>> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE, where we're live from Dallas, Texas here at Super computing 2022. I am joined by my cohost David Nicholson. Thank you so much for being here with me and putting up with my trashy jokes all day. >> David: Thanks for having me. >> Yeah. Yes, we are going to be talking about AI this morning and I'm very excited that our guest has has set the stage for us here quite well. Please welcome Andrea Booker. Andrea, thank you so much for being here with us. >> Absolutely. Really excited to be here. >> Savannah: How's your show going so far? >> It's been really cool. I think being able to actually see people in person but also be able to see the latest technologies and and have the live dialogue that connects us in a different way than we have been able to virtually. >> Savannah: Oh yeah. No, it's all, it's all about that human connection and that it is driving towards our first question. So as we were just chit chatting. You said you are excited about making AI real and humanizing that. >> Andrea: Absolutely. >> What does that mean to you? >> So I think when it comes down to artificial intelligence it means so many different things to different people. >> Savannah: Absolutely. >> I was talking to my father the other day for context, he's in his late seventies, right. And I'm like, oh, artificial intelligence, this or that, and he is like, machines taking over the world. Right. >> Savannah: Very much the dark side. >> A little bit Terminator. And I'm like, well, not so much. So that was a fun discussion. And then you flip it to the other side and I'm talking to my 11 year old daughter and she's like, Alexa make sure you know my song preferences. Right. And that's the other very real way in which it's kind of impacting our lives. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> Right. There's so many different use cases that I don't think everyone understands how that resonates. Right. It's the simple things from, you know, recommend Jason Engines when you're on Amazon and it suggests just a little bit more. >> Oh yeah. >> I'm a little bit to you that one, right. To stuff that's more impactful in regards to getting faster diagnoses from your doctors. Right. Such peace of mind being able to actually hear that answer faster know how to go tackle something. >> Savannah: Great point, yeah. >> You know, and, and you know, what's even more interesting is from a business perspective, you know the projections are over the next five years about 90% of customers are going to use AI applications in in some fashion, right. >> Savannah: Wow. >> And the reason why that's interesting is because if you look at it today, only about 15% of of them are doing so. Right. So we're early. So when we're talking growth and the opportunity, it's, it's amazing. >> Yeah. I can, I can imagine. So when you're talking to customers, what are are they excited? Are they nervous? Are you educating them on how to apply Dell technology to advance their AI? Where are they off at because we're so early? >> Yeah well, I think they're figuring it out what it means to them, right? >> Yeah. Because there's so many different customer applications of it, right? You have those in which, you know, are on on the highest end in which that our new XE products are targeting that when they think of it. You know, I I, I like to break it down in this fashion in which artificial intelligence can actually save human lives, right? And this is those extreme workloads that I'm talking about. We actually can develop a Covid vaccine faster, right. Pandemic tracking, you know with global warming that's going on. And we have these extreme weather events with hurricanes and tsunamis and all these things to be able to get advanced notice to people to evacuate, to move. I mean, that's a pretty profound thing. And it is, you know so it could be used in that way to save lives, right? >> Absolutely. >> Which is it's the natural outgrowth of the speeds and feeds discussions that we might have internally. It's, it's like, oh, oh, speed doubled. Okay. Didn't it double last year? Yeah. Doubled last year too. So it's four x now. What does that mean to your point? >> Andrea: Yeah, yeah. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> Being able to deliver faster insight insights that are meaningful within a timeframe when otherwise they wouldn't be meaningful. >> Andrea: Yeah. >> If I tell you, within a two month window whether it's going to rain this weekend, that doesn't help you. In hindsight, we did the calculation and we figured out it's going to be 40 degrees at night last Thursday >> Knowing it was going to completely freeze here in Dallas to our definition in Texas but we prepare better to back to bring clothes. >> We were talking to NASA about that yesterday too. I mean, I think it's, it's must be fascinating for you to see your technology deployed in so many of these different use cases as well. >> Andrea: Absolutely, absolutely. >> It's got to be a part of one of the more >> Andrea: Not all of them are extreme, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> There's also examples of, you know natural language processing and what it does for us you know, the fact that it can break down communication barriers because we're global, right? We're all in a global environment. So if you think about conference calls in which we can actually clearly understand each other and what the intent is, and the messaging brings us closer in different ways as well. Which, which is huge, right? You don't want things lost in translation, right? So it, it helps on so many fronts. >> You're familiar with the touring test idea of, of, you know whether or not, you know, the test is if you can't discern within a certain number of questions that you're interacting with an AI versus a real human, then it passes the touring test. I think there should be a natural language processing test where basically I say, fine >> Andrea: You see if people was mad or not. >> You tell me, you tell me. >> I love this idea, David. >> You know? >> Yeah. This is great. >> Okay. AI lady, >> You tell me what I meant. >> Yeah, am I actually okay? >> How far from, that's silly example but how far do you think we are from that? I mean, what, what do you seeing out there in terms of things where you're kind of like, whoa, they did this with technology I'm responsible for, that was impressive. Or have you heard of things that are on the horizon that, you know, again, you, you know they're the big, they're the big issues. >> Yeah. >> But any, anything kind of interesting and little >> I think we're seeing it perfected and tweaked, right? >> Yeah. >> You know, I think going back to my daughter it goes from her screaming at Alexa 'cause she did hear her right the first time to now, oh she understands and modifies, right? Because we're constantly tweaking that technology to have a better experience with