >> Great, thank you for that setup. And so Nick, tell us more about your role and Ionis Pharma please. >> Sure. So I've been at Ionis for around five years now. You know, when when I joined it was, the IT department was pretty small. There wasn't a lot of warehousing, there wasn't a lot of kind of big data there. We saw an opportunity with Snowflake pretty early on as a provider that would be a lot of benefit for us, you know, 'cause we're small, wanted something that was fairly hands off. You know, I remember the days where you had to get a lot of DBAs in to fine tune your databases, make sure everything was running really, really well. The notion that there's, you know, no indexes to tune, right? There's very few knobs and dials, you can turn on Snowflake. That was appealing that, you know, it just kind of worked. So we found a use case to bring the platform in. We basically used it as a logging replacement as a Splunk kind of replacement with a platform called Elysium Analytics as a way to just get it in the door and give us the opportunity to solve a real world use case, but also to help us start to experiment using Snowflake as a platform. It took us a while to A, get the funding to bring it in, but B, build the momentum behind it. But, you know, as we experimented we added more data in there, we ran a few more experiments, we piloted in few more applications, we really saw the power of the platform and now, we are becoming a commercial organization. And with that comes a lot of major datasets. And so, you know, we really see Snowflake as being a very important part of our ecology going forward to help us build out our infrastructure. >> Okay, and you are running, your group runs on Azure, it's kind of mono cloud, single cloud, but others within Ionis are using other clouds, but you're not currently, you know, collaborating in terms of data sharing. And I wonder if you could talk about how your data needs have evolved over the past decade. I know you came from another highly regulated industry in financial services. So what's changed? You sort of touched on this before, you had these, you know, very specialized individuals who were, you know, DBAs, and, you know, could tune databases and the like, so that's evolved, but how has generally your needs evolved? Just kind of make an observation over the last, you know, five or seven years. What have you seen? >> Well, we, I wasn't in a group that did a lot of warehousing. It was more like online trade capture, but, you know, it was very much on-prem. You know, being in the cloud is very much a dirty word back then. I know that's changed since I've left. But in, you know, we had major, major teams of everyone who could do everything, right. As I mentioned in the pharma organization, there's a lot fewer of us. So the data needs there are very different, right? It's, we have a lot of SaaS applications. One of the difficulties with bringing a lot of SaaS applications on board is obviously data integration. So making sure the data is the same between them. But one of the big problems is joining the data across those SaaS applications. So one of the benefits, one of the things that we use Snowflake for is to basically take data out of these SaaS applications and load them into a warehouse so we can do those joins. So we use technologies like Boomi, we use technologies like Fivetran, like DBT to bring this data all into one place and start to kind of join that basically, allow us to do, run experiments, do analysis, basically take better, find better use for our data that was siloed in the past. You mentioned- >> Yeah. And just to add on to Nick's point there. >> Go ahead. >> That's actually something very common that we're seeing across the industry is because a lot of these SaaS applications that you mentioned, Nick, they're with from vendors that are trying to build their own ecosystem in walled garden. And by definition, many of them do not want to integrate with one another. So from a, you know, from a data platform vendor's perspective, we see this as a huge opportunity to help organizations like Ionis and others kind of deal with the challenges that Nick is speaking about because if the individual platform vendors are never going to make that part of their strategy, we see it as a great way to add additional value to these customers. >> Well, this data sharing thing is interesting. There's a lot of walled gardens out there. Oracle is a walled garden, AWS in many ways is a walled garden. You know, Microsoft has its walled garden. You could argue Snowflake is a walled garden. But the, what we're seeing and the whole reason behind the notion of super-cloud is we're creating an abstraction layer where you actually, in this case for this use case, can share data in a governed manner. Let's forget about the cross-cloud for a moment. I'll come back to that, but I wonder, Nick, if you could talk about how you are sharing data, again, Snowflake sort of, it's, I look at Snowflake like the app store, Apple, we're going to control everything, we're going to guarantee with data clean rooms and governance and the standards that we've created within that platform, we're going to make sure that it's safe for you to share data in this highly regulated industry. Are you doing that today? And take us through, you know, the considerations that you have in that regard. >> So it's kind of early days for us in Snowflake in general, but certainly in data sharing, we have a couple of examples. So data marketplace, you know, that's a great invention. It's, I've been a small IT shop again, right? The fact that we are able to just bring down terabyte size datasets straight into our Snowflake and run analytics directly on that is huge, right? The fact that we don't have to FTP these massive files around run jobs that may break, being able to just have that on tap is huge for us. We've recently been talking to one of our CRO feeds- CRO organizations about getting their data feeds in. Historically, this clinical trial data that comes in on an FTP file, we have to process it, take it through the platforms, put it into the warehouse. But one of the CROs that we talked to recently when we were reinvestigate in what data opportunities they have, they were a Snowflake customer and we are, I think, the first production customer they have, have taken that feed. So they're basically exposing their tables of data that historically came in these FTP files directly into our Snowflake instance now. We haven't taken advantage of that. It only actually flipped the switch about three or four weeks ago. But that's pretty big for us again, right? We don't have to worry about maintaining those jobs that take those files in. We don't have to worry about the jobs that take those and shove them on the warehouse. We now have a feed that's directly there that we can use a tool like DBT to push through directly into our model. And then the third avenue that's came up, actually fairly recently as well was genetics data. So genetics data that's highly, highly regulated. We had to be very careful with that. And we had a conversation with Snowflake about the data white rooms practice, and we see that as a pretty interesting opportunity. We are having one organization run genetic analysis being able to send us those genetic datasets, but then there's another organization that's actually has the in quotes "metadata" around that, so age, ethnicity, location, et cetera. And being able to join those two datasets through some kind of mechanism would be really beneficial to the organization. Being able to build a data white room so we can put that genetic data in a secure place, anonymize it, and then share the amalgamated data back out in a way that's able to be joined to the anonymized metadata, that could be pretty huge for us as well. >> Okay, so this is interesting. So you talk about FTP, which was the common way to share data. And so you basically, it's so, I got it now you take it and do whatever you want with it. Now we're talking, Jesse, about sharing the same copy of live data. How common is that use case in your industry? >> It's become very common over the last couple of years. And I think a big part of it is having the right technology to do it effectively. You know, as Nick mentioned, historically, this was done by people sending files around. And the challenge with that approach, of course, while there are multiple challenges, one, every time you send a file around your, by definition creating a copy of the data because you have to pull it out of your system of record, put it into a file, put it on some server where somebody else picks it up. And by definition at that point you've lost governance. So this creates challenges in general hesitation to doing so. It's not that it hasn't happened, but the other challenge with it is that the data's no longer real time. You know, you're working with a copy of data that was as fresh as at the time at that when that was actually extracted. And that creates limitations in terms of how effective this can be. What we're starting to see now with some of our customers is live sharing of information. And there's two aspects of that that are important. One is that you're not actually physically creating the copy and sending it to someone else, you're actually exposing it from where it exists and allowing another consumer to interact with it from their own account that could be in another region, some are running in another cloud. So this concept of super-cloud or cross-cloud could becoming realized here. But the other important aspect of it is that when that other- when that other entity is querying your data, they're seeing it in a real time state. And this is particularly important when you think about use cases like supply chain planning, where you're leveraging data across various different enterprises. If I'm a manufacturer or if I'm a contract manufacturer and I can see the actual inventory positions of my clients, of my distributors, of the levels of consumption at the pharmacy or the hospital that gives me a lot of indication as to how my demand profile is changing over time versus working with a static picture that may have been from three weeks ago. And this has become incredibly important as supply chains are becoming more constrained and the ability to plan accurately has never been more important. >> Yeah. So the race is on to solve these problems. So it start, we started with, hey, okay, cloud, Dave, we're going to simplify database, we're going to put it in the cloud, give virtually infinite resources, separate compute from storage. Okay, check, we got that. Now we've moved into sort of data clean rooms and governance and you've got an ecosystem that's forming around this to make it safer to share data. And then, you know, nirvana, at least near term nirvana is we're going to build data applications and we're going to be able to share live data and then you start to get into monetization. Do you see, Nick, in the near future where I know you've got relationships with, for instance, big pharma like AstraZeneca, do you see a situation where you start sharing data with them? Is that in the near term? Is that more long term? What are the considerations in that regard? >> I mean, it's something we've been thinking about. We haven't actually addressed that yet. Yeah, I could see situations where, you know, some of these big relationships where we do need to share a lot of data, it would be very nice to be able to just flick a switch and share our data assets across to those organizations. But, you know, that's a ways off for us now. We're mainly looking at bringing data in at the moment. >> One of the things that we've seen in financial services in particular, and Jesse, I'd love to get your thoughts on this, is companies like Goldman or Capital One or Nasdaq taking their stack, their software, their tooling actually putting it on the cloud and facing it to their customers and selling that as a new monetization vector as part of their digital or business transformation. Are you seeing that Jesse at all in healthcare or is it happening today or do you see a day when that happens or is healthier or just too scary to do that? >> No, we're seeing the early stages of this as well. And I think it's for some of the reasons we talked about earlier. You know, it's a much more secure way to work with a colleague if you don't have to copy your data and potentially expose it. And some of the reasons that people have historically copied that data is that they needed to leverage some sort of algorithm or application that a third party was providing. So maybe someone was predicting the ideal location and run a clinical trial for this particular rare disease category where there are only so many patients around the world that may actually be candidates for this disease. So you have to pick the ideal location. Well, sending the dataset to do so, you know, would involve a fairly complicated process similar to what Nick was mentioning earlier. If the company who was providing the logic or the algorithm to determine that location could bring that algorithm to you and you run it against your own data, that's a much more ideal and a much safer and more secure way for this industry to actually start to work with some of these partners and vendors. And that's one of the things that we're looking to enable going into this year is that, you know, the whole concept should be bring the logic to your data versus your data to the logic and the underlying sharing mechanisms that we've spoken about are actually what are powering that today. >> And so thank you for that, Jesse. >> Yes, Dave. >> And so Nick- Go ahead please. >> Yeah, if I could add, yeah, if I could add to that, that's something certainly we've been thinking about. In fact, we'd started talking to Snowflake about that a couple of years ago. We saw the power there again of the platform to be able to say, well, could we, we were thinking in more of a data share, but could we share our data out to say an AI/ML vendor, have them do the analytics and then share the data, the results back to us. Now, you know, there's more powerful mechanisms to do that within the Snowflake ecosystem now, but you know, we probably wouldn't need to have onsite AI/ML people, right? Some of that stuff's very sophisticated, expensive resources, hard to find, you know, it's much better for us to find a company that would be able to build those analytics, maintain those analytics for us. And you know, we saw an opportunity to do that a couple years ago and we're kind of excited about the opportunity there that we can just basically do it with a no op, right? We share the data route, we have the analytics done, we get the result back and it's just fairly seamless. >> I mean, I could have a whole another Cube session on this, guys, but I mean, I just did a a session with Andy Thurai, a Constellation research about how difficult it's been for organization to get ROI because they don't have the expertise in house so they want to either outsource it or rely on vendor R&D companies to inject that AI and machine intelligence directly into applications. My follow-up question to you Nick is, when you think about, 'cause Jesse was talking about, you know, let the data basically stay where it is and you know bring the compute to that data. If that data lives on different clouds, and maybe it's not your group, but maybe it's other parts of Ionis or maybe it's your partners like AstraZeneca, or you know, the AI/ML partners and they're potentially on other clouds or that data is on other clouds. Do you see that, again, coming back to super-cloud, do you see it as an advantage to be able to have a consistent experience across those clouds? Or is that just kind of get in the way and make things more complex? What's your take on that, Nick? >> Well, from the vendors, so from the client side, it's kind of seamless with Snowflake for us. So we know for a fact that one of the datasets we have at the moment, Compile, which is a, the large multi terabyte dataset I was talking about. They're on AWS on the East Coast and we are on Azure on the West Coast. And they had to do a few tweaks in the background to make sure the data was pushed over from, but from my point of view, the data just exists, right? So for me, I think it's hugely beneficial that Snowflake supports this kind of infrastructure, right? We don't have to jump through hoops to like, okay, well, we'll download it here and then re-upload it here. They already have the mechanism in the background to do these multi-cloud shares. So it's not important for us internally at the moment. I could see potentially at some point where we start linking across different groups in the organization that do have maybe Amazon or Google Cloud, but certainly within our providers. We know for a fact that they're on different services at the moment and it just works. >> Yeah, and we learned from Benoit Dageville, who came into the studio on August 9th with first Supercloud in 2022 that Snowflake uses a single global instance across regions and across clouds, yeah, whether or not you can query across you know, big regions, it just depends, right? It depends on latency. You might have to make a copy or maybe do some tweaks in the background. But guys, we got to jump, I really appreciate your time. Really thoughtful discussion on the future of data and cloud, specifically within healthcare and pharma. Thank you for your time. >> Thanks- >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE team and my co-host, John Furrier. Keep it right there for more action at Supercloud 2. (upbeat music)

>>Good morning friends. Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube Day four of our coverage of AWS. Reinvent continues. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. You >>Can tell it's day four. Yeah. >>You can tell, you >>Get punchy. >>Did you? Yes. Did you know that the Vegas rodeo is coming into town? I'm kind of bummed down, leaving tonight. >>Really? You rodeo >>Fan this weekend? No, but to see a bunch of cowboys in Vegas, >>I'd like to see the Raiders. I'd like to see the Raiders get tickets. >>Yeah. And the hockey team. Yeah. We have had an amazing event, Dave. The cubes. 10th year covering reinvent 11th. Reinvent >>Our 10th year here. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean we covered remotely in during Covid, but >>Yes, yes, yes. Awesome content. Anything jump out at you that we really, we, we love talking to aws, the ecosystem. We got a customer next. Anything jump out at you that's really a kind of a key takeaway? >>Big story. The majority of aws, you know, I mean people ask me what's different under a Adam than under Andy. And I'm like, really? It's the maturity of AWS is what's different, you know, ecosystem, connecting the dots, moving towards solutions, you know, that's, that's the big thing. And it's, you know, in a way it's kind of boring relative to other reinvents, which are like, oh wow, oh my god, they announced outposts. So you don't see anything like that. It's more taking the platform to the next level, which is a good >>Thing. The next level it is a good thing. Speaking of next level, we have a couple of next level guests from T-Mobile joining us. We're gonna be talking through their customers story, their business transformation with aws. Glenn Curing joins us, the director product and technology. And Nick Chris, senior manager, product and technology guys. Welcome. Great to have you on brand. You're on T-Mobile brand. I love it. >>Yeah, >>I mean we are always T-Mobile. >>I love it. So, so everyone knows T-Mobile Blend, you guys are in the digital commerce domain. Talk to us about what that is, what functions that delivers for T-Mobile. Yeah, >>So the digital commerce domain operates and runs a platform called the Digital commerce platform. What this essentially does, it's a set of APIs that are headless that power the shopping experiences. When you talk about shopping experiences at T-Mobile, a customer comes to either a T-Mobile website or goes to a store. And what they do is they start with the discovery process of a phone. They take it through the process, they decide to purchase the phone day at, at the phone to cart, and then eventually they decide to, you know, basically pull the trigger and, and buy the phone at, at which point they submit the order. So that whole experience, essentially from start to finish is powered by the digital commerce platform. Just this year we have processed well over three and a half million orders amounting to a billion and a half dollars worth of business for T-Mobile. >>Wow. Big outcomes. Nick, talk about the before stage, obviously the, the customer experience is absolutely critical because if, if it goes awry, people churn. We know that and nobody wants, you know, brand reputation is is at stake. Yep. Talk about some of the challenges before that you guys faced and how did you work with AWS and part its partner ecosystem to address those challenges? >>Sure. Yeah. So actually before I started working with Glen on the commerce domain, I was part of T-Mobile's cloud team. So we were the team that kind of brought in AWS and commerce platform was really the first tier one system to go a hundred percent cloud native. And so for us it was very much a learning experience and a journey to learn how to operate on the cloud and which was fundamentally different from how we were doing things in the old on-prem days. When >>You talk about headless APIs, you talk, I dunno if you saw Warren a Vogel's keynote this morning, but you're talking about loosely coupled, a loosely coupled system that you can evolve without ripping out the whole system or without bringing the whole system down. Can you explain that in a little bit more >>Detail? Absolutely. So the concept of headless API exactly opens up that possibility. What it allows us to do is to build and operator platform that runs sort of loosely coupled from the user experiences. So when you think about this from a simplistic standpoint, you have a set of APIs that are headless and you've got the website that connects to it, the retail store applications that connect to it, as well as the customer care applications that connect to it. And essentially what that does is it allows us to basically operate all these platforms without being sort of tightly coupled to >>Each other. Yeah, he was talking about this morning when, when AWS announced s3, you know, there was just a handful of services maybe at just two or three. I think now there's 200 and you know, it's never gone down, it's never been, you know, replaced essentially. And so, you know, the whole thing was it's an asynchronous system that's loosely coupled and then you create that illusion of synchronicity for the customer. >>Exactly. >>Which was, I thought, you know, really well described, but maybe you guys could talk about what the genesis was for this system. Take us kind of to the, from the before or after, you know, the classic as as was and the, and as is. Did you talk about that? >>Yeah, I can start and then hand it off to Nick for some more details. So we started this journey back in 2016 and at that point T-Mobile had seven or eight different commerce platforms. Obviously you can think about the complexity involved in running and operating platforms. We've all talked about T-Mobile being the uncarrier. It's a brand that we have basically popularized in the telco industry. We would come out with these massive uncarrier moves and every time that announcement was made, teams have to scramble because you've got seven systems, seven teams, every single system needs to be updated, right? So that's where we started when we kicked off this transformational journey over time, essentially we have brought it down to one platform that supports all these experiences and what that allows us to do is not only time to market gets reduced immensely, but it also allows us to basically reduce our operational cost. Cuz we don't have to have teams running seven, eight systems. It's just one system with one team that can focus on making it a world class, you know, platform. >>Yeah, I think one of the strategies that definitely paid off for us, cuz going all the way back to the beginning, our little platform was powering just a tiny little corner of the, of the webspace, right? But even in those days we approached it from we're gonna build functions in a way that is sort of agnostic to what the experience is gonna be. So over time as we would build a capability that one particular channel needed primary, we were still thinking about all the other channels that needed it. So now over a few years that investment pays off and you have basically the same capabilities working in the same way across all the channels. >>When did the journey start? >>2016. >>2016, yeah. It's been, it's been six years. >>What are some of the game changers in, in this business transformation that you would say these are some of the things that really ignited our transformation? >>Yeah, there's particularly one thing that we feel pretty proud about, which is the fact that we now operate what we call active active stacks. And what that means is you've got a single stack of the eCommerce platform start to finish that can run in an independent manner, but we can also start adding additional stacks that are basically loosely coupled from each other but can, but can run to support the business. What that basically enables is it allows us to run in active active mode, which itself is a big deal from a system uptime perspective. It really changes the game. It allows us to push releases without worrying about any kind of downtime. We've done canary releases, we are in the middle of retail season and we can introduce changes without worrying about it. And more importantly, I think what it has also allowed us to do is essentially practice disaster recovery while doing a release. Cuz that's exactly what we do is every time we do a release we are switching between these separate stacks and essentially are practicing our DR strategy. >>So you do this, it's, it's you separate across regions I presume? Yes. Is that right? Yes. This was really interesting conversation because as you well know in the on-prem world, you never tested that disaster recovery was too risky because you're afraid you're gonna take your whole business down and you're essentially saying that the testing is fundamental to the implementation. >>Absolutely. >>It, it is the thing that you do for every release. So you know, at least every week or so you are doing this and you know, in the old world, the active passive world on paper you had a bunch of capabilities and in in incidents that are even less than say a full disaster recovery scenario, you would end up making the choice not to use that capability because there was too much complexity or risk or problem. When we put this in place. Now if I, I tell people everything we do got easier after that. >>Is it a challenge for you or how do you deal with the challenge? Correct me if it's not a, a challenge that sometimes Amazon services are not available in both regions. I think for instance, the observability thing that they just announced this week is it's not cross region or maybe I'm getting that wrong, but there are services where, you know, you might not be able to do data sharing across region. How do you manage that? Or maybe there's different, you know, levels of certifications. How do you manage that discontinuity or is that not an issue for you? >>Yeah, I mean it, it is certainly a concern and so the stacks, like Glen said, they are largely decoupled and that what that means is practically every component and there's a lot of lot of components in there. I have redundancy from an availability zone point of view. But then where the real magic happens is when you come in as a user to the stack, we're gonna initially kind of lock you on one stack. And then the key thing that we do is we, we understand the difference between what, what we would call the critical data. So think of like your shopping carts and then contextual data that we can relatively easily reload if we need to. And so that critical data is constantly in an async fashion. So it's not interrupting your performance, being broadcast out to a place where we can recover it if we need to, if we need to send you to another stack and then we call that dehydration. And if you end up getting bumped to a new stack, we rehydrate you on that stack and reload that, that contextual data. So to make that whole thing happen, we rely on something we call the global cart store and that's basically powered by Dynamo. So Dynamo is highly, highly reliable and multi >>Reason. So, and, and presume you're doing some form of server list for the stateless stuff and, and maybe taking control of the run time for the stateful things you, are you leaning into to servers and lambda or Not yet cuz you want control over the, the, the EC two and the memory configs. What, what's, I mean, I know we're going inside the plumbing a little bit, but it's kind of fun. >>That's always fun. You >>Went Yeah, and, and it has been a journey. Back in 2016 when we started, we were all on EC twos and across, you know, over the last three or four years we have kind of gone through that journey where we went from easy two to, to containers and we are at some point we'll get to where we will be serverless, we've got a few functions running. But you know, in that journey, I think when you look at the full end of the spectrum, we are somewhere towards the, the process of sort of going from, you know, containers to, to serverless. >>Yeah. So today your team is setting up the containers, they're fencing 'em off, fencing off the app and doing all that sort of sort of semi heavy lifting. Yeah. How do you deal with the, you know, this is one of the things Lisa, you and I were talking about is the skill sets. We always talk about this. What's that? What's your team look like and what are the skill sets that you've got that you're deploying? >>Yeah, I mean, as you can imagine, it's a challenge and it's a, a highly specialized skill set that you need. And you talk about cloud, you know, I, I tell developers when we bring new folks in, in the old days, you could just be like really good at Java and study that for and be good at that for decades. But in the cloud world, you have to be wide in, in your breadth. And so you have to understand those 200 services, right? And so one of the things that really has helped us is we've had a partner. So UST Global is a digital services company and they've really kind of been on the journey up the same timeline that we were. And I had worked with them on the cloud team, you know, before I came to commerce. And when I came to, to the commerce team, we were really struggling, especially from that operational perspective. >>The, the team was just not adapting to that new cloud reality. They were used to the on-prem world, but we brought these folks in because not only were they really able to understand the stuff, but they had built a lot of the platforms that we were gonna be leveraging for commerce with us on the cloud team. So for example, we have built, T-Mobile operates our own customized Kubernetes platform. We've done some stuff for serverless development, C I C D, cloud security. And so not only did these folks have the right skill sets, but they knew how we were approaching it from a T-mobile cloud perspective. And so it's kind of kind of fun to see, you know, when they came on board with this journey with us, we were both, both companies were relatively new and, and learning. Now I look and, you know, I I think that they're like a, a platinum sponsor these days here of aws and so it's kind of cool to see how we've all grown together, >>A lot of evolution, a lot of maturation. Glen, I wanna know from you when we're almost out of time here, but tell me the what the digital commerce domain, you kind of talked about this in the beginning, but I wanna know what's the value in it for me as a customer? All of this under the hood plumbing? Yeah, the maturation, the transformation. How does it benefit mean? >>Great question. So as a customer, all they care about is coming into, going to the website, walking into a store, and without spending too much time completed that transaction and walkout, they don't care about what's under the hood, right? So this transformational journey from, you know, like I talked about, we started with easy twos back in the day. It was what we call the wild west in the, on a cloud native platform to where we have reached today. You know, the journey we have collectively traversed with the USD has allowed us to basically build a system that allows a customer to walk into a store and not spend a whole hour dealing with a sales rep that's trying to sell them things. They can walk in and out quickly, they go to the website, literally within a couple minutes they can complete the transaction and leave. That's what customers want. It is. And that has really sort of helped us when you think about T-Mobile and the fact that we are now poised to be a leader in the US in telco at this whole concept of systems that really empower the customers to quickly complete their transaction has been one of the key components of allowing us to kind of make that growth. Right. So >>Right. And a big driver of revenue. >>Exactly. >>I have one final question for each of you. We're making a Instagram reel, so think about if you had 30 seconds to describe T-Mobile as a technology company that sells phones or a technology company that delights people, what, what would you say if you had a billboard, what would it say about that? Glen, what do you think? >>So T-Mobile, from a technology company perspective, the, the whole purpose of setting up T-mobile's, you know, shopping experience is about bringing customers in, surprising and delighting them with the frictionless shopping experiences that basically allow them to come in and complete the transaction and move on with their lives. It's not about keeping them in the store for too long when they don't want to do it. And essentially the idea is to just basically surprise and delight our customers. >>Perfect. Nick, what would you say, what's your billboard about T-Mobile as a technology company that's delivering great services to its customers? >>Yeah, I think, you know, Glen really covered it well. What I would just add to that is I think the way that we are approaching it these days, really starting from that 2016 period is we like to say we don't think of ourselves as a telco company anymore. We think of ourselves as a technology company that happens to do telco among other things, right? And so we've approached this from a point of view of we're here to provide the best possible experience we can to our customers and we take it personally when, when we don't reach that high bar. And so what we've done in the last few years as a transformation is really given us the toolbox that we need to be able to meet that promise. >>Awesome. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you on the program, talking about the transformation of T-Mobile. Great to hear what you're doing with aws, the maturation, and we look forward to having you back on to see what's next. Thank you. >>Awesome. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guests and Dave Ante, I'm Lisa Martin, you watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> Presenter: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering GitLab Commit 2020. Brought to you by GitLab. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of GitLab Commit 2020 here in San Francisco. You might notice some of our guests have some jackets on. It is a little cooler than normal here in San Francisco, but the community and knowledge is keeping us all warm. Joining us for the first time on the program is Nicholas Klick, who is an engineering manager at GitLab. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for inviting me. >> Alright, so you had an interesting topic. The state of serverless in 2020 was the session that you gave. Definitely a topic we love covering on theCUBE, something I personally have been digging into, trying to understand. Definitely something that the developers, and especially the app devs that I speak with, are very bullish on, so what is the state of serverless in 2020? >> That's actually a good question. So, my talk was actually broken into two parts. One was, like initially I just wanted to help provide a clear definition of what serverless is. In my opinion, serverless is more than just functions. There are a lot of other a lot of other technologies, like backend is a service, API gateways, service integration proxies that you can stitch together to create dynamic applications. So, I created a more expanded definition of what serverless is from my perspective, and the other part was to really talk about three things that I'm finding exciting right now in the serverless space. The first was Knative, and the fact that Knative is likely going to go to GA pretty soon, so it'll be production ready, and we can finally build production workloads on it. The second is that running serverless at the edge I find to be an exciting topic. And then finally, talking more in depth on those, the service integrations. Of how you can actually create applications that don't include functions at all, so functionless serverless. >> Yeah, so a lot of things I definitely want to tease out of that, but Nicholas, I guess maybe we should step back a second-- >> Nicholas: Okay. >> And was there survey work, or was there something done, or is this kind of something related to your job that you put together as just an important topic? >> Yeah, I know this is just me speaking as someone that works in the space and sees the technology is evolving and just my opinions, I guess. >> Okay, when I talk to the practitioners, when you go and say, "Oh, they're interested in it." Chances are they're doing stuff on Amazon, is like what kind of the first piece of it tends to be. There are lots of open source projects out there, but it's still this kind of dominated by Amazon. Azure has some pieces, of course. Google has things they're doing. I liked how you teased out that serverless definitely isn't a thing, and the definition, and even the term itself, gets people all riled up and things like that, so I hate getting into the ontological arguments, but the promise of it is that I can build applications in a different way, and I shouldn't have to think about some of the underlying components, hence the name serverless, kind of-- >> Right. >> does that, but it definitely is a change in mindset as to how I build and consume environments. >> Right. Right, and like another point that I made in the talk, that I believe pretty strongly, is that serverless is not something that's going to replace monoliths and microservices. I believe it's another tool in the tool belt of the developer, of the operator, to solve problems, and that we should look at it like that. It shouldn't be, it's not the next progression in application architecture. >> Yeah, I've met some companies that are 100%, they've built everything on serverless, but that's like saying I've met plenty of companies that are all in the cloud. It depends on what you do and what your business is. >> Nicholas: Right. >> When we look at the enterprise, it is a broad spectrum, and making changes along that path is something that typically takes a decade or more, and they have hundreds, if not thousands of applications, and therefore, we understand. I've got my stuff running on my mainframe through my latest microservice architecture, and everything in between. >> Right, and I mean I'm speaking as an employee of GitLab, and we have a very well known monolith that we deploy, and so for my opinion, I don't believe that monoliths are going to die any time soon. >> Alright, I'd love you to tease out some of those pieces that you talked about, the three items you talked about: Knative. You know, Knative is interesting. The thing I poked at when I go to KubenCon and CloudNativeCon is today I mentioned when I think about customers, most of them are using Amazon. The second choice is they're probably doing Azure, and today Knative directly doesn't work with EKS, AKS, or the like. I know there's a solution like trigger match that actually will interact-- >> Right. >> Between the Amazon and there, but don't you need the buy-in of Amazon and Microsoft for Knative to be taken seriously. And the other thing is, Google still hasn't opened up the-- >> Right. >> the Google controls, the governance of both Istio and Knative, and there are some concerns in the ecosystem about that, so what makes you so bullish on Knative. >> Yeah, so I'm definitely aware of some of the discussions around Knative. From my perspective, I think that Knative is, if someone is already operating a lot of Kubernetes infrastructure, if they already have those, that infrastructure running, then deploying Knative to it is not that much more of a it doesn't require additional resources and expense, so it could be, again it depends on their use case, and I think that, when I think about serverless, I try to remain pragmatic, so if I'm already using Kubernetes, and I want a simple serverless runtime, Knative would be a great option in that situation. If I want to be able to work cross-cloud, like this is another opportunity that Knative provides, is the ability of deploying to any Kubernetes cluster anywhere, so it has that, you know, that, there's not a vendor lock-in issue with Knative. >> Yeah, and absolutely there was initially some concern that, could serverless actually be the ultimate lock-in? >> Right. >> I'm going to go deep on one provider and don't have a way. There, open source groups like the CNCF trying to help along those ways-- >> Sure. >> Knative absolutely along those ways looking at that environment. From a GitLab customer's standpoint, GitLab's not tied to whether you're doing containers or serverless or VMs or in the environment. What does it mean for GitLab customers? If I want to look at serverless, how does that fit into my overall work flow? >> Yeah, so initially at GitLab we focused on providing the ability to deploy to Knative. That was, we were very early in the Knative space, and I think that as it's matured, as those APIs have matured, then our product has kind of developed, and so right now we enable you to be able to create Kubernetes clusters through our interface and then deploy your function run times directly from your GitLab repo. We've also, are kind of growing in our our examples and documentation of how to integrate GitLab CI/CD with Lambda. That's another big area that we're moving into as well. >> Great. As you look forward to 2020, we've got a whole new decade in front of us, what should, what do you think people should be watching on in the maturity of this space. >> Yeah, so I think that the point that I touched on earlier of the service integrations, I think that that is something you're going to see more and more of. Of the providers themselves linking together their different services and enabling you to create these dynamic applications without a lot of glue that you have to manually create in between. I think that we're going to see, you know, more open source frameworks, like, for example, Service Framework or Terraform that people want the, I mean, I know that a lot of people use, for example, AWS SAM. People want easier ways, and faster ways, to be able to deploy their serverless, so you have the bootstrapping of serverless. I guess, another thing that I expect is that the serverless, the serverless development life cycle will mature, in that whether going from bootstrapping to testing, deployment, monitoring security, I believe you're going to see companies that will start to really fill in that entire space, the same way that they do for monoliths and microservices. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Nicholas. Definitely something we've been tracking over the last year or so. You start to see many in the tool chain of cloud native environments digging into serverless, helping to mature those solutions, and definitely an area to watch closely. >> Great. >> Alright. Lot's more coverage. Check out theCUBE.net for all the events that we will be at through 2020 as well. If you can go back and see we've actually done Serverlessconf a couple of years, many of the other cloud and cloud native shows. Search in our index. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (energetic electronic music)

