>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017 brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back here on The Cube, the Flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV. We rap up our coverage today, day two of Dell EMC World 2017. We're live in Las Vegas. I'm John Walls along with Rebecca Knight and joining us now all the way from Tobacco Road Patrick Williams, who is the IT Infrastructure Architect at North Carolina State University in beautiful Raleigh, North Carolina. Patrick, thank you for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Tell us first of all, you know, academically, you're the first, somebody from that community that we have a chance to speak with over the past two days. What are you seeing here that you are going to find of interest that you might want to take back with you to Raleigh, that maybe you're going to put into practice? >> Right, so we're really taking a look at the technologies that we have in play, and there's been a lot of new announcements at the conference this year, so we have Unity Storage, we have Data Domain and there's been announcements pretty much across that product spectrum, so we've been looking, going to breakout sessions talking to the experts and trying to take a look at the technology and see how we can take advantage of the new features that are offered in our environment. >> So before the cameras were rolling, you were setting the scene a little bit and describing the kinds of data needs, security needs that you have for a busy, thriving, and large college campus. Can you lay that out for our viewers? >> Right so for a college campus, one of the biggest concerns is around security, so there's a mandate or desire, probably as part of the academic culture to be as open as possible because the goal is to exchange ideas and to share resources between the university and across our set of institutions. So contrast that with the reality that we have to maintain a high level of security now, so there's obviously a lot of incidents. We are a Google Mail university and as you know, there was recently an attack on Gmail, right? So one of the things that we've had to do is to say, "We're going to implement Two Factor Authentication. "We're going to develop a classification system "around how we assess and manage data," so depending on the category, there's different levels of security that are in put in place in our (mumbles) environment, while also trying to remain as open as possible. >> So you have a lot of competing interests, it seems, in trying to balance those interests, is how much of your job? >> 100%. (laughing) Yeah, so what I would say is that in order to be able to get proposals forward, I have to be able to make the case on all sides of the equation, so I have to make the correct academic case. I have to make the correct business case. I have to make the correct cultural case and if I can make those cases coincide, then we can succeed and move things forward and get proposals. >> 'Cause you're saying that at NC State, it's not central IT. You're in IT, but there are some more schools that have options, they can make their own decisions, and so I would think coordination, integration, are not barriers, but certainly challenges. >> That's right, so we are, we call ourselves a central IT group; however, there is no mandate for each of the colleges to use central IT services, so our goal is to create kind of a foundational set of services that the consumers then in come and build on top of rather than building their own resources and we like to see that grow kind of organically rather than to mandate it, use of central services, and we've actually had great success. So we've had a lot of resources to come back from the edge into the central folds and be able to grow that centrally, put a higher level of resiliency on top of those services and satisfy our customers. >> In terms of one of the challenges, though, cost is a huge one, and then making sure that things do come within budget and not a penny over. Can you talk a little bit about some of those obstacles and how you've overcome them? >> Right, so cost is everything for us. Our budgets have been flat for the past three years, but the demand for growth in capacity and existing environments and the demand for new services is ongoing. What we've been able to do is to work really hard on assessing our resources. We've implemented Cloud IQ a year ago when it was first announced to get a kind of a long-term view of our environment and kind of track our growth, and that has enabled us to put the right data in the appropriate tier and be able to maximize our investment and that's really helped us be able to continue to grow our environments as we move forward. >> When you're talking about the different clients or constituencies you're trying to please: you've got the students, the faculty, the administration, and the staff, what do students want, what do faculty want, and how do you give them what they want? >> That's right. So students, is really interesting because the student perspective has really changed over the past couple of years and it caught us off-guard. We have a pervasive data network on our campus. We have all the dorms wired. We have about 21,000 students total. About 8000 stay on campus. All those dorms were hard-wired, but we did not have wifi enabled in all the dorms and we survey students every year. Last year we surveyed them and we got very bad marks because that, even a jack was not enough for them. If you look at what you typically show up with now, how many devices have a hard-wired jack, none, right? So they show up with four devices. They couldn't use any of them on our data network and their response on the survey was, the one that I remember the most was, "Our lives depend on wifi," that was the quote. >> Of course. >> We, of course, immediately went and looked at how we roll out 4000 access points right away. We did that over a summer. That was able to succeed. We also have a very unique set of challenges in that because I mentioned that, we only have 4000 students, slightly more than that, that stay on campus. The majority of them move back and forth between classes so 10 AM when 5000 people walk by one access point. >> When they've just woken up. >> That's right. >> 10 AM. >> Or log in to check their email, et cetera. So those are unique challenges so what we had to do is what are the tools to track the application resources? What's normal application performance? What's a normal peak and what's a breakout that's outside of the normal, and how do we profile that and we want to be well ahead of the demand so that we can put those resources in place ahead of the need. >> So what do you do about the challenge of future deployments? Your budget's going to be somewhat constrained. You know your needs are increasing. You know your constituents have new and growing demand. So, I mean, tough nut to crack, isn't it? You're trying to make your cloud strategy. What are you going to do with that? The 4GG server coming on board now, how do you find, or how do you balance that from the academic perspective? >> You mentioned that and also I didn't mention that one of our data centers is aging and so on top of all that, we're also starting to see, put a strain on our data center resources. What we really hope to be able to do is to leverage some type of a hybrid cloud strategy. The challenge for us has been, what is our application profile? If you look at applications that are a great fit in cloud and applications that are not a great fit in cloud, the traditional backend applications, the core infrastructure applications are not necessarily a great fit, and so what we're trying to figure out is what is the best hybrid solution that will help you move our environment forward and still leverage existing resources. >> So looking ahead, what does the college campus of the future, the technology-enabled college campus of the future look like? Give us a picture. >> I think one of the best examples i can give is our Hunt Library, so we opened a new library on what we call our Centennial Campus a few years ago. It was designed from the ground up as kind of a new model of what does the next generational library look like because it's not, if you think of a library now, you don't think of a traditional, okay, here's a building and stacks and stacks and stacks of books. So they put the books off in a corner and there is a large robotic library that's designed to handle the books and the bulk of it is about collaborative spaces, so there are high-end collaborative work stations, consolidated areas. There are students that are in the design school. If you want to go and practice your DJ skills, you can do that there as well, so that's where things are really headed. >> So Patrick, before we let you go, my final question is, when are you going to beat Carolina and Duke at basketball? >> We're waiting, so we have that US Championship banners from the '80s and I'm tired of looking at that, so we're really looking forward to-- >> Those days are long-gone. >> Right. >> Right, Patrick Williams, NC State, thank you for being with us here on The Cube. Safe travels back home and continued success at Raleigh. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate the time. >> Alright. >> Good. That raps it up here on The Cube, day two is in the books. We'll see you back here tomorrow morning at 11:30 central time, that's 2:30 on the East Coast, for more interviews live from Las Vegas, until then. For Rebecca Knight, I'm John Walls. Have a good night.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a CUBE conversation. we've got a couple of a CUBE alumni veterans who've been on a lot of times. They've got some exciting announcements to tell us today, so we're excited to jump into it, So let's go. First we're joined by Eric Herzog. He's the CMO and VP worldwide storage channels for IBM Storage, made his time on theCUBE Eric, great to see you. >> Great, thanks very much for having us today. >> Jeff: Absolutely. And joining him, I think all the way from North Carolina, Sam Werner, the VP of, and offering manager business line executive storage for IBM. Sam, great to see you as well. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> Absolutely. So let's jump into it. So Sam you're in North Carolina, I think that's where the Red Hat people are. You guys have Red Hat, a lot of conversations about containers, containers are going nuts. We know containers are going nuts and it was Docker and then Kubernetes. And really a lot of traction. Wonder if you can reflect on, on what you see from your point of view and how that impacts what you guys are working on. >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We talk, everybody hears about containers constantly. Obviously it's a hot part of digital transformation. What's interesting about it though is most of those initiatives are being driven out of business lines. I spend a lot of time with the people who do infrastructure management, particularly the storage teams, the teams that have to support all of that data in the data center. And they're struggling to be honest with you. These initiatives are coming at them, from application developers and they're being asked to figure out how to deliver the same level of SLAs the same level of performance, governance, security recovery times, availability. And it's a scramble for them to be quite honest they're trying to figure out how to automate their storage. They're trying to figure out how to leverage the investments they've made as they go through a digital transformation and keep in mind, a lot of these initiatives are accelerating right now because of this global pandemic we're living through. I don't know that the strategy's necessarily changed, but there's been an acceleration. So all of a sudden these storage people kind of trying to get up to speed or being thrown right into the mix. So we're working directly with them. You'll see, in some of our announcements, we're helping them, you know, get on that journey and provide the infrastructure their teams need. >> And a lot of this is driven by multicloud and hybrid cloud, which we're seeing, you know, a really aggressive move to before it was kind of this rush to public cloud. And that everybody figured out, "Well maybe public cloud isn't necessarily right for everything." And it's kind of this horses for courses, if you will, with multicloud and hybrid cloud, another kind of complexity thrown into the storage mix that you guys have to deal with. >> Yeah, and that's another big challenge. Now in the early days of cloud, people were lifting and shifting applications trying to get lower capex. And they were also starting to deploy DevOps, in the public cloud in order to improve agility. And what they found is there were a lot of challenges with that, where they thought lifting and shifting an application will lower their capital costs the TCO actually went up significantly. Where they started building new applications in the cloud. They found they were becoming trapped there and they couldn't get the connectivity they needed back into their core applications. So now we're at this point where they're trying to really, transform the rest of it and they're using containers, to modernize the rest of the infrastructure and complete the digital transformation. They want to get into a hybrid cloud environment. What we found is, enterprises get two and a half X more value out of the IT when they use a hybrid multicloud infrastructure model versus an all public cloud model. So what they're trying to figure out is how to piece those different components together. So you need a software-driven storage infrastructure that gives you the flexibility, to deploy in a common way and automate in a common way, both in a public cloud but on premises and give you that flexibility. And that's what we're working on at IBM and with our colleagues at Red Hat. >> So Eric, you've been in the business a long time and you know, it's amazing as it just continues to evolve, continues to evolve this kind of unsexy thing under the covers called storage, which is so foundational. And now as data has become, you know, maybe a liability 'cause I have to buy a bunch of storage. Now it is the core asset of the company. And in fact a lot of valuations on a lot of companies is based on its value, that's data and what they can do. So clearly you've got a couple of aces in the hole you always do. So tell us what you guys are up to at IBM to take advantage of the opportunity. >> Well, what we're doing is we are launching, a number of solutions for various workloads and applications built with a strong container element. For example, a number of solutions about modern data protection cyber resiliency. In fact, we announced last year almost a year ago actually it's only a year ago last week, Sam and I were on stage, and one of our developers did a demo of us protecting data in a container environment. So now we're extending that beyond what we showed a year ago. We have other solutions that involve what we do with AI big data and analytic applications, that are in a container environment. What if I told you, instead of having to replicate and duplicate and have another set of storage right with the OpenShift Container configuration, that you could connect to an existing external exabyte class data lake. So that not only could your container apps get to it, but the existing apps, whether they'll be bare-metal or virtualized, all of them could get to the same data lake. Wow, that's a concept saving time, saving money. One pool of storage that'll work for all those environments. And now that containers are being deployed in production, that's something we're announcing as well. So we've got a lot of announcements today across the board. Most of which are container and some of which are not, for example, LTO-9, the latest high performance and high capacity tape. We're announcing some solutions around there. But the bulk of what we're announcing today, is really on what IBM is doing to continue to be the leader in container storage support. >> And it's great, 'cause you talked about a couple of very specific applications that we hear about all the time. One obviously on the big data and analytics side, you know, as that continues to do, to kind of chase history of honor of ultimately getting the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make the right decision. And the other piece you talked about was business continuity and data replication, and to bring people back. And one of the hot topics we've talked to a lot of people about now is kind of this shift in a security threat around ransomware. And the fact that these guys are a little bit more sophisticated and will actually go after your backup before they let you know that they're into your primary storage. So these are two, really important market areas that we could see continue activity, as all the people that we talk to every day. You must be seeing the same thing. >> Absolutely we are indeed. You know, containers are the wave. I'm a native California and I'm coming to you from Silicon Valley and you don't fight the wave, you ride it. So at IBM we're doing that. We've been the leader in container storage. We, as you know, way back when we invented the hard drive, which is the foundation of almost this entire storage industry and we were responsible for that. So we're making sure that as container is the coming wave that we are riding that in and doing the right things for our customers, for our channel partners that support those customers, whether they be existing customers, and obviously, with this move to containers, is going to be some people searching for probably a new vendor. And that's something that's going to go right into our wheelhouse because of the things we're doing. And some of our capabilities, for example, with our FlashSystems, with our Spectrum Virtualize, we're actually going to be able to support CSI snapshots not only for IBM Storage, but our Spectrum Virtualize products supports over 500 different arrays, most of which aren't ours. So if you got that old EMC VNX2 or that HPE, 3PAR or aNimble or all kinds of other storage, if you need CSI snapshot support, you can get it from IBM, with our Spectrum Virtualize software that runs on our FlashSystems, which of course cuts capex and opex, in a heterogeneous environment, but gives them that advanced container support that they don't get, because they're on older product from, you know, another vendor. We're making sure that we can pull our storage and even our competitor storage into the world of containers and do it in the right way for the end user. >> That's great. Sam, I want to go back to you and talk about the relationship with the Red Hat. I think it was about a year ago, I don't have my notes in front of me, when IBM purchased Red Hat. Clearly you guys have been working very closely together. What does that mean for you? You've been in the business for a long time. You've been at IBM for a long time, to have a partner you know, kind of embed with you, with Red Hat and bringing some of their capabilities into your portfolio. >> It's been an incredible experience, and I always say my friends at Red Hat because we spend so much time together. We're looking at now, leveraging a community that's really on the front edge of this movement to containers. They bring that, along with their experience around storage and containers, along with the years and years of enterprise class storage delivery that we have in the IBM Storage portfolio. And we're bringing those pieces together. And this is a case of truly one plus one equals three. And you know, an example you'll see in this announcement is the integration of our data protection portfolio with their container native storage. We allow you to in any environment, take a snapshot of that data. You know, this move towards modern data protection is all about a movement to doing data protection in a different way which is about leveraging snapshots, taking instant copies of data that are application aware, allowing you to reuse and mount that data for different purposes, be able to protect yourself from ransomware. Our data protection portfolio has industry leading ransomware protection and detection in it. So we'll actually detect it before it becomes a problem. We're taking that, industry leading data protection software and we are integrating it into Red Hat, Container Native Storage, giving you the ability to solve one of the biggest challenges in this digital transformation which is backing up your data. Now that you're moving towards, stateful containers and persistent storage. So that's one area we're collaborating. We're working on ensuring that our storage arrays, that Eric was talking about, that they integrate tightly with OpenShift and that they also work again with, OpenShift Container Storage, the Cloud Native Storage portfolio from, Red Hat. So we're bringing these pieces together. And on top of that, we're doing some really, interesting things with licensing. We allow you to consume the Red Hat Storage portfolio along with the IBM software-defined Storage portfolio under a single license. And you can deploy the different pieces you need, under one single license. So you get this ultimate investment protection and ability to deploy anywhere. So we're, I think we're adding a lot of value for our customers and helping them on this journey. >> Yeah Eric, I wonder if you could share your perspective on multicloud management. I know that's a big piece of what you guys are behind and it's a big piece of kind of the real world as we've kind of gotten through the hype and now we're into production, and it is a multicloud world and it is, you got to manage this stuff it's all over the place. I wonder if you could speak to kind of how that challenge you know, factors into your design decisions and how you guys are about, you know, kind of the future. >> Well we've done this in a couple of ways in things that are coming out in this launch. First of all, IBM has produced with a container-centric model, what they call the Multicloud Manager. It's the IBM Cloud Pak for multicloud management. That product is designed to manage multiple clouds not just the IBM Cloud, but Amazon, Azure, et cetera. What we've done is taken our Spectrum Protect Plus and we've integrated it into the multicloud manager. So what that means, to save time, to save money and make it easier to use, when the customer is in the multicloud manager, they can actually select Spectrum Protect Plus, launch it and then start to protect data. So that's one thing we've done in this launch. The other thing we've done is integrate the capability of IBM Spectrum Virtualize, running in a FlashSystem to also take the capability of supporting OCP, the OpenShift Container Platform in a Clustered environment. So what we can do there, is on-premise, if there really was an earthquake in Silicon Valley right now, that OpenShift is sitting on a server. The servers just got crushed by the roof when it caved in. So you want to make sure you've got disaster recovery. So what we can do is take that OpenShift Container Platform Cluster, we can support it with our Spectrum Virtualize software running on our FlashSystem, just like we can do heterogeneous storage that's not ours, in this case, we're doing it with Red Hat. And then what we can do is to provide disaster recovery and business continuity to different cloud vendors not just to IBM Cloud, but to several cloud vendors. We can give them the capability of replicating and protecting that Cluster to a cloud configuration. So if there really was an earthquake, they could then go to the cloud, they could recover that Red Hat Cluster, to a different data center and run it on-prem. So we're not only doing the integration with a multicloud manager, which is multicloud-centric allowing ease of use with our Spectrum Protect Plus, but incase of a really tough situation of fire in a data center, earthquake, hurricane, whatever, the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster can be replicated out to a cloud, with our Spectrum Virtualize Software. So in most, in both cases, multicloud examples because in the first one of course the multicloud manager is designed and does support multiple clouds. In the second example, we support multiple clouds where our Spectrum Virtualize for public clouds software so you can take that OpenShift Cluster replicate it and not just deal with one cloud vendor but with several. So showing that multicloud management is important and then leverage that in this launch with a very strong element of container centricity. >> Right >> Yeah, I just want to add, you know, and I'm glad you brought that up Eric, this whole multicloud capability with, the Spectrum Virtualize. And I could see the same for our Spectrum Scale Family, which is our storage infrastructure for AI and big data. We actually, in this announcement have containerized the client making it very simple to deploy