it. And it's a continuum, right? The voice to text capabilities, right. You know, I I'd say early on it got most of those words, right Right now it's, it's getting pretty dialed in. Right. >> Savannah: That's a great example. >> So, you know, little things, little things. >> Yeah. I think I, I love the, the this thought of your daughter as the example of training AI. What, what sort of, you get to look into the future quite a bit, I'm sure with your role. >> Andrea: Absolutely. >> Where, what is she going to be controlling next? >> The world. >> The world. >> No, I mean if you think about it just from a generational front, you know technology when I was her age versus what she's experiencing, she lives and breathes it. I mean, that's the generational change. So as these are coming out, you have new folks growing with it that it's so natural that they are so open to adopting it in their common everyday behaviors. Right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> But they'd they never, over time they learn, oh well how it got there is 'cause of everything we're doing now, right. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> You know, one, one fun example, you know as my dad was like machines are taking over the world is not, not quite right. Even if when you look at manufacturing, there's a difference in using AI to go build a digital simulation of a factory to be able to optimize it and design it right before you're laying the foundation that saves cost, time and money. That's not taking people's jobs in that extreme event. >> Right. >> It's really optimizing for faster outcomes and, and and helping our customers get there which is better for everyone. >> Savannah: Yeah and safer too. I mean, using the factory example, >> Totally safer. >> You're able to model out what a workplace injury might be or what could happen. Or even the ergonomics of how people are using. >> Andrea: Yeah, should it be higher so they don't have to bend over? Right. >> Exactly. >> There's so many fantastic positive ways. >> Yeah so, so for your dad, you know, I mean it's going to help us, it's going to make, it's going to take away when I. Well I'm curious what you think, David when I think about AI, I think it's going to take out a lot of the boring things in life that, that we don't like >> Andrea: Absolutely. Doing. The monotony and the repetitive and let us optimize our creative selves maybe. >> However, some of the boring things are people's jobs. So, so it is, it it it will, it will it will push a transition in our economy in the global economy, in my opinion. That would be painful for some, for some period of time. But overall beneficial, >> Savannah: Yes. But definitely as you know, definitely there will be there will be people who will be disrupted and, you know. >> Savannah: Tech's always kind of done that. >> We No, but we need, I, I think we need to make sure that the digital divide doesn't get so wide that you know that, that people might not be negative, negatively affected. And, but, but I know that like organizations like Dell I believe what you actually see is, >> Andrea: Yeah. >> No, it's, it's elevating people. It's actually taking away >> Andrea: Easier. >> Yeah. It's, it's, it's allowing people to spend their focus on things that are higher level, more interesting tasks. >> Absolutely. >> David: So a net, A net good. But definitely some people disrupted. >> Yes. >> I feel, I feel disrupted. >> I was going to say, are, are we speaking for a friend or for ourselves here today on stage? >> I'm tired of software updates. So maybe if you could, if you could just standardize. So AI and ML. >> Andrea: Yeah. >> People talk about machine learning and, and, and and artificial intelligence. How would you differentiate the two? >> Savannah: Good question. >> It it, it's, it's just the different applications and the different workloads of it, right? Because you actually have artificial intelligence you have machine learning in which the learn it's learning from itself. And then you have like the deep learning in which it's diving deeper in in its execution and, and modeling. And it really depends on the workload applications as long as well as how large the data set is that's feeding into it for those applications. Right. And that really leads into the, we have to make sure we have the versatility in our offerings to be able to meet every dimension of that. Right. You know our XE products that we announced are really targeted for that, those extreme AI HPC workloads. Right. Versus we also have our entire portfolio products that we make sure we have GPU diversity throughout for the other applications that may be more edge centric or telco centric, right? Because AI isn't just these extreme situations it's also at the edge. It's in the cloud, it's in the data center, right? So we want to make sure we have, you know versatility in our offerings and we're really meeting customers where they're at in regards to the implementation and and the AI workloads that they have. >> Savannah: Let's dig in a little bit there. So what should customers expect with the next generation acceleration trends that Dell's addressing in your team? You had three exciting product announcements here >> Andrea: We did, we did. >> Which is very exciting. So you can talk about that a little bit and give us a little peek. >> Sure. So, you know, for, for the most extreme applications we have the XE portfolio that we built upon, right? We already had the XC 85 45 and we've expanded that out in a couple ways. The first of which is our very first XC 96 88 way offering in which we have Nvidia's H 100 as well as 8 100. 'Cause we want choice, right? A choice between performance, power, what really are your needs? >> Savannah: Is that the first time you've combined? >> Andrea: It's the first time we've had an eight way offering. >> Yeah. >> Andrea: But we did so mindful that the technology is emerging so much from a thermal perspective as well as a price and and other influencers that we wanted that choice baked into our next generation of product as we entered the space. >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah. >> The other two products we have were both in the four way SXM and OAM implementation and we really focus on diversifying and not only from vendor partnerships, right. The XC 96 40 is based off Intel Status Center max. We have the XE 86 40 that is going to be in or Nvidia's NB length, their latest H 100. But the key differentiator is we have air cold and we have liquid cold, right? So depending on where you are from that data center journey, I mean, I think one of the common themes you've heard is thermals are going up, performance is going up, TBPs are going up power, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So how do we kind of meet in the middle to be able to accommodate for that? >> Savannah: I think it's incredible how many different types