>>live from Orlando, Florida It's the cue covering Microsoft Ignite Brought to you by Cho He City >>Welcome back, everyone. And welcome to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft Ignite Here in Orlando, I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host Stew Minimum. We're joined by Nicholas Djerassi. Moto's He is a cloud computing evangelist at Red Hat. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. It's a pleasure. Thank you. So tell us a little bit about what you do at Red Hat. >>So I work with a lot of red, have partners really trying to foster the ecosystem and build red have products and solutions that can actually be deployable, repeatable for different customers. So different verticals. Financial health care doesn't really matter. For the most part, I try and just focus on cloud computing and really just evangelizing a lot of our technologies that we have. >>Okay, so So what are the kinds of things you're doing here at ignite? >>So I've been spending a lot of time actually working with some of the partners, like a center IBM. We've been doing a bunch of different webinars a little bit of hands on workshops that kind of educating people about distributed computing edge computing on dhe some of the technologies that we've been working along with Microsoft. So, uh, co engineering of sequel server The man is service offering that we're doing with open shift, which is our enterprise great kubernetes platform along many other >>different things. So So, Nicholas, you know, it's been a couple of years now that we've gotten over some of the gas. Wait. Microsoft has not said that, you know, we're killing the penguins, you know, off on the side. I was in Boston for Red Hat Summit. Tatiana Della's up on stage there, you know, Red hat. You know he's not hiding at the show. So bring us inside. You know where customers deployments are happening where engineering efforts are working together. You know, we know we've been hearing for years red hats in all of the clouds and partnering all of the merit. So what? What, you know, different or special, about the Microsoft relationship? >>I mean, honestly, I think the relationship is just evolving and growing because our customers were asking for it right there, going towards hybrid and multi cloud type of strategies. They want to be able to take advantage of, you know, running rail within their own data. Centers were running rails specifically on top of Microsoft Azure, but they're also looking at other club service providers. I think it's gonna be mandated eventually at some point in time where customers are gonna start looking at diversification when it comes to running applications, wherever it makes sense, taking advantage of different you know, cloud end of service is different providers. So we've been getting a lot of time like understanding what their needs are and then trying to build the engineering to actually address those needs. I think a lot of that has really come from the co engineering that we have going on. So we have a red head engineer sitting alongside bikers, off engineers, spending a lot of time building things like the Windows distraction layer wsl things along those lines, All >>right, so I'll be a Q Khan in a couple of weeks and kubernetes still, a lot of people don't really understand where it fits Way have been saying in a Cuban eight is gonna be baked into every platform. Red hat, of course, is not really a major contributor but has a lot of customers on open shift. We had Microsoft, you know, this week, talking about as your arc is in preview. But you know, they're they're the David Taunton who does partnership, Engagement says. You know, this does not mean that we will not continue to partner with open shift in the best place to run open shift is on azure. It's the most secure. It's the best. So help us understand his toe. You know where this fits In the overall discussion of that multi hybrid cloud that we were talking about earlier. I >>think everybody wants kind of a single pane of glass for manageability. They want ability to actually look and see where their infrastructure is being deployed. One of the pitfalls of moving to the cloud is the fact that it's so easy to spend a resource is that a lot of times we lose track of where these resource is. Our or individuals leave companies, and when they leave, cos they leave behind a lot of leftover items and instances, and that becomes really costly over a period of time. Maybe not so bad if you have, you know, 100 or 500 instances. But when you talk to some of these enterprise customers that are running 110,000 instances and spending millions of dollars a month, it could get very costly. And not only that, but it could also be a security risk is well, >>so let's talk about security. What kinds of conversations are you having with regard to security and data protection at this conference? >>So you know, one of the biggest things that we've had a lot of customers asking about his redhead insights so ready in sizes away it's a smart management application that actually ties into looking at either workloads or configuration management. It could actually tell you if you have a drift. So, for example, let's say you install sequel server on well, and you miss configure it. You leave the admin account running on it, it can actually alert you and make recommendations for remediation. Or maybe in general, you're using you know, S E. Lennox is disabled. The things along those lines so insights can actually look into, uh, the operating system or the applications and tell you if there's miss configurations all right, >>a lot of discussion about developers here, You know, day to keynote was all about, you know, AP Dev And, like Sathya have been a lot of time talking about the citizen developer. Seems like that would be an intersection between what red hats doing in and Microsoft. >>Um, so I would say, you know, we're obviously very developer first focused right when we built things like Open Shift Way kind of. We're thinking about developers. Before you were thinking about operations, and later on, we actually had to build more of the operations aspects into it. Now, like, for example, in open shift, there's two different portals. There's one for the developer Focus and one for the I T admin focus with operations groups because they want to see what's going on. Developers don't really care specifically about seeing the distraction of where things are. They just want to deploy their code, get it out the door as quickly as they can, and they're really just not too concerned about the infrastructure component pieces. But all of these developers, they want to be ableto right there, applications right there code and deploy it essentially anywhere and everywhere and having the easiest process and We're really just trying to make that as simple as possible, like visual studio plug ins that we have for open shift, you know, Eclipse G and other things. So really, I mean, Red has always been very developer focused first, >>so does that seeing Microsoft Satya Nadella up on the stage talking about this developer first attitude that Microsoft is really embracing the developer. And, as you said at development for all that does seem like a bit of a cultural shift for Microsoft much more aligned with the red hat way and sort of open source. So are you talking about that within without your cut with your colleagues? That red hat, about the change that you've seen the evolution of Microsoft? >>Absolutely. I mean, if you look at, like Microsoft, the contributions that they're putting towards, like kubernetes or even contribution towards open shift, it's It's amazing, right? I mean, it's like the company's gonna complete 1 80 from the way that they used to be. There's so much more open the acquisition of Like Get Hub, for example, all these different changes, it's it's amazing. He's done amazing things with the company. I can't say enough positive things about all the wonderful things that he's done. So >>all right, so Nicholas Red Hat has an interesting position in the marketplace because you do partner with all of the clouds on the environment. While IBM is now the parent owner of Red Hat and they have a cloud, your customers touch all of them. I'm not gonna ask you to competitively analyze them. But when you're talking to customers that are choosing Azure, is there anything that calling out as to why they're choosing Microsoft where you know they have, you know, a advantage of the marketplace or what is drawing customers to them on then? Of course, redhead. With that, >>I think Microsoft is more advanced when it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning. A, I and ML and computing. I think they're light years ahead of everyone else at this point in time. I think you know, Amazon and Google are kind of playing a little bit of catch up there, Um, and it's showing right. If you look at the power platform, for example, customers are embracing that. It's just it's fantastic looking at a lot of the changes that they've implemented and I think it's very complimentary toe the way that people are starting to build their applications. Moving towards distributed infrastructures, Micro Service's and then obviously cloud native service is as well >>in terms of the future will be. We are really just scratching the surface when it comes to to the cloud. What do you see 5 10 years from now in terms of growth rates and also in terms of the ways in which companies are using the cloud. >>So I kind of like Thio equate it towards, like, the progression that we've had with cars. I know it sounds so simple, but, you know, we went from steam engine to regular piston engines, and now we've gotten to a point where we have electric cars and there's gonna be self driving cars. I think we're gonna get to a point where code is gonna be autonomous in a sense, right self correcting ability to actually just write code and deploy it. Not really having to worry about that entire infrastructure layer. Everybody's calling it server lists. There's always gonna be a server per se, but I think we're gonna have a point where next 5 to 10 years that all of that is gonna be completely abstracted away. It's just gonna be focused on writing the code and machine learning is gonna help us actually evolve that code and make it run faster and make it run better. We're already seeing huge benefits. And when it comes to machine learning and the big data analytics and things on those lines, it's just natural progression. All right, >>love, you know what's top of mine from the customers that you're talking to Earth event. Any new learning is that you've had or, you know, things that have kind of caught your attention. >>I think the biggest thing, honestly, is really been them. The multi cloud Polly Cloud methodology that everybody seems to be embracing. It seems like every customer I'm talking to is looking at trying to avoid that vendor lock and per se, but still have that flexibility to deploy their applications wherever and still utilize cloud Native Service's without actually specifically having to, you know, go completely open source >>and one of the challenges there is every cloud. I need different skills to be able to do them. If I'm deploying it, it's the people and being able to do that. You know, we all lived through that era of trying to do multi vendor, and often it was challenges. So have we learned from what we've done in the past? Can multi cloud actually be more valuable to a company than the sum of its parts? >>I think so. And I think that's the reason why I, like Microsoft, is investing in art. For example, I think those methodologies way No multi clouds, tough. It's never gonna be easy. And so these companies need to start building in developing platforms for it. There needs to be be great if there were standard AP ice and such right, but they're never gonna do something along those lines. But I think the investments that they're putting forth now are gonna make Multiplied and Polly Cloud a lot easier in the future. And I think customers are asking for it. Customers ask for it, they're gonna build it. >>What does this mean for the workforce, though? In in terms of the kinds of candidates that cos they're going to hire because, as we said, it does require different skills and and different capabilities. So how what's your advice to the young computer scientists coming up in terms of what they should be learning. And then also, how do you think companies are making sensible of this? >>So I know from a company respectable. It's challenging a lot of companies. Especially, for example, I was talking to a very large financial institution, and they were saying that their biggest issue right now is hiring talented people to deal with Micro Service's kubernetes. Any time to hire someone, they end up getting poached by the big cloud companies. So you know, it's one of those things where people are gonna have to start diversifying their talents and look at the future. So I mean, obviously, Micro Service's are here. They're gonna continue to be here. I would say people should invest in that. But also look a server Lis, you know, I definitely think serverless these days towards the future. And then when it comes to like learning skills of multi club, I think cloud competing, that's just the number one growing in general. >>So since you didn't bring up server Lis, you know, today I hear serverless and most customers that I talked to that means a W s number two in the space probably is Microsoft, but there's efforts in to try to help, you know, give a little bit of open source and standardization there. Where's Red Hat? Stand on this. What do you see? What from Microsoft? What are you hearing from customers? >>Were heavily contribute all the different, you know, projects, trying to make server lists like easier to use and not so much specific vendors, Right? So whether that's, you know, Apache, spar or whatever you want to consider it to be, were trying to invest. Invest in those different types of technologies. I think the main issue we serve earless right now is we still don't really know how to utilize it effectively. And it's still kind of this gray area in a sense, right? It's cutting edge, bleeding edge emerging technologies. And it's just, in my opinion, it's not perfectly ready for prime time. But I think that's specifically because there's just not enough people that are actually invested in it. This point in time. So >>So what are you gonna take back with you when you head back to Phoenix from from this conference? What are the things that have sparked your interest the most. >>Gosh, I live, I would probably have to say, Really digging in deep on the Ark announcement. I think that's the thing that I'm most interested in, understanding how how we can actually contribute to that and maybe make that plug double for things like open Shift. You know, whether it's open shift on premise, open shit, running in the cloud on another, Well, architecture's, you know, things like insights. Being able to plug into that, I really see us trying to work with Microsoft to start building those things. >>Well, Nicholas, thank you so much for coming on. The cubit was really fabulous conversation. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Sue minimum. Stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage from Microsoft ignite.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for day two of three days of exclusive coverage from the Cube here at HPE Discover 2017. Our two next guests is Bill Mannel, VP and General Manager of HPC and AI for HPE. Bill, great to see you. And Dr. Nick Nystrom, senior of research at Pittsburgh's Supercomputer Center. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> My pleasure >> Thanks for having us. >> As we wrap up day two, first of all before we get started, love the AI, love the high performance computing. We're seeing great applications for compute. Everyone now sees that a lot of compute actually is good. That's awesome. What is the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center? Give a quick update and describe what that is. >> Sure. The quick update is we're operating a system called Bridges. Bridges is operating for the National Science Foundation. It democratizes HPC. It brings people who have never used high performance computing before to be able to use HPC seamlessly, almost as a cloud. It unifies HPC big data and artificial intelligence. >> So who are some of the users that are getting access that they didn't have before? Could you just kind of talk about some of the use cases of the organizations or people that you guys are opening this up to? >> Sure. I think one of the newest communities that's very significant is deep learning. So we have collaborations between the University of Pittsburgh life sciences and the medical center with Carnegie Mellon, the machine learning researchers. We're looking to apply AI machine learning to problems in breast and lung cancer. >> Yeah, we're seeing the data. Talk about some of the innovations that HPE's bringing with you guys in the partnership, because we're seeing, people are seeing the results of using big data and deep learning and breakthroughs that weren't possible before. So not only do you have the democratization cool element happening, you have a tsunami of awesome open source code coming in from big places. You see Google donating a bunch of machine learning libraries. Everyone's donating code. It's like open bar and open source, as I say, and the young kids that are new are the innovators as well, so not just us systems guys, but a lot of young developers are coming in. What's the innovation? Why is this happening? What's the ah-ha moment? Is it just cloud, is it a combination of things, talk about it. >> It's a combination of all the big data coming in, and then new techniques that allow us to analyze and get value from it and from that standpoint. So the traditional HPC world, typically we built equations which then generated data. Now we're actually kind of doing the reverse, which is we take the data and then build equations to understand the data. So it's a different paradigm. And so there's more and more energy understanding those two different techniques of kind of getting two of the same answers, but in a different way. >> So Bill, you and I talked in London last year. >> Yes. With Dr. Gho. And we talked a lot about SGI and what that acquisition meant to you guys. So I wonder if you could give us a quick update on the business? I mean it's doing very well, Meg talked about it on the conference call this last quarter. Really high point and growing. What's driving the growth, and give us an update on the business. >> Sure. And I think the thing that's driving the growth is all this data and the fact that customers want to get value from it. So we're seeing a lot of growth in industries like financial services, like in manufacturing, where folks are moving to digitization, which means that in the past they might have done a lot of their work through experimentation. Now they're moving it to a digital format, and they're simulating everything. So that's driven a lot more HPC over time. As far as the SGI, integration is concern. We've integrated about halfway, so we're at about the halfway point. And now we've got the engineering teams together and we're driving a road map and a new set of products that are coming out. Our Gen 10-based products are on target, and they're going to be releasing here over the next few months. >> So Nick, from your standpoint, when you look at, there's been an ebb and flow in the supercomputer landscape for decades. All the way back to the 70s and the 80s. So from a customer perspective, what do you see now? Obviously China's much more prominent in the game. There's sort of an arms race, if you will, in computing power. From a customer's perspective, what are you seeing, what are you looking for in a supplier? >> Well, so I agree with you, there is this arms race for exaflops. Where we are really focused right now is enabling data-intensive applications, looking at big data service, HPC is a service, really making things available to users to be able to draw on the large data sets you mentioned, to be able to put the capability class computing, which will go to exascale, together with AI, and data and Linux under one platform, under one integrated fabric. That's what we did with HPE for Bridges. And looking to build on that in the future, to be able to do the exascale applications that you're referring to, but also to couple on data, and to be able to use AI with classic simulation to make those simulations better. >> So it's always good to have a true practitioner on The Cube. But when you talk about AI and machine learning and deep learning, John and I sometimes joke, is it same wine, new bottle, or is there really some fundamental shift going on that just sort of happened to emerge in the last six to nine months? >> I think there is a fundamental shift. And the shift is due to what Bill mentioned. It's the availability of data. So we have that. We have more and more communities who are building on that. You mentioned the open source frameworks. So yes, they're building on the TensorFlows, on the Cafes, and we have people who have not been programmers. They're using these frameworks though, and using that to drive insights from data they did not have access to. >> These are flipped upside down, I mean this is your point, I mean, Bill pointed it out, it's like the models are upside down. This is the new world. I mean, it's crazy, I don't believe it. >> So if that's the case, and I believe it, it feels like we're entering this new wave of innovation which for decades we talked about how we march to the cadence of Moore's Law. That's been the innovation. You think back, you know, your five megabyte disk drive, then it went to 10, then 20, 30, now it's four terabytes. Okay, wow. Compared to what we're about to see, I mean it pales in comparison. So help us envision what the world is going to look like in 10 or 20 years. And I know it's hard to do that, but can you help us get our minds around the potential that this industry is going to tap? >> So I think, first of all, I think the potential of AI is very hard to predict. We see that. What we demonstrated in Pittsburgh with the victory of Libratus, the poker-playing bot, over the world's best humans, is the ability of an AI to beat humans in a situation where they have incomplete information, where you have an antagonist, an adversary who is bluffing, who is reacting to you, and who you have to deal with. And I think that's a real breakthrough. We're going to see that move into other aspects of life. It will be buried in apps. It will be transparent to a lot of us, but those sorts of AI's are going to influence a lot. That's going to take a lot of IT on the back end for the infrastructure, because these will continue to be compute-hungry. >> So I always use the example of Kasperov and he got beaten by the machine, and then he started a competition to team up with a supercomputer and beat the machine. Yeah, humans and machines beat machines. Do you expect that's going to continue? Maybe both your opinions. I mean, we're just sort of spitballing here. But will that augmentation continue for an indefinite period of time, or are we going to see the day that it doesn't happen? >> I think over time you'll continue to see progress, and you'll continue to see more and more regular type of symmetric type workloads being done by machines, and that allows us to do the really complicated things that the human brain is able to better process than perhaps a machine brain, if you will. So I think it's exciting from the standpoint of being able to take some of those other roles and so forth, and be able to get those done in perhaps a more efficient manner than we're able to do. >> Bill, talk about, I want to get your reaction to the concept of data. As data evolves, you brought up the model, I like the way you're going with that, because things are being flipped around. In the old days, I want to monetize my data. I have data sets, people are looking at their data. I'm going to make money from my data. So people would talk about how we monetizing the data. >> Dave: Old days, like two years ago. >> Well and people actually try to solve and monetize their data, and this could be use case for one piece of it. Other people are saying no, I'm going to open, make people own their own data, make it shareable, make it more of an enabling opportunity, or creating opportunities to monetize differently. In a different shift. That really comes down to the insights question. What's your, what trends do you guys see emerging where data is much more of a fabric, it's less of a discreet, monetizable asset, but more of an enabling asset. What's your vision on the role of data? As developers start weaving in some of these insights. You mentioned the AI, I think that's right on. What's your reaction to the role of data, the value of the data? >> Well, I think one thing that we're seeing in some of our, especially our big industrial customers is the fact that they really want to be able to share that data together and collect it in one place, and then have that regularly updated. So if you look at a big aircraft manufacturer, for example, they actually are putting sensors all over their aircraft, and in realtime, bringing data down and putting it into a place where now as they're doing new designs, they can access that data, and use that data as a way of making design trade-offs and design decision. So a lot of customers that I talk to in the industrial area are really trying to capitalize on all the data possible to allow them to bring new insights in, to predict things like future failures, to figure out how they need to maintain whatever they have in the field and those sorts of things at all. So it's just kind of keeping it within the enterprise itself. I mean, that's a challenge, a really big challenge, just to get data collected in one place and be able to efficiently use it just within an enterprise. We're not even talking about sort of pan-enterprise, but just within the enterprise. That is a significant change that we're seeing. Actually an effort to do that and see the value in that. >> And the high performance computing really highlights some of these nuggets that are coming out. If you just throw compute at something, if you set it up and wrangle it, you're going to get these insights. I mean, new opportunities. >> Bill: Yeah, absolutely. >> What's your vision, Nick? How do you see the data, how do you talk to your peers and people who are generally curious on how to approach it? How to architect data modeling and how to think about it? >> I think one of the clearest examples on managing that sort of data comes from the life sciences. So we're working with researchers at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and the Institute for Precision Medicine at Pitt Cancer Center. And there it's bringing together the large data as Bill alluded to. But there it's very disparate data. It is genomic data. It is individual tumor data from individual patients across their lifetime. It is imaging data. It's the electronic health records. And trying to be able to do this sort of AI on that to be able to deliver true precision medicine, to be able to say that for a given tumor type, we can look into that and give you the right therapy, or even more interestingly, how can we prevent some of these issues proactively? >> Dr. Nystrom, it's expensive doing what you do. Is there a commercial opportunity at the end of the rainbow here for you or is that taboo, I mean, is that a good thing? >> No, thank you, it's both. So as a national supercomputing center, our resources are absolutely free for open research. That's a good use of our taxpayer dollars. They've funded these, we've worked with HP, we've designed the system that's great for everybody. We also can make this available to industry at an extremely low rate because it is a federal resource. We do not make a profit on that. But looking forward, we are working with local industry to let them test things, to try out ideas, especially in AI. A lot of people want to do AI, they don't know what to do. And so we can help them. We can help them architect solutions, put things on hardware, and when they determine what works, then they can scale that up, either locally on prem, or with us. >> This is a great digital resource. You talk about federally funded. I mean, you can look at Yosemite, it's a state park, you know, Yellowstone, these are natural resources, but now when you start thinking about the goodness that's being funded. You want to talk about democratization, medicine is just the tip of the iceberg. This is an interesting model as we move forward. We see what's going on in government, and see how things are instrumented, some things not, delivery of drugs and medical care, all these things are coalescing. How do you see this digital age extending? Because if this continues, we should be doing more of these, right? >> We should be. We need to be. >> It makes sense. So is there, I mean I just not up to speed on what's going on with federally funded-- >> Yeah, I think one thing that Pittsburgh has done with the Bridges machine, is really try to bring in data and compute and all the different types of disciplines in there, and provide a place where a lot of people can learn, they can build applications and things like that. That's really unusual in HPC. A lot of times HPC is around big iron. People want to have the biggest iron basically on the top 500 list. This is where the focus hasn't been on that. This is where the focus has been on really creating value through the data, and getting people to utilize it, and then build more applications. >> You know, I'll make an observation. When we first started doing The Cube, we observed that, we talked about big data, and we said that the practitioners of big data, are where the guys are going to make all the money. And so far that's proven true. You look at the public big data companies, none of them are making any money. And maybe this was sort of true with ERP, but not like it is with big data. It feels like AI is going to be similar, that the consumers of AI, those people that can find insights from that data are really where the big money is going to be made here. I don't know, it just feels like-- >> You mean a long tail of value creation? >> Yeah, in other words, you used to see in the computing industry, it was Microsoft and Intel became, you know, trillion dollar value companies, and maybe there's a couple of others. But it really seems to be the folks that are absorbing those technologies, applying them, solving problems, whether it's health care, or logistics, transportation, etc., looks to where the huge economic opportunities may be. I don't know if you guys have thought about that. >> Well I think that's happened a little bit in big data. So if you look at what the financial services market has done, they've probably benefited far more than the companies that make the solutions, because now they understand what their consumers want, they can better predict their life insurance, how they should-- >> Dave: You could make that argument for Facebook, for sure. >> Absolutely, from that perspective. So I expect it to get to your point around AI as well, so the folks that really use it, use it well, will probably be the ones that benefit it. >> Because the tooling is very important. You've got to make the application. That's the end state in all this That's the rubber meets the road. >> Bill: Exactly. >> Nick: Absolutely. >> All right, so final question. What're you guys showing here at Discover? What's the big HPC? What's the story for you guys? >> So we're actually showing our Gen 10 product. So this is with the latest microprocessors in all of our Apollo lines. So these are specifically optimized platforms for HPC and now also artificial intelligence. We have a platform called the Apollo 6500, which is used by a lot of companies to do AI work, so it's a very dense GPU platform, and does a lot of processing and things in terms of video, audio, these types of things that are used a lot in some of the workflows around AI. >> Nick, anything spectacular for you here that you're interested in? >> So we did show here. We had video in Meg's opening session. And that was showing the poker result, and I think that was really significant, because it was actually a great amount of computing. It was 19 million core hours. So was an HPC AI application, and I think that was a really interesting success. >> The unperfect information really, we picked up this earlier in our last segment with your colleagues. It really amplifies the unstructured data world, right? People trying to solve the streaming problem. With all this velocity, you can't get everything, so you need to use machines, too. Otherwise you have a haystack of needles. Instead of trying to find the needles in the haystack, as they was saying. Okay, final question, just curious on this natural, not natural, federal resource. Natural resource, feels like it. Is there like a line to get in? Like I go to the park, like this camp waiting list, I got to get in there early. How do you guys handle the flow for access to the supercomputer center? Is it, my uncle works there, I know a friend of a friend? Is it a reservation system? I mean, who gets access to this awesomeness? >> So there's a peer reviewed system, it's fair. People apply for large allocations four times a year. This goes to a national committee. They met this past Sunday and Monday for the most recent. They evaluate the proposals based on merit, and they make awards accordingly. We make 90% of the system available through that means. We have 10% discretionary that we can make available to the corporate sector and to others who are doing proprietary research in data-intensive computing. >> Is there a duration, when you go through the application process, minimums and kind of like commitments that they get involved, for the folks who might be interested in hitting you up? >> For academic research, the normal award is one year. These are renewable, people can extend these and they do. What we see now of course is for large data resources. People keep those going. The AI knowledge base is 2.6 petabytes. That's a lot. For industrial engagements, those could be any length. >> John: Any startup action coming in, or more bigger, more-- >> Absolutely. A coworker of mine has been very active in life sciences startups in Pittsburgh, and engaging many of these. We have meetings every week with them now, it seems. And with other sectors, because that is such a great opportunity. >> Well congratulations. It's fantastic work, and we're happy to promote it and get the word out. Good to see HP involved as well. Thanks for sharing and congratulations. >> Absolutely. >> Good to see your work, guys. Okay, great way to end the day here. Democratizing supercomputing, bringing high performance computing. That's what the cloud's all about. That's what great software's out there with AI. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante bringing you all the data here from HPE Discover 2017. Stay tuned for more live action after this short break.