in Kubernetes Cluster. But one of the really special things about Spectrum Scale is it's active file management. This allows you to build out a file system not only on-premises for your, Kubernetes Cluster but you can actually extend that to a public cloud and it automatically will extend the file system. If you were to go into a public cloud marketplace which it's available in more than one, you can go in there click deploy, for example, in AWS Marketplace, click deploy it will deploy your Spectrum Scale Cluster. You've now extended your file system from on-prem into the cloud. If you need to access any of that data, you can access it and it will automatically cash you on locally and we'll manage all the file access for you. >> Yeah, it's an interesting kind of paradox between, you know, kind of the complexity of what's going on in the back end, but really trying to deliver simplicity on the front end. Again, this ultimate goal of getting the right data to the right person at the right time. You just had a blog post Eric recently, that you talked about every piece of data isn't equal. And I think it's really highlighted in this conversation we just had about recovery and how you prioritize and how you, you know, think about, your data because you know, the relative value of any particular piece might be highly variable, which should drive the way that you treated in your system. So I wonder if you can speak a little bit, you know, to helping people think about data in the right way. As you know, they both have all their operational data which they've always had, but now they've got all this unstructured data that's coming in like crazy and all data isn't created equal, as you said. And if there is an earthquake or there is a ransomware attack, you need to be smart about what you have available to bring back quickly. And maybe what's not quite so important. >> Well, I think the key thing, let me go to, you know a modern data protection term. These are two very technical terms was, one is the recovery time. How long does it take you to get that data back? And the second one is the recovery point, at what point in time, are you recovering the data from? And the reason those are critical, is when you look at your datasets, whether you replicate, you snap, you do a backup. The key thing you've got to figure out is what is my recovery time? How long is it going to take me? What's my recovery point. Obviously in certain industries you want to recover as rapidly as possible. And you also want to have the absolute most recent data. So then once you know what it takes you to do that, okay from an RPO and an RTO perspective, recovery point objective, recovery time objective. Once you know that, then you need to look at your datasets and look at what does it take to run the company if there really was a fire and your data center was destroyed. So you take a look at those datasets, you see what are the ones that I need to recover first, to keep the company up and rolling. So let's take an example, the sales database or the support database. I would say those are pretty critical to almost any company, whether you'd be a high-tech company, whether you'd be a furniture company, whether you'd be a delivery company. However, there also is probably a database of assets. For example, IBM is a big company. We have buildings all over, well, guess what? We don't lease a chair or a table or a whiteboard. We buy them. Those are physical assets that the company has to pay, you know, do write downs on and all this other stuff, they need to track it. If we close a building, we need to move the desk to another building. Like even if we leasing a building now, the furniture is ours, right? So does an asset database need to be recovered instantaneously? Probably not. So we should focus on another thing. So let's say on a bank. Banks are both online and brick and mortar. I happened to be a Wells Fargo person. So guess what? There's Wells Fargo banks, two of them in the city I'm in, okay? So, the assets of the money, in this case now, I don't think the brick and mortar of the building of Wells Fargo or their desks in there but now you're talking financial assets or their high velocity trading apps. Those things need to be recovered almost instantaneously. And that's what you need to do when you're looking at datasets, is figure out what's critical to the business to keep it up and rolling, what's the next most critical. And you do it in basically the way you would tear anything. What's the most important thing, what's the next most important thing. It doesn't matter how you approach your job, how you used to approach school, what are the classes I have to get an A and what classes can I not get an A and depending on what your major was, all that sort of stuff, you're setting priorities, right? And the dataset, since data is the most critical asset of any company, whether it's a Global Fortune 500 or whether it's Herzog Cigar Store, all of those assets, that data is the most valuable. So you've got to make sure, recover what you need as rapidly as you need it. But you can't recover all of it. You just, there's just no way to do that. So that's why you really ranked the importance of the data to use sameware, with malware and ransomware. If you have a malware or ransomware attack, certain data you need to recover as soon as you can. So if there, for example, as a, in fact there was one Jeff, here in Silicon Valley as well. You've probably read about the University of California San Francisco, ended up having to pay over a million dollars of ransom because some of the data related to COVID research University of California, San Francisco, it was the health care center for the University of California in Northern California. They are working on COVID and guess what? The stuff was held for ransom. They had no choice, but to pay them. And they really did pay, this is around end of June, of this year. So, okay, you don't really want to do that. >> Jeff: Right >> So you need to look at everything from malware and ransomware, the importance of the data. And that's how you figure this stuff out, whether be in a container environment, a traditional environment or virtualized environment. And that's why data protection is so important. And with this launch, not only are we doing the data protection we've been doing for years, but now taking it to the heart of the new wave, which is the wave of containers. >> Yeah, let me add just quickly on that Eric. So think about those different cases you talked about. You're probably going to want for your mission critically. You're going to want snapshots of that data that can be recovered near instantaneously. And then, for some of your data, you might decide you want to store it out in cloud. And with Spectrum Protect, we just announced our ability to now store data out in Google cloud. In addition to, we already supported AWS Azure IBM Cloud, in various on-prem object stores. So we already provided that capability. And then we're in this announcement talking about LTL-9. And you got to also be smart about which data do you need to keep, according to regulation for long periods of time, or is it just important to archive? You're not going to beat the economics nor the safety of storing data out on tape. But like Eric said, if all of your data is out on tape and you have an event, you're not going to be able to restore it quickly enough at least the mission critical things. And so those are the things that need to be in snapshot. And that's one of the main things we're announcing here for Kubernetes environments is the ability to quickly snapshot application aware backups, of your mission critical data in your Kubernetes environments. It can very quickly to be recovered. >> That's good. So I'll give you the last word then we're going to sign off, we are out of time, but I do want to get this in it's 2020, if I didn't ask the COVID question, I would be in big trouble. So, you know, you've all seen the memes and the jokes about really COVID being an accelerant to digital transformation, not necessarily change, but certainly a huge accelerant. I mean, you guys have a, I'm sure a product roadmap that's baked pretty far and advanced, but I wonder if you can speak to, you know, from your perspective, as COVID has accelerated digital transformation you guys are so foundational to executing that, you know, kind of what is it done in terms of what you're seeing with your customers, you know, kind of the demand and how you're seeing this kind of validation as to an accelerant to move to these better types of architectures? Let's start with you Sam. >> Yeah, you know I, and I think i said this, but I mean the strategy really hasn't changed for the enterprises, but of course it is accelerating it. And I see storage teams more quickly getting into trouble, trying to solve some of these challenges. So we're working closely with them. They're looking for more automation. They have less people in the data center on-premises. They're looking to do more automation simplify the management of the environment. We're doing a lot around Ansible to help them with that. We're accelerating our roadmaps around that sort of integration and automation. They're looking for better visibility into their environments. So we've made a lot of investments around our storage insights SaaS platform, that allows them to get complete visibility into their data center and not just in their data center. We also give them visibility to the stores they're deploying in the cloud. So we're making it easier for them to monitor and manage and automate their storage infrastructure. And then of course, if you look at everything we're doing in this announcement, it's about enabling our software and our storage infrastructure to integrate directly into these new Kubernetes, initiatives. That way as this digital transformation accelerates and application developers are demanding more and more Kubernetes capabilities. They're able to deliver the same SLAs and the same level of security and the same level of governance, that their customers expect from them, but in this new world. So that's what we're doing. If you look at our announcement, you'll see that across, across the sets of capabilities that we're delivering here. >> Eric, we'll give you the last word, and then we're going to go to Eric Cigar Shop, as soon as this is over. (laughs) >> So it's clearly all about storage made simple, in a Kubernetes environment, in a container environment, whether it's block storage, file storage, whether it be object storage and IBM's goal is to offer ever increasing sophisticated services for the enterprise at the same time, make it easier and easier to use and to consume. If you go back to the old days, the storage admins manage X amount of gigabytes, maybe terabytes. Now the same admin is managing 10 petabytes of data. So the data explosion is real across all environments, container environments, even old bare-metal. And of course the not quite so new anymore virtualized environments. The admins need to manage that more and more easily and automated point and click. Use AI based automated tiering. For example, we have with our Easy Tier technology, that automatically moves data when it's hot to the fastest tier. And when it's not as hot, it's cool, it pushes down to a slower tier, but it's all automated. You point and you click. Let's take our migration capabilities. We built it into our software. I buy a new array, I need to migrate the data. You point, you click, and we automatic transparent migration in the background on the fly without taking the servers or the storage down. And we always favor the application workload. So if the application workload is heavy at certain times a day, we slow the migration. At night for sake of argument, If it's a company that is not truly 24 by seven, you know, heavily 24 by seven, and at night, it slows down, we accelerate the migration. All about automation. We've done it with Ansible, here in this launch, we've done it with additional integration with other platforms. So our Spectrum Scale for example, can use the OpenShift management framework to configure and to grow our Spectrum Scale or elastic storage system clusters. We've done it, in this case with our Spectrum Protect Plus, as you saw integration into the multicloud manager. So for us, it's storage made simple, incredibly new features all the time, but at the same time we do that, make sure that it's easier and easier to use. And in some cases like with Ansible, not even the real storage people, but God forbid, that DevOps guy messes with a storage and loses that data, wow. So by, if you're using something like Ansible and that Ansible framework, we make sure that essentially the DevOps guy, the test guy, the analytics guy, basically doesn't lose the data and screw up the storage. And that's a big, big issue. So all about storage made simple, in the right way with incredible enterprise features that essentially we make easy and easy to use. We're trying to make everything essentially like your iPhone, that easy to use. That's the goal. And with a lot less storage admins in the world then there has been an incredible storage growth every single year. You'd better make it easy for the same person to manage all that storage. 'Cause it's not shrinking. It is, someone who's sitting at 50 petabytes today, is 150 petabytes the next year and five years from now, they'll be sitting on an exabyte of production data, and they're not going to hire tons of admins. It's going to be the same two or four people that were doing the work. Now they got to manage an exabyte, which is why this storage made simplest is such a strong effort for us with integration, with the Open, with the Kubernetes frameworks or done with OpenShift, heck, even what we used to do in the old days with vCenter Ops from VMware, VASA, VAAI, all those old VMware tools, we made sure tight integration, easy to use, easy to manage, but sophisticated features to go with that. Simplicity is really about how you manage storage. It's not about making your storage dumb. People want smarter and smarter storage. Do you make it smarter, but you make it just easy to use at the same time. >> Right. >> Well, great summary. And I don't think I could do a better job. So I think we'll just leave it right there. So congratulations to both of you and the teams for these announcement after a whole lot of hard work and sweat went in, over the last little while and continued success. And thanks for the, check in, always great to see you. >> Thank you. We love being on theCUBE as always. >> All right, thanks again. All right, he's Eric, he was Sam, I'm I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here, in our Palo Alto, California studios, here with our quarantine crew. We're getting all the remote interviews during this time of COVID-19. We've got two great remote guests here, Rachini Moosavi who's the Executive Director of Analytical Services and Data Governance at UNC Healthcare, and Sonya Jordan, Enterprise Analytics Manager of Data Governance at UNC Health. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, I'm super excited. University of North Carolina, my daughter will be a freshman this year, and she is coming, so hopefully she won't have to visit UNC Health, but looking forward to having more visits down there, it's a great place. So, thanks for coming on, really appreciate it. Okay, so the conversation today is going to be about how data and how analytics are helping solve problems, and ultimately, in your case, serve the community, and this is a super important conversation. So, before we get started, talk about UNC Health, what's going on there, how you guys organize, how big is it, what are some of the challenges that you have? >> SO UNC Health is comprised of about 12 different entities within our hospital system. We have physician groups as well as hospitals, and we serve, we're spread throughout all of North Carolina, and so we serve the patients of North Carolina, and that is our primary focus and responsibility for our mission. As part of the offices Sonya and I are in, we are in the Enterprise Analytics and Data Sciences Office that serves all of those entities and so we are centrally located in the triangle area of North Carolina, which is pretty central to the state, and we serve all of our entities equally from our Analytics and Data Governance needs. >> John: You guys got a different customer base, obviously you've got the clinical support, and you got the business applications, you got to be agile, that's what it's all about today, you don't need to rely on IT support. How do you guys do that? What's the framework? How do you guys tackle that problem of being agile, having the data be available, and you got two different customers, you got all the compliance issues with clinical, I can only imagine all the regulations involved, and you've got the business applications. How do you handle those? >> Yeah, so for us in the roles that we are in, we are fully responsible for more of the data and analytics needs of the organization, and so we provide services that truly are balanced across our clinician group, so we have physicians, and nurses, and all of the other ancillary clinical staff that we support, as well as the operational needs as well, so revenue cycle, finance, pharmacy, any of those groups that are required in order to run a healthcare system. So, we balance our time amongst all of those and for the work that we take on and how we continuously support them is really based on governance at the end of the day. How we make decisions around what the priorities are and what needs to happen next, and requires the best insights, is really how we focus on what work we do next. As for the applications that we build, in our office, we truly only build analytical applications or products like visualizations within Tableau as well as we support data governance platforms and services and so we provide some of the tools that enable our end users to be able to interact with the information that we're providing around analytics and insights, at the end of the day. >> Sonya, what's your job? Your title is Analytics Manager of Data Governance, obviously that sounds broad but governance is obviously required in all things. What is your job, what is your day-to-day roles like? What's your focus? >> Well, my day-to-day operations is first around building a data governance program. I try to work with identifying customers who we can start partnering with so that we can start getting documentation and utilizing a lot of the programs that we currently have, such as certification, so when we talk about initiatives, this is one of the initiatives that we use to partner with our stakeholders in order to start bringing visibilities to the various assets, such as metrics, or universes that we want to certify, or dashboards, algorithm, just various lists of different types of assets that we certify that we like to partner with the customers in order for them to start documenting within the tools, so that we can bring visibility to what's available, really focusing on data literacy, helping people to understand what assets are available, not only what assets are available, but who owns them, and who own the asset, and what can they do with it, making sure that we have great documentation in order to be able to leverage literacy as well. >> So, I can only imagine with how much volume you guys are dealing from a data standpoint, and the diversity, that the data warehouse must be massive, or it must be architected in a way that it can be agile because the needs, of the diverse needs. Can you guys share your thoughts on how you guys look on the data warehouse challenge and opportunity, and what you guys are currently doing? >> Well, so- >> Yeah you go ahead, Rachini. >> Go ahead, Sonya. >> Well, last year we implemented a tool, an enterprise warehouse, basically behind a tool that we implemented, and that was an opportunity for Data Governance to really lay some foundation and really bring visibility to the work that we could provide for the enterprise. We were able to embed into probably about six or seven of the 13 initiatives, I was actually within that project, and with that we were able to develop our stewardship committee, our data governance council, and because Rachini managed Data Solutions, our data solution manager was able to really help with the architect and integration of the tools. >> Rachini, your thoughts on running the data warehouse, because you've got to have flexibility for new types of data sources. How do you look at that? >> So, as Sonya just mentioned, we upgraded our data warehouse platform just recently because of these evolving needs, and like a lot of healthcare providers out there, a lot of them are either one or the other EMRs that are top in the market. With our EMR, they provide their own data warehouse, so you have to factor almost the impact of what they bring to the table in with an addition to all of those other sources of data that you're trying to co-mingle and bring together into the same data warehouse, and so for us, it was time for us to evolve our data warehouse. We ended up deciding on trying to create a virtual data warehouse, and in doing so, with virtualization, we had to upgrade our platform, which is what created that opportunity that Sonya was mentioning. And by moving to this new platform we are now able to bring all of that into one space and it's enabled us to think about how does the community of analysts interact with the data? How do we make that available to them in a secure way? In a way that they can take advantage of reusable master data files that could be our source of truth within our data warehouse, while also being able to have the flexibility to build what they need in their own functional spaces so that they can get the wealth of information that they need out of the same source and it's available to everyone. >> Okay, so I got to ask the question, and I was trying to get the good stuff out first, but let's get at the reality of COVID-19. You got pre-COVID-19 pandemic, we're kind of in the middle of it, and people are looking at strategies to come out of it, obviously the world will be changed, higher with a lot of virtualization, virtual meetings, and virtual workforce, but the data still needs to be, the business still needs to run, but data will be changing different sources, how are you guys responding to that crisis because you're going to be leaned on heavily for more and more support? >> Yeah it's been non-stop since March (laughs). So, I'm going to tell you about the reporting aspects of it, and then I'd love to turn it over to Sonya to tell you about some of the great things that we've actually been able to do to it and enhance our data governance program by not wasting this terrible event and this opportunity that's come up. So, with COVID, when it kicked off back in March, we actually formed a war room to address the needs around reporting analytics and just insights that our executives needed, and so in doing so, we created within the first week, our first weekend actually, our first dashboard, and within the next two weeks we had about eight or nine other dashboards that were available. And we continuously add to that. Information is so critical to our executives, to our clinicians, to be able to know how to address the evolving needs of COVID-19 and how we need to respond. We literally, and I'm not even exaggerating, at this very moment we have probably, let's see, I think it's seven different forecasts that we're trying to build all at the same time to try and help us prepare for this new recovery, this sort of ramp up efforts, so to your point, it started off as we're shutting down so that we can flatten the curve, but now as we try to also reopen at the same time while we're still meeting the needs of our COVID patients, there's this balancing act that we're trying to keep up with and so analytics is playing a critical factor in doing that. >> Sonya, your thoughts. First of all, congratulations, and action is what defines the players from the pretenders in my mind, you're seeing that play out, so congratulations for taking great action, I know you're working hard. Sonya, your thoughts, COVID, it's putting a lot of pressure? It highlights the weaknesses and strengths of what's kind of out there, what's your thoughts? >> Well, it just requires a great deal of collaboration and making sure that you're documenting metrics in a way where you're factoring true definition because at the end of the day, this information can go into a dashboard that's going to be visualized across the organization, I think what COVID has done was really enhanced the need and the understanding of why data governance is important and also it has allowed us to create a lot of standardization, where we we're standardizing a lot of processes that we currently had in correct place but just enhancing them. >> You know, not to go on a tangent, but I will, it's funny how the