of customers you're able to accommodate. I mean, it's really impressive. I feel lucky we've gotten to see these products you're describing. They're here on the show floor. There's millions of dollars of hardware literally sitting in your booth. >> Andrea: Oh yes. >> Which is casual only >> Pies for you. Yeah. >> Yeah. We were, we were chatting over there yesterday and, and oh, which, which, you know which one of these is more expensive? And the response was, they're both expensive. It was like, okay perfect >> But assume the big one is more. >> David: You mentioned, you mentioned thermals. One of the things I've been fascinated by walking around is all of the different liquid cooling solutions. >> Andrea: Yeah. >> And it's almost hysterical. You look, you look inside, it looks like something from it's like, what is, what is this a radiator system for a 19th century building? >> Savannah: Super industrial? >> Because it looks like Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. It's exactly the way to describe it. But just the idea that you're pumping all of this liquid over this, over this very, very valuable circuitry. A lot of the pitches have to do with, you know this is how we prevent disasters from happening based on the cooling methods. >> Savannah: Quite literally >> How, I mean, you look at the power requirements of a single rack in a data center, and it's staggering. We've talked about this a lot. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> People who aren't kind of EV you know electric vehicle nerds don't appreciate just how much power 90 kilowatts of power is for an individual rack and how much heat that can generate. >> Andrea: Absolutely. >> So Dell's, Dell's view on this is air cooled water cooled figure it out fit for for function. >> Andrea: Optionality, optionality, right? Because our customers are a complete diverse set, right? You have those in which they're in a data center 10 to 15 kilowatt racks, right? You're not going to plum a liquid cool power hungry or air power hungry thing in there, right? You might get one of these systems in, in that kind of rack you know, architecture, but then you have the middle ground the 50 to 60 is a little bit of choice. And then the super extreme, that's where liquid cooling makes sense to really get optimized and have the best density and, and the most servers in that solution. So that's why it really depends, and that's why we're taking that approach of diversity, of not only vendors and, and choice but also implementation and ways to be able to address that. >> So I think, again, again, I'm, you know electric vehicle nerd. >> Yeah. >> It's hysterical when you, when you mention a 15 kilowatt rack at kind of flippantly, people don't realize that's way more power than the average house is consuming. >> Andrea: Yeah, yeah >> So it's like your entire house is likely more like five kilowatts on a given day, you know, air conditioning. >> Andrea: Maybe you have still have solar panel. >> In Austin, I'm sorry >> California, Austin >> But, but, but yeah, it's, it's staggering amounts of power staggering amounts of heat. There are very real problems that you guys are are solving for to drive all of these top line value >> Andrea: Yeah. >> Propositions. It's super interesting. >> Savannah: It is super interesting. All right, Andrea, last question. >> Yes. Yes. >> Dell has been lucky to have you for the last decade. What is the most exciting part about you for the next decade of your Dell career given the exciting stuff that you get to work on. >> I think, you know, really working on what's coming our way and working with my team on that is is just amazing. You know, I can't say it enough from a Dell perspective I have the best team. I work with the most, the smartest people which creates such a fun environment, right? So then when we're looking at all this optionality and and the different technologies and, and, and you know partners we work with, you know, it's that coming together and figuring out what's that best solution and then bringing our customers along that journey. That kind of makes it fun dynamic that over the next 10 years, I think you're going to see fantastic things. >> David: So I, before, before we close, I have to say that's awesome because this event is also a recruiting event where some of these really really smarts students that are surrounding us. There were some sirens going off. They're having competitions back here. >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> So, so when they hear that. >> Andrea: Where you want to be. >> David: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. >> Savannah: Well played. >> David: That's exactly right. >> Savannah: Well played. >> Have fun. Come on over. >> Well, you've certainly proven that to us. Andrea, thank you so much for being with us This was such a treat. David Nicholson, thank you for being here with me and thank you for tuning in to theCUBE a lot from Dallas, Texas. We are all things HPC and super computing this week. My name's Savannah Peterson and we'll see you soon. >> Andrea: Awesome.

>> (dramatic orchestral music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco. It's the Cube. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello welcome back everyone. Day three of wall-to-wall coverage here at Red Hat Summit 2018 live in San Francisco, California, here at Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, your co-host of The Cube with John Troyer, analyst, co-host this week. He's the co-founder of TechReckoning, and advisory and community development firm. Our next guest is our (mumble) of the senior Vice President General Manager of Hewlett Packard Enterprises Pointnext HPE. Great to see you. >> Great to see you as well. Thank you. >> So there's not secret HPE been partnering with companies for many generations. And Red Hat is one of the big strategic partners. Lot of services opportunity, a lot of transformation happening, and the biggest thing is that true Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud, and Public Clouds all happening an IOT Edge is kind of seeing pretty clearly what's happening. On-Premise isn't going away. >> No! >> It'll look like Cloud is going to run like a Cloud. >> Yeah. >> Has to work with the Cloud or Clouds plural, and then you got the IOT Edge out there-- >> That's right. >> All kind of coming together with software Kubernetes containers all kind of being glue layers in here. So, you know, must be good for you guys okay, customers can now see what you guys have been promoting. So what is HP doing with their ad? How's that tie into that-- >> Sure, sure >> You know, transformation with the cloud? >> You said it very well John. In fact when we talked to our customers weather they realized it or not, it's the Hybrid world, and the environments are hybrid, and like you said, probably private (mumble) are not going anywhere. In fact we did the