>> "theCUBE," presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey, welcome back to "theCUBE's" live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante joins me. Dan O'Brien joins us next. The senior vice president of technology solutions at Presidio. Dan, welcome to "theCUBE." >> It's great to be here. Great to be in Vegas too. >> Is it great to be back live in person, three dimensional? >> You have no idea. >> Oh, I know. >> Yeah. >> Just the seeing people again and the vibe here day-one is already fantastic. >> Yeah. >> Talk to us about Presidio and Dell's relationship? What's going on with Presidio? >> Yeah, so I'll tell you just Presidio as as a whole, and part of why I joined about a year ago and I'm still just excited as I was on day one. We're a digital services and solutions provider with deep engineering expertise in networking, cloud, security, collaboration, and modern technologies. And we'll help our customers acquire, deploy, and then operate and manage the solutions that we have. So, we're a Dell titanium black partner. We just got that, we're a super excited about it. And they're a critical part of how we deliver solutions to our customers. >> So, you joined during an interesting time during the pandemic. What are some of the challenges your customers are facing now? Aging infrastructure, labor shortages, supply chain. What do you, what are you seeing from the customers lens? >> Yeah, you know, all of the above. I think when the pandemic first hit, every customer that we spoke with basically said, Cash is king. We want to preserve it, we don't know what the future holds. So, all of the spend that happened was on the things that drove their business forward. So, I got a distributed workforce. How do I go invest in technology to make them productive? A lot of them had to take a digital agenda that was five years long and do it in three months to survive, so they spent it and that generally meant cloud. But what they didn't spend money on, was infrastructure inside the data center. And now what they're finding, is things are old, maintenance bills are going up, the cost to get it is going up. And sometimes supply chain is over 12 months long to be able to actually do something about it. >> You know, when "theCUBE" first started in 2010, it was EFC World 2010 now, 'cause Dell is really our legacy here. So, we said that companies that sell, it's kind of a pejorative, but sell boxes are going to be in trouble because of the cloud. Interesting, right? So, it was partly true because the cloud just intermediated a lot of that sort of box selling business. We said they have to become more value added players, identify. And so, when I watched Presidio, the transformation that you guys went through, and you're relatively new. Cloud has actually become an opportunity. And you're doing stuff around digital, a lot of stuff around security. It's cyber, probably automation, life cycle management. >> True. >> Talk about that transformation? And I'm interested in why you joined Presidio? >> So, I'll tell you why I joined Presidio, is I was talking to a lot of customers every day in my old role, I love doing that part. And the conversation started with, "Dan, I can't spend money on my data center right now because we're in a pandemic. I've got to innovate faster and the answer is to cloud. I don't know how to actually make my workforce productive because they're all over the place now. And we didn't invest in technology. And now I've got a threat surface with people working everywhere in workloads in different places. I don't know how to approach that." And I looked at what Presidio had built, I'm like, that's exactly what we did. But what's been fun for me, has been the answer to most of our customers is this the end? It's not the public cloud, it's not the private cloud. It's, you need to do both of them really well and have the skills and expertise to leverage 'em for the right application, or workload, or use case. And that's why I'm super excited to be here, 'cause we're really helping our customers in both areas. >> You mentioned security. We've seen a number of announcements today from Dell Technologies with respect to cybersecurity. We know the stats are what they are. It's no longer a matter of, if we're going to get hit by a cyber attack, it's when? Most organizations are going to get hit by 2025. Where is security in the conversation now? How high up in the priority is it? >> I would say it's, we don't have a single customer meeting without having that conversation. And what we're finding, is you look at the stats that say, you know, 30% of companies that have a cyber attack, don't come back from it. 20% pay the ransom, and then they don't even get their data back. So, while we want to stop the attacks, I think you're right on that the answer is, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when? But what's great about Dell Technologies, is we have a complete portfolio that can meet any SLA of our customers. It's in backup technology, it's in primary storage, they can do a mutable backups and recoveries everywhere. But what happened this week, where they announced partnerships with the cloud, that's huge because the same resource constraints that customers have in their data centers today, are the same ones you have to deploy infrastructure to be able to make this work and be able to accelerate recovery. So, the partnership and the integration with the public cloud, really gives a great integration point for a lot of our customers. >> At the analyst of the event today, we had a meeting with Jen Felch, the CIO of Dell. And I said to her, you know, our survey data from ETR shows that security now, number one priority, it kind of always was, but it's distance itself from the number two, which is cloud migration. And I asked her, I said, "Obviously, cloud migration is not your number two, 'cause number security number one was number two?" And she said, "Let me help you interpret that data. Because for us, we have the scale, we can do our own cloud essentially." What her interpretation, was what those customers are really saying is modernization. Now, you must see that. Now, of course, you're leaning into cloud. Dell is not defensive really more about cloud, like, hey, we could take advantage of it as well. So, what are you seeing in terms of the changing priorities of IT kind of pre-post pandemic? Is it like a rubber band that goes and then comes back to where it was, or is it kind of permanent? >> I think that the both worlds together are absolutely permanent. And there's no way we're going to go back from one or the other. And then we're always going to have a world where you might lean more into one. To innovate, you might lean more into one for disaster recovery. But I truly think the world and the answer for us and our perspective, has to be both. But you said something to interesting earlier, is the key I think to what customers are doing is you can't just pick up a workload and move it to the cloud, it doesn't solve a problem. You use that term modernize. And we've invested, acquisitions and continued engineering resources that were hiring around modernization because the economics and the true benefit of actually running a workload and running right at the right SLAs and meeting your customer's objectives, aren't going to work right if you're just picking an application up and moving it over there. So, we're really focused there. >> So, Couch Base, just ran a survey. We did a power panel on it with a bunch of database analysts. And it was a survey of 650 CIOs and CTOs. And it was really interesting 'cause it's an IT bias. But they said like 2/3 of the survey base said that IT is responsible for setting the digital transformation strategy of the company. And I went, "Well, I wonder what the business guys say to that. It was sort of a red flag to me. But I wonder what you're seeing 'cause there's obviously you get a difference when you talk to different worlds. So, I guess what is modernization, was kind of one of the big questions that came out of it? And who's driving the agenda? >> So, it really depends upon the customer, right? But the key to what you said, and there was an article that came out. I won't say where it was from, but it really kind of opened my eyes. But the article was titled that, "It's Time To Get Rid of the IT Department." And for someone like me and a lot of customers, that kind of scares people. But the whole underpin of it, was they were studying customers that took IT and actually disparaged, like broke 'em apart and put them into business units. So, it said, it's your turn to wake up every day and figure out what that business unit needs to be successful. Because the answer is, David, it's both, right? You need both parties on board, right? Where, you've got a business stakeholder that clearly knows want to do, understands technology's the answer but you need IT to be able to go make it work and be a true partner, and help go actually make it work. >> It reminds me of when Nicholas Carr wrote that article if you're, you guys are probably too young to remember, "But Does IT Matter?" It was kind of post Y2K, right? And then everybody went crazy. All the CIO was when nuts. And in fact, IT matters more than ever, but it's a different context, as you're saying. A question on things like skill shortages, supply chain, I mean, obviously, top of mind. >> Yeah. >> Are you helping people with that? And if so, how so? >> Yeah, so two ways I would look at this, is when you look at the supply chain, I mean, Intel I think spent a $100 million on standing up new Silicon plants. We won't see a benefit from that from 2025. So, it's real. So, a lot of what we're doing on a supply chain is how can we help a customer reach in and have certain targeted ways to leverage the cloud? Because we can't physically solve for the physics issue. The other part of it, the people shortage. I mean, it's real. I mean, everyone's sitting at home they're pondering whether or not, you know, what they're doing is fulfilling their dreams. Now, geography doesn't matter, you can do a job from anywhere. And technology is the heart of everything. So, the people shortage is real. So, we're finding that our focus on managed services we're essentially allowing our customers to run and deploy things across every technology aspect, is something that we used to have to drive to our customers. And now, we can't get out of a conversation without them asking for it 'cause they just don't have the people- >> Yeah, they're calling you into that need. >> Yeah. >> Can you share that customer example that you think really articulates the value of the Dell Technologies that Presidio is delivering? It's really been able to truly modernize in the last couple of years? >> Yeah, so looking specifically to Dell, I mean, for us, one of the taking technical data out of the data center and modernizing, their HCI portfolio together with VMware, is a complete home run. It takes multiple products, brings it into a single common solution, uses a common tool set for all the operators that are there so you don't need the number of people to run it. But if you do it right, it solves for the portability issue in some of the public cloud options, especially with things like VMC where you can have an on and off-prem and an automation between 'em, so you can pick and choose dynamically. That for us has been a home run in driving modernization strategies. >> From a multi-cloud perspective, it's going to be a big focus of this event the next couple of days. What are you seeing from customers' perspective? They're probably in multi-cloud environments for a variety of reasons, that's going to be persisting. The hyperscalers are all growing. What's going on there? How are you helping customers to manage the multi-cloud environment with just much more simplicity? >> Yeah, so I think there's a couple parts to that, right? I mean, obviously, Dell together with VMware has a great set of technologies to be able to manage the deployment of that. But what we're trying to do, is number one, help a customer determine which workload should be running in which place, right? Understand application dependencies. But as we work through a migration strategy with a lot of our customers, the key part that a lot of people don't realize, is we all think security but the networking is probably the hardest part if you want to have portability in a well running cloud. So, having years and years in network heritage, it's been a great synergy on us kind of moving in that direction to help our cloud customers make sure that the right SLA, the right connectivity, and the right availability to make that world work. >> Yeah, so multicloud, obviously, a big topic of of discussion this morning with Chuck Whitten. And that's another one of those, well, what do you mean by that? I have a sort of a premise I want to test on you, Dan. I've always said, it just comes from talking to customers, multi-cloud is kind of multi-vendor. I got to run some workloads in AWS, I run some On Prem. I run some in Google, some in Azure, and many of them, a handful like the big banks, for instance, they say, "Well we're building our own abstraction layer so we can control the policies, the security." And it seems like that's a direction that the industry generally in Dell specifically is headed. Do you buy that? And what's driving that need? >> Yeah, so I would buy it based on the size of the customer. So, when you take a big bank, a lot of what drives them to go to one cloud or the other, is that the big cloud providers they're innovating constantly. Every day there's a new tool or capability that exists there. And certain ones of them are going to match, a use case that, that large customer has- >> You can't resist? >> So, they're going to end up with multiple clouds, so it makes perfect sense. When you get into smaller customer, they really have to want to be successful. They got to pick one, right? They can't afford the people, and the scale, and the process. So, I think that's... The answer would depend based on the customer. The larger ones, I think they're going to build a full orchestration stack and small customers are going to look for one and someone maybe with managed services to help them augment the skills and staffing to make it work. >> For a while, I haven't heard it much lately, but you'd hear about repatriation, people come to me like, "Dave, you got to look into this repatriation thing." And I did, and I was like, "Eh, I really see, it a little bit, little pockets." But I do see hybrid. I mean, that's very clear. And I do see a lot of people went into the cloud, they didn't have a great experience. And okay, so there's some of that going on. I guess you could call that repatriation. But what are you seeing in terms of both of those? Is repatriation a trend or is it really an hybrid? >> So, I've interesting perspective coming from Dell, right? Where we're a very infrastructure focused in there. I see a little bit of repatriation in like a workload, like virtual desktops where you picked it up and you threw it in the cloud and make your workforce productive. But generally speaking, what we're seeing is not repatriation, which is, "Hey I move things. My cost is out of control, I don't know how to manage it. Can you help me get better controls on cost? Can you help me automate a lot of the things that are running here so I've got better control of cost and we're where things are running in my security posture?" So, it's much more about optimization that we're finding than it is. Let's bring it back. >> So, it's fine tuning the knobs? >> There you go. >> Right? And that seems to be the trend over the next couple of years? >> 110%. Yeah. >> Excellent. >> Have you seen any industries, in particular the last year that you've been with Presidio really leading edge in terms of modernization? >> Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting enough. I mean, I could give you a few examples, right? When we look in our public sector business, a lot of the educational institutions had to invest in new platforms they interact and engage with students. Our financial institutions, believe it or not, continue to innovate. I mean, what people don't realize, is the mainframe still has the transaction where your money lives in the ledger, but all the supporting ecosystem is digitalized and is completely modernized to interact with you. And, of course, retail for us. I mean, retail, they had to change their business model in many cases overnight, not even to survive, but to serve the communities they were working in. >> Yeah, I think one of the things that we've all learned in the last couple of years, is just the access, the e-commerce, the access online. We expect that now in the brick and mortar stores to be able to deliver that connected store, make sure that they have the inventory that I'm looking for with a frictionless experience. >> Yeah, and I tell you my favorite one, is you look at the healthcare industry, and while obviously with loans, and healthcare, and billing, all had to change. But that was really exciting for us, I mean, as consumers, right? Is the fact that we can interact with doctors online at the click of a button now. I mean, that part for us has been super exciting. >> Everything's at the click of the button now. >> Yeah. >> Oh, my gosh. Well, Dan, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program today, sharing what's new with Presidio, what you guys are doing together with Dell, and how you're helping companies in every industry to modernize. >> Perfect. I appreciate it. >> Great to have you. >> Likewise. >> Thank you. >> With Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching "theCUBE's" coverage of Dell Technologies World live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Stick around, and Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (bright upbeat music)

(pensive music) >> Thank you, Jenna, it's great to see you guys and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS Storage Day. We're here at The Spheres, it's amazing venue. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec who's Vice President of Block and Object Storage. Mai-Lan, always a pleasure to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Nice to see you, Dave. >> It's pretty crazy, you know, this is kind of a hybrid event. We were in Barcelona a while ago, big hybrid event. And now it's, you know, it's hard to tell. It's almost like day-to-day what's happening with COVID and some things are permanent. I think a lot of things are becoming permanent. What are you seeing out there in terms of when you talk to customers, how are they thinking about their business, building resiliency and agility into their business in the context of COVID and beyond? >> Well, Dave, I think what we've learned today is that this is a new normal. These fluctuations that companies are having and supply and demand, in all industries all over the world. That's the new normal. And that has what, is what has driven so much more adoption of cloud in the last 12 to 18 months. And we're going to continue to see that rapid migration to the cloud because companies now know that in the course of days and months, you're, the whole world of your expectations of where your business is going and where, what your customers are going to do, that can change. And that can change not just for a year, but maybe longer than that. That's the new normal. And I think companies are realizing it and our AWS customers are seeing how important it is to accelerate moving everything to the cloud, to continue to adapt to this new normal. >> So storage historically has been, I'm going to drop a box off at the loading dock and, you know, have a nice day. And then maybe the services team is involved in, in a more intimate way, but you're involved every day. So I'm curious as to what that permanence, that new normal, some people call it the new abnormal, but it's the new normal now, what does that mean for storage? >> Dave, in the course of us sitting here over the next few minutes, we're going to have dozens of deployments go out all across our AWS storage services. That means our customers that are using our file services, our transfer services, block and object services, they're all getting improvements as we sit here and talk. That is such a fundamentally different model than the one that you talked about, which is the appliance gets dropped off at the loading dock. It takes a couple months for it to get scheduled for setup and then you have to do data migration to get the data on the new appliance. Meanwhile, we're sitting here and customers storage is just improving, under the hood and in major announcements, like what we're doing today. >> So take us through the sort of, let's go back, 'cause I remember vividly when, when S3 was announced that launched this cloud era and people would, you know, they would do a lot of experimentation of, we were storing, you know, maybe gigabytes, maybe even some terabytes back then. And, and that's evolved. What are you seeing in terms of how people are using data? What are the patterns that you're seeing today? How is that different than maybe 10 years ago? >> I think what's really unique about AWS is that we are the only provider that has been operating at scale for 15 years. And what that means is that we have customers of all sizes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, that are running their storage on AWS and running their applications using that storage. And so we have this really unique position of being able to observe and work with customers to develop what they need for storage. And it really breaks down to three main patterns. The first one is what I call the crown jewels, the crown jewels in the cloud. And that pattern is adopted by customers who are looking at the core mission of their business and they're saying to themselves, I actually can't scale this core mission on on-premises. And they're choosing to go to the cloud on the most important thing that their business does because they must, they have to. And so, a great example of that is FINRA, the regulatory body of the US stock exchanges, where, you know, a number of years ago, they took a look at all the data silos that were popping up across their data centers. They were looking at the rate of stock transactions going up and they're saying, we just can't keep up. Not if we want to follow the mission of being the watchdog for consumers, for transactions, for stock transactions. And so they moved that crown jewel of their application to AWS. And what's really interesting Dave, is, as you know, 'cause you've talked to many different companies, it's not technology that stops people from moving to the cloud as quick as they want to, it's culture, it's people, it's processes, it's how businesses work. And when you move the crown jewels into the cloud, you are accelerating that cultural change and that's certainly what FINRA saw. Second thing we see, is where a company will pick a few cloud pilots. We'll take a couple of applications, maybe one or a several across the organization and they'll move that as sort of a reference implementation to the cloud. And then the goal is to try to get the people who did that to generalize all the learning across the company. That is actually a really slow way to change culture. Because, as many of us know, in large organizations, you know, you have, you have some resistance to other organizations changing culture. And so that cloud pilot, while it seems like it would work, it seems logical, it's actually counter-productive to a lot of companies that want to move quickly to the cloud. And the third example is what I think of as new applications or cloud first, net new. And that pattern is where a company or a startup says all new technology initiatives are on the cloud. And we see that for companies like McDonald's, which has transformed their drive up experience by dynamically looking at location orders and providing recommendations. And we see it for the Digital Athlete, which is what the NFL has put together to dynamically take data sources and build these models that help them programmatically simulate risks to player health and put in place some ways to predict and prevent that. But those are the three patterns that we see so many customers falling into depending on what their business wants. >> I like that term, Digital Athlete, my business partner, John Furrier, coined the term tech athlete, you know, years ago on theCUBE. That third pattern seems to me, because you're right, you almost have to shock the system. If you just put your toe in the water, it's going to take too long. But it seems like that third pattern really actually de-risks it in a lot of cases, it's so it's said, people, who's going to argue, oh, the new stuff should be in the cloud. And so, that seems to me to be a very sensible way to approach that, that blocker, if you will, what are your thoughts on that? >> I think you're right, Dave. I think what it does is it allows a company to be able to see the ideas and the technology and the cultural change of cloud in different parts of the organization. And so rather than having a, one group that's supposed to generalize it across an organization, you get it decentralized and adopted by different groups and the culture change just goes faster. >> So you, you bring up decentralization and there's a, there's an emerging trend referred to as a data mesh. It was, it was coined, the term coined by Zhamak Dehghani, a very thought-provoking individual. And the concept is basically the, you know, data is decentralized, and yet we have this tendency to sort of shove it all into, you know, one box or one container, or you could say one cloud, well, the cloud is expanding, it's the cloud is, is decentralizing in many ways. So how do you see data mesh fitting in to those patterns? >> We have customers today that are taking the data mesh architectures and implementing them with AWS services. And Dave, I want to go back to the start of Amazon, when Amazon first began, we grew because the Amazon technologies were built in microservices. Fundamentally, a data mesh is about separation or abstraction of what individual components do. And so if I look at data mesh, really, you're talking about two things, you're talking about separating the data storage and the characteristics of data from the data services that interact and operate on that storage. And with data mesh, it's all about making sure that the businesses, the decentralized business model can work with that data. Now our AWS customers are putting their storage in a centralized place because it's easier to track, it's easier to view compliance and it's easier to predict growth and control costs. But, we started with building blocks and we deliberately built our storage services separate from our data services. So we have data services like Lake Formation and Glue. We have a number of these data services that our customers are using to build that customized data mesh on top of that centralized storage. So really, it's about at the end of the day, speed, it's about innovation. It's about making sure that you can decentralize and separate your data services from your storage so businesses can go faster. >> But that centralized storage is logically centralized. It might not be physically centralized, I mean, we put storage all over the world, >> Mai-Lan: That's correct. >> right? But, but we, to the developer, it looks like it's in one place. >> Mai-Lan: That's right. >> Right? And so, so that's not antithetical to the concept of a data mesh. In fact, it fits in perfectly to the point you were making. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about AWS's storage strategy and it started of course, with, with S3, and that was the focus for years and now of course EBS as well. But now we're seeing, we heard from Wayne this morning, the portfolio is expanding. The innovation is, is accelerating that flywheel that we always talk about. How would you characterize and how do you think about AWS's storage strategy per se? >> We are a dynamically and constantly evolving our AWS storage services based on what the application and the customer want. That is fundamentally what we do every day. We talked a little bit about those deployments that are happening right now, Dave. That is something, that idea of constant dynamic evolution just can't be replicated by on-premises where you buy a box and it sits in your data center for three or more years. And what's unique about us among the cloud services, is again that perspective of the 15 years where we are building applications in ways that are unique because we have more customers and we have more customers doing more things. So, you know, I've said this before. It's all about speed of innovation Dave, time and change wait for no one. And if you're a business and you're trying to transform your business and base it on a set of technologies that change rapidly, you have to use AWS services. Let's, I mean, if you look at some of the launches that we talk about today, and you think about S3's multi-region access points, that's a fundamental change for customers that want to store copies of their data in any number of different regions and get a 60% performance improvement by leveraging the technology that we've built up over, over time, leveraging the, the ability for us to route, to intelligently route a request across our network. That, and FSx for NetApp ONTAP, nobody else has these capabilities today. And it's because we are at the forefront of talking to different customers and that dynamic evolution of storage, that's the core of our strategy. >> So Andy Jassy used to say, oftentimes, AWS is misunderstood and you, you comfortable with that. So help me square this circle 'cause you talked about things you couldn't do on on-prem, and yet you mentioned the relationship with NetApp. You think, look at things like Outposts and Local Zones. So you're actually moving the cloud out to the edge, including on-prem data centers. So, so how do you think about hybrid in that context? >> For us, Dave, it always comes back to what the customer's asking for. And we were talking to customers and they were talking about their edge and what they wanted to do with it. We said, how are we going to help? And so if I just take S3 for Outposts, as an example, or EBS and Outposts, you know, we have customers like Morningstar and Morningstar wants Outposts because they are using it as a step in their journey to being on the cloud. If you take a customer like First Abu Dhabi Bank, they're using Outposts because they need data residency for their compliance requirements. And then we have other customers that are using Outposts to help, like Dish, Dish Networks, as an example, to place the storage as close as account to the applications for low latency. All of those are customer driven requirements for their architecture. For us, Dave, we think in the fullness of time, every customer and all applications are going to be on the cloud, because it makes sense and those businesses need that speed of innovation. But when we build things like our announcement today of FSx for NetApp ONTAP, we build them because customers asked us to help them with their journey to the cloud, just like we built S3 and EBS for Outposts for the same reason. >> Well, when you say over time, you're, you believe that all workloads will be on the cloud, but the cloud is, it's like the universe. I mean, it's expanding. So what's not cloud in the future? When you say on the cloud, you mean wherever you meet customers with that cloud, that includes Outposts, just the programming, it's the programmability of that model, is that correct? That's it, >> That's right. that's what you're talking about? >> In fact, our S3 and EBS Outposts customers, the way that they look at how they use Outposts, it's either as part of developing applications where they'll eventually go the cloud or taking applications that are in the cloud today in AWS regions and running them locally. And so, as you say, this definition of the cloud, you know, it, it's going to evolve over time. But the one thing that we know for sure, is that AWS storage and AWS in general is going to be there one or two steps ahead of where customers are, and deliver on what they need. >> I want to talk about block storage for a moment, if I can, you know, you guys are making some moves in that space. We heard some announcements earlier today. Some of the hardest stuff to move, whether it's cultural or maybe it's just hardened tops, maybe it's, you know, governance edicts, or those really hardcore mission critical apps and workloads, whether it's SAP stuff, Oracle, Microsoft, et cetera. You're clearly seeing that as an opportunity for your customers and in storage in some respects was a blocker previously because of whatever, latency, et cetera, then there's still some, some considerations there. How do you see those workloads eventually moving to the cloud? >> Well, they can move now. With io2 Block Express, we have the performance that those high-end applications need and it's available today. We have customers using them and they're very excited about that technology. And, you know, again, it goes back to what I just said, Dave, we had customers saying, I would like to move my highest performing applications to the cloud and this is what I need from the, from the, the storage underneath them. And that's why we built io2 Block Express and that's how we'll continue to evolve io2 Block Express. It is the first SAN technology in the cloud, but it's built on those core principles that we talked about a few minutes ago, which is dynamically evolving and capabilities that we can add on the fly and customers just get the benefit of it without the cost of migration. >> I want to ask you about, about just the storage, how you think about storage in general, because typically it's been a bucket, you know, it's a container, but it seems, I always say the next 10 years aren't going to be like the last, it seems like, you're really in the data business and you're bringing in machine intelligence, you're bringing in other database technology, this rich set of other services to apply to the data. That's now, there's a lot of data in the cloud and so we can now, whether it's build data products, build data services. So how do you think about the business in that sense? It's no longer just a place to store stuff. It's actually a place to accelerate innovation and build and monetize for your customers. How do you think about that? >> Our customers use the word foundational. Every time they talk about storage, they say for us, it's foundational, and Dave, that's because every business is a data business. Every business is making decisions now on this changing landscape in a world where the new normal means you cannot predict what's going to happen in six months, in a year. And the way that they're making those smart decisions is through data. And so they're taking the data that they have in our storage services and they're using SageMaker to build models. They're, they're using all kinds of different applications like Lake Formation and Glue to build some of the services that you're talking about around authorization and data discovery, to sit on top of the data. And they're able to leverage the data in a way that they have never been able to do before, because they have to. That's what the business world demands today, and that's what we need in the new normal. We need the flexibility and the dynamic foundational storage that we provide in AWS. >> And you think about the great data companies, those were the, you know, trillions in the market cap, their data companies, they put data at their core, but that doesn't mean they shove all the data into a centralized location. It means they have the identity access capabilities, the governance capabilities to, to enable data to be used wherever it needs to be used and, and build that future. That, exciting times we're entering here, Mai-Lan. >> We're just set the start, Dave, we're just at the start. >> Really, what ending do you think we have? So, how do you think about Amazon? It was, it's not a baby anymore. It's not even an adolescent, right? You guys are obviously major player, early adulthood, day one, day zero? (chuckles) >> Dave, we don't age ourself. I think if I look at where we're going for AWS, we are just at the start. So many companies are moving to the cloud, but we're really just at the start. And what's really exciting for us who work on AWS storage, is that when we build these storage services and these data services, we are seeing customers do things that they never thought they could do before. And it's just the beginning. >> I think the potential is unlimited. You mentioned Dish before, I mean, I see what they're doing in the cloud for Telco. I mean, Telco Transformation, that's an industry, every industry, there's a transformation scenario, a disruption scenario. Healthcare has been so reluctant for years and that's happening so quickly, I mean, COVID's certainly accelerating that. Obviously financial services have been super tech savvy, but they're looking at the Fintech saying, okay, how do we play? I mean, there isn't manufacturing with EV. >> Mai-Lan: Government. >> Government, totally. >> It's everywhere, oil and gas. >> There isn't a single industry that's not a digital industry. >> That's right. >> And there's implications for everyone. And it's not just bits and atoms anymore, the old Negroponte, although Nicholas, I think was prescient because he's, he saw this coming, it really is fundamental. Data is fundamental to every business. >> And I think you want, for all of those in different industries, you want to pick the provider where innovation and invention is in our DNA. And that is true, not just for storage, but AWS, and that is driving a lot of the changes you have today, but really what's coming in the future. >> You're right. It's the common editorial factors. It's not just the, the storage of the data. It's the ability to apply other technologies that map into your business process, that map into your organizational skill sets that drive innovation in whatever industry you're in. It's great Mai-Lan, awesome to see you. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Great seeing you Dave, take care. >> All right, you too. And keep it right there for more action. We're going to now toss it back to Jenna, Canal and Darko in the studio. Guys, over to you. (pensive music)

>> Okay. We're back here. theCube and all the action here in Mobile World Congress, cloud city, I'm John ferry, host of the cube. We've got a great remote interviews. Of course, it's a hybrid event here in the cube. And of course, cloud city's bringing all the physical face-to-face and we're going to get the remote interviews. Peter Adderton, founder, chairman, CEO of Mobile X Global. Nicholas Gerrard, founder and CEO of OxyGo. Gentlemen, thank you for coming in remotely onto the cube here in the middle of cloud city. You missed Bon Jovi last night, he was awesome. The little acoustic unplugged and all the action. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right, Peter and Nicholas, if you don't mind, just take a quick 30 seconds to set the table on what you guys do, your business and your focus here at Mobile World Congress. >> So I'll jump in quickly. Being the Australian, I'll go first, but just quick by way of background, I founded a company called Boost Mobile, which is one of the, is now the fourth largest mobile brand in, in America. And I spent a lot of time managing effort in that, in that space and now launching Mobile X, which is kind of the first cloud AI platform that we're going to build for mobile. >> Awesome. Nicholas. >> So I'm a founder of a company called, Ox Fuel where we do is basically a telecommunity service platform for brands to basically incorporate telecom as part of their services and learn from their customers through what we call a telecom business intelligence. So basically making sense of the telecom data to improve their business across retail, financial services or in-demand economy. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for the setup. Peter, I want to ask you first, if you don't mind, the business models in the telecom area is really becoming, not just operate, but build and build new software enabled software defined just cloud-based software. And this has been a change in mindset, not so much a change so much in the actual topologies per se, or the actual investments, but as a change in personnel. What's your take on this whole cloud powering the change in the future of telco? >> Well, I think you've got to look at where the telcos have come from in order to understand where they're going in the future. And where they've come from is basically using other people's technology to try to create a differentiation. And I think that that's the struggle that they're going to have. They talk about wanting to convert themselves from telcos into techcos. I just think it's a leap too far for the carriers to do that. So I think we're going to see, you know, them pushing 5G, which you see they're doing out there right now. Then they start talking about open rand and cloud and, and at the end of the day, all they want to do is basically sell you a plan, give you a phone attached to that and try to make as much money out of you as they possibly can. And they disguise that basically in the whole technology 5G open rand discussion, but they really, I don't think care. And at the end of the day, I don't think the consumers care, their model isn't built around technology. The model is built around selling your data and, and that's their fundamental principle and how they do that. And I've seen them go through from 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G. Every G we see come out has a promise of something new and incredible. But what we basically get is a data plan with the minutes. Right? >> Yeah, yeah I totally right on. And I think we're going to get into the whole edge piece of what that's going to open up when you start thinking about what, what the capabilities are and this new stakeholders who are going to have an interest in the trillions of dollars on the table right now, up for grabs. But Nicholas wanted to get to you on this whole digital-first thing, because one of the things we've been saying on theCube and interviewing folks and riffing on is: If digital drives more value and there's new use cases that are going to bring on, that's going to enabled by software. There's now new stakeholders coming and saying, Hey, you know what? I need more than just a pipe. I need more than just the network. I need to actually run healthcare. I need to run education on the edge. These are now industrial and consumer related use cases. I mean, this is software. This is where software and apps shine. So cloud native can enable that. So what's your take on the industry as they start to wake up and say, holy shit, this is going to be pretty massive when you look at what's coming. Not so much what's going to be replatformed, but what's coming. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a, it's where I kind join Peter on this. There's been pretty significant, heavy innovation on the carrier side for, you know, if you think about it 30 years or so of like just reselling plans effectively, which is a virtual slice of the network that built. And all of a sudden they started competing against, you know, the heavyweights on the internet. We had, putting the bar really high in terms of, you know, latency in terms of expectation, in terms of APIs, right? We've we've heard about telecom APIs for 15 years, right? It's- nothing comes close to what you could get if you start building on top of a Stripe or a Google. So I think, it's going to be hard for a lot of those companies. What we do with our show is we try to bridge that gap. Right, we try to build on top of their infrastructure to be able to expose modern APIs, to be able to open up a programmatic interface so that innovators like Peter's are able to actually really take the user experience forward and start, building those specialized businesses across healthcare, financial services, and whatnot. >> Yeah, David Blanca and I were on the, on theCube yesterday talking about how Snowflake, a company that basically sits on top of Amazon built almost nothing on the infrastructure. Built on top of it and was successful. Peter, this is a growth thing. One of the things I want to get your thoughts on is you've had experiences in growing companies. How do you look at the growth coming into this market, Peter, because you know, you got to have new opportunities coming in. It's a growth play too. It's not just take share from someone. It's net new capabilities. >> Yeah. Here's the issue you've got with the wireless industry is that there's only a very few amount of them that actually have that last mile covered. So if you're going to build something on top of it, you're going to have to deal with the carrier, and the carrier as out of like a duopoly slash monopoly, because without their access to their network, you're not going to be able to do these incredible things. So I think we've got a real challenge there where you're going to have to get the carriers to innovate. Now you've got the CEO of Deutsche Telekom coming out yesterday saying that the OTT players aren't paying their fair share. Right, and I sit back and go, well, hang on. You're selling data to customers who basically are using that data to use apps and OTT. And now he's saying, well, they should pay as well. So not only the consumer pay, but now the OTT players should pay. It's a mixed message. So what you're going to have to do, and what we're going to have to do as a, as a growth industry is we're going to have to allow it to grow. And the only way to do that is that the carriers are going to have to have better access, allow more access to their networks, as Nico said, let the APIs has become more available. I just think that that's a leap too far. So I think we're going to be handicapped in our growth based on these carriers. And it's going to take regulators and it's going to take innovation and consumers demanding carriers, do it, otherwise, you know, you're still going to deal with the three carriers in your world. >> Yeah, That's interesting about- I was just talking to Danielle Royce, the DR here at TelcoDR. And she said, I was talking about ORAN and there's more infrastructure than needed. She said, oh, it's more software. I don't disagree with her. I do agree with it. But I also think that the ORAN points to, Nicholas, kind of this idea that there's more surface area to be had on the scale side. So standardizing hardware creates a lower fixed cost, so you can get some cost reduction. And then with standardized software, you get more enablement for hardened openness. I mean, open source is already proven. You can still be secure. And obviously Cloud was once said, could never be secure and most, is probably more secure than anything. What's your take on this whole ORAN commodity standardization mission- efforts? >> I think it's a, I mean, it goes along to the second phase, right? Of what the differentiation in telecom was, you know. Early on, specialized boxes that are very expensive. You know, that you, you, you, you get from a few vendors, then you have the transition over to a software. We lower the price, as you were mentioning. It can run on off the shelf hardware. And then we're in the transition, which is what Danielle is, is evangelizing, right. Transition towards the cloud and specifically the public cloud, because there's no such thing as a private cloud really. And, and so up and running is just another, another piece where you can make the Legos connect better effectively and just have more flexibility. And generally the, the, the game here is to also break the agenda when you- from, from the vendors, right? Because now you have a standard, so you don't necessarily need to buy the entire stack from, from the same vendors. You have a lot more flexibility. You know, you've probably followed the same debate that we've all seen, right. With a push against Huawei, for instance. Th-this is extremely hard for an operator, to start ripping out an entire vendor, because most of the time, they, they own the entire stack. But something like ORAN, now you can start mixing and matching with different vendors, but generally this is also a trend that's going to accelerate the move towards the public cloud. >> That's awesome. Peter, I want to get your thoughts because you're basically building on the cloud. And if you don't mind chime it in to kind of end the segment on this one point. People are trying to really get their minds around what refactoring means. And we've been saying, and talking about, you know, the three phases of, of waking up to the world. Reset your business, or reboot. Replatform to the cloud, and then refactor, which means take advantage of cloud enabled things, whether it's AI and other things. But first get on the platform, understand the economics, and then replatform. So the question, Peter, we'll start with you. What does refactoring actually mean and look like in a successful future execution or playbook? Can you share your thoughts, because this is what people want to get to because that's where the value will come from. That's where the iteration gets you. What's your take on this refactoring? >> Yeah, yeah. So I always, I mean, we're in the consumer business, so I'm always about what is the difference going to make for the consumer? So, whether you're, and when you look at refactoring and you look at what's happening in the space. Is what is the difference that's going to, what are the consumers going to see that's different and are they willing to pay for that? And so we can strip away the technical layers and we all get caught up in the industry with these buzzwords and terms, and we get, and at the end of the day, when it moves to the consumer, the consumer just sits there and says, so what's the value? How much am I paying? And so what we're trying to do at MobileX is, we're trying to use the cloud and we're trying to use kind of innovation into create a better experience for the consumer. One way to do that is to basically help the customer, understand their usage patents. You know, right now today, they don't understand that. Right if I asked you how much you paid for your mobile bill, you will tell me my cell phone bill is $150, but I'm going to ask you the next question How much data do you use? You go, I don't know, right? >> John: unlimited. >> And then I'd say why am I started- well you'd say limited, right. I will go. I'd go, I don't know. So I sit back and go, most customers are like you. You're basically paying for a service that you have no clear, no idea what you're getting. And it's designed by the carriers to scare you into thinking you need it. So I think we've got to get away from the buzzwords that we use as an industry and just dumb that down to what, what does that mean for a consumer? And I think that the cloud is going to allow us to create some very unique ways for consumers to interact with their device and their usage of that device. And I think that that's the holy grail for me. >> Yeah. That's a great point. And it's worth calling out because I think if the cloud can get you a 10X value at, at a reduction in costs compared to the competition, that's one benefit that people will pay for. And the other one is just, Hey, that's really cool. I want I'll, I value that, that's a valuable thing. I'll pay for it. So it's interesting that the cloud scale there, it's just a good mindset. >> Yeah. So it's always, I always like say to people, you know, I've spoken a lot to the Dish guys about what open rand is going to do and I keep saying to them, so what's the value that I'm going to get from a consumer. And they'll say, oh it's flexible pricing plans. They're now starting to talk about, okay, what the end product is of this technology. You look at ECM, right? ECM has been around for a long time. It's only now that we're to see ECM technology, get enabled. The carriers fought that for a long, long time. So there's a monumental shift that needs to take place. And it's in the four or five carriers in our counties. >> Awesome. Nicholas, what's your take on refactoring? Obviously, you know, you've got APIs, you've got all this cool software enabled. How do you get to refactoring and how do you execute through that? >> I mean, it's a little bit of a, what Peter was saying as well, right? There's the, the advantage of that point is to be, you know, all our stuff basically lives in the cloud, right. So it's opportunity to, to get that closer, you know, just having better latency, making sure that, you know, you're not losing your, your photos and your data as you lose your phone and yep. Just bet- better access in general. I, I think ultimately like the, the push to the cloud right now is it's mostly just a cost reduction. The back tick, as far as the carriers are concerned, right. They don't necessarily see how they can build that break. And then from there start interacting with the rest of the OTT world and, and, you know, Netflix is built on Amazon and companies like that, right? Like, so as you're able to get closer as a carrier to that cloud where the data lives, this is also just empowering better digital experience. >> Yeah I think that's where the that's, the proof point will be there, as they say, that's where the rubber will meet the road or proof is in the pudding, whatever expression. Once they get to that cost reduction, if they can wake up to that, whoa we can actually do something better here and make m- or if they don't someone else will. Right. That's the whole point. So, final question as we wrap up, ecosystem changeover. Lot more ecosystem action. I mean, there's a lot of vendors here at Mobile Congress, but real quick, Peter, Nicholas, your take on the future of ecosystem around this new telco. Peter, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I look, I mean, it, it, again, it keeps coming back to, to, to where I say that consumers have driven all the ecosystems that have ever existed. And when I say consumers also to IOT as well, right? So it's not just the B to C it's also B to B. So look to the consumer and look to the business to see what pain points you can solve. And that will create the ecosystems. None of us bet on Uber, none of us bet on Airbnb. Otherwise we'd all be a lot richer than we are today. So none of us took that platform- and by the way, we've been in mobile and wireless and any kind of that space smartphone space for a long time. And we will miss those applications. And if you ask a CEO today of a telco, what's the 5G killer application, that's going to send 5G into the next atmosphere, they can't answer the question. They'll talk about drones and robotic surgeries and all things that basically will never have any value to a consumer at the end of the day. So I think we've got to go back to the consumer and that's where my focus is and say, how do we make their lives better? And that will create the ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, they go for the low hanging fruit. Low latency and, and whatnot. But yeah, let's, it's going to be, it's going to be, we'll see what happens. Nicolas your take on ecosystems as they develop. A lot more integrations and not customization. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I think going back to, you know, again like 20- 20 years ago, the network was the product conductivity to the product. Today it's a, it's a building block, right? Something that you integrate that's part of your experience. So the same way we're seeing like conversions between telecom and financial services. Right? You see a lot of telcos trying to be banks. Banks and fintechs trying to be telcos. It's, it's a blending of that, right? So it, at the end of the day, it's like, why, what is the experience? What is the above and beyond the conductivity? Because customers, at this point, it's just not differentiated based on conductivity, kind of become just a busy commodity. So even as you look at what Peter is building, right, this, what is the experience above and beyond just buying a plan that I get out of it, or if you are a media company, you know, how do I pair my content or resolve real problems? Like for instance, we work a lot to the NBA and TikTok. They get into markets where, you know, having a video product at the end and people not being well-connected, that's a problem, right? So it's an opportunity for them to bring the building block into their ecosystem and start offering solutions that are a different shape. >> Awesome. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Both of you, both experienced entrepreneurs and executives riding the wave on the right side of history, I believe. Thanks for coming on theCube, I appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> If you're not riding the wave the right way, you're driftwood. And we're going to toss it back to the studio. Adam and the team, take it from here.