reality has kind of pulled back, exposed a lot of things, whether it's the remote work situation, people are VPNing, not under provision with the IT side. On the data side, everyone now understands the quality of the data. I mean, I got my kids talking progression analysis, "Oh, the curves are all wrong," I mean people are now seeing the science behind the data and they're looking at graphs all the time, you guys are in the visualization piece, this really highlights the need of data as a story, because there's an impact, and two, quality data. And if you don't have the data, the story isn't being told and then misinformation comes out of it, and this is actually playing out in real time, so it's not like it's just a use case for the most analytics but this again highlights the value of proposition of what you guys do. What's your personal thoughts on all this because this really is playing out globally. >> Yeah, it's been amazing how much information is out there. So, we have been extremely blessed at times but also burdened at times by that amount of information. So, there's the data that's going through our healthcare system that we're trying to manage and wrangle and do that data storytelling so that people can drive those insights to very effective decisions. But there's also all of this external data that we're trying to be able to leverage as well. And this is where the whole sharing of information can sometimes become really hard to try and get ahead of, we leverage the Johns Hopkins data for some time, but even that, too, can have some hiccups in terms of what's available. We try to use our State Department of Health and Human Services data and they just about updated their website and how information was being shared every other week and it was making it impossible for us to ingest that into our dashboards that we were providing, and so there's really great opportunities but also risks in some of the information that we're pulling. >> Sonya, what's your thoughts? I was just having a conversation this morning with the Chief of Analytics and Insight from NOA which is the National Oceanic Administration, about weather data and forecasting weather, and they've got this community model where they're trying to get the edges to kind of come in, this teases out a template. You guys have multiple locations. As you get more democratized in the connection points, whether it's third-party data, having a system managing that is hard, and again, this is a new trend that's emerging, this community connection points, where I think you guys might also might be a template, and your multiple locations, what's your general thoughts on that because the data's coming in, it's now connected in, whether it's first-party to the healthcare system or third-party. >> Yeah, well we have been leveraging our data governance tool to try to get that centralized location, making sure that we obtain the documentations. Due to COVID, everything is moving very fast, so it requires us to really sit down and capture the information and when you don't have enough resources in order to do that, it's easy to miss some very important information, so really trying to encourage people to understand the reason why we have data governance tools in order for them to leverage, in order to capture the documentation in a way that it can tell the story about the data, but most of all, to be able to capture it in a way so that if that person happened to leave the organization, we're not spending a lot of time trying to figure out how was this information created, how was this dashboard designed, where are the requirements, where are the specifications, where are the key elements, where does that information live, and making sure we capture that up front. >> So, guys, you guys are using Informatica, how are they helping you? Obviously, they have a system they're getting some great feedback on, how are you using Informatica, how is it going, and how has that enabled you guys to be successful? >> Yeah, so we decided on Informatica after doing a really thorough vetting of all of the other vendors in the industry that could provide us these services. We've really loved the capabilities that we've been able to provide to our customers at this point. It's evolving, I think, for us, the ability to partner with a group like Prominence, to be able to really leverage the capabilities of Informatica and then be really super, super hyper focused on providing data literacy back to our end users and making that the full intent of what we're doing within data governance has really enabled us to take the tools and make it something that's specific to UNC Health and the needs that our end users are verbalizing and provide that to them in a very positive way. >> Sonya, they talk about this master catalog, and I've talked to the CEO of Informatica and all their leaders, governance is a big part of it, and I've always said, I've always kind of had a hard time, I'm an entrepreneur, I like to innovate, move fast, break things, which is kind of not the way you work in the data world, you don't want to be breaking anything, so how do you balance governance and compliance with innovation? This has been a key topic and I know that you guys are using their enterprise data catolog. Is that helping? How does that fit in, is that part of it? >> Well, yeah, so during our COVID initiatives and building these telos dashboards, these visualizations and forecast models for executive leaders, we were able to document and EMPower you, which we rebranded Axon to EMPower, we were able to document a lot of our dashboards, which is a data set, and pretty much document attributes and show lineage from EMPower to EDC, so that users would know exactly when they start looking at the visualization not only what does this information mean, but they're also able to see what other sources that that information impacts as well as the data lineage, where did the information come from in EDC. >> So I got to ask the question to kind of wrap things up, has Informatica helped you guys out now that you're in this crisis? Obviously you've implemented before, now that you're in the middle of it, have you seen any things that jumped out at you that's been helpful, and are there areas that need to be worked on so that you guys continue to fight the good fight, come out of this thing stronger than before you came in? >> Yeah, there is a lot of new information, what we consider as "aha" moments that we've been learning about, and how EMPower, yes there's definitely a learning curve because we implemented EDC and EMPower last year doing our warehouse implementation, and so there's a lot of work that still needs to be done, but based on where we were the first of the year, I can say we have evolved tremendously due to a lot of the pandemic issues that arised, and we're looking to really evolve even greater, and pilot across the entire organization so that they can start leveraging these tools for their needs. >> Rachini you got any thoughts on your end on what's worked, what you see improvements coming, anything to share? >> Yeah, so we're excited about some of the new capabilities like the marketplace for example that's available in Axon, we're looking forward to being able to take advantage of some of these great new aspects of the tool so that we can really focus more on providing those insights back to our end users. I think for us, during COVID, it's really been about how do we take advantage of the immediate needs that are surfacing. How do we build all of these dashboards in record-breaking time but also make sure that folks understand exactly what's being represented within those dashboards, and so being able to provide that through our Informatica tools and service it back to our end users, almost in a seamless way like it's built into our dashboards, has been a really critical factor for us, and feeling like we can provide that level of transparency, and so I think that's where as we evolve that we would look for more opportunities, too. How do we make it simple for people to get that immediate answers to their questions, of what does the information need without it feeling like they're going elsewhere for the information. >> Rachini, thank you so much for your insight, Sonya as well, thanks for the insight, and stay safe. Sonya, behind you, I was pointing out, that's your artwork, you painted that picture. >> Yes. >> Looks beautiful. >> Yes, I did. >> You got two jobs, you're an artist, and you're doing data governance. >> Yes, I am, and I enjoy painting, that's how I relax (laughs). >> Looks great, get that on the market soon, get that on the marketplace, let's get that going. Appreciate the time, thank you so much for the insights, and stay safe and again, congratulations on the hard work you're doing, I know there's still a lot more to do, thanks for your time, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> It's theCUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier at the Palo Alto studios, for the remote interviews with Informatica, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(electronic dance music) (Intel Jingle) (ethereal electronic dance music) ♪ Okay ♪ (upbeat techno dance music) ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Yeah everybody get loose yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Ye-yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody everybody yeah ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody get loose whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ >> As a courtesy to the presenters and those around you, please silence all mobile devices, thank you. (electronic dance music) ♪ Everybody get loose ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (upbeat salsa music) ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ So happy ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) >> Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our program will begin momentarily. ♪ Hey ♪ (female singer scatting) (male singer scatting) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) (electronic dance music) ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ Red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ In don't go ♪ ♪ Oh red go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red go ♪ >> Ladies and gentlemen, there are available seats. Towards house left, house left there are available seats. If you are please standing, we ask that you please take an available seat. We will begin momentarily, thank you. ♪ Let go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ (upbeat electronic dance music) ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ I live ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ah ah ah ah ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ (bouncy techno music) >> Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask that you please take the available seats to your left, house left, there are many available seats. If you are standing, please make your way there. The program will begin momentarily, thank you. Good morning! This is Lenovo Transform 2.0! (keyboard clicks) >> Progress. Why do we always talk about it in the future? When will it finally get here? We don't progress when it's ready for us. We need it when we're ready, and we're ready now. Our hospitals and their patients need it now, our businesses and their customers need it now, our cities and their citizens need it now. To deliver intelligent transformation, we need to build it into the products and solutions we make every day. At Lenovo, we're designing the systems to fight disease, power businesses, and help you reach more customers, end-to-end security solutions to protect your data and your companies reputation. We're making IT departments more agile and cost efficient. We're revolutionizing how kids learn with VR. We're designing smart devices and software that transform the way you collaborate, because technology shouldn't just power industries, it should power people. While everybody else is talking about tomorrow, we'll keep building today, because the progress we need can't wait for the future. >> Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappen! (electronic dance music) (audience applauding) >> Alright. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning. >> Ooh, that was pretty good actually, I'll give it one more shot. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning! >> Oh, that's much better! Hope everyone's had a great morning. Welcome very much to the second Lenovo Transform event here in New York. I think when I got up just now on the steps I realized there's probably one thing in common all of us have in this room including myself which is, absolutely no one has a clue what I'm going to say today. So, I'm hoping very much that we get through this thing very quickly and crisply. I love this town, love New York, and you're going to hear us talk a little bit about New York as we get through here, but just before we get started I'm going to ask anyone who's standing up the back, there are plenty of seats down here, and down here on the right hand side, I think he called it house left is the professional way of calling it, but these steps to my right, your left, get up here, let's get you all seated down so that you can actually sit down during the keynote session for us. Last year we had our very first Lenovo Transform. We had about 400 people. It was here in New York, fantastic event, today, over 1,000 people. We have over 62 different technology demonstrations and about 15 breakout sessions, which I'll talk you through a little bit later on as well, so it's a much bigger event. Next year we're definitely going to be shooting for over 2,000 people as Lenovo really transforms and starts to address a lot of the technology that our commercial customers are really looking for. We were however hampered last year by a storm, I don't know if those of you who were with us last year will remember, we had a storm on the evening before Transform last year in New York, and obviously the day that it actually occurred, and we had lots of logistics. Our media people from AMIA were coming in. They took the, the plane was circling around New York for a long time, and Kamran Amini, our General Manager of our Data Center Infrastructure Group, probably one of our largest groups in the Lenovo DCG business, took 17 hours to get from Raleigh, North Carolina to New York, 17 hours, I think it takes seven or eight hours to drive. Took him 17 hours by plane to get here. And then of course this year, we have Florence. And so, obviously the hurricane Florence down there in the Carolinas right now, we tried to help, but still Kamran has made it today. Unfortunately, very tragically, we were hoping he wouldn't, but he's here today to do a big presentation a little bit later on as well. However, I do want to say, obviously, Florence is a very serious tragedy and we have to take it very serious. We got, our headquarters is in Raleigh, North Carolina. While it looks like the hurricane is just missing it's heading a little bit southeast, all of our thoughts and prayers and well wishes are obviously with everyone in the Carolinas on behalf of Lenovo, everyone at our headquarters, everyone throughout the Carolinas, we want to make sure everyone stays safe and out of harm's way. We have a great mixture today in the crowd of all customers, partners, industry analysts, media, as well as our financial analysts from all around the world. There's over 30 countries represented here and people who are here to listen to both YY, Kirk, and Christian Teismann speak today. And so, it's going to be a really really exciting day, and I really appreciate everyone coming in from all around the world. So, a big round of applause for everyone whose come in. (audience applauding) We have a great agenda for you today, and it starts obviously a very consistent format which worked very successful for us last year, and that's obviously our keynote. You'll hear from YY, our CEO, talk a little bit about the vision he has in the industry and how he sees Lenovo's turned the corner and really driving some great strategy to address our customer's needs. Kirk Skaugen, our Executive Vice President of DCG, will be up talking about how we've transformed the DCG business and once again are hitting record growth ratios for our DCG business. And then you'll hear from Christian Teismann, our SVP and General Manager for our commercial business, get up and talk about everything that's going on in our IDG business. There's really exciting stuff going on there and obviously ThinkPad being the cornerstone of that I'm sure he's going to talk to us about a couple surprises in that space as well. Then we've got some great breakout sessions, I mentioned before, 15 breakout sessions, so while this keynote section goes until about 11:30, once we get through that, please go over and explore, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. We have all of our subject matter experts from both our PC, NBG, and our DCG businesses out to showcase what we're doing as an organization to better address your needs. And then obviously we have the technology pieces that I've also spoken about, 62 different technology displays there arranged from everything IoT, 5G, NFV, everything that's really cool and hot in the industry right now is going to be on display up there, and I really encourage all of you to get up there. So, I'm going to have a quick video to show you from some of the setup yesterday on a couple of the 62 technology displays we've got on up on stage. Okay let's go, so we've got a demonstrations to show you today, one of the greats one here is the one we've done with NC State, a high-performance computing artificial intelligence demonstration of fresh produce. It's about modeling the population growth of the planet, and how we're going to supply water and food as we go forward. Whoo. Oh, that is not an apple. Okay. (woman laughs) Second one over here is really, hey Jonas, how are you? Is really around virtual reality, and how we look at one of the most amazing sites we've got, as an install on our high-performance computing practice here globally. And you can see, obviously, that this is the Barcelona supercomputer, and, where else in New York can you get access to being able to see something like that so easily? Only here at Lenovo Transform. Whoo, okay. (audience applauding) So there's two examples of some of the technology. We're really encouraging everyone in the room after the keynote to flow into that space and really get engaged, and interact with a lot of the technology we've got up there. It seems I need to also do something about my fashion, I've just realized I've worn a vest two days in a row, so I've got to work on that as well. Alright so listen, the last thing on the agenda, we've gone through the breakout sessions and the demo, tonight at four o'clock, there's about 400 of you registered to be on the cruise boat with us, the doors will open behind me. the boat is literally at the pier right behind us. You need to make sure you're on the boat for 4:00 p.m. this evening. Outside of that, I want everyone to have a great time today, really enjoy the experience, make it as experiential as you possibly can, get out there and really get in and touch the technology. There's some really cool AI displays up there for us all to get involved in as well. So ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a lover of tennis, as some of you would've heard last year at Lenovo Transform, as well as a lover of technology, Lenovo, and of course, New York City. I am obviously very pleasured to introduce to you Yang Yuanqing, our CEO, as we like to call him, YY. (audience applauding) (upbeat funky music) >> Good morning, everyone. >> Good morning. >> Thank you Rod for that introduction. Welcome to New York City. So, this is the second year in a row we host our Transform event here, because New York is indeed one of the most transformative cities in the world. Last year on this stage, I spoke about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and our vision around the intelligent transformation, how it would fundamentally change the nature of business and the customer relationships. And why preparing for this transformation is the key for the future of our company. And in the last year I can assure you, we were being very busy doing just that, from searching and bringing global talents around the world to the way we think about every product and every investment we make. I was here in New York just a month ago to announce our fiscal year Q1 earnings, which was a good day for us. I think now the world believes it when we say Lenovo has truly turned the corner to a new phase of growth and a new phase of acceleration in executing the transformation strategy. That's clear to me is that the last few years of a purposeful disruption at Lenovo have led us to a point where we can now claim leadership of the coming intelligent transformation. People often asked me, what is the intelligent transformation? I was saying this way. This is the unlimited potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by artificial intelligence being realized, ordering a pizza through our speaker, and locking the door with a look, letting your car drive itself back to your home. This indeed reflect the power of AI, but it just the surface of it. The true impact of AI will not only make our homes smarter and offices more efficient, but we are also completely transformed every value chip in every industry. However, to realize these amazing possibilities, we will need a structure built around the key components, and one that touches every part of all our lives. First of all, explosions in new technology always lead to new structures. This has happened many times before. In the early 20th century, thousands of companies provided a telephone service. City streets across the US looked like this, and now bundles of a microscopic fiber running from city to city bring the world closer together. Here's what a driving was like in the US, up until 1950s. Good luck finding your way. (audience laughs) And today, millions of vehicles are organized and routed daily, making the world more efficient. Structure is vital, from fiber cables and the interstate highways, to our cells bounded together to create humans. Thankfully the structure for intelligent transformation has emerged, and it is just as revolutionary. What does this new structure look like? We believe there are three key building blocks, data, computing power, and algorithms. Ever wondered what is it behind intelligent transformation? What is fueling this miracle of human possibility? Data. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, not only PCs, mobile phones, have come online and been generating data. Today it is the cameras in this room, the climate controls in our offices, or the smart displays in our kitchens at home. The number of smart devices worldwide will reach over 20 billion in 2020, more than double the number in 2017. These devices and the sensors are connected and generating massive amount of data. By 2020, the amount of data generated will be 57 times more than all the grains of sand on Earth. This data will not only make devices smarter, but will also fuel the intelligence of our homes, offices, and entire industries. Then we need engines to turn the fuel into power, and the engine is actually the computing power. Last but not least the advanced algorithms combined with Big Data technology and industry know how will form vertical industrial intelligence and produce valuable insights for every value chain in every industry. When these three building blocks all come together, it will change the world. At Lenovo, we have each of these elements of intelligent transformations in a single place. We have built our business around the new structure of intelligent transformation, especially with mobile and the data center now firmly part of our business. I'm often asked why did you acquire these businesses? Why has a Lenovo gone into so many fields? People ask the same questions of the companies that become the leaders of the information technology revolution, or the third industrial transformation. They were the companies that saw the future and what the future required, and I believe Lenovo is the company today. From largest portfolio of devices in the world, leadership in the data center field, to the algorithm-powered intelligent vertical solutions, and not to mention the strong partnership Lenovo has built over decades. We are the only company that can unify all these essential assets and deliver end to end solutions. Let's look at each part. We now understand the important importance data plays as fuel in intelligent transformation. Hundreds of billions of devices and smart IoTs in the world are generating better and powering the intelligence. Who makes these devices in large volume and variety? Who puts these devices into people's home, offices, manufacturing lines, and in their hands? Lenovo definitely has the front row seats here. We are number one in PCs and tablets. We also produces smart phones, smart speakers, smart displays. AR/VR headsets, as well as commercial IoTs. All of these smart devices, or smart IoTs are linked to each other and to the cloud. In fact, we have more than 20 manufacturing facilities in China, US, Brazil, Japan, India, Mexico, Germany, and more, producing various devices around the clock. We actually make four devices every second, and 37 motherboards every minute. So, this factory located in my hometown, Hu-fi, China, is actually the largest laptop factory in the world, with more than three million square feet. So, this is as big as 42 soccer fields. Our scale and the larger portfolio of devices gives us access to massive amount of data, which very few companies can say. So, why is the ability to scale so critical? Let's look again at our example from before. The early days of telephone, dozens of service providers but only a few companies could survive consolidation and become the leader. The same was true for the third Industrial Revolution. Only a few companies could scale, only a few could survive to lead. Now the building blocks of the next revolution are locking into place. The (mumbles) will go to those who can operate at the scale. So, who could foresee the total integration of cloud, network, and the device, need to deliver intelligent transformation. Lenovo is that company. We are ready to scale. Next, our computing power. Computing power is provided in two ways. On one hand, the modern supercomputers are providing the brute force to quickly analyze the massive data like never before. On the other hand the cloud computing data centers with the server storage networking capabilities, and any computing IoT's, gateways, and miniservers are making computing available everywhere. Did you know, Lenovo is number one provider of super computers worldwide? 