CTPF acquisition, Red Pexia acquisition, and this is really all to help clients on the Cloud journey. Doesn't really matter to us whether the workload ends up in AWS, Google, Azure, on Prime or dedicated infrastructure. So, that's actually been a huge plus for us to really have a seat at the table, to have a discussion on the customers workload strategy. Now a partner like Red Hat, who have been together working together for probably 18 years now, and it's been a long steady partnership. Who they're number one OAM partner but also the point you made I think from a services standpoint that's just a huge opportunity you know, customers tell us anyone can do infrastructure service or they're looking for platforming service. So in jointly with our consumption capabilities, and Red Hat Open Shift. Now who giving them true Container Product Service. >> Containerization, how we were talking yesterday in our wrap-up. You can bring in the new without killing the old and but it's really fundamental because people want Cloud scale, they want the horizontal scalable application, devops and programing infrastructures code. But they can't just throw out their legacy stuff. Containers which allows them to nurture those applications and workload, and let it take it's natural course. This is actually good for services cause you can take-- there's a solution there. >> That's right! There's absolutely. In fact customers tell us when they looking for the platform, it's not just to help them on their new build. They're looking for help also to run the existing environment and most of the times it's not practical to re-factor, re-architect every single of the Legacy applications, and cause some of them applications, as you know, they were done to leverage the performance optimization on the underlying infrastructure piece of it, and so one of the things we're doing join to the Red Hat is leverage Containerization to provide the portability for the applications. To move between the different environments and whether it's Private Cloud, Public Cloud, but the key thing is portability, and mobility and that's sweet spot for containerization. >> Give some use cases of customers. Take us through a day-in-the-life of maybe a couple different examples where you guys are engaging with Red Hat where you coming in the customer is like, "Okay, here's my situation". What are some of the trends and patterns that you see with customers? What specifically are you, is it workload, moving it to the mobile clouds? Is it more re-platforming On-Premise. >> Yeah! >> What are some of the things that you guys are doing? >> I would say that the bulk of our engagement, and that's one thing that we feel really good about joining Red Hat. We have really shifted our engagement model to be much more outcome driven. So the discussions with the client is always start off with like a workshop, and within that workshop we're actually understanding where the customer is really trying to go, what business outcomes they're trying to achieve? Before we start we going to push a specific technology or stack with specific solution set, and by having that alignment, in in fact, we talk about that IT means to be embedded with the business. Not alignment, embedded with the business, and because the role of IT has changed. So when we talk about workload, right, it's about no longer, and I talked about this earlier today, you no longer running workload just within the Forward Data Center, and the traditional view of that IT owns and operates the Forward Data Center, that's just dead. So, it's really more about managing the supply chain. We talk about the overall workload strategy. Which workloads make the most sense to go on Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and then the discussion also centers around their application portfolio and really understanding which applications truly need to be Cloud Native. Which ones really need to be left in shift, and this whole portability concept comes into play and that's one thing joining with Red Hat because Red Hat is really good joining with us on driving this kind of innovation workshops. Then you heard this earlier today as well, and that's just the fun of if. When no longer you talking about PowerPoint presentation, this and that. It's getting in a room, getting on a White Board and talking about what kind of journey really make sense for that party-- >> That's been really notable here, this week at this conference, right. There a lot of tech, a lot of software talked about, but also on the keynote a lot of people talking about culture, transformation, getting beyond your process, and the places you get stuck as IT professionals. So that's a great way to approach it. Right, nobody starts with a list of skews-- >> No! And absolutely, the other point is that one of the things that always gets missed is the focus on the management of change, and that's one of the key pieces we emphasize that not just the business process, but the culture, the people. How you going to bring them along the change journey. So, we actually put lot of emphasis on the whole area around management of change. We actually have a practice that this is one of the keys areas they focus on. So, you're absolutely right. Key focus area. >> I did want to flip to the products for a second. There was an announcement here now and talk a little bit about HP Synergy, Composable Infrastructure, with Open Shift. Maybe if you have a headline on exactly how you guys describe Synergy and then maybe how we working with Open Shift. >> So the HP Synergy the best way I can describe it is it is truly industry first composable infrastructure, and it gives you the ability to pull fluid resources and with software intelligence built in, and Unified API. It really gives you the ability to pull the resource that you need for specific applications. In fact, I use the analogy, it's kind of like building Legos and you can pull together based on what you going to do at a given moment, and then you decompose it and build something new. So it's all done via a software and truly gives you that flexibility that customers have been seeking. So it's just to me its got a great market traction across the globe and we'll just see continued momentum when joining with the Red Hat. What we've done is now with the announcing new solutions like the one you referenced to, to support ansible automation of the Red Hat Open Shift on the Synergy platform from the three part and the Nimble product lines and it just helps scale the Open Shift and while making container operation simple, scalable and more importantly repeatable. >> I want to make sure that I get this out there, because you guys were early with composable. Dave Valata and I had a debate on this at one of your HP Discovers where, I was really lov'n the composable message. Although it was kind of for a different massage but at that time Devos was really picking up