(upbeat music) >> In 2009, Cisco made a major announcement in the form of UCS. It was designed to attack the IT labor problem. Cisco recognized that, data center professionals were struggling to be agile and provide the types of infrastructure services that lines of business were demanding for the modern applications of that day. The value proposition was all about, simplifying infrastructure deployment and management and by combining networking compute and storage with virtualization and a management layer, Cisco changed the game for running applications on premises and the era of converged infrastructure was born. Now fast forward a dozen years, and a lot has changed. The cloud has gone mainstream, forcing new requirements on organizations to bridge their on-prem environments to public clouds and manage workloads across clouds. Now to address this challenge, Cisco earlier this month, announced a series of offerings, that meaningfully expands its original vision, to support the more demanding requirements of today's dev sec ops teams. In particular Cisco, with this announcement is enabling customers to deploy a full stack cloud-like operating model that leverages modern platforms such as Kubernetes, new integrations and advanced tooling to bring automation, visibility and better security for both hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Now the underpinning of this solution, is a new UCS architecture called the X series. Cisco claims this new system gives customers a trusted platform for the next decade to support their hybrid and multi-cloud workloads. Gents, great to see you, welcome. >> Hey, thank you. Good to be here. >> Thanks for having a us Dave. I appreciate. >> My pleasure. Looking forward to this. So look, we've seen the X series announcement and it looks to be quite a new approach. What are the critical aspects of the X series that you want people to understand? Maybe James, and you can take that. >> Sure I think that, you know, overall, there is a lot of change coming in the marketplace, right? We're seeing we're looking at and we're seeing from a technology standpoint, a significant amount of change. Look at CPU's and GPU's, the power draw alone is becoming, you know, it basically at the trajectory, it is, it may be untenable for some, you know, of the current configurations that people are consuming, right? So some of these current architectures just can't deal with that, right? Or at least they can't deal with what's coming in the future. We're also seeing the relevance of other types of architectures like maybe arm to start to become something that our customers want to take advantage of, right? Or maybe want to see how that scale fits into their environment on a totally different level. At the same time, the fabrics are really evolving at lightning speed here, right? So we're seeing PCI express, we've gone from gen three to gen four, gen five is coming in the very near future. We're layering on top of that, things like CXL to take that, that fabric to the next level for capabilities and be able to do things that we couldn't do before. To connect things together, we couldn't do before. Beyond that, we probably are just a few years away from even more exciting developments in the fabric space around some of the high performance low latency fabrics that are that are again on the drawing board today just around the corner. Take that and you, you look at the kind of the evolution of the the admin, right? So we're seeing the admin developer emerge. No longer is this just a guy who's sitting in front of a dashboard and managing systems, keeping them up and down, we're now seeing a whole class of developers that are also administrators, right? So all of this together is starting to push us well beyond what human scale really can manage, what human scale can consume. So, there's a lot of change coming and I think that we're taking a look at that and realizing that something like X series has to be able to deal with that change and the challenges that it brings, but also and do so in a simple manner that we can allow automation orchestration and some of these new capabilities to enhance what our customers can do, not to drown them in technology. >> You know, that taught, that's kind of interesting what James was saying about beyond human scale. I mean, I think my little narrative upfront, it was sort of, hey, we recognize as an IT labor problem. We're going to address that. And it really wasn't about massive scale back then, it is now. We really what we've learned from the cloud guys, right? >> Definitely. I mean, people are moving from pets to cattle to now with containers, they're saying that it's mosquitoes, right? Cause they're so ephemeral, they come and go and on a single host, you could have, you know, hundreds if not thousands of containers. And so the application environment has influenced the infrastructure design and really changed the role of the infrastructure operator to one that necessitates automation, necessitates operations at scale, even on prem everyone's trying to operate in that cloud like model and they're trying to bridge, the big challenge I see is, they're trying to bridge their existing environment big monolithic applications they've got on-prem with those data lakes that they built around them over the past decade, but they're also trying to follow their developers as they go out into the public cloud and innovate there. That's really where the nexus of all the application innovation is. So the IT teams who are already strapped for resources it's not like their budgets are going up every year, are now taking on a new front out in the cloud while they're still trying to maintain the systems that they've built with on-prem. That's the challenge. >> Yeah that's really the hard part and where some of the innovation here is, is anybody that lives in an old house knows that connecting old to new is very challenging much more challenging than building from scratch. But James I wonder if we'd come back to the to the architecture of the X series and what's really unique about it and what's in it for your customers? >> Yes, absolutely. So we're, when were looking at at kind of redesigning this thing from the ground up, we recognized that, you know from a timing standpoint, we're sitting at a place with the development of future fabrics and some of these other technologies that we finally have the opportunity to hit the timing perfectly to start to do composability right. So we've heard a lot of noise, you know in the market for the last several years about composability and how that's going to be the salvation or change the game here. But at the end of the day, the technology hasn't been there in those offerings, right? So we're sitting at the edge of some of the development of those technologies that are going to allow us to do that. And what we've done with X series, is we've taken a construct that we call the UCS X fabric, which is the ability to consume these technologies today as like a effectively a chassis fabric that can allow us to connect resources together within the chassis and future external to the chassis. But it also allows us to take advantage of the change in fabric that's coming. So as fabrics evolve, as we see new technologies like CXL and the PCI express gen five and beyond, come into play here and eventually physical technologies like Silicon Photonix, those are constructs that are going to allow our customers to do some amazing things and we have the construct to be able to consume those. Our goal here is like, to effectively look out at these disruptive technologies on the horizon and make sure that they're not disrupting our customers that we give our customers the ability to disrupt their competitors and to disrupt their markets, but by consuming those technologies in an easy way. >> You know, you didn't use the term future-proof. And I usually don't like that phrase because a lot of times people go that's future-proof and I'm like, well, what's future proof? Well, it's really fast. Well, okay. And in two years, it's going to be, you know really slow compared to everything else. But what you, what you just laid out is an architecture that's really taking advantage of some of these new capabilities that are driving latency down. So that's so, thank you for that. Now, Todd I get how the X series is going to enable customers you know, today I just mentioned the future but how does it play into Cisco's hybrid cloud vision? >> Well I mean, our customers aren't looking for, you know, point solutions or bolt on layers of software to manage across the hybrid cloud landscape. That's the fundamental challenge and so what we're doing with intersite, if you really think about all the systems that we have in our portfolio, like X series, really it's just extensions of our inner site platform. And there we're bridging the gaps between fundamental infrastructure prem, with all of those services that you need to optimize workloads and infrastructure, both in that on-prem environment but also out in the public cloud and even moving up the stack now into serverless. So we know that customers again are trying to bolt together a cohesive environment that allows them to manage those existing workloads on prem but also support the innovation going on out in the cloud and to do that, you have to have services to manage Kubernetes. You need hooks into modern tool chains like a Hashi corks Terraform, we did that a few months back and we recently brought in something we call our service mesh manager that came out of an acquisition of a Bonzai cloud. So what we're doing is, we're kind of spanning that entire spectrum from physical infrastructure, to the workload and that could be extracted in any number of ways either in containers or containers around VMs or bare metal running applications run on bare metal or just virtual machine applications encapsulation. So, you got all these different modalities that customers are going to run applications in and it's our intent to create a platform here that supports all of them, both on their on-prem environment and also all the resources they're managing out in the cloud. So that's a big deal for us. You know, one thing I want to go back to the X series for a second, something James mentioned, right? Is you know as we see subsystems in computing, start to decompose and break apart, you know, we have intersite as the mechanism to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and that's really, I think composability and district's options bar, but that's okay. But so I'll read it together. And like James said, you know be able to take on whatever fabrics, low latency fabrics, ultra low latency fabrics we need in coming years to sew these systems together, we're kind of breaking a barrier that didn't, that wasn't, you know people have trouble breaking through in the past, right? And that's this idea of true infrastructure as code or true software defined infrastructure. Cause now we're talking about being able to apply policy and automation, to the actual construct of a server. How do you build that thing to the needs of the workload? And so if you talk to an SRE or a developer today and you say infrastructure, they're thinking of Kubernetes cluster, but ultimately we want to push that boundary or that frontier between the world software to find it abstracted as far down in the infrastructure, as we can. And with intersite and X fabric and X series, we're taking it all the way down to the individual drive or CPU or ultimately breaking memory apart and sewing that back together. So it's kind of exciting time for us, cause really, pushing that frontier of what is software defined further and further down into the infrastructure and that just gives people a lot more flexibility in what they build. >> So I want to play something back to you and see if it resonates. Essentially, I look at what you just said is you're building a layer across my on-prem, whatever public cloud across clouds at the conventionally, you know, get to the edge, but let's hold off on that, let's park that for now. But that layer obstructs the underlying technical complexity and allows that infrastructure to be, you said programmable, infrastructure is code essentially. So that's one of my other questions, it's like, how programmable is this infrastructure, you know, today and in the future? But is that idea of an abstraction layer kind of how you're thinking about hybrid and multi-cloud? >> It is in terms of the infrastructure that customers are going to run on prem right in the public cloud the cloud providers are already abstracting that for them. And so what we want to do is bring that same type of public cloud experience to managing infrastructure on prem. So being able to have pools of resources that you allocate out to workloads, shifted as things change. So it's absolutely a cloud-like approach to on-prem infrastructure and you know, one of the things I like to say is, you know, friends don't let friends, build their own private cloud platforms from scratch, right? We're productizing this, we're bringing it as a cohesive system that customers don't need to engineer on their own. They can focus on their operations and James actually, he's a pilot, and one of the things he observed about Intersight a couple of years ago was, this idea of Intersight as a co-pilot and kind of, you know, adding a person to your team almost when you have intersite in your data center, because some very, what feels like rudimentary things are incredibly impactful day-to-day for our customers. So we have recommendation engines. If it, if like, you know, maybe it says some interplay between bios and firmware and operating system and we know that there's an issue there rather than letting customers stumble upon that on their own we're going to flag it, show them the correction, go implement it for them. So that it starts to feel a lot more like what they're accustomed to in a public cloud setting where the system has some intelligence baked in, the system is kind of covering them and watching their back and acting like a co-pilot day-to-day operations. >> Okay, so I get that, you know, the cloud guys will abstract the complexity you guys are focused on prem, but is it, so my question then is multi-cloud across clouds because we have some cloud providers, you know you're partners with Google they do some things with Antho, so I know Microsoft with Ark, but even near-term. Should we think about Cisco as playing that role of my, across cloud, you know, partner if you will? >> Absolutely. You know, cloud agnosticism is core to our approach because we know that, you know if you dial the clock way back to the early odds, right? When cloud first started emerging it was kind of an efficiency play. And you had folks like Nicholas Carr, right? The author that they put out the big switch, kind of envisioning a world where there'd be this ultimate consolidation to maybe one or two or three cloud platforms worldwide. But what we're seeing, you know we had data sovereignty kind of emerge over the past decade but even the past year or two, it's now becoming issues of actual cloud sovereignty. So you have governments in Australia and in India and in Europe actually asserting control over the cloud providers and services that can be used by their public sector organizations and so that's just leading to actually cloud fragmentation. It's not nearly as monolithic of future as we thought it would be. It's a lot of clouds and so as customers want to move around geographically or if they want to go harvest innovation that maybe Google is really good at something like machine vision, or they want to use AWS or Azure for different applications that they're going to go build. We're seeing customers really being put in a place where they're going to deal with multiple cloud providers and the data supports that. So it's definitely our approach especially on the networking technology side to make it very easy for our customers to go out and connect these different clouds and not have to repeat the integration process every time they want to go, you know, start using another public cloud provider. So that's absolutely our strategies to be very agnostic and build everything in mind for customers they're going to be using in multiple providers. >> Thank you for that touch. So James, I want to come back and talk a little bit about sort of your competitive posture here. I mean, you guys, when you made the announcement, I inferred that you were feeling like you were in a pretty good position relative to the competition that you were putting forth, not just you know, core infrastructure in hardware and software but also all these other components around it that we talked about, observability extending out to the, you know, beyond the four walls of my data center, et cetera. But talk a little bit about why you think this gives you such competitive advantage in the marketplace. >> Well I mean, I think first of all, back to where Todd was going as well, is that, you know if you think about trying to be, to work in this hybrid cloud world, that we're clearly living in, the idea of burrowing features and functions as far down the stack as possible, doesn't make a lot of sense, right? So intersite is a great example. We want to manage and we want to orchestrate across clouds, right? So how are we going to have our management and infrastructure services buried into the chassis, down at the very lowest level, that doesn't make sense. So we elevated our, you know, our operating model to the cloud, right? And that's how we manage across clouds from the cloud. So, building a system and really we've done this from the ground up with X series, building a system that is able to take advantage of all these two technologies. And you mentioned, you know, how being future proof was probably you know, a derogatory term almost and I agree with you completely. I think we're future ready. Like, we're ready to embrace it because we're not trying to say that nothing is going to change beyond what we've already thought of, we're saying, bring it on. We're saying, bring on that change because we're ready for it. We've we can accommodate change. We, we're not saying that the technology we have today is to going to ride us for 10 years, we're saying,, we're ready for the next 10 years of change. Bring it. We can do that in a simple way. That is, you know, I think, you know going to give us the versatility and the simplicity to allow the technology to go beyond human scale without having to you know drown our customers in administrative duties, right? So that co-pilot that Todd mentioned is going to be able to take on a lot more of the work, just like an airplane where you know, the pilot has functionality that he has to absolutely be part of and those are the our developers, right? We want those admin developers to develop, to build things and to do things and not get bogged down in the minutiae that exists. So I think competitively, you know, our architecture top to bottom, you know, all the way up the stack, all the way to the bottom is unique and it is focused on not just the rear view mirror but what's coming in the future. >> So my takeaway there is that, okay, I get it. The new technologies will come along but this architecture is the architecture for the decade. You're not going to have to redo the architecture in a few years. That's really the key point here. Todd, I'll give you last word might just taking some notes here and takeaways that I heard, I heard upfront. Chip diversity really take advantage of all the innovations that are coming out. You're ready for that. You're kind of blurring the lines between blade and rack, giving some optionality there. Scale is a big theme. I mean, the cloud has brought that in and, you know people want to scale, they don't want to be, you know provisioning lawns all day and they won't be able to scale if that's what their job is. Developer friendly, particularly as it relates to infrastructure as code. And you've got a roadmap. So Todd, that's my summary. I'll give you the last word. >> No, it's really good. I mean, you hit it, right. We're thinking about this holistic operating environment that our customers are building for hybrid cloud and we're pre-engineering that environment for them. So our Intersight platform, all of our systems that connect to that, are really built to tackle that hybrid environment from end to end, and with systems like X series, we're giving them a more simple, efficient landing spot for their workloads on prem but crucially it's fully integrated with this hybrid cloud platform so as they have workloads on prem and workloads in the cloud, it's kind of a transparent environment between those two, between those two, two worlds there. So bringing it together so that our customers don't have to build it themselves. >> Excellent. Well, gents thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the details of this announcement. Congratulations, I know how much work and thought goes into these things, really looking forward to its progress and adoption in the marketplace. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for time. >> And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everybody, welcome back to IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome back a long time Cube alum, Jim Whitehurst, who's the president of IBM. And I'll call him chief cultural evangelist, welcome Jim. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you, Dave. Thanks so much for having me. >> Yeah, it's really our pleasure. And I want to start off, it's just over a year as president of IBM. And I wonder, you know, when you're a little kid or, you know, early in your career, computer science class, did you ever think you'd be president of a company that was founded in 1911? I mean, amazing. I wonder if you could share what's the most important thing you've learned in your first year? >> Well, look, I mean, as you said, I would've never thought it. Yeah, I was the first kid to have an IBM PC on the block and was always into technology but never saw myself as like, you know, running a big tech company. So it is humbling. I would say that there are tons of lessons in the first year. I guess the two that strike me most is one is just related to strategy and that's, you know, Red Hat and most technology companies, we're very customer focused. But it's around whatever technology we're bringing to market where IBM has fundamentally transitioned. And kind of transformed itself over time to make sure it can meet customer needs. So it's sold off businesses, it's bought other businesses, it's created new businesses. So it really shows the kind of the focus and value on serving our customers and doing whatever it takes to do it. And that's been a fundamental kind of different strategy than most companies have had. I think one of the reasons that we've been around for over a 100 years. The second is I'm deeply into culture and I've talked a lot about the difference of running Red Hat, it's all about innovation versus Delta Airlines where I was before, which is driving efficiency. IBM is both and so really trying to think through how you run an organization that needs to run the financial systems of the world, that extraordinary reliability and drive roadmaps on things like quantum computing. At the same time be able to innovate iteratively with our customers and in open source communities. And kind of getting that balance right as a leader. It's, you're kind of doing what we did at Red Hat and what we did at Delta but kind of doing it together. And I think that stretched me as a leader and kind of taught me a lot about how we're thinking about continuing to evolve the culture at IBM. >> Now, of course, you do this leadership series, you put out things out on LinkedIn and words matter. And that's what I take away from a lot of the little short hits that you do, which I really appreciate. My stuff that I put Jim on LinkedIn, it's just, you got to invest like 15, 20 minutes. So I really appreciate the short hits. But you do that regular series and I'm curious do you do that to reach more IBM people? Are you an open source culture? You're trying to help others. And I'm curious as to sort of why that platform as opposed to sending around an internal thing an IBM. And I'm wondering if your principles and how they've evolved kind of post pandemic. >> Well, so first off, maybe that comes from Red Hat but I think IBM shares that it's if you have something really, really valuable, you want to share it. And look, when I am out talking to our customers, CEOs and some of the biggest companies in the world, honestly we rarely talk about technology 'cause other people are more detailed or deep in that. We primarily do talk about culture. And how you think about again, how do you take an organization that's been built to drive efficiency and scale on a global basis and make it able to be more nimble and more innovative? And so, and obviously, hopefully that's all with IBM and Red Hat technologies. But ultimately most of my conversations at a senior leadership level are about culture and leadership style to drive that. And so if that's valuable for CEOs of some of the world's largest companies, it's valuable to leaders kind of across all spectrums, all sizes. And so I think LinkedIn is a good way to kind of take some of those messages and make sure we were able to share those much more broadly. So certainly I spend more time talking about it inside of IBM and I spend a lot of time with our clients talking about it. But I think many of the lessons are applicable more broadly. And so why not share them? And LinkedIn's a great platform to be able to do that. >> How about you, how have your principles, how have your principles sort of changed and how have they evolved post pandemic? >> Well, I think a couple things, so one is the pandemic kind of forces you to get more precise about it. And what I mean by that is so much of leadership is about building credibility and trust and influence. And when you're seeing someone in 3D live, visual cues can kind of mean a lot in the water cooler conversations. Or who you run into in the hall can all help kind of create that level of trust. But you can't do that in 2D. As great as Zoom and other platforms are, you just can't quite do it. And so you have to be much more thoughtful in how you're creating opportunities to kind of create trust. So I'd say I've gotten more surgical in thinking about kind of what those elements of leadership are that do that. I think the second thing I've really learned at IBM again is back to this. We have to be able to do both, drive a future state in a known world as well as, I call it seek a future state in an unknown world. So driving a roadmap for quantum computing takes a number of different technologies coming together in one year, in two years, in five years. And that really does have to be pre-planned, which is very very different, that I'll call the iterative innovation approach that we use at Red Hat and open source communities and working with our clients. And we have to do both. And so as a leader you really have to understand the problem you're trying to solve and apply slightly different kind of leadership tactics against that. So when you're executing a known versus you are trying to create something in an unknown, does require different approaches and we have to do both in IBM. And I think that's the struggle a lot of companies have, every company needs to do that. If you're Delta Airlines, you don't want anybody innovating on the safety procedures before your flight. Yet you want a lot of innovation happening on your website and your mobile app. So how do you bring those together? And as a leader you can have a common set of values, but recognize you have to bring different tools to the table, depending on the context in which you're leading. And so I learned a lot more and gotten a lot crisper with that since being at IBM. >> Interesting, I mean, the pandemic, we all know it's been terrible but one of the upshots has been we had a glimpse of the future sort of shoved into a forced march of digital in 2020. And so obviously the next 10 years ain't going to be like the last 10 years. And one of the things we've been talking about is ecosystems and partnerships and the power and leverage that you can get from those. And Arvin has said, laid it out, we are returning to growth company. And so I wonder if you could talk to how partnerships and ecosystems play into that return to growth for IBM. >> Well, first off a key part of our strategy we talk about hybrid cloud and AI. It's not just about, hey, a platform that runs across all the different deployment models is convenient. It's also because innovation is coming from so many sources today. It's coming from a by-product from the web 2.0 companies, it's coming from open source. It's coming from an explosion of startups because of the amount of capital in venture capital. It's coming from traditional software companies. It's coming from our clients who are participating in open source. And so you have so many sources of innovation. Much of what we're doing is landing a platform that allows you to consume innovation safely and reliably from wherever it's coming from. So a core part of a platform by definition is the ecosystem around it. Having a platform that runs everywhere is great but if you don't have any applications that run on it who cares. And so ecosystem and partners have always been important to IBM, but for this strategy of this horizontal platform oriented strategy, it is critical to our success because much of the platform is the ecosystem. And so we've already talked about investing a billion dollars in that ecosystem to get ISVs and other partners on our platform, again, to ultimately kind of create that kind of horizontal layer where I can run anything that I want to on it and I can run that anywhere I want to. And so the two sides of that so all the innovation happening on top and making sure it runs everywhere is what really unlocks the freedom of choice. That reduces friction to innovation, which allows everybody in the ecosystem from our clients to ISVs to hardware partners to innovate more quickly. And that's what we really see as the benefit of our platform. It's not a horizontal stove pipe, come innovate in this one place. It's recognizing innovation's happening in so many places. And the only way we're going to be able to allow people to ingest that is to have a horizontal platform that everyone's participating in. Which is why partners and ecosystem are so important, not only to the success of our platform, but to the, I'd say, as a success of this next generation of computing. These horizontal fabrics that require an ecosystem kind of built around them. >> I think that's an important nuance that maybe people don't understand that yes, you have a platform. Obviously, OpenShift is a linchpin but it's an enabler for people to build other platforms. It's not the be all, end all platform that's sort of ultimately becomes another Island. And so that is a key part of the growth strategy and presumably expand your total available market. >> Oh, absolutely and so this is the key is we can talk about great IBM technologies. We're doing amazing things in security and AI and natural language processing and all these other areas. But the platform is a recognition that we're not going to do everything for everybody anymore. There's just the democratization of technology means that there is so many sources of innovation. And so first and foremost, we have to land a platform so you can consume anything from anywhere. And then of course, we'll drive our own pace of innovation both in hardware and software around that platform. But we are just a player on that platform, which we're really instantiating for really anybody to be able to reach customers or customers to reach sources of innovation. >> I know sustainability is a passion of yours, that it's obviously a hot topic right now. Oftentimes I joke tongue in cheek, Milton Friedman's rolling over in his grave with all this ESG talk. And I know you just posted recently on LinkedIn. And of course I went right down to Kavanaugh because my premise is not only is sustainability the right thing to do, it's also good business. But I wonder if you could give us your perspectives on this. >> Yeah, well, so first off, I mean, as a large global citizen as IDM I think this is an important role that we play and look, this isn't new to IBM. We came out with our first statements around environment in 1970. We put out our first report that's become our environmental impact report in 1990. We've been talking about climate since the early two thousands. So we've been involved in this for a long, long time because I do think it's important broadly. But there's also a specific role I think IBM can play beyond just our own individual actions to reduce our own footprint. Because of some of the extraordinary technologies that IBM has worked on in the years especially around semiconductors, we have just an amazing amount of technology, expertise, intellectual property around material science. And so just a couple of examples of those that relate to the environment. We in doing some other work realized that we had a way to be able to recycle PET plastic, which is a real problem because so many clothes and other things are now made out of PET. And it's really hard to recycle but a by-product of other work we're doing realized we could do that. And so we've formed a JV and we're funding that to not profit from it but to make sure that much more of the world's PET is recycled. Or the work that we're doing on batteries, where using ocean water instead of rare earth minerals to make batteries that not only are cleaner but last longer. Those are kind of byproducts of our kind of core business. The areas that we can see the benefits of innovation and material science being able to impact the world. I am hopeful that we'll be able to play a role with all of that in clear air carbon capture. I mean, that's still far further away but I do think IBM has a unique role that we can play because of our deep expertise in, again, material science, quantum computing, and modeling that put us in a unique position to have a major impact on the world. >> I wonder if we could talk a little bit about sort of IBM and its technology bets. And I've made the point a number of times in my writing that IBM's R and D spend has been about pretty constant, about $6 billion a year. But as IBM is jettison certain businesses got out of the x86 server business and it got out of the Foundry business with micro electronics. Now it's spinning out NewCo. What happens, the effect is that R and D as a percent of revenue goes way, way up. And my premise has always been that allows IBM to be more focused. So whether it's hybrid cloud, AI, quantum, Edge where are you placing your technology bets and maybe give us a sense of how you ranked them, some of your favorites. >> Yeah, so, look, that's exactly right. I mean, we are one of the few places that still invest a massive amount in R and D, especially in fundamental research. And so I'll kind of break down kind of the core areas. So first off, what I'd say is part of the hybrid cloud platform is recognizing we don't need to do everything for everyone. There is great open source technology. There are great other vendors that are doing things that we can enable our customers to access via the platform. So we're not trying to do everything for everybody in the way maybe 40 years ago we did. Because we understand there's so much great other technology out there that we're going to make sure that we expose. So we're investing in areas where we think we can uniquely add value that need to happen that others aren't doing. So AI, let me take that as an example. There's tremendous work happening in machine learning that we see every day because of Facebook and people trying to identify cats. And so I don't mean to trivialize