170 of the top 500 supercomputers, run on Lenovo. We hold 89 World Records in key workloads. We are number one in x86 server reliability for five years running, according to ITIC. a respected provider of industry research. We are also the fastest growing provider of hyperscale public cloud, hyper-converged and aggressively growing in edge computing. cur-ges target, we are expand on this point soon. And finally to run these individual nodes into our symphony, we must transform the data and utilize the computing power with advanced algorithms. Manufactured, industry maintenance, healthcare, education, retail, and more, so many industries are on the edge of intelligent transformation to improve efficiency and provide the better products and services. We are creating advanced algorithms and the big data tools combined with industry know-how to provide intelligent vertical solutions for several industries. In fact, we studied at Lenovo first. Our IT and research teams partnered with our global supply chain to develop an AI that improved our demand forecasting accuracy. Beyond managing our own supply chain we have offered our deep learning supply focused solution to other manufacturing companies to improve their efficiency. In the best case, we have improved the demand, focused the accuracy by 30 points to nearly 90 percent, for Baosteel, the largest of steel manufacturer in China, covering the world as well. Led by Lenovo research, we launched the industry-leading commercial ready AR headset, DaystAR, partnering with companies like the ones in this room. This technology is being used to revolutionize the way companies service utility, and even our jet engines. Using our workstations, servers, and award-winning imaging processing algorithms, we have partnered with hospitals to process complex CT scan data in minutes. So, this enable the doctors to more successfully detect the tumors, and it increases the success rate of cancer diagnosis all around the world. We are also piloting our smart IoT driven warehouse solution with one of the world's largest retail companies to greatly improve the efficiency. So, the opportunities are endless. This is where Lenovo will truly shine. When we combine the industry know-how of our customers with our end-to-end technology offerings, our intelligent vertical solutions like this are growing, which Kirk and Christian will share more. Now, what will drive this transformation even faster? The speed at which our networks operate, specifically 5G. You may know that Lenovo just launched the first-ever 5G smartphone, our Moto Z3, with the new 5G Moto model. We are partnering with multiple major network providers like Verizon, China Mobile. With the 5G model scheduled to ship early next year, we will be the first company to provide a 5G mobile experience to any users, customers. This is amazing innovation. You don't have to buy a new phone, just the 5G clip on. What can I say, except wow. (audience laughs) 5G is 10 times the fast faster than 4G. Its download speed will transform how people engage with the world, driverless car, new types of smart wearables, gaming, home security, industrial intelligence, all will be transformed. Finally, accelerating with partners, as ready as we are at Lenovo, we need partners to unlock our full potential, partners here to create with us the edge of the intelligent transformation. The opportunities of intelligent transformation are too profound, the scale is too vast. No company can drive it alone fully. We are eager to collaborate with all partners that can help bring our vision to life. We are dedicated to open partnerships, dedicated to cross-border collaboration, unify the standards, share the advantage, and market the synergies. We partner with the biggest names in the industry, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, and Disney. We also find and partner with the smaller innovators as well. We're building the ultimate partner experience, open, shared, collaborative, diverse. So, everything is in place for intelligent transformation on a global scale. Smart devices are everywhere, the infrastructure is in place, networks are accelerating, and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and Lenovo is at the center of it all. We are helping to drive change with the hundreds of companies, companies just like yours, every day. We are your partner for intelligent transformation. Transformation never stops. This is what you will hear from Kirk, including details about Lenovo NetApp global partnership we just announced this morning. We've made the investments in every single aspect of the technology. We have the end-to-end resources to meet your end-to-end needs. As you attend the breakout session this afternoon, I hope you see for yourself how much Lenovo has transformed as a company this past year, and how we truly are delivering a future of intelligent transformation. Now, let me invite to the stage Kirk Skaugen, our president of Data Center growth to tell you about the exciting transformation happening in the global Data C enter market. Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) >> Well, good morning. >> Good morning. >> Good morning! >> Good morning! >> Excellent, well, I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk about how we're transforming the Data Center and taking you as our customers through your own intelligent transformation journey. Last year I stood up here at Transform 1.0, and we were proud to announce the largest Data Center portfolio in Lenovo's history, so I thought I'd start today and talk about the portfolio and the progress that we've made over the last year, and the strategies that we have going forward in phase 2.0 of Lenovo's transformation to be one of the largest data center companies in the world. We had an audacious vision that we talked about last year, and that is to be the most trusted data center provider in the world, empowering customers through the new IT, intelligent transformation. And now as the world's largest supercomputer provider, giving something back to humanity, is very important this week with the hurricanes now hitting North Carolina's coast, but we take this most trusted aspect very seriously, whether it's delivering the highest quality products on time to you as customers with the highest levels of security, or whether it's how we partner with our channel partners and our suppliers each and every day. You know we're in a unique world where we're going from hundreds of millions of PCs, and then over the next 25 years to hundred billions of connected devices, so each and every one of you is going through this intelligent transformation journey, and in many aspects were very early in that cycle. And we're going to talk today about our role as the largest supercomputer provider, and how we're solving humanity's greatest challenges. Last year we talked about two special milestones, the 25th anniversary of ThinkPad, but also the 25th anniversary of Lenovo with our IBM heritage in x86 computing. I joined the workforce in 1992 out of college, and the IBM first personal server was launching at the same time with an OS2 operating system and a free mouse when you bought the server as a marketing campaign. (audience laughing) But what I want to be very clear today, is that the innovation engine is alive and well at Lenovo, and it's really built on the culture that we're building as a company. All of these awards at the bottom are things that we earned over the last year at Lenovo. As a Fortune now 240 company, larger than companies like Nike, or AMEX, or Coca-Cola. The one I'm probably most proud of is Forbes first list of the top 2,000 globally regarded companies. This was something where 15,000 respondents in 60 countries voted based on ethics, trustworthiness, social conduct, company as an employer, and the overall company performance, and Lenovo was ranked number 27 of 2000 companies by our peer group, but we also now one of-- (audience applauding) But we also got a perfect score in the LGBTQ Equality Index, exemplifying the diversity internally. We're number 82 in the top working companies for mothers, top working companies for fathers, top 100 companies for sustainability. If you saw that factory, it's filled with solar panels on the top of that. And now again, one of the top global brands in the world. So, innovation is built on a customer foundation of trust. We also said last year that we'd be crossing an amazing milestone. So we did, over the last 12 months ship our 20 millionth x86 server. So, thank you very much to our customers for this milestone. (audience applauding) So, let me recap some of the transformation elements that have happened over the last year. Last year I talked about a lot of brand confusion, because we had the ThinkServer brand from the legacy Lenovo, the System x, from IBM, we had acquired a number of networking companies, like BLADE Network Technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last year we've been ramping based on two brand structures, ThinkAgile for next generation IT, and all of our software-defined infrastructure products and ThinkSystem as the world's highest performance, highest reliable x86 server brand, but for servers, for storage, and for networking. We have transformed every single aspect of the customer experience. A year and a half ago, we had four different global channel programs around the world. Typically we're about twice the mix to our channel partners of any of our competitors, so this was really important to fix. We now have a single global Channel program, and have technically certified over 11,000 partners to be technical experts on our product line to deliver better solutions to our customer base. Gardner recently recognized Lenovo as the 26th ranked supply chain in the world. And, that's a pretty big honor, when you're up there with Amazon and Walmart and others, but in tech, we now are in the top five supply chains. You saw the factory network from YY, and today we'll be talking about product shipping in more than 160 countries, and I know there's people here that I've met already this morning, from India, from South Africa, from Brazil and China. We announced new Premier Support services, enabling you to go directly to local language support in nine languages in 49 countries in the world, going directly to a native speaker level three support engineer. And today we have more than 10,000 support specialists supporting our products in over 160 countries. We've delivered three times the number of engineered solutions to deliver a solutions orientation, whether it's on HANA, or SQL Server, or Oracle, et cetera, and we've completely reengaged our system integrator channel. Last year we had the CIO of DXE on stage, and here we're talking about more than 175 percent growth through our system integrator channel in the last year alone as we've brought that back and really built strong relationships there. So, thank you very much for amazing work here on the customer experience. (audience applauding) We also transformed our leadership. We thought it was extremely important with a focus on diversity, to have diverse talent from the legacy IBM, the legacy Lenovo, but also outside the industry. We made about 19 executive changes in the DCG group. This is the most senior leadership team within DCG, all which are newly on board, either from our outside competitors mainly over the last year. About 50 percent of our executives were now hired internally, 50 percent externally, and 31 percent of those new executives are diverse, representing the diversity of our global customer base and gender. So welcome, and most of them you're going to be able to meet over here in the breakout sessions later today. (audience applauding) But some things haven't changed, they're just keeping getting better within Lenovo. So, last year I got up and said we were committed with the new ThinkSystem brand to be a world performance leader. You're going to see that we're sponsoring Ducati for MotoGP. You saw the Ferrari out there with Formula One. That's not a surprise. We want the Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands to be synonymous with world record performance. So in the last year we've gone from 39 to 89 world records, and partners like Intel would tell you, we now have four times the number of world record workloads on Lenovo hardware than any other server company on the planet today, with more than 89 world records across HPC, Java, database, transaction processing, et cetera. And we're proud to have just brought on Doug Fisher from Intel Corporation who had about 10-17,000 people on any given year working for him in workload optimizations across all of our software. It's just another testament to the leadership team we're bringing in to keep focusing on world-class performance software and solutions. We also per ITIC, are the number one now in x86 server reliability five years running. So, this is a survey where CIOs are in a blind survey asked to submit their reliability of their uptime on their x86 server equipment over the last 365 days. And you can see from 2016 to 2017 the downtime, there was over four hours as noted by the 750 CXOs in more than 20 countries is about one percent for the Lenovo products, and is getting worse generation from generation as we went from Broadwell to Pearlie. So we're taking our reliability, which was really paramount in the IBM System X heritage, and ensuring that we don't just recognize high performance but we recognize the highest level of reliability for mission-critical workloads. And what that translates into is that we at once again have been ranked number one in customer satisfaction from you our customers in 19 of 22 attributes, in North America in 18 of 22. This is a survey by TVR across hundreds of customers of us and our top competitors. This is the ninth consecutive study that we've been ranked number one in customer satisfaction, so we're taking this extremely seriously, and in fact YY now has increased the compensation of every single Lenovo employee. Up to 40 percent of their compensation bonus this year is going to be based on customer metrics like quality, order to ship, and things of this nature. So, we're really putting every employee focused on customer centricity this year. So, the summary on Transform 1.0 is that every aspect of what you knew about Lenovo's data center group has transformed, from the culture to the branding to dedicated sales and marketing, supply chain and quality groups, to a worldwide channel program and certifications, to new system integrator relationships, and to the new leadership team. So, rather than me just talk about it, I thought I'd share a quick video about what we've done over the last year, if you could run the video please. Turn around for a second. (epic music) (audience applauds) Okay. So, thank you to all our customers that allowed us to publicly display their logos in that video. So, what that means for you as investors, and for the investor community out there is, that our customers have responded, that this year Gardner just published that we are the fastest growing server company in the top 10, with 39 percent growth quarter-on-quarter, and 49 percent growth year-on-year. If you look at the progress we've made since the transformation the last three quarters publicly, we've grown 17 percent, then 44 percent, then 68 percent year on year in revenue, and I can tell you this quarter I'm as confident as ever in the financials around the DCG group, and it hasn't been in one area. You're going to see breakout sessions from hyperscale, software-defined, and flash, which are all growing more than a 100 percent year-on-year, supercomputing which we'll talk about shortly, now number one, and then ultimately from profitability, delivering five consecutive quarters of pre-tax profit increase, so I think, thank you very much to the customer base who's been working with us through this transformation journey. So, you're here to really hear what's next on 2.0, and that's what I'm excited to talk about today. Last year I came up with an audacious goal that we would become the largest supercomputer company on the planet by 2020, and this graph represents since the acquisition of the IBM System x business how far we were behind being the number one supercomputer. When we started we were 182 positions behind, even with the acquisition for example of SGI from HP, we've now accomplished our goal actually two years ahead of time. We're now the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers, 117 on the list, are now Lenovo computers, and you saw in the video where the universities are said, but I think what I'm most proud of is when your customers rank you as the best. So the awards at the bottom here, are actually Readers Choice from the last International Supercomputing Show where the scientific researchers on these computers ranked their vendors, and we were actually rated the number one server technology in supercomputing with our ThinkSystem SD530, and the number one storage technology with our ThinkSystem DSS-G, but more importantly what we're doing with the technology. You're going to see we won best in life sciences, best in data analytics, and best in collaboration as well, so you're going to see all of that in our breakout sessions. As you saw in the video now, 17 of the top 25 research institutions in the world are now running Lenovo supercomputers. And again coming from Raleigh and watching that hurricane come across the Atlantic, there are eight supercomputers crunching all of those models you see from Germany to Malaysia to Canada, and we're happy to have a SciNet from University of Toronto here with us in our breakout session to talk about what they're doing on climate modeling as well. But we're not stopping there. We just announced our new Neptune warm water cooling technology, which won the International Supercomputing Vendor Showdown, the first time we've won that best of show in 25 years, and we've now installed this. We're building out LRZ in Germany, the first ever warm water cooling in Peking University, at the India Space Propulsion Laboratory, at the Malaysian Weather and Meteorological Society, at Uninett, at the largest supercomputer in Norway, T-Systems, University of Birmingham. This is truly amazing technology where we're actually using water to cool the machine to deliver a significantly more energy-efficient computer. Super important, when we're looking at global warming and some of the electric bills can be millions of dollars just for one computer, and could actually power a small city just with the technology from the computer. We've built AI centers now in Morrisville, Stuttgart, Taipei, and Beijing, where customers can bring their AI workloads in with experts from Intel, from Nvidia, from our FPGA partners, to work on their workloads, and how they can best implement artificial intelligence. And we also this year launched LICO which is Lenovo Intelligent Compute Orchestrator software, and it's a software solution that simplifies the management and use of distributed clusters in both HPC and AI model development. So, what it enables you to do is take a single cluster, and run both HPC and AI workloads on it simultaneously, delivering better TCO for your environment, so check out LICO as well. A lot of the customers here and Wall Street are very excited and using it already. And we talked about solving humanity's greatest challenges. In the breakout session, you're going to have a virtual reality experience where you're going to be able to walk through what as was just ranked the world's most beautiful data center, the Barcelona Supercomputer. So, you can actually walk through one of the largest supercomputers in the world from Barcelona. You can see the work we're doing with NC State where we're going to have to grow the food supply of the world by 50 percent, and there's not enough fresh water in the world in the right places to actually make all those crops grow between now and 2055, so you're going to see the progression of how they're mapping the entire globe and the water around the world, how to build out the crop population over time using AI. You're going to see our work with Vestas is this largest supercomputer provider in the wind turbine areas, how they're working on wind energy, and then with University College London, how they're working on some of the toughest particle physics calculations in the world. So again, lots of opportunity here. Take advantage of it in the breakout sessions. Okay, let me transition to hyperscale. So in hyperscale now, we have completely transformed our business model. We are now powering six of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world, which is a significant difference from where we were two years ago. And the reason we're doing that, is we've coined a term called ODM+. We believe that hyperscalers want more procurement power than an ODM, and Lenovo is doing about $18 billion of procurement a year. They want a broader global supply chain that they can get from a local system integrator. We're more than 160 countries around the world, but they want the same world-class quality and reliability like they get from an MNC. So, what we're doing now is instead of just taking off the shelf motherboards from somewhere, we're starting with a blank sheet of paper, we're working with the customer base on customized SKUs and you can see we already are developing 33 custom solutions for the largest hyperscalers in the world. And then we're not just running notebooks through this factory where YY said, we're running 37 notebook boards a minute, we're now putting in tens and tens and tens of thousands of server board capacity per month into this same factory, so absolutely we can compete with the most aggressive ODM's in the world, but it's not just putting these things in in the motherboard side, we're also building out these systems all around the world, India, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, China. This is an example of a new hyperscale customer we've had this last year, 34,000 servers we delivered in the first six months. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 68 days. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 35 days, with more than 99 percent on-time delivery to 35 data centers in 14 countries as diverse as South Africa, India, China, Brazil, et cetera. And I'm really ashamed to say it was 99.3, because we did have a forklift driver who rammed their forklift right through the middle of the one of the server racks. (audience laughing) At JFK Airport that we had to respond to, but I think this gives you a perspective of what it is to be a top five global supply chain and technology. So last year, I said we would invest significantly in IP, in joint ventures, and M and A to compete in software defined, in networking, and in storage, so I wanted to give you an update on that as well. Our newest software-defined partnership is with Cloudistics, enabling a fully composable cloud infrastructure. It's an exclusive agreement, you can see them here. I think Nag, our founder, is going to be here today, with a significant Lenovo investment in the company. So, this new ThinkAgile CP series delivers the simplicity of the public cloud, on-premise with exceptional support and a marketplace of essential enterprise applications all with a single click deployment. So simply put, we're delivering a private cloud with a premium experience. It's simple in that you need no specialists to deploy it. An IT generalist can set it up and manage it. It's agile in that you can provision dozens of workloads in minutes, and it's transformative in that you get all of the goodness of public cloud on-prem in a private cloud to unlock opportunity for use. So, we're extremely excited about the ThinkAgile CP series that's now shipping into the marketplace. Beyond that we're aggressively ramping, and we're either doubling, tripling, or quadrupling our market share as customers move from traditional server technology to software-defined technology. With Nutanix we've been public, growing about more than 150 percent year-on-year, with Nutanix as their fastest growing Nutanix partner, but today I want to set another audacious goal. I believe we cannot just be Nutanix's fastest growing partner but we can become their largest partner within two years. On Microsoft, we are already four times our market share on Azure stack of our traditional business. We were the first to launch our ThinkAgile on Broadwell and on Skylake with the Azure Stack Infrastructure. And on VMware we're about twice our market segment share. We were the first to deliver an Intel-optimized Optane-certified VSAN node. And with Optane technology, we're delivering 50 percent more VM density than any competitive SSD system in the marketplace, about 10 times lower latency, four times the performance of any SSD system out there, and Lenovo's first to market on that. And at VMworld you saw CEO Pat Gelsinger of VMware talked about project dimension, which is Edge as a service, and we're the only OEM beyond the Dell family that is participating today in project dimension. Beyond that you're going to see a number of other partnerships we have. I'm excited that we have the city of Bogota Columbia here, an eight million person city, where we announced a 3,000 camera video surveillance solution last month. With pivot three you're going to see city of Bogota in our breakout sessions. You're going to see a new partnership with Veeam around backup that's launching today. You're going to see partnerships with scale computing in IoT and hyper-converged infrastructure working on some of the largest retailers in the world. So again, everything out in the breakout session. Transitioning to storage and data management, it's been a great year for Lenovo, more than a 100 percent growth year-on-year, 2X market growth in flash arrays. IDC just reported 30 percent growth in storage, number one in price performance in the world and the best HPC storage product in the top 500 with our ThinkSystem DSS G, so strong coverage, but I'm excited today to announce for Transform 2.0 that Lenovo is launching the largest data management and storage portfolio in our 25-year data center history. (audience applauding) So a year ago, the largest server portfolio, becoming the largest fastest growing server OEM, today the largest storage portfolio, but as you saw this morning we're not doing it alone. Today Lenovo and NetApp, two global powerhouses are joining forces to deliver a multi-billion dollar global alliance in data management and storage to help customers through their intelligent transformation. As the fastest growing worldwide server leader and one of the fastest growing flash array and data management companies in the world, we're going to deliver more choice to customers than ever before, global scale that's never been seen, supply chain efficiencies, and rapidly accelerating innovation and solutions. So, let me unwrap this a little bit for you and talk about what we're announcing today. First, it's the largest portfolio in our history. You're going to see not just storage solutions launching today but a set of solution recipes from NetApp that are going to make Lenovo server and NetApp or Lenovo storage work better together. The announcement enables Lenovo to go from covering 15 percent of the global storage market to more than 90 percent of the global storage market and distribute these products in more than 160 countries around the world. So we're launching today, 10 new storage platforms, the ThinkSystem DE and ThinkSystem DM platforms. They're going to be centrally managed, so the same XClarity management that you've been using for server, you can now use across all of your storage platforms as well, and it'll be supported by the same 10,000 plus service personnel that are giving outstanding customer support to you today on the server side. And we didn't come up with this in the last month or the last quarter. We're announcing availability in ordering today and shipments tomorrow of the first products in this portfolio, so we're excited today that it's not just a future announcement but something you as customers can take advantage of immediately. (audience applauding) The second part of the announcement is we are announcing a joint venture in China. Not only will this be a multi-billion dollar global partnership, but Lenovo will be a 51 percent owner, NetApp a 49 percent owner of a new joint venture in China with the goal of becoming in the top three storage companies in the largest data and storage market in the world. We will deliver our R and D in China for China, pooling our IP and resources together, and delivering a single route to market through a complementary channel, not just in China but worldwide. And in the future I just want to tell everyone this is phase one. There is so much exciting stuff. We're going to be on the stage over the next year talking to you about around integrated solutions, next-generation technologies, and further synergies and collaborations. So, rather than just have me talk about it, I'd like to welcome to the stage our new partner NetApp and Brad Anderson who's the senior vice president and general manager of NetApp Cloud Infrastructure. (upbeat music) (audience applauding) >> Thank You Kirk. >> So Brad, we've known each other a long time. It's an exciting day. I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say NetApp's perspective on this announcement. >> Very good, thank you very much, Kirk. Kirk and I go back to I think 1994, so hey good morning and welcome. My name is Brad Anderson. I manage the Cloud Infrastructure Group at NetApp, and I am honored and privileged to be here at Lenovo Transform, particularly today on today's announcement. Now, you've heard a lot about digital transformation about how companies have to transform their IT to compete in today's global environment. And today's announcement with the partnership between NetApp and Lenovo is what that's all about. This is the joining of two global leaders bringing innovative technology in a simplified solution to help customers modernize their IT and accelerate their global digital transformations. Drawing on the strengths of both companies, Lenovo's high performance compute world-class supply chain, and NetApp's hybrid cloud data management, hybrid flash and all flash storage solutions and products. And both companies providing our customers with the global scale for them to be able to meet their transformation goals. At NetApp, we're very excited. This is a quote from George Kurian our CEO. George spent all day yesterday with YY and Kirk, and would have been here today if it hadn't been also our shareholders meeting in California, but I want to just convey how excited we are for all across NetApp with this partnership. This is a partnership between two companies with tremendous market momentum. Kirk took you through all the amazing results that Lenovo has accomplished, number one in supercomputing, number one in performance, number one in x86 reliability, number one in x86 customers sat, number five in supply chain, really impressive and congratulations. Like Lenovo, NetApp is also on a transformation journey, from a storage company to the data authority in hybrid cloud, and we've seen some pretty impressive momentum as well. Just last week we became number one in all flash arrays worldwide, catching EMC and Dell, and we plan to keep on going by them, as we help customers modernize their their data centers with cloud connected flash. We have strategic partnerships with the largest hyperscalers to provide cloud native data services around the globe and we are having success helping our customers build their own private clouds with just, with a new disruptive hyper-converged technology that allows them to operate just like hyperscalers. These three initiatives has fueled NetApp's transformation, and has enabled our customers to change the world with data. And oh by the way, it has also fueled us to have meet or have beaten Wall Street's expectations for nine quarters in a row. These are two companies with tremendous market momentum. We are also building this partnership for long term success. We think about this as phase one and there are two important components to phase one. Kirk took you through them but let me just review them. Part one, the establishment of a multi-year commitment and a collaboration agreement to offer Lenovo branded flash products globally, and as Kurt said in 160 countries. Part two, the formation of a joint venture in PRC, People's Republic of China, that will provide long term commitment, joint product development, and increase go-to-market investment to meet the unique needs to China. Both companies will put in storage technologies and storage expertise to form an independent JV that establishes a data management company in China for China. And while we can dream about what phase two looks like, our entire focus is on making phase one incredibly successful and I'm pleased to repeat what Kirk, is that the first products are orderable and shippable this week in 160 different countries, and you will see our two companies focusing on the here and now. On our joint go to market strategy, you'll see us working together to drive strategic alignment, focused execution, strong governance, and realistic expectations and milestones. And it starts with the success of our customers and our channel partners is job one. Enabling customers to modernize their legacy IT with complete data center solutions, ensuring that our customers get the best from both companies, new offerings the fuel business success, efficiencies to reinvest in game-changing initiatives, and new solutions for new mission-critical applications like data analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Channel partners are also top of mind for both our two companies. We are committed to the success of our existing and our future channel partners. For NetApp channel partners, it is new pathways to new segments and to new customers. For Lenovo's channel partners, it is the competitive weapons that now allows you to compete and more importantly win against Dell, EMC, and HP. And the good news for both companies is that our channel partner ecosystem is highly complementary with minimal overlap. Today is the first day of a very exciting partnership, of a partnership that will better serve our customers today and will provide new opportunities to both our companies and to our partners, new products to our customers globally and in China. I am personally very excited. I will be on the board of the JV. And so, I look forward to working with you, partnering with you and serving you as we go forward, and with that, I'd like to invite Kirk back up. (audience applauding) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Well, thank you, Brad. I think it's an exciting overview, and these products will be manufactured in China, in Mexico, in Hungary, and around the world, enabling this amazing supply chain we talked about to deliver in over 160 countries. So thank you Brad, thank you George, for the amazing partnership. So again, that's not all. In Transform 2.0, last year, we talked about the joint ventures that were coming. I want to give you a sneak peek at what you should expect at future Lenovo events around the world. We have this Transform in Beijing in a couple weeks. We'll then be repeating this in 20 different locations roughly around the world over the next year, and I'm excited probably more than ever about what else is coming. Let's talk about Telco 5G and network function virtualization. Today, Motorola phones are certified on 46 global networks. We launched the world's first 5G upgradable phone here in the United States with Verizon. Lenovo DCG sells to 58 telecommunication providers around the world. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai, you saw China Telecom and China Mobile in the Lenovo booth, China Telecom showing a video broadband remote access server, a VBRAS, with video streaming demonstrations with 2x less jitter than they had seen before. You saw China Mobile with a virtual remote access network, a VRAN, with greater than 10 times the throughput and 10x lower latency running on Lenovo. And this year, we'll be launching a new NFV company, a software company in China for China to drive the entire NFV stack, delivering not just hardware solutions, but software solutions, and we've recently hired a new CEO. You're going to hear more about that over the next several quarters. Very exciting as we try to drive new economics into the networks to deliver these 20 billion devices. We're going to need new economics that I think Lenovo can uniquely deliver. The second on IoT and edge, we've integrated on the device side into our intelligent devices group. With everything that's going to consume electricity computes and communicates, Lenovo is in a unique position on the device side to take advantage of the communications from Motorola and being one of the largest device companies in the world. But this year, we're also going to roll out a comprehensive set of edge gateways and ruggedized industrial servers and edge servers and ISP appliances for the edge and for IoT. So look for that as well. And then lastly, as a service, you're going to see Lenovo delivering hardware as a service, device as a service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and hardware as a service, not just as a glorified leasing contract, but with IP, we've developed true flexible metering capability that enables you to scale up and scale down freely and paying strictly based on usage, and we'll be having those announcements within this fiscal year. So Transform 2.0, lots to talk about, NetApp the big news of the day, but a lot more to come over the next year from the Data Center group. So in summary, I'm excited that we have a lot of customers that are going to be on stage with us that you saw in the video. Lots of testimonials so that you can talk to colleagues of yourself. Alamos Gold from Canada, a Canadian gold producer, Caligo for data optimization and privacy, SciNet, the largest supercomputer we've ever put into North America, and the largest in Canada at the University of Toronto will be here talking about climate change. City of Bogota again with our hyper-converged solutions around smart city putting in 3,000 cameras for criminal detection, license plate detection, et cetera, and then more from a channel mid market perspective, Jerry's Foods, which is from my home state of Wisconsin, and Minnesota which has about 57 stores in the specialty foods market, and how they're leveraging our IoT solutions as well. So again, about five times the number of demos that we had last year. So in summary, first and foremost to the customers, thank you for your business. It's been a great journey and I think we're on a tremendous role. You saw from last year, we're trying to build credibility with you. After the largest server portfolio, we're now the fastest-growing server OEM per Gardner, number one in performance, number one in reliability, number one in customer satisfaction, number one in supercomputing. Today, the largest storage portfolio in our history, with the goal of becoming the fastest growing storage company in the world, top three in China, multibillion-dollar collaboration with NetApp. And the transformation is going to continue with new edge gateways, edge servers, NFV solutions, telecommunications infrastructure, and hardware as a service with dynamic metering. So thank you for your time. I've looked forward to meeting many of you over the next day. We appreciate your business, and with that, I'd like to bring up Rod Lappen to introduce our next speaker. Rod? (audience applauding) >> Thanks, boss, well done. Alright ladies and gentlemen. No real secret there. I think we've heard why I might talk about the fourth Industrial Revolution in data and exactly what's going on with that. You've heard Kirk with some amazing announcements, obviously now with our NetApp partnership, talk about 5G, NFV, cloud, artificial intelligence, I think we've hit just about all the key hot topics. It's with great pleasure that I now bring up on stage Mr. Christian Teismann, our senior vice president and general manager of commercial business for both our PCs and our IoT business, so Christian Teismann. (techno music) Here, take that. >> Thank you. I think I'll need that. >> Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, you and I last year, we had a bit of a chat about being in New York. >> Exports. >> You were an expat in New York for a long time. >> That's true. >> And now, you've moved from New York. You're in Munich? >> Yep. >> How does that feel? >> Well Munich is a wonderful city, and it's a great place to live and raise kids, but you know there's no place in the world like New York. >> Right. >> And I miss it a lot, quite frankly. >> So what exactly do you miss in New York? >> Well there's a lot of things in New York that are unique, but I know you spent some time in Japan, but I still believe the best sushi in the world is still in New York City. (all laughing) >> I will beg to differ. I will beg to differ. I think Mr. Guchi-san from Softbank is here somewhere. He will get up an argue very quickly that Japan definitely has better sushi than New York. But obviously you know, it's a very very special place, and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. What about Munich? Anything else that you like in Munich? >> Well I mean in Munich, we have pork knuckles. >> Pork knuckles. (Christian laughing) Very similar sushi. >> What is also very fantastic, but we have the real, the real Oktoberfest in Munich, and it starts next week, mid-September, and I think it's unique in the world. So it's very special as well. >> Oktoberfest. >> Yes. >> Unfortunately, I'm not going this year, 'cause you didn't invite me, but-- (audience chuckling) How about, I think you've got a bit of a secret in relation to Oktoberfest, probably not in Munich, however. >> It's a secret, yes, but-- >> Are you going to share? >> Well I mean-- >> See how I'm putting you on the spot? >> In the 10 years, while living here in New York, I was a regular visitor of the Oktoberfest at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, where I actually met my wife, and she's German. >> Very good. So, how about a big round of applause? (audience applauding) Not so much for Christian, but more I think, obviously for his wife, who obviously had been drinking and consequently ended up with you. (all laughing) See you later, mate. >> That's the beauty about Oktoberfest, but yes. So first of all, good morning to everybody, and great to be back here in New York for a second Transform event. New York clearly is the melting pot of the world in terms of culture, nations, but also business professionals from all kind of different industries, and having this event here in New York City I believe is manifesting what we are trying to do here at Lenovo, is transform every aspect of our business and helping our customers on the journey of intelligent transformation. Last year, in our transformation on the device business, I talked about how the PC is transforming to personalized computing, and we've made a lot of progress in that journey over the last 12 months. One major change that we have made is we combined all our device business under one roof. So basically PCs, smart devices, and smart phones are now under the roof and under the intelligent device group. But from my perspective makes a lot of sense, because at the end of the day, all devices connect in the modern world into the cloud and are operating in a seamless way. But we are also moving from a device business what is mainly a hardware focus historically, more and more also into a solutions business, and I will give you during my speech a little bit of a sense of what we are trying to do, as we are trying to bring all these components closer together, and specifically also with our strengths on the data center side really build end-to-end customer solution. Ultimately, what we want to do is make our business, our customer's businesses faster, safer, and ultimately smarter as well. So I want to look a little bit back, because I really believe it's important to understand what's going on today on the device side. Many of us have still grown up with phones with terminals, ultimately getting their first desktop, their first laptop, their first mobile phone, and ultimately smartphone. Emails and internet improved our speed, how we could operate together, but still we were defined by linear technology advances. Today, the world has changed completely. Technology itself is not a limiting factor anymore. It is how we use technology going forward. The Internet is pervasive, and we are not yet there that we are always connected, but we are nearly always connected, and we are moving to the stage, that everything is getting connected all the time. Sharing experiences is the most driving force in our behavior. In our private life, sharing pictures, videos constantly, real-time around the world, with our friends and with our family, and you see the same behavior actually happening in the business life as well. Collaboration is the number-one topic if it comes down to workplace, and video and instant messaging, things that are coming from the consumer side are dominating the way we are operating in the commercial business as well. Most important beside technology, that a new generation of workforce has completely changed the way we are working. As the famous workforce the first generation of Millennials that have now fully entered in the global workforce, and the next generation, it's called Generation Z, is already starting to enter the global workforce. By 2025, 75 percent of the world's workforce will be composed out of two of these generations. Why is this so important? These two generations have been growing up using state-of-the-art IT technology during their private life, during their education, school and study, and are taking these learnings and taking these behaviors in the commercial workspace. And this is the number one force of change that we are seeing in the moment. Diverse workforces are driving this change in the IT spectrum, and for years in many of our customers' focus was their customer focus. Customer experience also in Lenovo is the most important thing, but we've realized that our own human capital is equally valuable in our customer relationships, and employee experience is becoming a very important thing for many of our customers, and equally for Lenovo as well. As you have heard YY, as we heard from YY, Lenovo is focused on intelligent transformation. What that means for us in the intelligent device business is ultimately starting with putting intelligence in all of our devices, smartify every single one of our devices, adding value to our customers, traditionally IT departments, but also focusing on their end users and building products that make their end users more productive. And as a world leader in commercial devices with more than 33 percent market share, we can solve problems been even better than any other company in the world. So, let's talk about transformation of productivity first. We are in a device-led world. Everything we do is connected. There's more interaction with devices than ever, but also with spaces who are increasingly becoming smart and intelligent. YY said it, by 2020 we have more than 20 billion connected devices in the world, and it will grow exponentially from there on. And users have unique personal choices for technology, and that's very important to recognize, and we call this concept a digital wardrobe. And it means that every single end-user in the commercial business is composing his personal wardrobe on an ongoing basis and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and based where he's going and based what task he is doing. I would ask all of you to put out all the devices you're carrying in your pockets and in your bags. You will see a lot of you are using phones, tablets, laptops, but also cameras and even smartwatches. They're all different, but they have one underlying technology that is bringing it all together. Recognizing digital wardrobe dynamics is a core factor for us to put all the devices under one roof in IDG, one business group that is dedicated to end-user solutions across mobile, PC, but also software services and imaging, to emerging technologies like AR, VR, IoT, and ultimately a AI as well. A couple of years back there was a big debate around bring-your-own-device, what was called consumerization. Today consumerization does not exist anymore, because consumerization has happened into every single device we build in our commercial business. End users and commercial customers today do expect superior display performance, superior audio, microphone, voice, and touch quality, and have it all connected and working seamlessly together in an ease of use space. We are already deep in the journey of personalized computing today. But the center point of it has been for the last 25 years, the mobile PC, that we have perfected over the last 25 years, and has been the undisputed leader in mobility computing. We believe in the commercial business, the ThinkPad is still the core device of a digital wardrobe, and we continue to drive the success of the ThinkPad in the marketplace. We've sold more than 140 million over the last 26 years, and even last year we exceeded nearly 11 million units. That is about 21 ThinkPads per minute, or one Thinkpad every three seconds that we are shipping out in the market. It's the number one commercial PC in the world. It has gotten countless awards but we felt last year after Transform we need to build a step further, in really tailoring the ThinkPad towards the need of the future. So, we announced a new line of X1 Carbon and Yoga at CES the Consumer Electronics Show. And the reason is not we want to sell to consumer, but that we do recognize that a lot of CIOs and IT decision makers need to understand what consumers are really doing in terms of technology to make them successful. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> When you're the number one business laptop of all time, your only competition is yourself. (wall shattering) And, that's different. Different, like resisting heat, ice, dust, and spills. Different, like sharper, brighter OLA display. The trackpoint that reinvented controls, and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, built by an engineering and design team, doing the impossible for the last 25 years. This is the number one business laptop of all time, but it's not a laptop. It's a ThinkPad. (audience applauding) >> Thank you very much. And we are very proud that Lenovo ThinkPad has been selected as the best laptop in the world in the second year in a row. I think it's a wonderful tribute to what our engineers have been done on this one. And users do want awesome displays. They want the best possible audio, voice, and touch control, but some users they want more. What they want is super power, and I'm really proud to announce our newest member of the X1 family, and that's the X1 extreme. It's exceptionally featured. It has six core I9 intel chipset, the highest performance you get in the commercial space. It has Nvidia XTX graphic, it is a 4K UHD display with HDR with Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos Audio, two terabyte in SSD, so it is really the absolute Ferrari in terms of building high performance commercial computer. Of course it has touch and voice, but it is one thing. It has so much performance that it serves also a purpose that is not typical for commercial, and I know there's a lot of secret gamers also here in this room. So you see, by really bringing technology together in the commercial space, you're creating productivity solutions of one of a kind. But there's another category of products from a productivity perspective that is incredibly important in our commercial business, and that is the workstation business . Clearly workstations are very specifically designed computers for very advanced high-performance workloads, serving designers, architects, researchers, developers, or data analysts. And power and performance is not just about the performance itself. It has to be tailored towards the specific use case, and traditionally these products have a similar size, like a server. They are running on Intel Xeon technology, and they are equally complex to manufacture. We have now created a new category as the ultra mobile workstation, and I'm very proud that we can announce here the lightest mobile workstation in the industry. It is so powerful that it really can run AI and big data analysis. And with this performance you can go really close where you need this power, to the sensors, into the cars, or into the manufacturing places where you not only wannna read the sensors but get real-time analytics out of these sensors. To build a machine like this one you need customers who are really challenging you to the limit. and we're very happy that we had a customer who went on this journey with us, and ultimately jointly with us created this product. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> My world involves pathfinding both the hardware needs to the various work sites throughout the company, and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, laptop, or workstation to match those needs. My first impressions when I first seen the ThinkPad P1 was I didn't actually believe that we could get everything that I was asked for inside something as small and light in comparison to other mobile workstations. That was one of the I can't believe this is real sort of moments for me. (engine roars) >> Well, it's better than general when you're going around in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, and going on a track is not necessarily the best bet, so having a lightweight very powerful laptop is extremely useful. It can take a Xeon processor, which can support ECC from when we try to load a full car, and when we're analyzing live simulation results. through and RCFT post processor or example. It needs a pretty powerful machine. >> It's come a long way to be able to deliver this. I hate to use the word game changer, but it is that for us. >> Aston Martin has got a lot of different projects going. There's some pretty exciting projects and a pretty versatile range coming out. Having Lenovo as a partner is certainly going to ensure that future. (engine roars) (audience applauds) >> So, don't you think the Aston Martin design and the ThinkPad design fit very well together? (audience laughs) So if Q, would get a new laptop, I think you would get a ThinkPad X P1. So, I want to switch gears a little bit, and go into something in terms of productivity that is not necessarily on top of the mind or every end user but I believe it's on top of the mind of every C-level executive and of every CEO. Security is the number one threat in terms of potential risk in your business and the cost of cybersecurity is estimated by 2020 around six trillion dollars. That's more than the GDP of Japan and we've seen a significant amount of data breach incidents already this years. Now, they're threatening to take companies out of business and that are threatening companies to lose a huge amount of sensitive customer data or internal data. At Lenovo, we are taking security very, very seriously, and we run a very deep analysis, around our own security capabilities in the products that we are building. And we are announcing today a new brand under the Think umbrella that is called ThinkShield. Our goal is to build the world's most secure PC, and ultimately the most secure devices in the industry. And when we looked at this end-to-end, there is no silver bullet around security. You have to go through every aspect where security breaches can potentially happen. That is why we have changed the whole organization, how we look at security in our device business, and really have it grouped under one complete ecosystem of solutions, Security is always something where you constantly are getting challenged with the next potential breach the next potential technology flaw. As we keep innovating and as we keep integrating, a lot of our partners' software and hardware components into our products. So for us, it's really very important that we partner with companies like Intel, Microsoft, Coronet, Absolute, and many others to really as an example to drive full encryption on all the data seamlessly, to have multi-factor authentication to protect your users' identity, to protect you in unsecured Wi-Fi locations, or even simple things like innovation on the device itself, to and an example protect the camera, against usage with a little thing like a thinkShutter that you can shut off the camera. SO what I want to show you here, is this is the full portfolio of ThinkShield that we are announcing today. This is clearly not something I can even read to you today, but I believe it shows you the breadth of security management that we are announcing today. There are four key pillars in managing security end-to-end. The first one is your data, and this has a lot of aspects around the hardware and the software itself. The second is identity. The third is the security around online, and ultimately the device itself. So, there is a breakout on security and ThinkShield today, available in the afternoon, and encourage you to really take a deeper look at this one. The first pillar around productivity was the device, and around the device. The second major pillar that we are seeing in terms of intelligent transformation is the workspace itself. Employees of a new generation have a very different habit how they work. They split their time between travel, working remotely but if they do come in the office, they expect a very different office environment than what they've seen in the past in cubicles or small offices. They come into the office to collaborate, and they want to create ideas, and they really work in cross-functional teams, and they want to do it instantly. And what we've seen is there is a huge amount of investment that companies are doing today in reconfiguring real estate reconfiguring offices. And most of these kind of things are moving to a digital platform. And what we are doing, is we want to build an entire set of solutions that are just focused on making the workspace more productive for remote workforce, and to create technology that allow people to work anywhere and connect instantly. And the core of this is that we need to be, the productivity of the employee as high as possible, and make it for him as easy as possible to use these kind of technologies. Last year in Transform, I announced that we will enter the smart office space. By the end of last year, we brought the first product into the market. It's called the Hub 500. It's already deployed in thousands of our customers, and it's uniquely focused on Microsoft Skype for Business, and making meeting instantly happen. And the product is very successful in the market. What we are announcing today is the next generation of this product, what is the Hub 700, what has a fantastic audio quality. It has far few microphones, and it is usable in small office environment, as well as in major conference rooms, but the most important part of this new announcement is that we are also announcing a software platform, and this software platform allows you to run multiple video conferencing software solutions on the same platform. Many of you may have standardized for one software solution or for another one, but as you are moving in a world of collaborating instantly with partners, customers, suppliers, you always will face multiple software standards in your company, and Lenovo is uniquely positioned but providing a middleware platform for the device to really enable multiple of these UX interfaces. And there's more to come and we will add additional UX interfaces on an ongoing base, based on our customer requirements. But this software does not only help to create a better experience and a higher productivity in the conference room or the huddle room itself. It really will allow you ultimately to manage all your conference rooms in the company in one instance. And you can run AI technologies around how to increase productivity utilization of your entire conference room ecosystem in your company. You will see a lot more devices coming from the node in this space, around intelligent screens, cameras, and so on, and so on. The idea is really that Lenovo will become a core provider in the whole movement into the smart office space. But it's great if you have hardware and software that is really supporting the approach of modern IT, but one component that Kirk also mentioned is absolutely critical, that we are providing this to you in an as a service approach. Get it what you want, when you need it, and pay it in the amount that you're really using it. And within UIT there is also I think a new philosophy around IT management, where you're much more focused on the value that you are consuming instead of investing into technology. We are launched as a service two years back and we already have a significant number of customers running PC as a service, but we believe as a service will stretch far more than just the PC device. It will go into categories like smart office. It might go even into categories like phone, and it will definitely go also in categories like storage and server in terms of capacity management. I want to highlight three offerings that we are also displaying today that are sort of building blocks in terms of how we really run as a service. The first one is that we collaborated intensively over the last year with Microsoft to be the launch pilot for their Autopilot offering, basically deploying images easily in the same approach like you would deploy a new phone on the network. The purpose really is to make new imaging and enabling new PC as seamless as it's used to be in the phone industry, and we have a complete set of offerings, and already a significant number customers have deployed Autopilot with Lenovo. The second major offering is Premier Support, like in the in the server business, where Premier Support is absolutely critical to run critical infrastructure, we see a lot of our customers do want to have Premier Support for their end users, so they can be back into work basically instantly, and that you have the highest possible instant repair on every single device. And then finally we have a significant amount of time invested into understanding how the software as a service really can get into one philosophy. And many of you already are consuming software as a service in many different contracts from many different vendors, but what we've created is one platform that really can manage this all together. All these things are the foundation for a device as a service offering that really can manage this end-to-end. So, implementing an intelligent workplace can be really a daunting prospect depending on where you're starting from, and how big your company ultimately is. But how do you manage the transformation of technology workspace if you're present in 50 or more countries and you run an infrastructure for more than 100,000 people? Michelin, famous for their tires, infamous for their Michelin star restaurant rating, especially in New York, and instantly recognizable by the Michelin Man, has just doing that. Please welcome with me Damon McIntyre from Michelin to talk to us about the challenges and transforming collaboration and productivity. (audience applauding) (electronic dance music) Thank you, David. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> We on? >> So, how do you feel here? >> Well good, I want to thank you first of all for your partnership and the devices you create that helped us design, manufacture, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? I just had to say it and put out there, alright. And I was wondering, were those Michelin tires on that Aston Martin? >> I'm pretty sure there is no other tire that would fit to that. >> Yeah, no, thank you, thank you again, and thank you for the introduction. >> So, when we talk about the transformation happening really in the workplace, the most tangible transformation that you actually see is the drastic change that companies are doing physically. They're breaking down walls. They're removing cubes, and they're moving to flexible layouts, new desks, new huddle rooms, open spaces, but the underlying technology for that is clearly not so visible very often. So, tell us about Michelin's strategy, and the technology you are deploying to really enable this corporation. >> So we, so let me give a little bit a history about the company to understand the daunting tasks that we had before us. So we have over 114,000 people in the company under 170 nationalities, okay? If you go to the corporate office in France, it's Clermont. It's about 3,000 executives and directors, and what have you in the marketing, sales, all the way up to the chain of the global CIO, right? Inside of the Americas, we merged in Americas about three years ago. Now we have the Americas zone. There's about 28,000 employees across the Americas, so it's really, it's really hard in a lot of cases. You start looking at the different areas that you lose time, and you lose you know, your productivity and what have you, so there, it's when we looked at different aspects of how we were going to manage the meeting rooms, right? because we have opened up our areas of workspace, our CIO, CEOs in our zones will no longer have an office. They'll sit out in front of everybody else and mingle with the crowd. So, how do you take those spaces that were originally used by an individual but now turn them into like meeting rooms? So, we went through a large process, and looked at the Hub 500, and that really met our needs, because at the end of the day what we noticed was, it was it was just it just worked, okay? We've just added it to the catalog, so we're going to be deploying it very soon, and I just want to again point that I know everybody struggles with this, and if you look at all the minutes that you lose in starting up a meeting, and we know you know what I'm talking about when I say this, it equates to many many many dollars, okay? And so at the end the day, this product helps us to be more efficient in starting up the meeting, and more productive during the meeting. >> Okay, it's very good to hear. Another major trend we are seeing in IT departments is taking a more hands-off approach to hardware. We're seeing new technologies enable IT to create a more efficient model, how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, and how they are ultimately supporting themselves. So what's your strategy around the lifecycle management of the devices? >> So yeah you mentioned, again, we'll go back to the 114,000 employees in the company, right? You imagine looking at all the devices we use. I'm not going to get into the number of devices we have, but we have a set number that we use, and we have to go through a process of deploying these devices, which we right now service our own image. We build our images, we service them through our help desk and all that process, and we go through it. If you imagine deploying 25,000 PCs in a year, okay? The time and the daunting task that's behind all that, you can probably add up to 20 or 30 people just full-time doing that, okay? So, with partnering with Lenovo and their excellent technology, their technical teams, and putting together the whole process of how we do imaging, it now lifts that burden off of our folks, and it shifts it into a more automated process through the cloud, okay? And, it's with the Autopilot on the end of the project, we'll have Autopilot fully engaged, but what I really appreciate is how Lenovo really, really kind of got with us, and partnered with us for the whole process. I mean it wasn't just a partner between Michelin and Lenovo. Microsoft was also partnered during that whole process, and it really was a good project that we put together, and we hope to have something in a full production mode next year for sure. >> So, David thank you very, very much to be here with us on stage. What I really want to say, customers like you, who are always challenging us on every single aspect of our capabilities really do make the big difference for us to get better every single day and we really appreciate the partnership. >> Yeah, and I would like to say this is that I am, I'm doing what he's exactly said he just said. I am challenging Lenovo to show us how we can innovate in our work space with your devices, right? That's a challenge, and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. We've done some in the past, but I'm really going to challenge you, and my whole aspect about how to do that is bring you into our workspace. Show you how we make how we go through the process of making tires and all that process, and how we distribute those tires, so you can brainstorm, come back to the table and say, here's a device that can do exactly what you're doing right now, better, more efficient, and save money, so thank you. >> Thank you very much, David. (audience applauding) Well it's sometimes really refreshing to get a very challenging customers feedback. And you know, we will continue to grow this business together, and I'm very confident that your challenge will ultimately help to make our products even more seamless together. So, as we now covered productivity and how we are really improving our devices itself, and the transformation around the workplace, there is one pillar left I want to talk about, and that's really, how do we make businesses smarter than ever? What that really means is, that we are on a journey on trying to understand our customer's business, deeper than ever, understanding our customer's processes even better than ever, and trying to understand how we can help our customers to become more competitive by injecting state-of-the-art technology in this intelligent transformation process, into core processes. But this cannot be done without talking about a fundamental and that is the journey towards 5G. I really believe that 5G is changing everything the way we are operating devices today, because they will be connected in a way like it has never done before. YY talked about you know, 20 times 10 times the amount of performance. There are other studies that talk about even 200 times the performance, how you can use these devices. What it will lead to ultimately is that we will build devices that will be always connected to the cloud. And, we are preparing for this, and Kirk already talked about, and how many operators in the world we already present with our Moto phones, with how many Telcos we are working already on the backend, and we are working on the device side on integrating 5G basically into every single one of our product in the future. One of the areas that will benefit hugely from always connected is the world of virtual reality and augmented reality. And I'm going to pick here one example, and that is that we have created a commercial VR solution for classrooms and education, and basically using consumer type of product like our Mirage Solo with Daydream and put a solution around this one that enables teachers and schools to use these products in the classroom experience. So, students now can have immersive learning. They can studying sciences. They can look at environmental issues. They can exploring their careers, or they can even taking a tour in the next college they're going to go after this one. And no matter what grade level, this is how people will continue to learn in the future. It's quite a departure from the old world of textbooks. In our area that we are looking is IoT, And as YY already elaborated, we are clearly learning from our own processes around how we improve our supply chain and manufacturing and how we improve also retail experience and warehousing, and we are working with some of the largest companies in the world on pilots, on deploying IoT solutions to make their businesses, their processes, and their businesses, you know, more competitive, and some of them you can see in the demo environment. Lenovo itself already is managing 55 million devices in an IoT fashion connecting to our own cloud, and constantly improving the experience by learning from the behavior of these devices in an IoT way, and we are collecting significant amount of data to really improve the performance of these systems and our future generations of products on a ongoing base. We have a very strong partnership with a company called ADLINK from Taiwan that is one of the leading manufacturers of manufacturing PC and hardened devices to create solutions on the IoT platform. The next area that we are very actively investing in is commercial augmented reality. I believe augmented reality has by far more opportunity in commercial than virtual reality, because it has the potential to ultimately improve every single business process of commercial customers. Imagine in the future how complex surgeries can be simplified by basically having real-time augmented reality information about the surgery, by having people connecting into a virtual surgery, and supporting the surgery around the world. Visit a furniture store in the future and see how this furniture looks in your home instantly. Doing some maintenance on some devices yourself by just calling the company and getting an online manual into an augmented reality device. Lenovo is exploring all kinds of possibilities, and you will see a solution very soon from Lenovo. Early when we talked about smart office, I talked about the importance of creating a software platform that really run all these use cases for a smart office. We are creating a similar platform for augmented reality where companies can develop and run all their argumented reality use cases. So you will see that early in 2019 we will announce an augmented reality device, as well as an augmented reality platform. So, I know you're very interested on what exactly we are rolling out, so we will have a first prototype view available there. It's still a codename project on the horizon, and we will announce it ultimately in 2019, but I think it's good for you to take a look what we are doing here. So, I just wanted to give you a peek on what we are working beyond smart office and the device productivity in terms of really how we make businesses smarter. It's really about increasing productivity, providing you the most secure solutions, increase workplace collaboration, increase IT efficiency, using new computing devices and software and services to make business smarter in the future. There's no other company that will enable to offer what we do in commercial. No company has the breadth of commercial devices, software solutions, and the same data center capabilities, and no other company can do more for your intelligent transformation than Lenovo. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) >> Thanks mate, give me that. I need that. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are done. So firstly, I've got a couple of little housekeeping pieces at the end of this and then we can go straight into going and experiencing some of the technology we've got on the left-hand side of the room here. So, I want to thank Christian obviously. Christian, awesome as always, some great announcements there. I love the P1. I actually like the Aston Martin a little bit better, but I'll take either if you want to give me one for free. I'll take it. We heard from YY obviously about the industry and how the the fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting us all from a digital transformation perspective, and obviously Kirk on DCG, the great NetApp announcement, which is going to be really exciting, actually that Twitter and some of the social media panels are absolutely going crazy, so it's good to see that the industry is really taking some impact. Some of the publications are really great, so thank you for the media who are obviously in the room publishing right no. But now, I really want to say it's all of your turn. So, all of you up the back there who are having coffee, it's your turn now. I want everyone who's sitting down here after this event move into there, and really take advantage of the 15 breakouts that we've got set there. There are four breakout sessions from a time perspective. I want to try and get you all out there at least to use up three of them and use your fourth one to get out and actually experience some of the technology. So, you've got four breakout sessions. A lot of the breakout sessions are actually done twice. If you have not downloaded the app, please download the app so you can actually see what time things are going on and make sure you're registering correctly. There's a lot of great experience of stuff out there for you to go do. I've got one quick video to show you on some of the technology we've got and then we're about to close. Alright, here we are acting crazy. Now, you can see obviously, artificial intelligence machine learning in the browser. God, I hate that dance, I'm not a Millenial at all. It's effectively going to be implemented by healthcare. I want you to come around and test that out. Look at these two guys. This looks like a Lenovo management meeting to be honest with you. These two guys are actually concentrating, using their brain power to race each others in cars. You got to come past and give that a try. Give that a try obviously. Fantastic event here, lots of technology for you to experience, and great partners that have been involved as well. And so, from a Lenovo perspective, we've had some great alliance partners contribute, including obviously our number one partner, Intel, who's been a really big loyal contributor to us, and been a real part of our success here at Transform. Excellent, so please, you've just seen a little bit of tech out there that you can go and play with. I really want you, I mean go put on those black things, like Scott Hawkins our chief marketing officer from Lenovo's DCG business was doing and racing around this little car with his concentration not using his hands. He said it's really good actually, but as soon as someone comes up to speak to him, his car stops, so you got to try and do better. You got to try and prove if you can multitask or not. Get up there and concentrate and talk at the same time. 62 different breakouts up there. I'm not going to go into too much detai, but you can see we've got a very, very unusual numbering system, 18 to 18.8. I think over here we've got a 4849. There's a 4114. And then up here we've got a 46.1 and a 46.2. So, you need the decoder ring to be able to understand it. Get over there have a lot of fun. Remember the boat leaves today at 4:00 o'clock, right behind us at the pier right behind us here. There's 400 of us registered. Go onto the app and let us know if there's more people coming. It's going to be a great event out there on the Hudson River. Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote. I want to thank you all for being patient and thank all of our speakers today. Have a great have a great day, thank you very much. 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>> Narrator: Live from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, it's theCube, covering Women in Data Science conference 2018. Brought to you by Stanford. >> Welcome back to theCube. I'm Lisa Martin and we're live at Stanford University, the third annual Women in Data Science conference, WiDS. This is a great one day technical event with keynote speakers, with technical vision tracks, career panel and some very inspiring leaders. It's also expected to reach over 100,000 people today, which is incredible. So we're very fortunate to be joined by our next guest, Ruth Marinshaw, the CTO for Research Computing at Stanford University. Welcome to theCube, Ruth. >> Thank you. It's an honor to be here. >> It's great to have you here. You've been in this role as CTO for Research Computing at Stanford for nearly six years. >> That's correct. I came here after about 25 years at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. >> So tell us a little bit about what you do in terms of the services that you support to the Institute for Computational Mathematics and Engineering. >> So our team and we're about 17 now supports systems, file systems storage, databases, software across the university to support computational and data intensive science. So ICME, being really the home of computational science education at Stanford from a degree perspective, is a close partner with us. We help them with training opportunities. We try to do some collaborative planning, event promotion, sharing of ideas. We have joint office hours where we can provide system support. Margot's graduate students and data scientists can provide algorithmic support to some thousands of users across the campus, about 500 faculty. >> Wow. So this is the third year for WiDS, your third year here. >> Ruth: It is. >> When you spoke with Margot Gerritsen, who's going to be joining us later today, about the idea for WiDS, what were some of your thoughts about that? Did you expect it to make as big of >> Ruth: No. >> an impact? >> No, no people have been talking about this data tsunami and the rise of big data, literally for 10 years, but actually it arrived. This is the world we live in, data everywhere, that data deluge that had been foreseen or promised or feared was really there. And so when Margot had the idea to start WiDS, I actually thought what a nice campus event. There are women all over Stanford, across this disciplines who are engaged in data science and more who should. Stanford, if anything, is known for its interdisciplinary research and data science is one of those fields that really crosses the schools and the disciplines. So I thought, what a great way to bring women together at Stanford. I clearly did not expect that it would turn into this global phenomenon. >> That is exactly. I love that word, it is a phenomenon. It's a movement. They're expecting, there's, I said over a 100,000 participants today, at more than 150 regional events. I think that number will go up. >> Ruth: Yes. >> During the day. And more than 50 countries. >> Ruth: Yes. >> But it shows, even in three years, not only is there a need for this, there's a demand for it. That last year, I think it was upwards of 75,000 people. To make that massive of a jump in one year and global impact, is huge. But it also speaks to some of the things that Margot and her team have said. It may have been comfortable as one of or the only woman at a boardroom table, but maybe there are others that aren't comfortable and how do we help them >> Ruth: Exactly. >> and inspire them and inspire the next generation. >> Exactly. I think it's a really very powerful statement and demonstration of the importance of community and building technical teams in making, as you said, people comfortable and feeling like they're not alone. We see what 100,000 women maybe joining in internationally over this week for these events. That's such a small fraction compared to what the need probably is to what the hunger probably is. And as Margot said, we're a room full of women here today, but we're still such a minority in the industry, in the field. >> Yes. So you mentioned, you've been here at Stanford for over five years, but you were at Chapel Hill before. >> Ruth: Yes. >> Tell me a little bit about your career path in the STEM field. What was your inspiration all those years ago to study this? >> My background is actually computational social sciences. >> Lisa: Oh interesting. >> And so from an undergraduate and graduate perspective and this was the dawn of western civilization, long ago, not quite that long (Lisa laughs) but long ago and even then, I was drawn to programming and data analysis and data sort of discovery. I as a graduate student and then for a career worked at a demographic research center at UNC Chapel Hill, where firsthand you did data science, you did original data collection and data analysis, data manipulation, interpretation. And then parlayed that into more of a technical role, learning more programming languages, computer hardware, software systems and the like. And went on to find that this was really my love, was technology. And it's so exciting to be here at Stanford from that perspective because this is the birthplace of many technologies and again, referencing the interdisciplinary nature of work here, we have some of the best data scientists in the world. We have some of the best statisticians and algorithm developers and social scientists, humanists, who together can really make a difference in solving, using big data, data science, to solve some of the pressing problems. >> The social impact that data science and computer science alone can make with ideally a diverse set of eyes and perspectives looking at it, is infinite. >> Absolutely. And that's one reason I'm super excited today, this third WiDS for one of the keynote speakers, Latanya from Harvard. She's going to be talking, she's from government and sort of political science, but she's going to be talking about data science from the policy perspective and also the privacy perspective. >> Lisa: Oh yes. >> I think that this data science provides such great opportunity, not just to have the traditional STEM fields participating but really to leverage the ethicists and the humanists and the social sciences so we have that diversity of opinions shaping decision making. >> Exactly. And as much as big data and those technologies open up a lot of opportunities for new business models for corporations, I think so does it also in parallel open up new opportunities for career paths and for women in the field all over the world to make a big, big difference. >> Exactly. I think that's another value add for WiDS over it's three years is to expose young women to the range of career paths in which data science can have an impact. It's not just about coding, although that's an important part. As we heard this morning, investment banking, go figure. Right now SAP is talking about the impact on precision medicine and precision healthcare. Last year, we had the National Security Agency here, talking about use of data. We've had geographers. So I think it helps broaden the perspective about where you can take your skills in data science. And also expose you to the full range of skills that's needed to make a good data science team. >> Right. The hard skills, right, the data and statistical analyses, the computational skills, but also the softer skills. >> Ruth: Exactly. >> How do you see that in your career as those two sides, the hard skills, the soft skills coming together to formulate the things that you're doing today? >> Well we have to have a diverse team, so I think the soft skills come into play not just from having women on your team but a diversity of opinions. In all that we do in managing our systems and making decisions about what to do, we do look at data. They may not be data at scale that we see in healthcare or mobile devices or you know, our mobile health, our Fitbit data. But we try to base our decisions on an analysis of data. And purely running an algorithm or applying a formula to something will give you one perspective, but it's only part of the answer. So working as a team to evaluate other alternative methods. There never is just one right way to model something, right. And I think that, having the diversity across the team and pulling in external decision makers as well to help us evaluate the data. We look at the hard science and then we ask about, is this the right thing to do, is this really what the data are telling us. >> So with WiDS being aimed at inspiring and educating data scientists worldwide, we kind of talked a little bit already about inspiring the younger generation who are maybe as Maria Callaway said that the ideal time to inspire young females is first semester of college. But there's also sort of a flip side to that and I think that's reinvigorating. >> Yes. >> That the women who've been in the STEM field or in technology for awhile. What are some of the things that you have found invigorating in your own career about WiDS and the collaboration with other females in the industry? >> I think hearing inspirational speakers like Maria, last here and this year, Diane Greene from Google last year, talk about just the point you made that there's always opportunity, there's always time to learn new things, to start a new career. We don't have to be first year freshmen in college in order to start a career. We're all lifelong learners and to hear women present and to see and meet with people at the breakout sessions and the lunch, whose careers have been shaped by and some cases remade by the opportunity to learn new things and apply those skills in new areas. It's just exciting. Today for this conference, I brought along four or five of my colleagues from IT at Stanford, who are not data scientists. They would not call themselves data scientists, but there are data elements to all of their careers. And watching them in there this morning as they see what people are doing and hear about the possibilities, it's just exciting. It's exciting and it's empowering as well. Again back to that idea of community, you're not in it alone. >> Lisa: Right. >> And to be connected to all of these women across a generation is really, it's just invigorating. >> I love that. It's empowering, it is invigorating. Did you have mentors when you were in your undergraduate >> Ruth: I did. >> days? Were they males, females, both? >> I'd say in undergraduate and graduate school, actually they were more males from an academic perspective. But as a graduate student, I worked in a programming unit and my mentors there were all females and one in particular became then my boss. And she was a lifelong mentor to me. And I found that really important. She believed in women. She believed that programming was not a male field. She did not believe that technology was the domain only of men. And she really was supportive throughout. And I think it's important for young women as well as mid-career women to continue to have mentors to help bounce ideas off of and to help encourage inquiries. >> Definitely, definitely. I'm always surprised every now and then when I'm interviewing females in tech, they'll say I didn't have a mentor. >> Lisa: Oh. >> So I had to become one. But I think you know we think maybe think of mentors in an earlier stage of our careers, but at a later stage we talked about that reinvigoration. Are you finding WiDS as a source of maybe not only for you to have the opportunity to mentor more women but also are you finding more mentors of different generations >> Oh sure. >> as being part of WiDS? >> Absolutely, think of Karen Mathis, not just Margot but Karen, getting to know her. And we go for sort of walks around the campus and bounce ideas of each other. I think it is a community for yes, for all of us. It's not just for the young women and we want to remain engaged in this. The fact that it's global now, I think a new challenge is how do we leverage this international community now. So our opportunities for mentorship and partnership aren't limited to our local WiDS. They're an important group. But how do we connect across those different communities? >> Lisa: Exactly. >> They're international now. >> Exactly. I think I was on Twitter last night and there was the WiDS New Zealand about to go live. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And I just thought, wow it's this great community. But you make a good point that it's reached such scale so quickly. Now it's about how can we learn from women in different industries in other parts of the world. How can they learn from us? To really grow this foundation of collaboration and to a word you said earlier, community. >> It really is amazing though that in three years WiDS has become what it has because if you think about other organizations, special interest groups and the like, often they really are, they're not parochial. But they tend to be local and if they're national, they're not at this scale. >> Right. >> And so again back to it's the right time, it's the right set of organizers. I mean Margot, anything that she touches, she puts it herself completely into it and it's almost always successful. The right people, the right time. And finding ways to harness and encourage enthusiasm in really productive ways. I think it's just been fabulous. >> I agree. Last question for you. Looking back at your career, what advice would you have given young Ruth? >> Oh gosh. That's a really great question. I think to try to connect as much as you can outside your comfort zone. Back to that idea of mentorship. You think when you're an undergraduate, you explore curricula, you take crazy classes, Chinese or, not that that's crazy, but you know if you're a math major and you go take art or something. To really explore not just your academic breadth but also career opportunities and career understanding earlier on that really, oh I want to be a doctor, actually what do you know about being a doctor. I don't want to be a statistician, well why not? So I think to encourage more curiosity outside the classroom in terms of thinking about what is the world about and how can you make a difference. >> I love that, getting out of the comfort zone. One of my mentors says get comfortably uncomfortable and I love that. >> Ruth: That's great, yeah. >> I love that. Well Ruth, thank you so much for joining us on theCube today. It's our pleasure to have you here and we hope you have a great time at the event. We look forward to talking with you next time. >> We'll see you next year. >> Lisa: Excellent. >> Thank you. Buh-bye. >> I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live from Stanford University at the third annual Women in Data Science conference. #WiDS2018, join the conversation. After this short break, I'll be right back with my next guest. Stick around. (techno music)

live from the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose California it's the queue at big data sv 2015 hello everyone welcome back this is the cube our flagship program we go out to the events they strike this evil noise i'm john furrier we're here with IBM to talk about big data big data analytics and we're doing a first-ever crowd chat simulcast of live feed with IBM so guys we're going to try this out it's like go to crouch at dan / Hadoop next and join the conversation and our guests here Rob Thomas vice president product development big data analyst at IBM and beth smith general manager of IBM analytics platform guys welcome to welcome to the cube thank you welcome back and so IBM mostly we're super excited to next week as I was the interconnect you're bigger than you guys mashed up three shows for the mega shows and and Aerosmith's playing so it's going to say I'm from the Boston air so I'm really excited about you know Aerosmith and all the activities of social lounge and and whatnot but we've been following you guys the transformation of IBM is really impressive you guys certainly think a lot of heat in the press in terms of some of the performance size in the business but it's pumping right now you guys seem to have great positioning the stories are hanging together a huge customer base huge services so we're at the Big Data world which is tends to be startup driven from the past few years over the past phase one the big cuppies came in and started saying hey you know there's a big market our customers see demand and that so I got your take on on as we're coming in to interconnect next next week what is the perspective of big data asli Watson has garnered headlines from powering toys to jeopardy to solving huge world problems that's a big data problem you guys are not new to Big Data so when you look at this big data week here and Silicon Valley what's the take sure so I'll start often embedded Bethke night in so our big focus is how we start to bring data to the masses and we start to think in terms of personas data science and plays an increasingly important role around big data how people are accessing that the developer community and then obviously the line of business community which is the client set that I've been serving four years but the announcements that we've made this week around Hadoop are really focused on the first two personas in terms of data scientists how they start to get better value out of Hadoop leveraging different tools we'll talk about what some of those are and so we're really starting to change it about Hadoop results me about insight it's not about infrastructure infrastructure is interesting but it's really about what you're getting out of it so that's why we're approaching it that way it's how well it has naturally the IBM strategy around data cloud and engagement and data is really about using the insights which like Rob said it's about the value can get from the data and how that can be used in to transform professions and industries and I think when we bring it back to Big Data and the topic of a doob I think frankly it has gotten to a point that clients are really beginning to say it's time to scale they're seeing the value in the technology what it can bring how it gives them some diversity in their data and analytics platform and they're ready to announce scale on their workloads as a part of it so the theme is Hadoop next okay so that takes us right to the next point which is okay what's next is a phase one okay we got some base position validation okay this new environments customers don't want that so what so what is next i mean we're earring things like in memories hot aussie spark has proven that there's an action in member that that kind of says okay analytics at the speed of business is something that's important you guys are all over that and we've heard some things from you guys so so what's how do we get to the next part where we take Hadoop as an infrastructure opportunity and put it into