steam. But, it's actually happening now three years later the level of granularity to services level as microservices as it comes the architecture of the future. The services model is literally, "What do you want?" it's not, "Here's the solution", it's like< "What do you need?" so, you're buying off the menu, if you will, so that changes the game. So congratulations on having that composable method first. I got to ask you, the impact to the engagements. So you now have menu of services. Does that change how you guys go to market? You mention that you do kick of meeting, you do the needs assessment, so I get that. Check! good approach. But the customers now, they just want to make sure that it's custom for them. How does that change your engagement? >> At the CXO level, the discussion, no mater which way you start the discussion it tends to kind of follow into a few buckets. Rather it's about generating additional revenue, going to market quicker, or it's about safe to invest, reducing their operating expenses, or it's about securing their information network. One of the thing we find is especially if you take a look at even the containers, applications deploying it. It's one thing to deploy in the corporate environment but if you're trying to scale that with an enterprise. If the enterprises look for added features for their security, whether it's persistent storage and again the focus always turns into what can you do to help drive the total cost of ownership down. I think with Red Hat this is one thing that works great with Open standards. The focus is really much more around not just the simplicity, reducing costs, it's also about improving performance. Rather it's the physical virtual environment. So, you're right, the menu of services. Whether it's you talking about IOT Use Scape and I think you going to see more and more of that with the user experience, the focus that we talked about. Context of our apps. I use the example of going to the airport, getting into whatever transportation you using these days, but the point from point A to point B, you're no longer fumbling through cash or credit cards. It's a very easy experience, much more personalized much more usable and a lot of what some of the hospitality franchises are doing, whether you look at Starwood Properties, Marriott. Now you use a mobile device to access your room, and as soon as you get into some of the hotel property, as soon as you access their Wifi coverage all of a sudden you can actually, the hotel property picks you up. They can provide you with the navigation, how to get to your room and depending on your profile, and whether you opted in or opted out, they will push and their partners will push some specific services to you. So, how you are able to create that kind of experience and drive additional revenue and all that is possible to the point he just make, it's truly a flourishing eco-system of micro services and apps driven by the-- >> I think that business now seeing that which is great about that having a clear line of site that these new apps and new experiences is going to drive top line revenue for your customers. I got to ask you about the services now. With more services comes more delivery, right? So, options, ecosystems, you guys have a pretty big ecosystem right as a lot of other providers. You guys always worked will with multiple companies. How are you guys engaging with Pointnext with now new sets of service providers and your network. You got Cloud Service and you have someone actually maybe could be an intergrater, could be a software developer. How do you deal with this new stake holder in your equation? >> After all the spin mergers have been completed now and I think after DXC1 it really open up the door to get a lot of the system (mumble) back on the table because they don't really view us as competitor anymore. Because we no longer have a large the EDS acquisition that we had now the DXE. So whether you look at Accenture or whether you look at Deloitte and the other (mumble) we're actually partnering with them very well both in joint submission creation but also when we talk about true additions transformation for our client a lot of expertise they bring to us is very complimentary to what we have. So one of the thing we do very well is really around the technology advisor services. (mumble) bring more of the business advisory services as well as the specific vertical depth around the specific vertical whether it's emphasized retail. So when somebody talking about retail of the future or something like that. You marry the two together and you have a strong value proposition. I think the area that we have to put a lot more emphasis upon is more around program management, and because now you actually are trying to show that one outcome for the client, so it's very important whether you working with the ISB or whet ever you working with DSI or whether you working with the other intergraters, and your own resources how you going to bring that pool together around specific tracks and deliver a one common objective for the clients? The Program Manager plays a huge role in this process. >> For the folks watching. What should they know about HP Pointnext that they many or may not know about or should know about that that highlights what you guys are doing. Can you simplify, what is the value proposition that Pointnext is bring to customers? >> As the brand itself states, the Pointnext, it's really about working with the clients finding what's next in their journey. One of the thing I would say and a lot of people get surprised by this, even with after all the spin merge. We are twenty-five thousand people plus strong and we have a lot of great and deep appreciation when it comes to some of these solution and one thing we do very well is partner. Whether it's Red Hat and other SI and bring some unique innovative solution to the market and one of the thing Jim talked about here is all about accelerating user driven innovation, and when you take a look at some of the use cases we're rolling out and I talked about the analytics and the one AI project and how we're helping manufacturing clients or other use cases to truly analyze patterns and predict failures and increase productivity. These discussions customers truly trust us. With the (mumble) and CTP acquisitions we no longer just having On-Premise discussions. We have a strong public hard knowledge. It doesn't matter whether you cloud journey involves AWS, Google, Azure and what not. We are able to actually provide a very objective road map for the workload strategy and the transmission journey. >> The users in the communities as Jim pointed out in the meeting yesterday. The communities in Open Source are now also your customers. >> Right. >> So your customers are also participating in these projects upstream. Are you guys doing an Open Source work? What Pointnext doing? Are you guys relying on that