it, there's a phenomenal work happening there. There's a lot less work being done on in AI on things where you have a lot less data. Or areas where you need explainable unbiased AI and the problem with machine learning engines is they're not auditable by definition. That's kind of a black box. And so we do a lot of work in areas like that. We do a lot of work in natural language processing. So we've had more of a as a kind of publicity kind of push the technology something called Project Debater. Where Watson can debate kind of champion debaters. That was mainly to make sure we can understand language in context, which allows for being able to better handle call centers in areas like that. Allows us to understand source code, which also is thinking about how you migrate applications from on-premise to the cloud. So we have a bunch of AI things that we are doing and is a core focus of what we're doing. But specifically we're investing in areas like anti-biased auditability, natural language processing, areas where others aren't. Which is unique and we can bring those capabilities together with what others are doing. Security, obviously, a huge, huge area where we've invested in quantum safe encryption. We've invested in confidential computing. In other words, even in compute mode your data is encrypted. So you can keep your own keys, so not even we on our cloud can see your data. So a lot of investments happening around security and that's going to continue to be an area as we know that's going to get more and more and more scrutiny. So heavy, heavy focus there. Heavily focused on technologies that help you kind of modernize your infrastructure. So automation tools, integration tools and areas around that. So on the software side, those are kind of the main areas. When you look on the hardware side, obviously quantum is a significant area where we have a leadership position we continue to drive. But even semiconductor research in kind of process technology. So we announced something with Intel to work with them to bring some of our process technologies. As we kind of go from 7 nanometers to 5 to 2 to ultimately 1. That set of technologies is an area where we have a real leadership position and we'll continue to work with now Intel. We continue to work with others to drive that forward. So whole bunch of areas both on the hardware and the software side that we continue to make progress on. >> Yeah, the Silicon piece is interesting. And when we saw that Arvin as part of the Intel announcements that we thought originally, oh, maybe it's just about quantum but it's really much more than that. You mentioned the process. We dug into it and we realized, wow, we said Power10 actually has the highest performance. And because of the way in which you are not to geek out but you're you dis-aggregate memory. And Pat Gelsinger talked about system on a package. It turns out folks that IBM is actually the leader in that type of capability. And also the way that systems on chips use memory is very inefficient but IBM has actually invented some techniques to make that much more efficient. That's sort of the future of semiconductors. And the reason why we spend so much time thinking about it is because it's of national interest. There's a huge chip shortage, which doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. So that's a critical part of national competitiveness and technology competitiveness going forward. >> Well, and the other interesting part about that, and you talked about Power10, going back to the hybrid cloud platform that we talked about. It's not just about running applications across wherever you want to run them. It also abstracts the chip architecture. So all of a sudden whether it's on the mainframe, it's on power, it's on ARM, it's on x86 and a whole bunch of other technologies that might get developed. We're making it much easier to kind of consume that specialization or variety at the hardware level. Recognize as Moore's law runs its course there's no longer this inevitability of everything's just going to go to x86. I think we are going to see more variety because we're going to have needs in the factory floor or in the automobile or with massive container as applications. Where you're going to need, whether it's kind of shared memory or different architectures all the way out to kind of low battery consumption. And that whole kind of breadth and our hybrid cloud platform enables that variability. And then IBM obviously has great technology to enable kind of building unique capability in hardware. So we kind of play on both sides of it, both kind of developing great technologies but then making it really easy for developers to consume and use those specialized features. >> I'm glad you brought that up, Jim. We mentioned Moore's law because we're all talking about how Moore's law is waning and it's quote, unquote dead. But the reality is, is the outcome of Moore's law which is the doubling of performance every two years is actually accelerating because of the common actuarial factors of CPU's and GPU's and NPUs and accelerators and DSPs. If you add all those up and actually, we're actually quadrupling every two years. So we have more processing power at much lower costs because of the volumes that you're seeing on things like ARM. So it's actually a very exciting time. We're entering an era that really, it's hard to get your mind around sometimes. So my question is how should we think about the future state of IBM? What does that look like? >> Well, so first off, the thing that I've found extraordinary about IBM kind of having been there now just a little over a year as an employee, a couple of years, I guess, when Red Hat was acquired. Is it is unique in fundamentally changing, again, who we are to kind of meet the needs going forward. And if you think about the needs in technology, recognize it was only like 20 years ago that Nicholas Carr wrote his famous article, IT Doesn't Matter, it's about back office. And in that world, IBM was really, really effective at building and running IT systems for our clients. We would come in, we would just kind of do everything for them. Today, technology is the forefront of developing or building competitive advantage for almost any business. And so nobody wants to kind of hand the keys, so we no longer are necessarily doing things for our clients. We're doing things with our clients. So there's a whole set of work, and we talked about how we engage with our clients, how we're much more collaborative and co-creative and our whole garage model to help build the capability to innovate with our clients is a key part of what we're doing. We'll continue to drive core technologies forward like quantum in key areas that require billions of dollars of research that frankly no one else is willing to do. And then we bring it all together with this hybrid cloud platform where we recognize it's no longer about us doing it all for you anymore. We're going to do the things where we can uniquely add value but then provide it all on a platform which allows you to consume from wherever, however you want to in a safe, secure, reliable way. So as we watch this next generation of computing unfold, cloud shouldn't end up being a bunch of vertical stove pipes. It truly needs to be kind of a horizontal platform that allows you to run any application anywhere in a safe, secure, reliable way and our architecture helps do that. So it's no longer able to do everything for you. It's we can do things uniquely on a platform and work with you to be able to help you kind of create your own pace of innovation, your own sources of advantage. And so that's the broad kind of direction that we're going, again, as enterprises move from consuming technology to be more efficient, to driving advantage with it. They need partners who understand that focused on their success and can innovate with them. And that's really where we're going with our technology, with our services capability and kind of our approach to how we work with our clients. >> Yeah, Jim, you just laid out the Holy grail of computing in the coming decade and with IBM's acquisition of Red Hat. And it really enables that vision and clearly the company is one of the top few that are in a position to do that. Jim Whitehurst, thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me, it's great to chat. >> All right and thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more content of theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition, be right back. (gentle music)

(bright music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everybody, welcome back to IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome back a long time Cube alum, Jim Whitehurst, who's the president of IBM. And I'll call him chief cultural evangelist, welcome Jim. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you, Dave. Thanks so much for having me. >> Yeah, it's really our pleasure. And I want to start off, it's just over a year as president of IBM. And I wonder, you know, when you're a little kid or, you know, early in your career, computer science class, did you ever think you'd be president of a company that was founded in 1911? I mean, amazing. I wonder if you could share what's the most important thing you've learned in your first year? >> Well, look, I mean, as you said, I would've never thought it. Yeah, I was the first kid to have an IBM PC on the block and was always into technology but never saw myself as like, you know, running a big tech company. So it is humbling. I would say that there are tons of lessons in the first year. I guess the two that strike me most is one is just related to strategy and that's, you know, Red Hat and most technology companies, we're very customer focused. But it's around whatever technology we're bringing to market where IBM has fundamentally transitioned. And kind of transformed itself over time to make sure it can meet customer needs. So it's sold off businesses, it's bought other businesses, it's created new businesses. So it really shows the kind of the focus and value on serving our customers and doing whatever it takes to do it. And that's been a fundamental kind of different strategy than most companies have had. I think one of the reasons that we've been around for over a 100 years. The second is I'm deeply into culture and I've talked a lot about the difference of running Red Hat, it's all about innovation versus Delta Airlines where I was before, which is driving efficiency. IBM is both and so really trying to think through how you run an organization that needs to run the financial systems of the world, that extraordinary reliability and drive roadmaps on things like quantum computing. At the same time be able to innovate iteratively with our customers and in open source communities. And kind of getting that balance right as a leader. It's, you're kind of doing what we did at Red Hat and what we did at Delta but kind of doing it together. And I think that stretched me as a leader and kind of taught me a lot about how we're thinking about continuing to evolve the culture at IBM. >> Now, of course, you do this leadership series, you put out things out on LinkedIn and words matter. And that's what I take away from a lot of the little short hits that you do, which I really appreciate. My stuff that I put Jim on LinkedIn, it's just, you got to invest like 15, 20 minutes. So I really appreciate the short hits. But you do that regular series and I'm curious do you do that to reach more IBM people? Are you an open source culture? You're trying to help others. And I'm curious as to sort of why that platform as opposed to sending around an internal thing an IBM. And I'm wondering if your principles and how they've evolved kind of post pandemic. >> Well, so first off, maybe that comes from Red Hat but I think IBM shares that it's if you have something really, really valuable, you want to share it. And look, when I am out talking to our customers, CEOs and some of the biggest companies in the world, honestly we rarely talk about technology 'cause other people are more detailed or deep in that. We primarily do talk about culture. And how you think about again, how do you take an organization that's been built to drive efficiency and scale on a global basis and make it able to be more nimble and more innovative? And so, and obviously, hopefully that's all with IBM and Red Hat technologies. But ultimately most of my conversations at a senior leadership level are about culture and leadership style to drive that. And so if that's valuable for CEOs of some of the world's largest companies, it's valuable to leaders kind of across all spectrums, all sizes. And so I think LinkedIn is a good way to kind of take some of those messages and make sure we were able to share those much more broadly. So certainly I spend more time talking about it inside of IBM and I spend a lot of time with our clients talking about it. But I think many of the lessons are applicable more broadly. And so why not share them? And LinkedIn's a great platform to be able to do that. >> How about you, how have your principles, how have your principles sort of changed and how have they evolved post pandemic? >> Well, I think a couple things, so one is the pandemic kind of forces you to get more precise about it. And what I mean by that is so much of leadership is about building credibility and trust and influence. And when you're seeing someone in 3D live, visual cues can kind of mean a lot in the water cooler conversations. Or who you run into in the hall can all help kind of create that level of trust. But you can't do that in 2D. As great as Zoom and other platforms are, you just can't quite do it. And so you have to be much more thoughtful in how you're creating opportunities to kind of create trust. So I'd say I've gotten more surgical in thinking about kind of what those elements of leadership are that do that. I think the second thing I've really learned at IBM again is back to this. We have to be able to do both, drive a future state in a known world as well as, I call it seek a future state in an unknown world. So driving a roadmap for quantum computing takes a number of different technologies coming together in one year, in two years, in five years. And that really does have to be pre-planned, which is very very different, that I'll call the iterative innovation approach that we use at Red Hat and open source communities and working with our clients. And we have to do both. And so as a leader you really have to understand the problem you're trying to solve and apply slightly different kind of leadership tactics against that. So when you're executing a known versus you are trying to create something in an unknown, does require different approaches and we have to do both in IBM. And I think that's the struggle a lot of companies have, every company needs to do that. If you're Delta Airlines, you don't want anybody innovating on the safety procedures before your flight. Yet you want a lot of innovation happening on your website and your mobile app. So how do you bring those together? And as a leader you can have a common set of values, but recognize you have to bring different tools to the table, depending on the context in which you're leading. And so I learned a lot more and gotten a lot crisper with that since being at IBM. >> Interesting, I mean, the pandemic, we all know it's been terrible but one of the upshots has been we had a glimpse of the future sort of shoved into a forced march of digital in 2020. And so obviously the next 10 years ain't going to be like the last 10 years. And one of the things we've been talking about is ecosystems and partnerships and the power and leverage that you can get from those. And Arvin has said, laid it out, we are returning to growth company. And so I wonder if you could talk to how partnerships and ecosystems play into that return to growth for IBM. >> Well, first off a key part of our strategy we talk about hybrid cloud and AI. It's not just about, hey, a platform that runs across all the different deployment models is convenient. It's also because innovation is coming from so many sources today. It's coming from a by-product from the web 2.0 companies, it's coming from open source. It's coming from an explosion of startups because of the amount of capital in venture capital. It's coming from traditional software companies. It's coming from our clients who are participating in open source. And so you have so many sources of innovation. Much of what we're doing is landing a platform that allows you to consume innovation safely and reliably from wherever it's coming from. So a core part of a platform by definition is the ecosystem around it. Having a platform that runs everywhere is great but if you don't have any applications that run on it who cares. And so ecosystem and partners have always been important to IBM, but for this strategy of this horizontal platform oriented strategy, it is critical to our success because much of the platform is the ecosystem. And so we've already talked about investing a billion dollars in that ecosystem to get ISBS and other partners on our platform, again, to ultimately kind of create that kind of horizontal layer where I can run anything that I want to on it and I can run that anywhere I want to. And so the two sides of that so all the innovation happening on top and making sure it runs everywhere is what really unlocks the freedom of choice. That reduces friction to innovation, which allows everybody in the ecosystem from our clients to ISVs to hardware partners to innovate more quickly. And that's what we really see as the benefit of our platform. It's not a horizontal stove pipe, come innovate in this one place. It's recognizing innovation's happening in so many places. And the only way we're going to be able to allow people to ingest that is to have a horizontal platform that everyone's participating in. Which is why partners and ecosystem are so important, not only to the success of our platform, but to the, I'd say, as a success of this next generation of computing. These horizontal fabrics that require an ecosystem kind of built around them. >> I think that's an important nuance that maybe people don't understand that yes, you have a platform. Obviously, OpenShift is a linchpin but it's an enabler for people to build other platforms. It's not the be all, end all platform that's sort of ultimately becomes another Island. And so that is a key part of the growth strategy and presumably expand your total available market. >> Oh, absolutely and so this is the key is we can talk about great IBM technologies. We're doing amazing things in security and AI and natural language processing and all these other areas. But the platform is a recognition that we're not going to do everything for everybody anymore. There's just the democratization of technology means that there is so many sources of innovation. And so first and foremost, we have to land a platform so you can consume anything from anywhere. And then of course, we'll drive our own pace of innovation both in hardware and software around that platform. But we are just a player on that platform, which we're really instantiating for really anybody to be able to reach customers or customers to reach sources of innovation. >> I know sustainability is a passion of yours, that it's obviously a hot topic right now. Oftentimes I joke tongue in cheek, Milton Friedman's rolling over in his grave with all this ESG talk. And I know you just posted recently on LinkedIn. And of course I went right down to Kavanaugh because my premise is not only is sustainability the right thing to do, it's also good business. But I wonder if you could give us your perspectives on this. >> Yeah, well, so first off, I mean, as a large global citizen as IDM I think this is an important role that we play and look, this isn't new to IBM. We came out with our first statements around environment in 1970. We put out our first report that's become our environmental impact report in 1990. We've been talking about climate since the early two thousands. So we've been involved in this for a long, long time because I do think it's important broadly. But there's also a specific role I think IBM can play beyond just our own individual actions to reduce our own footprint. Because of some of the extraordinary technologies that IBM has worked on in the years especially around semiconductors, we have just an amazing amount of technology, expertise, intellectual property around material science. And so just a couple of examples of those that relate to the environment. We in doing some other work realized that we had a way to be able to recycle PET plastic, which is a real problem because so many clothes and other things are now made out of PET. And it's really hard to recycle but a by-product of other work we're doing realized we could do that. And so we've formed a JV and we're funding that to not profit from it but to make sure that much more of the world's PET is recycled. Or the work that we're doing on batteries, where using ocean water instead of rare earth minerals to make batteries that not only are cleaner but last longer. Those are kind of byproducts of our kind of core business. The areas that we can see the benefits of innovation and material science being able to impact the world. I am hopeful that we'll be able to play a role with all of that in clear air carbon capture. I mean, that's still far further away but I do think IBM has a unique role that we can play because of our deep expertise in, again, material science, quantum computing, and modeling that put us in a unique position to have a major impact on the world. >> I wonder if we could talk a little bit about sort of IBM and its technology bets. And I've made the point a number of times in my writing that IBM's R and D spend has been about pretty constant, about $6 billion a year. But as IBM is jettison certain businesses got out of the x86 server business and it got out of the Foundry business with micro electronics. Now it's spinning out NewCo. What happens, the effect is that R and D as a percent of revenue goes way, way up. And my premise has always been that allows IBM to be more focused. So whether it's hybrid cloud, AI, quantum, Edge where are you placing your technology bets and maybe give us a sense of how you ranked them, some of your favorites. >> Yeah, so, look, that's exactly right. I mean, we are one of the few places that still invest a massive amount in R and D, especially in fundamental research. And so I'll kind of break down kind of the core areas. So first off, what I'd say is part of the hybrid cloud platform is recognizing we don't need to do everything for everyone. There is great open source technology. There are great other vendors that are doing things that we can enable our customers to access via the platform. So we're not trying to do everything for everybody in the way maybe 40 years ago we did. Because we understand there's so much great other technology out there that we're going to make sure that we expose. So we're investing in areas where we think we can uniquely add value that need to happen that others aren't doing. So AI, let me take that as an example. There's tremendous work happening in machine learning that we see every day because of Facebook and people trying to identify cats. And so I don't mean to trivialize it, there's a phenomenal work happening there. There's a lot less work being done on in AI on things where you have a lot less data. Or areas where you need explainable unbiased AI and the problem with machine learning engines is they're not auditable by definition. That's kind of a black box. And so we do a lot of work in areas like that. We do a lot of work in natural language processing. So we've had more of a as a kind of publicity kind of push the technology something called Project Debater. Where Watson can debate kind of champion debaters. That was mainly to make sure we can understand language in context, which allows for being able to better handle call centers in areas like that. Allows us to understand source code, which also is thinking about how you migrate applications from on-premise to the cloud. So we have a bunch of AI things that we are doing and is a core focus of what we're doing. But in specifically we're investing in areas like anti-biased auditability, natural language processing, areas where others aren't. Which is unique and we can bring those capabilities together with what others are doing. Security, obviously, a huge, huge area where we've invested in quantum safe encryption. We've invested in confidential computing. In other words, even in compute mode your data is encrypted. So you can keep your own keys, so not even we on our cloud can see your data. So a lot of investments happening around security and that's going to continue to be an area as we know that's going to get more and more and more scrutiny. So heavy, heavy focus there. Heavily focused on technologies that help you kind of modernize your infrastructure. So automation tools, integration tools and areas around that. So on the software side, those are kind of the main areas. When you look on the hardware side, obviously quantum is a significant area where we have a leadership position we continue to drive. But even semiconductor research in kind of process technology. So we announced something with Intel to work with them to bring some of our process technologies. As we kind of go from 7 nanometers to 5 to 2 to ultimately 1. That set of technologies is an area where we have a real leadership position and we'll continue to work with now Intel. We continue to work with others to drive that forward. So whole bunch of areas both on the hardware and the software side that we continue to make progress on. >> Yeah, the Silicon piece is interesting. And when we saw that Arvin as part of the Intel announcements that we thought originally, oh, maybe it's just about quantum but it's really much more than that. You mentioned the process. We dug into it and we realized, wow, we said Power10 actually has the highest performance. And because of the way in which you are not to geek out but you're you dis-aggregate memory. And Pat Gelsinger talked about system on a package. It turns out folks that IBM is actually the leader in that type of capability. And also the way that systems on chips use memory is very inefficient but IBM has actually invented some techniques to make that much more efficient. That's sort of the future of semiconductors. And the reason why we spend so much time thinking about it is because it's of national interest. There's a huge chip shortage, which doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. So that's a critical part of national competitiveness and technology competitiveness going forward. >> Well, and the other interesting part about that, and you talked about Power10, going back to the hybrid cloud platform that we talked about. It's not just about running applications across wherever you want to run them. It also abstracts the chip architecture. So all of a sudden whether it's on the mainframe, it's on power, it's on ARM, it's on x86 and a whole bunch of other technologies that might get developed. We're making it much easier to kind of consume that specialization or variety at the hardware level. Recognize as Moore's law runs its course there's no longer this inevitability of everything's just going to go to x86. I think we are going to see more variety because we're going to have needs in the factory floor or in the automobile or with massive container as applications. Where you're going to need, whether it's kind of shared memory or different architectures all the way out to kind of low battery consumption. And that whole kind of breadth and our hybrid cloud platform enables that variability. And then IBM obviously has great technology to enable kind of building unique capability in hardware. So we kind of play on both sides of it, both kind of developing great technologies but then making it really easy for developers to consume and use those specialized features. >> I'm glad you brought that up, Jim. We mentioned Moore's law because we're all talking about how Moore's law is waning and it's quote, unquote dead. But the reality is, is the outcome of Moore's law which is the doubling of performance every two years is actually accelerating because of the common actuarial factors of CPU's and GPU's and NPUs and accelerators and DSPs. If you add all those up and actually, we're actually quadrupling every two years. So we have more processing power at much lower costs because of the volumes that you're seeing on things like ARM. So it's actually a very exciting time. We're entering an era that really, it's hard to get your mind around sometimes. So my question is how should we think about the future state of IBM? What does that look like? >> Well, so first off, the thing that I've found extraordinary about IBM kind of having been there now just a little over a year as an employee, a couple of years, I guess, when Red Hat was acquired. Is it is unique in fundamentally changing, again, who we are to kind of meet the needs going forward. And if you think about the needs in technology, recognize it was only like 20 years ago that Nicholas Carr wrote his famous article, IT Doesn't Matter, it's about back office. And in that world, IBM was really, really effective at building and running IT systems for our clients. We would come in, we would just kind of do everything for them. Today, technology is the forefront of developing or building competitive advantage for almost any business. And so nobody wants to kind of hand the keys, so we no longer are necessarily doing things for our clients. We're doing things with our clients. So there's a whole set of work, and we talked about how we engage with our clients, how we're much more collaborative and co-creative and our whole garage model to help build the capability to innovate with our clients is a key part of what we're doing. We'll continue to drive core technologies forward like quantum in key areas that require billions of dollars of research that frankly no one else is willing to do. And then we bring it all together with this hybrid cloud platform where we recognize it's no longer about us doing it all for you anymore. We're going to do the things where we can uniquely add value but then provide it all on a platform which allows you to consume from wherever, however you want to in a safe, secure, reliable way. So as we watch this next generation of computing unfold, cloud shouldn't end up being a bunch of vertical stove pipes. It truly needs to be kind of a horizontal platform that allows you to run any application anywhere in a safe, secure, reliable way and our architecture helps do that. So it's no longer able to do everything for you. It's we can do things uniquely on a platform and work with you to be able to help you kind of create your own pace of innovation, your own sources of advantage. And so that's the broad kind of direction that we're going, again, as enterprises move from consuming technology to be more efficient, to driving advantage with it. They need partners who understand that focused on their success and can innovate with them. And that's really where we're going with our technology, with our services capability and kind of our approach to how we work with our clients. >> Yeah, Jim, you just laid out the Holy grail of computing in the coming decade and with IBM's acquisition of Red Hat. And it really enables that vision and clearly the company is one of the top few that are in a position to do that. Jim Whitehurst, thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me, it's great to chat. >> All right and thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more content of theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition, be right back. (gentle music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by Silicon Angle. Hi, I'm stupid, man. And welcome back to the Cube on Cloud. We're talking about developers. And while so many people remember the mean from 2010 of Steve Balmer jumping around on stage development developers and developers, uh, many people know what really important is really important about developers. They probably read the 2013 book called The New King Makers by Stephen O. Grady. And I'm really happy to welcome to the program. Rachel Stevens, who is an industry analyst with Red Monk who was co founded by the aforementioned Stephen O. Grady. Rachel, Great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. >>Well, I've had the opportunity, Thio read some of what you've done. We've interacted on social media. We've got to talk events back when we used to do those in people. And >>I'm so >>glad that you get to come on the program especially. You were the ones I reached out. When we have this developer track, um, if you could just give our audience a little bit about your background. You know, that developer cred that you have Because as I joke, I've got a closet full of hoodies. But, you know, I'm an infrastructure guy by training I've been learning about, you know, containers and serverless and all this stuff for years. But I'm not myself much of developer. I've touched a thing or two in the years. >>Yeah. So happy to be here. Red Monk has been around since 2002 and have kind of been beating that developer drum ever since then, kind of as the company, The founder, Stephen James, notice that the decision making that developers was really a driver for what was actually ending up in the Enterprise. And as even more true, as cloud came onto, the scene is open source exploded, and I think it's become a lot more of a common view now. But in those early days, it was probably a little bit more of a controversial opinion, but I have been with the firm for coming up on five years now. My work is an industry analyst. We kind of help people understand, bottoms up technology, adoption trends, so that that's where I spend my time focusing is what's getting used in the enterprise. Why, what kind of trends are happening? So, yeah, that's where we all come from. That's the history of Red Monk in 30 seconds. >>Awesome. Rachel, you talk about the enterprise and developers For the longest time. I just said there was this huge gap you talk about. Bottoms up. It's like, well, developers use the tools that they want If they don't have to, they don't pay for anything. And the general I t. And the business sides of the house were like, I don't know, We don't know what those people in the corner we're doing, you know, it's important and things like that. But today it feels like that that's closed a bunch. Where are we? In your estimation, you know, our developers do they have a clear seat at the table? The title we have for this is whether the Enterprise Developer is its enterprise development oxymoron. In 2020 and 2021 >>I think enterprise developers have a lot more practical authority than people give them credit for, especially if you're kind of looking at that old view of the world where everything is driven by a buyer decision or kind of this top down purchasing motion. And we've really seen that authority of what is getting used and why change a lot in the last year. In the last decade, even more of people who are able to choose the tools that meet the job bring in tools, regardless of whether they maybe have that official approval through the right channels because of the convenience of trying to get things up and running. We are asking developers to do so much right now and to go faster and thio shifting things left. And so the things that they are responsible for incorporating into the way they are building APS is growing. And so, as we are asking developers to do more and to do more quickly, um, the tools that they need to do those, um, tasks to get these APS built is that the decision making us fall into them? This is what I need. This is what needs to come in, and so we're seeing. Basically, the tools that enterprise