practice for solutions at what what are the key things that you guys see happening that must happen for the large customers to be successful so I think that actually ties into the announcements we made this week around the open data platform because that's about getting that core platform to ensure that their standardization around it there's interoperability around it and then that's the base and that vendors and clients are coming together do that and to really enable and facilitate the community to be able to standardize around that then it's about the value on top of that around it etc it's about the workloads and what could be brought to bear to extend up that how do you apply it to real time streaming how do you add things like machine learning how do you deal with things like text analytics I mean we have a we have a client situation where the client took 4 billion tweets and were able to analyze that to identify over a hundred and ten million profiles of individuals and then by integrating and analyzing that data with the internal data sources of about seven or eight different data sources they were able to narrow into 1.7 million profiles that matched at at least ninety percent precision you know now they've got data that they can apply on buying patterns and stuff it's about that it's about going up the stack we're going to talk for hours my mind's exploding privacy creepy I mean a personas is relevant now you talk about personalization I mean collective intelligence has been an AI concepts we try not to be creepy okay cool but now so that brings us to the next level I mean you guys were talk about cognitives on that is a word you guys kick around also systems of engagement systems of records an old term that's been around in the old data warehousing dates fenced-off resources of disk and data but now with systems of engagement real-time in the moment immersive experience which is essentially the social and/or kind of mobile experience what does that mean how do you guys get there how do you make it so it's better for the users more secure or I mean these are hot button issues that kind of lead us right to that point so I'll take you to that a couple ways so so first of all your first question round head tube next so Hadoop was no longer just an IT discussion that's what I've seen changed dramatically in the last six months I was with the CEO of one of the world's largest banks just three days ago and the CEO is asking about Hadoop so there's a great interest in this topic and so so why so why would a CEO even care I think one is people are starting to understand the use cases of the place so that talks about entity extraction so how you start to look at customer records that you have internally in your systems are record to your point John and then you you know how do you match that against what's happening in the social world which is more or the engagement piece so there's a clear use case around that that changes how clients you know work with their with their customers so so that's one reason second is huge momentum in this idea of a logical data warehouse we no longer think of the data infrastructure as oh it's a warehouse or it's a database physically tied to something not tied to just what relational store so you can have a warehouse but you can scale in Hadoop you can provision data back and forth you can write queries from either side that's what we're doing is we're enabling clients to modernize their infrastructure with this type of a logit logical data warehouse approach when you take those kinds of use cases and then you put the data science tools on top of it suddenly our customers can develop a different relationship with their customers and they can really start to change the way that they're doing business Beth I want to get your comments we have the Crouch at crowd chat / a dupe next some commentary coming in ousley transforming industries billion tweets killer for customer experience so customer experience and then also the link about the data science into high gear so let's bring that now into the data science so the logical you know stores okay Nick sands with virtualization things are moving around you have some sort of cognitive engines out there that can overlay on top of that customer experience and data science how are they inter playing because this came out on some of the retail event at New York City that happened last week good point of purchase personalization customer experience hated science it's all rolling together and what does that mean unpack that for us and simplify it if you can oh wows complexing is a big topic you know it's a big topic so a couple of different points so first of all I think it is about enabling the data scientists to be able to do what they their specialty is and the technologies have advanced to allow them to do that and then it's about them having the the data and the different forms of data and the analytics at their fingertips to be able to apply that I the other point in it though is that the lines are blurring between the person that is the data scientist and the business user that needs to worry about how do they attract new customers or how do they you know create new business models and what do they use as a part of do you think we're also seeing that line blurring one of the things that we're trying to do is is help the industry around growing skills so we actually have big data University we have what two hundred and thirty thousand participants and this online free education and we're expanding that topic now to again go up the stack to go into the things that data scientists want to deal with like machine learning to go into things that the business user really wants to now be able to capture it's a part of it trying to ask you guys kind of more could be a product question and/or kind of a market question at IBM's Ted at IBM event in he talked about a big medical example in one of her favorite use cases but she made a comment in their active data active date is not a new term for the data geeks out there but we look at data science lag is really important Realty near real time is not going to make it for airplanes and people crossing the street with mobile devices so real real time means like that second latency is really important speed so active date is a big part of that so can you guys talk about passive active data and how that relates to computing and because it's all kind of coming to get it's not an obvious thing but she highlighted that in her presentation because I see with medical medical care is obviously urgent you know in the moment kind of thing so if you would what does that all mean I mean is that something custom Street paying attention to is it viable is it doable so certainly a viable I mean it's a huge opportunity and i'd say probably most famous story we have around that is the work that we did at the university of toronto at the Hospital for Sick Children where we were using real-time streaming algorithms and a real-time streaming engine to monitor instance in the neonatal care facility and this was a million data points coming off of a human body monitoring in real time and so why is that relevant I mean it's pretty pretty basic actually if you extract the data you eat yell it somewhere you load in a warehouse then you start to say well what's going on it's way too late you know we're talking about you know at the moment you need to know what's happening and so it started as a lot was in the medical field would you notice there's some examples that you mentioned but real time is now going well beyond the medical field you know places from retail at the point of sale and how things are happening to even things like farming so real time is here to stay we don't really view that as different from what I would describe as Hadoop next because streaming to me as part of what we're doing with a dupe and with spark which we'll talk about in a bit so it's certainly it is it is the new paradigm for many clients but it's going to be much more common actually if i can add there's a client North Carolina State University it's where I went to school so it's a if it's a client that I talk about a lot but they in addition to what they do with their students they also work with a lot of businesses own different opportunities that may that they may have and they have a big data and analytics sort of extended education business education project as a part of that they are now prepared to be able to analyze one petabyte in near real time so the examples that you and Rob talked about of the real world workloads that are going to exist where real time matters are there there's no doubt about it they're not going away and the technology is prepared to be able to handle the massive amount of data and analytics that needs to happen right there in real time you know that's a great exact point I mean these flagship examples are kind of like lighthouses for people to look at and kind of the ships that kind of come into the harbor if you will for other customers as you always have the early adopters can you guys talk about where the mainstream market is right now I'll see from a services standpoint you guys have great presence and a lot of accounts where are these ships coming into which Harper where the lighthouse is actually medical you mentioned some of those examples are bringing in the main customers is it the new apps that are driving it what innovations and what are the forces and what are the customers doing in the main stream right now where are they in the evolution of moving to these kind of higher-end examples so I mean so Hadoop I'd say this is the year Hadoop where clients have become serious about Hadoop like I said it's now become a board-level topic so it's it's at the forefront right now I see clients being very aggressive about trying out new use cases everybody really across every interest industry is looking for one thing which is growth and the way that you get growth if you're a bank is you're not really going to change your asset structure what you're going to change is how you engage with clients and how you personalized offers if your retailer you're not going to grow by simply adding more stores it might be a short term growth impact but you're going to change how you're engaging with clients and so these use cases are very real and they're happening now Hadoop is a bore group discussion or big day I just didn't see you formula we should have more Hadoop or is it you know I see I've seen it over and over again I'll tell you where you see a lot from his companies that are private equity-owned the private equity guys have figured out that there's savings and there's innovation here every company i worked with that has private equity ownership Hadoop is a boardroom discussion and the idea is how do we modernize the infrastructure because it's it's because of other forces though it's because of mobile it's because of cloud that comes to the forefront so absolutely so let's take Hadoop so I do bits great bad just great a lot of innovations going on there boardroom in these private equity because one they're cutting edge probably they're like an investment they want to see I realized pretty quickly now speed is critical right I would infer that was coming from the private equity side speed is critical right so speed to value what does that mean for ibn and your customers how do you guys deliver the speed to value is that's one of the things that comes out on all the premises of all the conversations is hey you can do things faster now so value on the business side what do you guys see that sure so a a lot of different ways to approach that so we believe that as I said when I said before it's not just about the infrastructure it's about the insight we've built a lot of analytic capabilities into what we're doing around a dupe and spark so that clients can get the answers faster so one thing that we're going to be we have a session here at strata this week talking about our new innovation big R which is our our algorithms which are the only our algorithms that you can run natively on Hadoop where your statistical programmers can suddenly start to you know analyze data and you know drive that to decision make it as an example so we believe that by providing the analytics on top of the infrastructure you can you can change how clients are getting value out of that so how do we do it quickly we've got IBM SoftLayer so we've got our Hadoop infrastructure up on the cloud so anybody can go provision something and get started and ours which is not something that was the case even a couple years ago and so speed is important but the tools and how you get the insight is equally important how about speed 22 value from a customer deployment standpoint is it the apps or is it innovating on existing what do you sing well I think it's both actually um and and so you talked earlier about system of engagement vs system of record you know and I think at the end of the day for clients is really about systems of insight which is some combination of that right we tend to thank the systems of engagement or the newer things and the newer applications and we tend to thank the systems of record are the older ones but I think it's a combination of it and we see it show up in different ways so I'll take an example of telco and we have a solution on the now factory and this is now about applying analytics in real time about the network and the dynamics so that for example the operator has a better view of what's happening for their customers they're in users and they can tell that an application has gone down and that customers have now switched all of a sudden using a competitive application on their mobile devices you know that's different and that is that new applications or old or is it the combination and I think at the end of the day it really comes to a combination I love these systems of insight i'm just going to write that down here inside the inside the crowd chat so i got to talk about the the holy grail for big data analytics and big data from your perspective ideas perspective and to where you guys are partnering I'll see here there's a show of rich targets of a queue hires acquisitions partnerships I mean it's really a frill ground certainly Silicon Valley and and in the growth of a big data cloud mobile and social kind of these infrared photography biz is a message we've heard so what is the holy grail and then what are you guys looking for in partnerships and within the community of startups and or other alliances sure you want to start with the Holy Grail me yeah so so you know I think at the end of the day it is about using technology for business value and business outcome I you know I really think that's what said the spirit of it and so if I tell you why we have for example increased our attention and investment around this topic it's because of that it's because of what Rob said earlier when he said the state that clients are now in um so that's what I think is really important there and I think it's only going to be successful if it's done based own standards and something that is in support of you know heterogeneous environments I mean that's the world of technology that we live in and that's a critical element of it which leads to why we are a part of the Open Data Platform initiative so on the on the the piece of analytics I was just cus our comment about our for example I was just mentioning the crowd chat I had Microsoft just revolution analytics which is not our which is different community is there a land-grab going on between the big guys of you know IBM's a big company what do you guys see in that kind of area terms acquisition targets yeah man I think the numbers would say there's not a land-grab I don't think the MMA numbers have changed at a macro level at all in the last couple years I mean we're very opportunistic in our strategy right we look for things that augment what we do I think you know it's related to partner on your comment your question on partnering but we do acquisitions is not only about what that company does but it's about how does it fit within what IBM already does because we're trying to you know we're going after a rising tide in terms of how we deliver what clients need I think some companies make that mistake they think that if they have a great product that's relevant to us maybe maybe not but it's about how it fits in what we're doing and that's how we look at all of our partnerships really and you know we partner with global systems integrators even though we have one with an IBM we partner with ISVs application developers the big push this week as I described before is around data scientists so we're rolling out data science education on Big Data university because we think that data scientists will quickly find that the best place to do that is on an IBM platform because it's the best tools and if they can provide better insight to their companies or to their clients they're going to be better off so I was so yes that was the commenting on and certainly the end of last week and earlier this week about that Twitter and it's a lot of common in Twitter's figured out and people are confused by Twitter versus facebook and I know IBM has a relation but we're so just that's why pops in my head and I was are saying HP Buddha's got a great value and so I was on the side of Twitter's a winner i love twitter i love the company misunderstood certainly i think in this market where there's waves coming in more and more there's a lot of misunderstanding and i think i want to get your perspective you can share with the folks out there what is that next way because it's confusing out there you guys are insiders IBM i would say like twitter is winning doing very well certainly we're close to you guys we are we're deeply reporting on IBM so we can see the momentum and the positioning it's all in line what we see is that is where the outcomes will end up being for customers but there's still a lot of naysayers out there certainly you guys had your share as as to where's as an example so what is the big misunderstanding that you think is out there around the market we're in and what's the next wave as always waves coming in if you're not out in front that next wave usually driftwood as the old expression goes so what is that big misunderstanding and this kind of converged from a hyper targeted with analytics this is all new stuff huge opportunities huge shifts and inflection point as Bob picciano said on the cube is its kind of both going on the same time shift and it point so what's misunderstood and what's that next big waves so let me start with the next big way is that I'll back into the misunderstanding so the next big wave to me is machine learning and how do you start to take the data assets that you have and through machine learning and the application of those type of algorithms you start to generate better insights or outcomes and the reason i think is the next big wave is it's it may be one of the last competitive motes out there if you think about it if you have a a corpus of data that's unique to you and you can practice machine learning on that and have that you know either data that you can sell or to feed into your core business that's something that nobody else can replicate so it becomes incredibly powerful so one example I'll share with you and I want to bring you my book but it's actually not getting published next week since so maybe next week but so Wiley's publishing a book I wrote and one of the examples I give is a company by the name of co-star which I think very few people have heard of co-star is in the commercial real estate business they weren't even around a decade ago they have skyrocketed you know from zero to five hundred million dollars in revenue and it's because they have data on four million commercial properties out there who else has that absolutely nobody has that kind of reach and so they've got a unique data asset they can apply things like machine learning and statistics to that and therefore anybody who wants to do anything commercial real estate has to start with them so I pointed you're starting to get the point where you have some businesses where data is the product it's not an enabler it's the actual product I think that's probably one of the big misunderstandings out there is that you know data is just something that serves our existing products or existing services we're moving to a world where data is the product and that's the moat I wrote a post in 2008 called data is the new development kit and what you're basically saying is that's the competitive advantage a business user can make any innovation observation about data and not be a scientist and change the game that's what you were saying earlier similar right that's right okay so next big wave misunderstanding what do you wait bet what's your take on what are people not getting what is Wall Street what is potential the VCG really on the front end of some of the innovation but what is the general public not getting I mean we are in shift and an inflection what's it what's the big shift and misunderstanding going on so so I I would tend to you know actually agree with with Rob that I think folks aren't yet really appreciating and I guess I would twist it a little bit and say the insight instead of just the data but but they're not realizing what that is and what it's going to give us the opportunity for you know I would retire early if I actually could predict everything that was going to happen but but you know yeah but if you think about it you know if you think about you know mid to late 90s and what we would have all fault that the internet was going to allow us to do compared to what it actually allowed us to do is probably like night and day and I think the the time we're in now when you take data and you take mobility and you take cloud and you take these systems of engagement and the fact the way people individuals actually want to do things is is similar but almost like on steroids to what we were dealing with in the mid-90s or so and so you know the possibilities are frankly endless and and I think that's part of what people aren't necessarily realizing is that they have to think about that insight that data that actually has some value to it in very different ways there's a lot of disruptive enablers out Dunham's there's a lot to look at but finding which ones will be the biggest right it's hard I mean you get paid a lot of money to do that is if you can figure it out and keep it a secret um but you didn't you machine learning is now out there you just shared with us out competitive advantage so everyone knows know everyone kind of new kind of in the inside but but not everybody's using it right i mean i think another example a company like into it has done a great job of they started off as a software company they've become a data company i think what you what i've observed in all these companies is you can build a business model that's effectively recession proof because data becomes the IP in the organization and so I don't I actually you know I think for us those are the live in the world we this is well understood I don't think it's that well understood yet yeah insiders mic right and you know when we first started doing big data research and working with thousands of clients around the world there were there were six basic use cases it started of course with the customer the the end customer and the customer 360 and that sort of thing and went through a number of different things around optimization etc but the additional one is about those new business models and you know that is clearly in the last 12 to 18 months has become a lot more of what the topic is when I'm talking to clients and I think we will see that expand even more as we go in the future we've a lot of activity on the crowd chatter crowd chatter net / Hadoop necks and I'll mentioned we can probably extend time on that if you guys want to keep it keep it going conversation is awesome and we did getting the hook here so we'll remove the conversation to crouch at totnes Esther Dube next great thought leadership and I can go on this stuff for an hour you guys are awesome great to have you on the cube and so much to talk about a lot of ground will certainly see it in to connect go final question for you guys is what do you guys see for this week real quick summarize what do you expect to see it unfold for a big data week here at Silicon Valley Big Data asked me so I think you know a lot of the what we talked about machine learning is going to be a big topic I think there'll be a lot of discussion around the open data platform that Beth mentioned before it's a big move that we made along with another group supporting the apache software foundation I think that that's a big thing for this week but it should be exciting alright guys thanks for coming out to be IBM here inside the cube we're live in Silicon Valley would be right back with our next guest after the strip break I'm Jennifer this is the cube we write back