community? Is there a crossover between your customers and those users in the Open Source community? >> Yeah, we always had a very strong (mumble) with the Open Source community. We contributed a lot to the Open Source communities and if you take a look at now as we working with the number of this next generation of partners, whether it's darker, scale it and Red Hat and others it's truly opened up the boundaries as to what can we push to drive new kind of solution there. I love what some of the speakers said yesterday. You remember the example from the Boston Children's Hospital where they talked about they didn't want to deal with the complexity, they'd rather focus on what they do best and so one of the thing we're focused on in the Open Source Continuity is the driving more standardization and automation. So you can run applications as scale. You can run analytics as scale. I think those are somethings we can bring to the table. >> Great! You know the thing about what's going on now with these abstraction layers is an opportunity to create new services and accelerate the services, and congratulations. Great to have you on the program. Thanks for sharing the update. >> Absolutely! >> Congratulation on your deep partnership with Red Hat. Go to see HP Pointnext doing well. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much. >> Live coverage here in San Francisco California. Red Hat Summit 2018 will continue. I'm John Furrier John Troyer. Stay with us more coverage after this short break. >> (electronic music) >> Often times a communities all ready know about facilities that are problematic, because they smell it, they see it but

(silence) (upbeat techno music) >> Narrator: Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering Big Data NYC 2016, brought to you by headline sponsors: Cisco... IBM... Nvidia, and our ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Peter Burris. >> Welcome back to New York City, everybody. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. David Richards is here. He's the CEO of WANdisco, a long time CUBE alum. Great to see you again. >> Great to be back. >> It was good fun hanging out with last night and a good surprise at the IBM event. There was good action across the street. >> Yeah, you're both looking surprisingly well, actually. >> (Dave laughs) Yes. >> Well, we also heard about the WANdisco versus theCUBE golf tournament, that apparently theCUBE just did really, really well in it and WANdisco went running away with their tail between their legs. >> Well, I talked to Furrier last night. I said, "David Richards was telling me "that he kicked your butt on the golf course." He goes, "Yeah, that's true, actually." (laughter) >> I think I've got some video proof that he actually gave me $20 live on air because, of course, his wallet was empty. (laughter) He was blowing the dust off it, you know? >> Of course, yeah, the body swerve. >> Alligator arms. >> So David, it's, again, great to see you again. You guys have been in this business since day one, and things are evolving. How are things changing for WANdisco? >> So, when we first came into this market, back in the mid-2006, 2007, and then we obviously made a bunch of acquisitions around 2011 and 2012 that took us headlong into the big data marketplace. We pretty much had a completely different business model to our business model now. Then, we had a product called Non-Stop NameNode... My God, can you imagine that? (Dave laughs) That was very focused on the Hadoop marketplace because, at that time, we believed, like everybody else, that Hadoop was going to take over the world, people were going to move to commoditized servers, open-source software, and solve the huge storage problems that they were going to have from both a cost and efficiency perspective. What I think has happened, or is happening right now, is this evolution, and it really is more of a revolution than an evolution is taking place, where workloads, and we were discussing this last night, are moving at massive scale to cloud, and people are really skipping that step, where we thought they were going to have 5, 10,000 sort of clusters on-premise, but now they have some clusters on-prem, but the bulk of the workloads are actually moving into cloud. I was just discussing with George, off-camera a few minutes ago, why that is happening, and there's a lot of applications that are very efficient. The cloud packs are up there ready to use, off the shelf, and it becomes very simplistic, and to be quite frank, do we really care anymore about all these different open-source components? Is the CIO waking up in the middle of the night thinking, oh, my God, am I going to use Ignite, am I going to use Spark, am I going to use Pig, am I going to use Hive, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Of course they're not. They really just want to-- Let's inverse the question to ourselves. If you were going to start a competitor to Uber tomorrow, would you go and build a data center (Dave laughs) or would you just throw up a thousand servers up in the cloud and have done with it, and use all the apps that are up there? Of course, the answer's simple, so that's really what's happening. >> Well, one of the things that I... I wrote a piece of research a million years ago in which I prognosticated, the Dictionary Word of the Day, that the value of middleware was inversely proportional to the degree to which anybody knew anything about it. (Dave laughs) CIOs are waking up and asking those questions today, which is an indication that they're creating a problem. >> Yep. >> Infrastructure has to do no harm in the organization. I had a CIO friend for years who still asks his chief CTO, "To what degree is infrastructure creating a problem "for me today?" >> Yeah. >> And if it's creating a problem, it's a problem. >> Mm-hmm. >> You don't want to have to know about this stuff, and so what degree are you helping companies mask some of those... that visibility, so that people can spend less time worrying about the infrastructure? >> So, what we're focused on is a business model that has gone from direct, where we were hiring out a very large direct sales force enterprise, the classic enterprise sales guys that would go knock on doors, knock deals down, go and sell to the Global 1000s, to an indirect model, and we announced that OAM, recently with IBM, IBM Big Replicate, that is under the covers, is WANdisco Fusion, which is a great deal for us. So, our focus very much is on data movement, and data movement between data centers, for companies that want to stay on-prem, and between data centers and in and out of cloud seamlessly, and the word there is seamlessly. So, we worked very hard for the past 18 months on our product such that anybody can go to, if you want to go to the AWS Marketplace, you can, in a few clicks, begin to replicate petabyte-scale in and out of cloud, and we think, and we were discussing