is air using are the tools that developers want to be using, and they kind of just find their way into the enterprise. >>Now I want to key off what you were talking about. Just developers were being asked to do Mawr and Mawr. We've seen these pendulum swings in technology. There was a time where it was like, Well, I'll outsource it because that'll be easier and maybe it'll be less expensive. And number one we found it necessarily. It wasn't necessarily cheaper. And number two, I couldn't make changes, and I didn't understand what was happening. So when when I talked to Enterprises today, absolutely. I need to have skills that's internally. I need to be able to respond to things fast, and therefore I need skills that I need people that can build what they have. What what do you see? What are those skill sets that are so important today? Uh, you know, we've talked so many times over the years is to you know, there's there's the skills gap. We don't have enough data scientists. We don't have enough developers way. We don't have any of these things. So what do we have and where things trending? >>Yeah, it's It's one of those things for developers where they both have probably the most full tool set that we've seen in this industry in terms of things that are available to them. But it's also really hard because it also indicates that there is just this fragmentation at every level of the stack. And there's this explosion of choice and decisions that is happening up and down the stack of how are we going to build things? And so it's really tricky to be a developer these days and that you are making a lot of decisions and you are wiring a lot of things together and you have to be able to navigate a lot of things. E think. One of the things that is interesting here is that we have seen the phrase like Full stack developer really carried a lot of panache, maybe earlier this decade and has kind of fallen away. Just because we've realized that it's impossible for anybody to be ableto spanned this whole broad spectrum of all of the things we're asking people to dio. So we're seeing this explosion of choice, which is meaning that there is a little bit more focused and where developers are trying to actually figure out what is my niche. What is it that I'm supposed to focus on. And so it's really just this balancing of act of trying to see this big picture of how to get this all put together and also have this focused area realizing that you have to specialize at some point. >>Rachel is such a great point there. We've actually seen that Cambrian explosion of developer tools that are out there. If you go to the CFCF landscape and look at everything out there or goto any of your public cloud providers, there's no way that anybody even working for those companies no good portion of the tools that are out there so nobody could be a master of everything. How about from a cloud standpoint, you know, there is the discussion of, you know what do I shift? Left What? You know, Can I just say, Okay, this piece of it, it could be a manage service. I don't need to think about it versus what skills that I need to have in house. What is it that's important. And obviously, you know, a zoo analyst. We know it varies greatly across companies, but you know what? What are some of those top things that we need to make sure that enterprises have skill set and the tools in house that they should understand. And what can they push off to their platform of choice? >>Yeah, I think your comment about managed services is really pressing because one of the trends that we're watching closely, it's just this rise of manage services. And it kind of ties back into the concept you had before about like, what an I team. That's they have, like the Nicholas Carr. I t doesn't matter, and we're pushing this all the way. And then we realized, Oh, we've got to bring that all back. Um, but we also realize that we really want as enterprises want to be spending our time doing differentiated work and wiring together, your entire infrastructure isn't necessarily differentiated for a lot of companies. And so it's trying to find this mix of where can I push my abstraction higher or to find a manage service that can do something for me? And we're seeing that happen in all levels of the stack. And so what we're seeing is this rise of composite APS where we're going to say, Okay, I'm gonna pull in back end AP ice from a whole bunch of tools like twilio or stripe or all zero where algo Leah, all of those things are great tools that I can incorporate into my app. And I can have this great user, um, interface that I can use. And then I don't have to worry quite so much about building it all myself. But I am responsible for wiring at all together. So I think it's that wire together set of interest that is happening for developers as the tool set that they are spending a lot of time with. So we see the manage services being important. Um played an important role in how absent composed, and it's the composition of that APs that is happening internally. >>What one of the one of the regular research items that I see a red monk is you know what languages you know. Where are the trends going? There's been relative stability, but then something's changed. You know, I look at the tools that you mentioned Full stack developer. I talked to a full stack developer a couple of years ago, and he's like like like terror form is my life and I love everything and I've used it forever. And that was 18 months, Andi. I kind of laugh because it's like, OK, I managed. I measure a lot of the technology that I used in the decades. Um, not that await. This came out six months ago and it's kind of mature. And of course, you know, C I C d. Come on. If it's six weeks old, it's probably gone through a lot of generations. So what do you see? Do you have any research that you can share as to looking forward? What are the You know what the skill sets we need? How should we be training our force? What do >>we need to >>be looking at in this kind of next decade of cloud? >>Yeah. So when when you spoke about languages, we dio a semi annual review of language usage as a sign on get hub and in discussion as seen on stack overflow, which we fully recognize is not a perfect representation of how these languages are used in the broader world. But those air data sets that we have access to that are relatively large and open eso just before anyone writes me angry letters that that's not the way that we should be doing it, Um, but one of the things that we've seen over time is that there is a lot of relative stability in those top tier languages in terms of how they are used, and there's some movement at the bottom. But the trends we're seeing where the languages are moving is type safety and having a safer language and the communities that are building upon other communities. So things like, um, we're seeing Scotland that is able to kind of piggyback off of being a jvm based language and having that support from Google. Or we're seeing typescript where it can piggyback off of the breath of deployment of JavaScript, things like that. So those things where were combining together multiple trends that developers are interested in the same time combined with an ecosystem that's already rich and full. And so we're seeing that there's definitely still movement in languages that people are interested in, but also, language on its own is probably pretty stable. So, like as you start to make language choices as a developer, that's not where we're seeing a ton of like turnover language frameworks on the other hand, like if you're a JavaScript developer and all of a sudden there's just explosion of frameworks that you need to choose from, that may be a different story, a lot more turnover there and harder to predict. But language trends are a little bit more stable over >>time, changing over time. You know, Boy, I I got to dig into, you know, relatively Recently I went down like the jam stack. Uh, ecosystem. I've been digging into a serverless for a number of years. What's your take on that? There's certain people. I talked to him. They're like, I don't even need to be a code. Or I could be a marketing person. And I can get things done when I talked to some developers there like a citizen developers. They're not developers. Come on, you know, I really need to be able to do this, so I'll give you your choices, toe. You know, serverless and some of these trends to kind of ext fan. You know who can you know? Code and development. >>Yeah. So for both translate jam stack and serve Ellis, One of the things that we see kind of early in the iteration of a technology is that it is definitely not going to be the right tool for every app. And the number of APS that they approach will fit for will grow as the tool develops. And you add more functionality over time and all of these platforms expand the capability, but definitely not the correct tool choice in every case. That said, we do watch both of those areas with extreme interest in terms of what this next generation of APS can look like and probably will look like in a lot of cases. And I think that it is super interesting to think about who gets to build these APs, because I e. I think one of the things that we probably haven't landed on the right language yet is what that what we should call these people because I don't think anyone associates themselves as a low code person. Like if you're someone from marketing and all of a sudden you can build something technical, that's really cool, and you're excited about that. Nobody else on your team could build. You're not walking around saying I am a low code marketing person like that, that that's that's that's demeaning. Like you're like. No, I'm technical. I'm a technical market, or look what I just did. And if you're someone who codes professionally for a living like and you use a low code tool to get something out the door quickly and >>you don't >>wanna demean and said, Oh, that was I did a low code that just like everybody, is just trying to solve problems. And everybody, um, is trying to figure out how to do things in the most effective way possible and making trade offs all the time. And so I don't think that the language of low code really is anything that resonates with any of the actual users of low code tools. And so I think that's something that we as an industry need toe work on finding the correct language because it doesn't feel like we've landed there yet. >>Yeah, Rachel, what? Want to get your take on just careers for developers now to think about in 2020 everyone is distributed. Lots of conversations about where we work. Can we bring the remote? Many of the developers I talked to already were remote. I had the chance that interview that the head of remote. Forget lab. They're over 1000 people and they're fully remote. So, you know, remote. Absolutely a thing for developers. But if you talk about careers, it is no longer, you know. Oh, hey, here's my CV. It's I'm on git Hub. You can see the code I've done. We haven't talked about open source yet, so give us your take on kind of developers today. Career paths. Andi. Kind of the the online community there. >>Yeah, this could be a whole own conversation. We'll try to figure out my points. Um, so I think one of the things that we are trying to figure out in terms of balance is how much are we expecting people to have done on the side? It's like a side project Hustle versus doing, exclusively getting your job done and not worrying too much about how many green squares you have on your get hub profile. And I think it's a really emotional and fraught discussion and a lot of quarters because it can be exclusionary for people saying that you you need to be spending your time on the side working on this open source project because there are people who have very different life circumstances, like if you're someone who already has kids or you're doing elder care or you are working another job and trying to transition into becoming a developer, it's a lot to ask. These people toe also have a side hustle. That said, it is probably working on open source, having an understanding of how tools are done. Having this, um, this experience and skills that you can point to and contributions you can point Teoh is probably one of the cleaner ways that you can start to move in the industry and break through to the industry because you can show your skills two other employers you can kind of maybe make your way in is a junior developer because you worked on a project and you make those connections. And so it's really still again. It's one of those balancing act things where there's not a perfect answer because there really is to correct sides of this argument. And both of those things are true. At the same time where it's it's hard to figure out what that early career path maybe looks like, or even advancing in a career path If you're already a developer, it's It's tricky. >>Well, I want to get your take on something to you know, I think back to you know, I go back a decade or two I started working with about 20 years ago. Back in the crazy days were just Colonel Daughter Warg and, you know, patches everywhere and lots of different companies trying to figure out what they would be doing on most of the people contributing to the free software before we're calling it open source. Most of the time, it was their side Hustle was the thing they're doing. What was their passion? Project? I've seen some research in the last year or so that says the majority of people that are contributing to open source are doing it for their day job. Obviously, there's a lot of big companies. There's plenty of small companies. When I goto the Linux Foundation shows. I mean, you've got whole companies that are you know, that that's their whole business. So I want to get your take on, you know, you know, governance, you know, contribution from the individual versus companies. You know, there's a lot of change going on there. The public cloud their impact on what's happening open source. What are you seeing there? And you know what's good? What's bad? What do we need to do better as a community? >>Yeah. E think the governance of open source projects is definitely a live conversation that we're having right now about what does this need to look like? What role do companies need to be having and how things are put together is a contribution or leadership position in the name of the individual or the name of the company. Like all of these air live conversations that are ongoing and a lot of communities e think one of the things that is interesting overall, though, is just watching if you're if you're taking a really zoomed out view of what open source looks like where it was at one point, um, deemed a cancer by one of the vendors in the space, and now it is something that is just absolutely an inherent part of most well tech vendors and and users is an important part of how they are building and using software today, like open source is really an integral tool. And what is happening in the enterprise and what's being built in the enterprise. And so I think that it is a natural thing that this conversation is evolving in terms of what is the enterprises role here and how are we supposed to govern for that? And e don't think that we have landed on all the correct answers yet. But I think that just looking at that long view, it makes sense that this is an area where we are spending some time focusing >>So Rachel without giving away state secrets. We know read Monk, you do lots of consulting out there. What advice do you give to the industry? We said we're making progress. There's good things there. But if we say okay, I wanna at 2030 look back and say, Boy, this is wonderful for developers. You know, everything is going good. What things have we done along the way? Where have we made progress? >>Yeah, I think I think it kind of ties back to the earlier discussion we were having around composite APS and thinking about what that developer experience looks like. I think that right now it is incredibly difficult for developers to be wiring everything together and There's just so much for developers to dio to actually get all of these APs from source to production. So when we talk with our customers, a lot of our time is spent thinking, How can you not only solve this individual piece of the puzzle, but how can you figure out how to fit it into this broader picture of what it is the developers air trying to accomplish? How can you think about where your ATF, It's not on your tool or you your project? Whatever it is that you are working on, how does this fit? Not only in terms of your one unique problem space, but where does this problem space fit in the broader landscape? Because I think that's going to be a really key element of what the developer experience looks like in the next decade. Is trying to help people actually get everything wired together in a coherent way. >>Rachel. No shortage of work to do there really appreciate you joining us. Thrilled to have you finally as a cube. Alumni. Thanks so much for joining. >>Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >>All right. Thank you for joining us. This is the developer content for the cube on cloud, I'm stew minimum, and as always, thank you for watching the Cube.

>> [Narrator} From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome back to theCUBE on cloud. We're talking about developers and well, so many people remember the meme from 2010 of Steve Ballmer jumping around on stage developer, developers and developers. Many people know what is really important about developers they probably read the 2013 book called "The New Kingmakers" by Stephen O'Grady. And I'm really happy to welcome to the program Rachel Stephens who's an industry analyst with RedMonk who was cofounded by the aforementioned Stephen O'Grady. Rachel great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. I've had the opportunity to read some of what you've done. We've interacted on social media. We've come to talk at events back when we used to do those in people. In person I don't- >> Busy times >> So glad that you get to come on the program, especially you were the ones that I reached out when we had this developer track. If you could just give our audience a little bit about your background that developer credit that you have because as I joke, I've got a closet full of hoodies but I'm an infrastructure guy by training. I've been learning about, containers and serverless and all this stuff for years but I'm not myself much a developer I've touched a thing or two in the years. >> Yeah. So happy to be here. RedMonk has been around since 2002 and have kind of been beating that developer drum ever since then kind of. As the company, I'm the founder. Stephen James noticed that the decision making the developers is really a driver for what was actually ending up in the enterprise. And as even more true as cloud came onto the scene as open source exploded. And I think it's become a lot more of a common view now but in those early days, it was probably a little bit more of a controversial opinion. But I have been with the firm for coming up on five years now. I work as an industry analyst. We kind of help people understand bottoms up technology adoption trends. So that that's where I spend my time focusing is what's getting used in the enterprise. Why, what kind of trends are happening? And so, yeah, that's where we all come from. That's the history of RedMonk in 30 seconds. >> Awesome. Rachel, you talk about the enterprise and developers. For the longest time I just said there was this huge gap. You talk about bottoms up. It's like, well, developers use the tools that they want. If they don't have to, they don't pay for anything. And the general IT and the business sides of the house were like, "We don't know what those people in the corner are doing, it's important." And things like that. But today it feels like that that's closed a bunch. Where are we in your estimation? Are our developers, do they have a clear seat at the table? The title we had for this is whether the enterprise developer is enterprise developer and oxymoron in 2020, in 2021? >> I think enterprise developers have a lot more practical authority than people give them credit for, especially if you're kind of looking at that old view of the world where everything is driven by a buyer decision or kind of this top down purchasing motion. And we've really seen that authority of what is getting used and why change a lot in the last year, And like last decade, even more of people who are able to choose the tools that meet the job and bring in tools, regardless of whether they may be have that official approval through the right channels. Because of the convenience of trying to get things up and running we are asking developers to do so much right now and to go faster and shifting things left. And so the things that they are responsible for incorporating into the way they are building apps is growing, and so as we are asking developers to do more and to do more quickly, the tools that they need to do those tasks to get these apps built, the decision making is falling to them. This is what I need. This is what needs to come in. And so we are seeing basically the tools that enterprise are using are the tools that developers want to be using and they kind of just find their way into the enterprise. >> Now, I want to key off what you were talking about. Just developers are being asked to do more and more. We see these pendulum swings in technology. There was a time where it was like, "Well, I'll outsource it because that'll be easier and maybe it'll be less expensive." And number one, we found it wasn't necessarily cheaper. Number two, I couldn't make changes and I didn't understand what was happening. So when I talked to enterprises today absolutely, I need to have skillsets internally. I need to be able to respond to things fast and therefore I need skills and I need people that can build what they have. What do you see? What are those skill sets that are so important today? we've talked so many times over the years there's the skills gap. We don't have enough data scientists. We don't have enough developers. We don't have any of these things. So what do we have? And where were things trending? >> Yeah, it's one of those things for developers where they both have probably the most full tool set that we've seen in this industry in terms of things that are available to them. But it's also really hard because it also indicates that there's just this fragmentation at every level of the stack. And there's this explosion of choice in decisions that is happening up and down the stack of how are we going to build things. And so it's really tricky to be a developer these days in that you are making a lot of decisions, and you are wiring a lot of things together, and you have to be able to navigate a lot of things. And I think one of the things that is interesting here is that we have seen the phrase like full stack developer really carried a lot of panache maybe earlier this decade and has kind of fallen away just because we've realized that it's impossible for anybody to be able to span this whole broad spectrum of all of the things we are asking people to do. So we're seeing this explosion of choice which is meaning that there is a little bit more focus in where developers, we're trying to actually figure out what is my niche, what is it that I'm supposed to focus on? And so it's really just this balancing of act of trying to see this big picture of how to get this all put together and also have this focused area realizing that you have to specialize at some point. >> Rachel is such a great point there we've absolutely seen that Cambrian explosion of developer tools that are out there. If you go to the CNCF as landscape and look at everything out there or go to any of your public cloud providers there's no way that anybody even working for those companies know a good portion of the tools that are out there. So nobody can be a master of everything. How about from a cloud standpoint? There's the discussion of, what do I shift left? Can I just say okay, this piece of it, it can be a managed service, I don't need to think about it versus what skills that I need to have in house? What is it that's important? And obviously, as analysts, we know it varies greatly across companies, but what are some of those top things that we need to make sure that enterprises have the skillset and the tools in house that they should understand and what can they push off to their platform of choice? >> Yeah, I think your comment about managed services is really prescient because one of the trends that we are watching closely it's just this rise of managed services. And it kind of ties back into the concept you had before about like what in NITMSA have like the Nicholas car, IT doesn't matter, and we're pushing this all away. And then we realized, "Oh, we got to bring that all back." But we also realized we really want as enterprises want to be spending our time doing differentiated work and why we're together your entire infrastructure isn't necessarily differentiated for a lot of companies. And so it's trying to find this mix of where can I push my abstraction higher or to find a managed service that can do something for me? And we're seeing that happen in all levels of the stack. And so what we're seeing is this rise of composite apps, where we're going to say, "Okay, I'm going to pull in back end APIs from a whole bunch of tools like Twilio or Stripe or Alsera, or Algolia all of those things are great tools that I can incorporate into my app, and I can have this great user interface that I can use. And then I don't have to worry quite so much about building it all myself but I am responsible for wiring it all together. So I think it's that wired together set of interests that is happening for developers has the tool set that they are spending a lot of time with. So we see the managed services being important playing an important role in how apps are composed. And it's the composition of that app sort of is happening internally. >> One of the regular research items that I see at a RedMonk is, what languages, where are the trends going? There's been some relative stability but then some things change. I look at the tool set, you mentioned full stack developer. I talked to a full stack developer a couple of years ago and he's like, "Like, ah." Like Terraform is my life and I love everything and I've used it forever. And that was 18 months. And I kind of laugh because it's like, okay, I measure a lot of the technologies that I use in the decades, not that, "Oh wait, this came out six months ago and it's kind of mature." And of course, CICD come on, if it's six weeks old it's probably gone through a lot of iterations. So what do you say, do you have any research that you can share as to looking forward? What are the skill sets we need? How should we be training our force? What do we need to be looking at in this kind of next decade of cloud? >> Yeah, so when you spoke about languages we do a semi-annual review of language usage as seen on GitHub and discussion as seen on Stack Overflow which we fully recognize is not a perfect representation of how these languages are used in the broader world but those are data sets that we have access to that are relatively large and open. So just before anyone writes me, angry letters I said that's not the way that we should be doing it (laughs) but one of the things that we've seen over time is that there is a lot of relative stability in those top tier languages in terms of how they are used. And there's some movement at the bottom but the trends we're seeing where the languages are moving is type safety and having a safer language and the communities that are building upon other communities. So things like we're seeing Kotlin, that is able to kind of piggyback off of being a JVM based language and having that support from Google or we're seeing TypeScript where it can piggyback off of the breadth of deployment of JavaScript, things like that. So those things where we're combining together multiple trends that developers are interested in the same time, combined with an ecosystem that's already rich and full. And so we're seeing that there's definitely still movement in languages that people are interested in but also language on its own is probably pretty stable. So as you start to make language choices as a developer that's not where we're seeing a ton of like turnover. Language frameworks on the other hand, like if you're a JavaScript developer and all of a sudden, there's just explosion of frameworks that you need to choose from. That's maybe a different story, a lot more turnover there and harder to predict, but language trends are a little bit more stable over time. >> There's a lot change. Changing over time. Boy, I got to dig into, relatively recently I went down like the JAMStack ecosystem I've been digging into serverless for a number of years. What's your take on that? There's certain people I talked to and they're like, "I don't even need to be a coder. I can be a marketing person, and I can get things done." When I talked to some developers they're like, "Citizen developers, they're not developers, come on. I really need to be able to do this." So I'll give you your choice as to, serverless and some of these trends to kind of expand who can code and develop. >> Yeah, so for both trans like JAMstack and serverless, one of the things that we see kind of early in the iteration of a technology is that it is definitely not going to be the right tool for every app. And the number of apps that they approach will fit for, will grow as the tool develops and that you add more functionality over time. And all of these platforms expand the capability but definitely not the correct tool choice in every case. That said we do watch both of those areas with extreme interest in terms of what this next generation of apps can look like and probably will look like in a lot of cases. And I think that it is super interesting to think about who gets to build these apps, because I think one of the things that we probably haven't landed on the right language yet is what we should call these people because I don't think anyone associates themselves as a low code person, like if you're someone from marketing and all of a sudden you can build something technical that's really cool. And you're excited about that nobody else on your team can build. You're not walking around saying, "I am a low code marketing person" Like that's demeaning. Like I know I'm a technical marketer. Look what I just did. And if you're someone who codes professionally for a living and you use a low code tool to get something out the door quickly and you don't want to demean or say, "oh hi, I did a low code, that in a sec." Everybody is just trying to solve problems. And everybody is trying to figure out how to do things in the most effective way possible and making trade offs all the time. And so I don't think that the language of low code really is anything that resonates with any of the actual users of low code tools. And so I think that's something that we as an industry need to work on finding the correct language because it doesn't feel like we've landed there yet. >> Yeah, quick Rachel, what want to get your take on just careers for developers now to think about in 2020, everyone is distributed lots of conversations about where do we work? Can we bring your remote? Many of the developers I talked to already were remote. I had a chance to interview the head of remote for GitHub there were over a thousand people and they're fully remote. So, remote absolutely a thing for developers. But if you talk about careers it's no longer, "Oh, Hey, here's my CV." It's, "I'm on GitHub. You can see the code I've done." We haven't talked about open source yet. So give us your take on kind of developers today, career paths and kind of the online community there. >> Yeah. Oh, this could be its whole own conversation. (laughs) I'll try to figure it out the, my points. So I think one of the things that we are trying to figure out in terms of balance is how much are we expecting people to have done on the side? It's like a side project hustle versus doing exclusively getting your job done and not worrying too much about how many green squares you have on your GitHub profile. And I think it's a really emotional and fraught discussion in a lot of quarters because it can be exclusionary for people saying that you need to be spending your time on the side, working on this open source project because there are people who have very different life circumstances. Like if you're someone who already has kids or you're doing elder care or you are working another job and trying to transition into becoming a developer, it's a lot to ask these people to also have a side hustle. That said, it is probably working on open source having an understanding of how tools are done, having this experience and skills that you can point to and contributions you can point to, is probably one of the cleaner ways that you can start to move in the industry and break through to the industry because you can show your skills to other employers. You can kind of maybe make your way in as a junior developer because you've worked on a project and you make those connections. And so it's really still, again, it's one of those balancing act things where there's not a perfect answer because there really is two correct sides of this argument. And both of the things are true at the same time where it's it's hard to figure out what that early career path maybe looks like or even advancing in a career path if you're already a developer, it's, it's tricky. >> Well, I want to get your take on something too. I go back a decade or two, when I started working with Linux about 20 years ago back in the crazy days where it was just kind of lot of work and patches everywhere, and lots of different companies trying to figure out what they would be doing. And most of the people contributing to the free software before we even were calling it open source most of the time it was their side hustle. It was the thing they're doing. It was their passion project. I've seen some research in the last year or so that says the majority of people that are contributing to open source are doing it for their day job. Obviously there's lots of big companies. There's plenty of small companies. When I go to the Linux Foundation shows I mean, you've got whole companies that, that's their whole business. So I want to get your take on governance, contribution from the individual versus companies there's a lot of change going on there. Heck the public clouds, their impact on what's happening open source. What are you seeing there? And what's good, what's bad? What do we need to do better as a community? >> Yeah, I think the governance of opensource projects is definitely a live conversation that we're having right now about what does this need to look like? What role do companies need to be having, and how things are put together is a contribution or leadership position in the name of the individual or the name of the company. Like all of these are live conversations that are ongoing in a lot of communities. I think one of the things that is interesting overall though is just watching if you're taking a really zoomed out view of what open source looks like, where it was at one point deemed at cancer by one of the vendors in this space, and now it is something that is just absolutely, an inherent part of most tech vendors and end users is an important part of how they are building and using software today. Like open source is really an integral tool in what is happening in the enterprise and what's being built in the enterprise. And so I think that it is a natural thing that this conversation is evolving in terms of what is the enterprise's role here and how are we supposed to govern for that? And I don't think that we have landed on all the correct answers yet but I think that just looking at that long view it makes sense that this is an area where we are spending some time focusing. >> So Rachel, without giving away state secrets we know RedMonk, you do lots of consulting out there. What advice do you give to the industry? We said, we're making progress. There's good things there. But if we say, okay, I want to at 2030, look back and say, "Boy, this is wonderful for developers, everything's going good." What things have we've done along the way, where have we made progress? >> Yeah, so I think it kind of ties back to the earlier discussion we were having around composite apps and thinking about what that developer experience looks like, I think that right now it is incredibly difficult for developers to be wiring everything together. And there's just so much for developers to do to actually, get all of these apps from source to production. So when we talk with our customers, a lot of our time is spent thinking, how can you not only solve this individual piece of the puzzle, but how can you figure out how to fit it into this broader picture of what it is the developers are trying to accomplish? How can you think about where you're art fits not only your tool or your project whatever it is that you are working on, how does this fit? Not only in terms of your one unique problem space but where does this problem space fit in the broader landscape? Because I think that's going to be a really key element of what the developer experience looks like in the next decade, is trying to help people actually, get everything wired together in a coherent way. >> Rachel, no shortage of work to do there, really appreciate you joining us thrilled to have you finally as a CUBE alumni. Thanks so much for joining. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> All right. Thank you for joining us. This is the Developer Content for theCUBE on cloud. I'm Stu Miniman. And as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. Hey, >>welcome to the cube at Lisa Martin in Colorado at convo go 19 I'm assuming a man and stew and I are pleased to welcome back to the cube and Alon my who hasn't visited us in awhile, but he's kind of a big deal is the CEO of Commonwealth's on Jay Mirchandani. Sanjay, welcome back. >>Thank you Lisa. Good to be a good too. >>So exciting. This is the fourth go. I love the name go and lots of stuff. So you have come onboard to combo in about about nine months ago and man, are you making some changes? You know the analysts said combo, you gotta, you gotta upgrade your sales force, you gotta expand your marketing, you've gotta shift gears and really expand your market share. And we've seen what Combolt is doing in all three of those areas along with some pretty big announcements in the last couple of days. Talk to us about this, this first nine months here. And really maybe even, I would start with the cultural change that you have brought to a company that's been run by the Bob hammer for 20 years >>right now. Firstly, I'm very fortunate to be here because the company is, it has incredible foundation. The bones of the company, if you would, are solid a great balance sheet, um, over 800 patents, no debt, cash on the books, profitable. It's just, you know, and great, great technology wrapped around some amazing people. So when I look at the, when I look at it and you go, this is this, this is an incredible asset. My role really when I came in when I transitioned with Bob and Al for a period of time was really about making sure we didn't break anything, making sure that we kept the momentum, understood the culture, took time to talk to customers, talk to partners, talk to our employees, shareholders and understand, um, what are the focus areas that we needed to go after. And the last nine months has been about, you know, a lot of learning on my part. >>But also a very receptive group of employees and partners saying, you know, we'll give you a chance. Let's get this done, let's see where it goes. So that's where the nine months had been around and it's been a, it's been fabulous. >> So that's actually one of the things I've heard from your team is you've come in loud and clear with the voice of the CIO. Having been a CIO yourself, that's something you want them to focus on. Everybody, we always talk about listening to the customers, but you know, the role of the CIO has changed an awful lot. You know, since you first became a CIO, clouds change everything in a Nicholas CARF said for a while, does it even matter? Right. Um, so you know, Ferguson side a little bit as to how you want to make sure you're delivering for what the CIO is need. >>Not necessarily what, you know, they were saying that they want. No, it's fair. And, and as much as the role of the CIO has evolved, I don't think it's changed fundamentally. They still, you know, the guardians of the data, the, you know, the compliance and everything else and of course more than anything else, the productivity and the competitive edge that businesses need, technology and business, regardless of which business you're in, are interested intrinsically tied. Your delivery of anything you do today is tied to technology. If you, if you want to be future proof. So if anything, the role of the CIO has only been elevated. I'm, I say this playfully, but I do say it. I said, if I wasn't running this great company that I am now, I'd love to be the CIO of a dysfunctional it organization at a large company because there's so much you can do. >>Many of the decisions that we would spend an inordinate amount of time on the infrastructure, the application, how do you bind it, what are the protocols? Which data center, how much, who runs it, which partner? I kind of dissipated if you're not going to the cloud in some form of fashion, come on, right? If you're not building cloud native applications, come on. If you're not using dev ops, come on. So you've got all this time back now where you're not hopefully having conversations that don't matter and you're really go and building new things. So I think it matters. That's great stuff. And absolutely we agree. We've talked many times on the cube. It definitely actually matters more than today. If anything. Not only did they need to be responsive to the business, but oftentimes it can be one of those drivers for innovation in change in the business. >>Um, I love something you said in your keynote, you said data is at the center of everything you do because right. Most CEO's, hopefully infrastructure is something they might have under their purview, but it's not what drives the business. It's the data, it's the application, it's their customers that matters. So to speak a little bit to the role of data has changed a lot. You know, you and I worked for that big storage company where we even didn't talk as much about storage back about data back in the day. Today it's the life blood of the company. It's everything like that. >> And you know that that is one of the reasons I'm at Convolt because for the past 30 years I've been in technology, I've done app side, I've done infrastructure side, I've done a mix of all of those. And the more I think of an dev ops, I've done that. >>The more I think about it. If I were, if I was sitting with a CEO today and having a conversation about what matters in technology, who's maybe a CEO is not a technologist, I would say data matters. I would say the asset of your company is the data. It's gone from something that you used to manage down, compress deduplicate and hope it went away and you wanted to minimize its footprint to something where you want to maximize its value. And those aren't just words. I mean that is what makes great companies, great companies today, the way they use data to their competitive advantage. So this is, this is exactly the mindset where the mindset, the Guppy do to convo because all we do, all we do is help our customers be data ready. As I was saying this morning, that's, I love that term because that kind of encapsulates it for me. So that's, that's where my head's at. >> Yeah. I mean, we've always said that the thing that defines a company that's gone through debt, that digital transformation is that data drives the business. >>It, it absolutely should, but we're, when you talk with customers that have, whether it's a big university, a research university, healthcare organization or whatever type of organization that has multiple departments, so much data that potentially has a tremendous amount of value that they actually aren't managing well or can't get visibility out of. When you say we want to help you be data ready, w what does that mean to them? >>It means a few things. You summed it up perfectly. That's the world, the customer, the chaos that customers could live in because fundamentally, Lisa, if I had over-simplified applications, we're intrinsically to date data that you use for tied intrinsically to the application to build. So if you had an SAP system, your data was very tightly tied to that. If an Oracle ERP system, it was very tight detail yet it'll supply chain system. You were tied to that. And once data side of getting released from the abstracted, from the system that was built on, you've got a little bit of chaos, then you had to figure out who had access, where, how, how are you replicating and how are you backing it up over the policies, your plan compliance. And then it became chaos. And what I say to customers being data ready, saying do you have a strategy and a capability, more importantly to protect, manage, control and use that information in the way you wish to for competitive advantage. >>Just protecting it is like a life insurance policy, controlling, managing and using it as where you get the value out of it. Right? And so as companies become more data driven, this is where we help them. So the whole concept of the show, what we're sort of bringing to market is the fact that we can help our customers be data ready. And some of the technologies we've talked about today lend themselves to exactly that. Alright. So Sanjay, one of the questions many of us had coming into the show is how exactly Hedvig your, your first acquisition was going to play out. You made a comment in your, your opening keynote this morning that we need to rethink primary and secondary storage. So some of us read the tea leaves and be like, well, you know, you're selling an SDS storage, your, you're in the primary storage market as we would've called it before. >>Yes, the lines are blurring. I don't think those there. So I want to give you the chance to let us know where we're going. Years primary and secondary storage as we classified them, we're looking grayer and grayer mean they'll always be primary storage because there's always a certain user use cases for, for high-performance scale up capabilities. But a lot of the stuff was getting murky. You know, is it really primary? Is is it lower end primary, is it secondary and it doesn't, it shouldn't really matter. And with that, would that segmentation game a set of other capabilities like Oh, you know, file block, object cloud, more, more segmentation, more silo and more fragmentation. And I'm a big believer that this is all about software. The magic is in the software. And if you, if you forget for a minute that it's software defined storage as we call it today, but a set of capability's, a universal plane that allows you to truly define how customers get that ubiquity between any infrastructure that they run. >>Okay. Which in turn gives them the abstraction from the data that they bill. Okay. We've just taken a lot of workload and pressure off the customer to figure all that stuff out, keep whole manage. So I wouldn't get, I wouldn't get wrapped up on the whole storage thing as much as I would on the SA on the universal data plane or the data brain as I called it, nicknamed it in the show, you know, earlier as the left and right side one size, the data management, the other sizes, you know, traditional storage management. Yeah. Maybe I was reading too much in this. There's two brains. I think you've, you turn them sideways. They look like clouds too. But uh, yeah. Yeah. Um, partners wonder if you could speak, you know, we're talking about obviously the channel hugely important, we're going to talk to a lot of your team, but from a technology standpoint, you've got a lot of those hardware providers as well as different software companies that are here in the expo hall. >>Does metallic and Hedvig in those, you know, how will that change the relationships? I mean there's one, I've never built a business in my life that wasn't partner centric and partnerships to me is where both sides feel like they won. They went together. And so I've been very clear with our team, our channel, our board, our ecosystem that we're not doing this alone. That's not my intent. And our goal is to work together. Now we have partners in across the spectrum, cloud partners, technology partners like NetApp, HPE, Cisco. We've got ecosystem partners, the up the, the startups that are building new capabilities that we want to be, they want to be part of our ecosystem and vice versa. Traditional channel. Okay. so we've got the whole run of those, of those partnerships and we've been very focused. But we've also being very clear that we're in this for the long haul with them. Hedvig is today sold through channel and will continue to and metallic is built to be only sold through the channel. >>And you guys also, I was looking at some of the strategic changes that you've implemented since you've been here. Leadership changes to the sales organization, but even on the marketing side go to market. You mentioned that the channel opportunities for Hedvig as well as metallic, but also you guys have a new partner programmed, really aimed at going after and cultivating those large global enterprises with your SIS. So in terms of of you know, partner first, it really seems like the strategic directions that you're moving in are really underscoring that. >>Absolutely. Everything we do, every single thing we do is, you know, the question, the reviews we do, the internal inspection we do with the business. The, the way I look at the, the, the go to market conversations as to uh, the, you know, the pipeline is always about which partners involved, who's the partner involved, you know, and on an exception where we don't have a partner involved. My um, my F it's a flag to me going why? Um, no, we're, I don't know if you're speaking with Ricardo today or at some point he'll, he'll, he'll let you know exactly what we're doing there and how we think about it. And then we've just hired Marissa Rowe, I don't know, you know, Mercer and so Mercer's just come on board as our sort of partner lead worldwide. Yup. >>We're going to be talking with him as well. >>It's a cultural shift folks and we're completely committed to it. 100% committed. >>So one of the things that, that Stu and I were chatting about earlier today that you guys talked about in the keynote is in terms of how quickly metallic was conceived, design built really fast. Does that come from kind of a nod to your days at puppet where you are used to much shorter cycles? And how did, how did internally, the Combolt folks kind of react and we're able to get that done so quick. >>They embraced it. And I'll tell you, I'm, people will tell you that I'm used to saying this, this, this thing. I say that competition and time are not our friends. So we have to, we have to get out there before somebody else does. And if you're coming out with something, it's gotta be better than anybody else has. And so we all agreed there was a need for world-class solution, but we also understood that we had to do a differently doing it the way we've always built something probably probably wasn't the best answer. We needed to go shake things up because it's a different audience, a different delivery capability. But the beauty of the whole thing was that we had core technology at vault that was truly multi-tenanted, truly secure, truly scalable, which we had. This was years of, of great IP, which we took and we built on top of. >>And so we ended up focusing on the user experience and the capabilities of a SAS solution, the modern SAS solution as opposed to putting a wrapper of SAS around substandard technology. So in full credit to the team, we do 90 day releases on our core technology today. Right. So yeah, I think, I think that refresh cycle is what customers expect of us. That you know the and, and then that's what we do today. Right. So something, I don't think it's, I'm not giving myself any credit for it. Yeah. And Sanjay actually we had a customer on earlier talking about that cadence release cycle and he said to Combolt's credit, they're hitting it and it makes my life more predictable when the channels yeah. You know, and so they know when to expect something. So we have a 90 day and Tom will talk to you about this when he, when he comes on, how we get our channel ready for it, how are we enabled them, our own support so we give, so we are completely buttoned up and taking advantage of that release cycle. >>All right. Great. Sunday, nine months, you've already made quite a few moves in the test board, making a lot of pieces there from what we hear, you know, this is just the beginning. Give us a little bit going forward though those people watching what does Sanjay's next nine to 12 months, you know, foretold and as much as you think it's a lot of moving parts that we've, we've changed, um, there we're all part of a, of a roadmap that and so that, and I've been very open and public about it. When I came in there was a lot we had to do and I wanted to be really focused about getting this company back to growth and really helping you realize the potential that it had with, with its heritage of great technology, great customer base, great ecosystem. So I laid out a very simple three point plan, simplify, innovate, execute and tell. >>People are tired of me talking about it and giving me proof points that I'm done. I'm going to keep talking about it. And so simplify is everything about how we use the product, the user experience with us and how you engage with us. OK. innovators innovate in everything we do, products, experiences, everything we have to, we have to challenge the status quo and say it's a smarter way of doing it. Metallic is a complete encapsulation of that, of that energy. Okay. And the last is execute. It's all about getting out there and getting it done. Doing what we say and saying what we do. Just get it out there, get it done. And um, and I think the team has been amazing. They've just rallied around it. And if I embraced it, this is what I think this is what they want. So the changes, sorry, just sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off but it, I'll sum it up by saying that, you know, the nine months have been very focused in the direction making. Now it's about really making sure we help the company and how customers realize its true potential because the technology is great. The people are great. We're a good company. People love our technology. They stay with us forever. Because it does what it's supposed to. We just think we have a lot more to offer. Now. >>I know we're only day one at the show. Things did kick off a little bit yesterday with partners. What's some of the feedback that you've heard from those customers? Either those that have been using vault for 10 years or those that are maybe newer to the bandwagon? >>Well, somebody asked me if I had 10 cups of coffee before I went on stage in the sporting, but I think it's a good proxy for what I feel on the show. I feel incredible energy. I think that the customers, the partners, our own people, it's just, there's a buzz and you've been to shows before and some of them are just, you know, some of them have that energy and some of them are flat. Well this one's just full of energy and uh, and it's, it feels like a lot of adrenaline here and this people are excited and um, you know, I'm excited to go walk the floor. >>Well, your competitors are taking notice. There was some interesting digital signage yesterday at the airport. I noticed that that wasn't okay. I didn't, I missed it. Invitation. Highest form of flattery. Sanjay, >>I got the notice that there's, there's a lot of investment that goes into this. Uh, this, this segment of the market. It's been really hot. Um, what, what's your take on all the startups in as well as the, the, the big companies that have been putting a lot of it that it's an important space, right? Um, it's, it's, it's in the top three to five depending on which study you look at data protections back because it's one thing to have data and nothing to know that it is the way you want it. It's also a testimony to the a, it's not an easy space to get into when you're telling your customer that you're protecting them. That's a big word. Okay. I believe that you earn your way there day on day release, on release. And we've done that. I mean the animals the same good things about as in half a years we had customers on stage, you know, and it, customers don't just come up on stage and they, they really believe it. We have a, we had a pretty decent turnout at the partner event yesterday. You know, I think we're, we're in a great space at a great time and we've got 20 years of, of great pedigree that I don't take for granted as much as people sort of go, Oh, you're an old company. I go, Oh, don't mistake pedigree for anything else. You know, we've got some incredible IP over 800 active. >>Yes. >>You were sharing some of those thoughts this morning. I was looking to see where I put them. How are you guys leveraging the data that you have under management to make combos technology even better and to help make some of those strategic, >>it's this deep learning. It gives as much, you know, we applying AI implicitly. I don't want it to be an AI washing my technology for my customers. It's in there. It just works for them and it's my job to make my product better so they get more value out of it as opposed to for them to bolt on something to make my product better. So I don't, I really don't care what other shit about it. What I care about is I'm building that right into, into the intelligence. We have all the data, we know we, our customers use it, how they back it up, what their expectations are, what the SLS are, what their protocols are. We know this stuff and you, you have to, you know, we've been around enough to know this stuff. So now we're taking all of that with technologies like deep learning and machine learning and making the product better. >>So Sunday, one of the toughest things to do out there is have people learn, learn about somebody again for the, for the second time, you know, you only get one chance to make a first impression. So maybe I'd love your insight. You've been on board for nine months, you know, everybody knows Combolt it has a strong pedigree as you said, has a lot of patents. There's the culture there, but anything you've learned in the last nine months that you didn't know from the outside, he was still a pretty good secret. And there's a lot of people that don't know us as long as even though we've been around in the enterprise and and have have achieved a ton, there's still a ton of customers that don't know us and you know in our chops to get it out there. And if you've looked at our digital presence, if you've looked at how we're engaging online, it's a different Convolt. In fact, one of my favorite hashtags that's a, that that's trending at the show is a hashtag new comm vault. Is that right? I like that one. >>As I say, I might have started it, I don't know. But it is, it's an opportunity, right as to said, you know, we all wish sometimes in certain situations we could make a first impression. Again, I think you have that opportunity is you're saying there's, you have I she was saying close to 80% of, I think I read the other day, 75 80% of Commonweal's revenue comes from the fortune 500 you have the big presence with Bleagh global enterprises. This sustainability initiative that you were doing with the U N that Chris talked about. So there's, there's a lot of momentum behind that as well to take and really kind of maybe even leverage the voice of those enterprises to share with the world the benefits that Convolt provides. Like you said, data protection is hot. Again, if you have the data and it's, and you don't have the insight and it's not protected and you can't recover it quickly, then what value >>or used, if you can't use that know, why does it have to be compartmentalized where you say, Oh, that is my archive. Why can't I, why can't I say that? Yes, it is my archive, but I can, I can leverage that data for other things in my business. Okay. And so our product orchestrate allows customers to discovery to do, sorry, activate, not orchestrate to do eDiscovery, to curate information to use it for R and D to have a policy on sensitive governance needs. There's so much we can do with that, with with the data that's just sitting there, that and from different sources that I believe that at some level, protecting and protecting, managing and controlling our almost table stakes. So I'm raising the stakes uses where the magic is. >>All right, raising the stakes. Well, Sanjay, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on the cube today. Can't wait to see where those stakes are going to be. Combo go 2020 hashtag new comm volt hashtag new comm vault. Thanks Lisa. Thanks. Thank you so much. Hashtag new cobalt for Stewman eman and Sanjay Mirchandani and Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube from Cannonball. Go.

>> Narrator: From Berlin, Germany, it's theCUBE, covering Dataworks Summit Europe 2018. Brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Well hello, welcome to the Cube. I'm James Kobielus, I'm the lead analyst for the Wikibon team within SiliconANGLE Media. I'm your host today here at Dataworks Summit 2018 in Berlin, Germany. We have one of Hortonworks' customers in South America with us. This is Fernando Lopez of Quanam. He's based in Montevideo, Uruguay. And he has won, here at the conference, he and his company have won an award, a data science award so what I'd like to do is ask Fernando, Fernando Lopez to introduce himself, to give us his job description, to describe the project for which you won the award and take it from there, Fernando. >> Hello and thanks for the chance >> Great to have you. >> I work for Quanam, as you already explained. We are about 400 people in the whole company. And we are spread across Latin America. I come from the kind of headquarters, which is located in Montevideo, Uruguay. And there we have a business analytics business unit. Within that, we are about 70 people and we have a big data and artificial intelligence and cognitive computing group, which I lead. And yes, we also implement Hortonworks. We are actually partnering with Hortonworks. >> When you say you lead the group, are you a data scientist yourself, or do you manage a group of data scientists or a bit of both? >> Well a bit of both. You know, you have to do different stuff in this life. So yes, I lead implementation groups. Sometimes the project is more big data. Sometimes it's more data science, different flavors. But within this group, we try to cover different aspects that are related in some sense with big data. It could be artificial intelligence. It could be cognitive computing, you know. >> Yes, so describe how you're using Hortonworks and describe the project for which you won, I assume it's a one project, for which you won the award, here at this conference. >> All right, yes. We are running several projects, but this one, the one about the prize, is one that I like so much because I'm actually a bioinformatics student so I have a special interest in this one. >> James: Okay. >> It's good to clarify that this was a joint effort between Quanam and GeneLifes. >> James: Genelabs. >> GeneLifes. >> James: GeneLifes. >> Yes, it's genetics and bioinformatics company. >> Right. >> That they specialize-- >> James: Is that a Montevideo based company? >> Yes. In a line, they are a startup that was born from the Institut Pasteur, but in Montevideo and they have a lot of people, who are specialists in bioinformatics, genetics, with a long career in the subject. And we come from the other side, from big data. I was kind of in the middle because of my interest with bioinformatics. So something like one year and a half ago, we met both companies. Actually there is a research, an innovation center, ICT4V. You can visit ICT4V.org, which is a non-profit organization after an agreement between Uruguay and France, >> Oh okay. >> Both governments. >> That makes possible different private or public organizations to collaborate. We have brainstorming sessions and so on. And from one of that brainstorming sessions, this project was born. So, after that we started to discuss ideas of how to bring tools to the medical genetiticists in order to streamline his work, in order to put on the top of his desktop different tools that could make his work easier and more productive. >> Looking for genetic diseases, or what are they looking for in the data specifically? >> Correct, correct. >> I'm not a geneticist but I try to explain myself as good as I can. >> James: Okay, that's good. You have a great job. >> If I am-- >> If I am the doctor, then I will spend a lot of hours researching literature. Bear in mind that we have nearly 300 papers each day, coming up in PubMed, that could be related with genetics. That's a lot. >> These are papers in Spanish that are published in South America? >> No, just talking about, >> Or Portuguese? >> PubMed from the NIH, it's papers published in English. >> Okay. >> PubMed or MEDLINE or-- >> Different languages different countries different sources. >> Yeah but most of it or everything in PubMed is in English. There is another PubMed in Europe and we have SciELO in Latin America also. But just to give you an idea, there's only from that source, 300 papers each day that could be related to genetics. So only speaking about literature, there's a huge amount of information. If I am the doctor, it's difficult to process that. Okay, so that's part of the issue. But on the core of the solution, what we want to give is, starting from the sequence genome of one patient, what can we assert, what can we say about the different variations. It is believed that we have around, each one of us, has about four million mutations. Mutation doesn't mean disease. Mutation actually leads to variation. And variation is not necessarily something negative. We can have different color of the eyes. We can have more or less hair. Or this could represent some disease, something that we need to pay attention as doctors, okay? So this part of the solution tries to implement heuristics on what's coming from the sequencing process. And this heuristics, in short, they tell you, which is the score of each variant, variation, of being more or less pathogenic. So if I am the doctor, part of the work is done there. Then I have to decide, okay, my diagnosis is there is this disease or not. This can be used in two senses. It can be used as prevention, in order to predict, this could happen, you have this genetic risk or this could be used in order to explain some disease and find a treatment. So that's the more bioinformatics part. On the other hand we have the literature. What we do with the literature is, we ingest this 300 daily papers, well abstracts not papers. Actually we have about three million abstracts. >> You ingest text and graphics, all of it? >> No, only the abstract, which is about a few hundred words. >> James: So just text? >> Yes >> Okay. >> But from there we try to identify relevant identities, proteins, diseases, phenotypes, things like that. And then we try to infer valid relationships. This phenotype or this disease can be caused because of this protein or because of the expression of that gene which is another entity. So this builds up kind of ontology, we call it the mini-ontology because it's specific to this domain. So we have kind of mini-semantic network with millions of nodes and edges, which is quite easy to interrogate. But the point is, there you have more than just text. You have something that is already enriched. You have a series of nodes and arrows, and you can query that in terms of reasoning. What leads to what, you know? >> So the analytical tools you're using, they come from, well Hortonworks doesn't make those tools. Are they coming from another partner in South America? Or another partner of Hortonworks' like an IBM or where does that come from? >> That's a nice question. Actually, we have an architecture. The core of the architecture is Hortonworks because we have scalability topics >> James: Yeah, HDP? >> Yes, HDFS, High-von-tessa, Spark. We have a number of items that need to be easily, ultra-escalated because when we talk about genome, it's easy to think about one terrabyte per patient of work. So that's one thing regarding storage and computing. On the other hand, we use a graph database. We use Neo4j for that. >> James: Okay the Neo4j for graph. The Neo4j, you have Hortonworks. >> Yes and we also use, in order to process natural language processing, we use Nine, which is based here in Berlin, actually. So we do part of the machine learning with Nine. Then we have Neo4j for the graph, for building this semantic network. And for the whole processing we have Hortonworks, for running this analysis and heuristics, and scoring the variance. We also use Solr for enterprise search, on top of the documents, or the conclusions of the documents that come from the ontology. >> Wow, that's a very complex and intricate deployment. So, great, in terms of the takeaways from this event, we only just have a little bit more time, what of all the discussions, the breakouts and the keynotes did you find most interesting so far about this show? Data stewardship was a theme of Scott Knowles, with that new solution, you know, in terms of what you're describing as operational application, have you built out something that can be deployed, is being deployed by your customers on an ongoing basis? It wasn't a one-time project, right? This is an ongoing application they can use internally. Is there a need in Uruguay or among your customers to provide privacy protections on this data? >> Sure. >> Will you be using these solutions like the data studio to enable a degree of privacy, protection of data equivalent to what, say, GDPR requires in Europe? Is that something? >> Yes actually we are running other projects in Uruguay. We are helping the, with other companies, we are helping the National Telecommunications Company. So there are security and privacy topics over there. And we are also starting these days a new project, again with ICT4V, another French company. We are in charge of their big data part, for an education program, which is based on the one laptop per child initiative, from the times of Nicholas Negroponte. Well, that initiative has already 10 years >> James: Oh from MIT, yes. >> Yes, from MIT, right. That initiative has already 10 years old in Uruguay, and now it has evolved also to retired people. So it's a kind of going towards the digital society. >> Excellent, I have to wrap it up Fernando, that's great you have a lot of follow on work. This is great, so clearly a lot of very advanced research is being done all over the world. I had the previous guest from South Africa. You from Uruguay so really south of the Equator. There's far more activity in big data than, we, here in the northern hemisphere, Europe and North America realize so I'm very impressed. And I look forward to hearing more from Quanam and through your provider, Hortonworks. Well, thank you very much. >> Thank you and thanks for the chance. >> It was great to have you here on theCUBE. I'm James Kobielus, we're here at DataWorks Summit, in Berlin and we'll be talking to another guest fairly soon. (mood music)