this last night, that the hybrid-cloud model is really fascinating, so the ability to take data on-premise, query it in cloud, get complete consistency between on-prem and cloud, but also have all the efficiency in the cloud economics, the elasticity, all the applications that exist in cloud, and I think that model is really interesting, and what's interesting is, I'm not sure that the little guys can execute in that model other than, like we're doing, veer on OAM, an indirect model. So, I'm not sure whether or not, just to go back to the conversation, CIOs are as concerned as they used to be about which Hadoop distribution, for example, they're using. I never hear that question anymore. That question was a 2012, 2013 question. What the CIOs are now concerned about is the economics of cloud, and how do I get that less than $5 per terabyte of data economics that I get in a cloud environment. >> Well, but also increasingly, they're talking about the use cases. >> David: Yeah. >> They want to get their people... They don't want to replicate the Linux or Unix versus NT wars of the 1990s, which was made possible because they were focused on what accounting package am I going to run? Am I going to run it-- >> Yeah. >> on this or that? You know, it was known process, unknown technology. In today's universe, it's unknown process, and they don't want to know as much about the technology, so they're focused on how do I get my men and women focused on use cases that are delivering value for their business. >> Exactly, and the economics question is really simple. Am I going to build a massive, partially used, elastic infrastructure on-premise or am I just going to go and use the elastic infrastructure that already exists in the cloud? That's a no-brainer. That's already happening, and the good news for us, the good news for WANdisco, is it's precisely what we do. It's a data movement problem. Now, I'm bound to say that, but it is actually a data movement problem. In this idea that you have data that changes, active transactional data, as we call it, so the active transactional data movement is a really hard problem. You can't just take a snapshot, right? A file scan and then a snapshot and then move the data, and that's the problem that all the other data replication guys have got. That's what IBM, OAM, that's why we've got strategic partnerships with companies like Oracle, like Amazon, and why I'm sure we'll be announcing things in due course with the other cloud vendors, like Google, for example, and Microsoft with their Azure products. They all have that problem, so data movement, in and out of cloud, if it's batch, if it's static, if it's archival data, easy problem to solve. There's a million and one different replication products. >> Dave: Right. >> You can use rsync if you really wanted to do that, but active transactional data, data that changes, data that moves, you know, at petabyte scale, hard problem. That's the problem that we solve. >> Because you've got speed of light problems and you're exposing yourself to data loss-- >> Yep. >> if something goes wrong. >> Peter: Fidelity is a problem. >> An eventual consistency replication model-- >> Yeah, it... >> doesn't work. You can't... If I'm query... We've got a customer that's trying to look at cardiographs, right, in and out of cloud. I mean, would you really feel comfortable in your cardiograph eventually getting into the cloud and being analyzed? You know, would you? You've got to be absolutely crystal clear that the data is completely consistent from the stuff that I'm generating on-premise versus the models that I'm building in cloud. It's vitally important. >> Well, I would imagine there's regulations, in certain industries anyway, that-- >> Oh, yeah, absolutely. >> require that eventual consistency doesn't fit, right? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, at the moment, without us, that's all you got, I'm afraid... >> Okay. >> Well, so, I'm on a mission, let me and I want to get your take on it, that we always talk about elastic infrastructure, which is a given workload, being able to scale up and scale down. >> David: Yeah. >> I think it's time to start talking about plastic infrastructure-- >> David: Oh, yeah, I like it. >> where a given workload, but a reconfiguration of how that workload is applied because of the value of data, because of integration, because of the need to be able to move in response to business needs. So we talk about plastic infrastructure, where we are reconfiguring based on policy and rules and some other things. What do you think about that? >> I love it, and the reason I love it is because, just to take a step back, the definition of hybrid cloud is... You would imagine it would be relatively simple, but to me, a hybrid means that you have... You know, it's a bit like a hybrid golf club. It's neither a driver nor an iron. It's somewhere in between. So, you have the same workload that can exist both on-premise and in the cloud. I can use both the cloud and on-premise interchangeably. What hybrid cloud actually means, for all the vendors, and this is their dirty little secret, it means that you have some workloads running against some data in the cloud and others that will run against some data on-premise. Now, why do they do that? Because they have to. Because they can't guarantee complete consistency between on-premise and cloud. Our definition of hybrid cloud is exactly the same data, if you want, between on-premise and cloud, and I love this plastic phrase, the idea of repurposing all of those applications, and they can live anywhere. It doesn't matter 'cause it's the same data. >> Yeah, so we have two terms we have to copyright here, plastic infrastructure. >> Plastic... >> What was the other one we heard? >> Data portfolio. >> Data portfolio, yeah. We'll run the tape back >> Plastic infrastructure. (laughter) >> Plastic infrastructure. >> I'm going to steal it (laughs). >> Please do, you know? But the key thing is, as these technologies get more deeply embedded within business and how the business runs, it's incumbent upon the technology leadership to be able to rapidly be able to reconfigure the infrastructure in response to what the business needs. That's not elasticity. >> Yeah. >> That's plasticity. >> I love it, absolutely. (Peter laughs) And I think you're touching on something that's changing, and what we discussed earlier, which is that CIOs aren't waking up in the middle of the night thinking, am I going to use Pig or Hive or any of those other open source components. They're thinking about the applications that they're going to build. How am I actually going to start using this data? And I think the agenda's kind of moved on, and walking around the whole... There's still a little bit of confusion. You still have people talking about infrastructure like it really still matters. I'm not absolutely sure it does. >> Well, so let's talk about that. We got a few minutes or something like that. >> Dave: It matters when it breaks, you know? >> What's that? >> It matters when it breaks. >> It sure does matter when it breaks. >> You know, but otherwise, nobody wants to think about it. >> No, yeah, because like I said earlier, it's the degree to which-- >> We have time, but I want to explore the new distribution model as well. >> Yeah, go ahead. >> Let me do that, get that out, tick that box, if I can. Help me understand, David, how it all works. So you, the partnership with IBM and others, you mentioned Amazon, how does it work? You are in the IBM cloud offering? IBM is actually selling that offering? Is it a branded IBM product? >> So, it's in the big data analytics and cloud offerings. So, at the moment, IBM are very focused, as you know, on owning the platform. IBM, as a company, have the own the platform. >> Dave: Yeah, absolutely. >> So, I'm delighted to say that we're embedded into their platform. Now, they had a big launch of some products last night. >> Yeah. >> I know that they were talking about IBM Big Replicate, which is 100% white label OAM of WANdisco Fusion to solve some very specific problems, primarily around data movement. So, at the hybrid cloud, how do I punch data out into clouds, run the analytics against it, and be sure that I'm going to get the right results? That's what Big Replicate solves, and also, they're moving into mixed environments, whether they're NetApp, just kind of Teradata environment, SAS-based environments, or whether a customer already has an existing distribution of, say, Cloudera or Hortonworks, so they can live alongside that, so we can replicate data between existing deployments, where they may have already made a strategic decision to go with one of those distributions, and also be able to migrate not just into IBM Big Insights, but also into their cloud offering, so that's a great deal for us. We're not... They're selling it themselves. I mean, obviously we've done a lot of field enablement, trained 5,000 or so IBM sales rep, and, you know, if a small company like WANdisco, or a small company like virtually any of the vendors in there that are not in the Global 1000 list, the go-to market has to be indirect. >> And so you're... Totally agree, and so you're basically, if I understand it correctly, you're moving what are conventional filers into the cloud. Customers are doing that. >> Oh. >> How fast is that happening and why are they doing that? >> My, God. I mean, we have not announced this product yet, but we're in the middle of launching it. It's, at scale, moving petabyte-scale data from, and this is transactional data, so it's a hard problem to solve, right, so it's an active data... It's an active transactional data replication problem. So, a lot of... The dirty little secret in the cloud is that a lot of those NFS filers have not moved yet-- >> Right. >> And why haven't they moved? 'Cause they can't. Because you can't just... You know, if you were to travel, one of the customaries of banks and travel companies is they can't press pause in their organization, do a file scan that's going to take six months, and then turn it back on again, and hey, presto, it's in the cloud. You can't do that. So, you kind of have to... At every single migration of those filers, of any sort of data, is a hybrid model, so you have to be able to run both on-prem and cloud while that migration is happening, and there, I can tell you, are a lot, a hell of a lot of NetApp filers that are going to move very soon here, in time. >> Dave: Oh, 'cause that's the problem that you solve. Otherwise, you'd have to freeze everything, which would kill your business, so you can't do it. >> Yeah, so when human beings imagine things, we're always imagining small use cases, small sets, like moving a few files into Dropbox or something, and that's okay that I can't edit those files for the few seconds it takes to move. I took a look at a deal the other day that was 3 billion files. (Dave laughs) Right, 3 billion. You can't even... My brain can't even calculate that, right? That's a three to six month data movement, and Amazon, for example, thought of this product called Snowball, which-- >> Yeah. >> You know, no techy ever believes this story, but, of course, they FedEx a box, a ruggedized hard drive to you essentially, a ruggedized server that you pour your data into it and then you mail it back to them and they can put it there. That doesn't work, of course, for transactional data, for data that changes all the time. >> These are hard problems to solve, and I go to market, getting back to your question, it is all about indirect, you know? So, AWS, a strategic partnership, that, Oracle, a strategic partnership, that, IBM... And as I said, I'm sure that we'll be doing things with Google and Microsoft soon, and they're the five partnerships that I really care about, to be quite frank with you. >> Mm-hmm. and this comes back to this notion of infrastructure, the value of infrastructure, and just to touch on it for a second, so many years ago, when we were doing client-server, >> David: Mm-hmm. >> We would test it on a local area network and deploy it on a WAN (David laughs) and wonder why it blew up. >> David: Yeah. >> The realities of the speed of light and the practical limitations have a real impact on design, and so where infrastructure still matters is we still have to worry about design, we still have to worry about legacy financial assets, how we're deploying those assets, and I want to come back to this because we were talking earlier about data as an asset, the value of data within the business, and you don't want to be limited by the legacy as you try to find new ways of generating value out of your data, and what you guys are trying to allow is that the data can be moved in response to the use case as opposed to the use case not being made possible because of the legacy decisions about where to put your data. >> David: That's precisely it, and I don't think that any CIO, in their right mind, wants to continue with the huge maintenance costs, maintenance payments they have to make to some of those vendors, some of those NFS-based vendors. They need to shut them down. They have to figure out a way to move them into cloud so you get cloud economics, and also be able to query the data in a massively efficient way. You simply cannot do that at the moment. They simply cannot do that at the moment, so, as I said, as we continue to launch these products in the marketplace, I'm sure you'll see, at scale, some pretty large companies surprising-- You know, the two that spring to my mind are that the regulators in the US and the UK, Fenero and the FCA, are both in the process of their moving all into cloud, 100% into cloud, and I would expect to see that trend continue. I mean, the re:Invent... I don't want to talk about another-- and we're here at Strata, but the AWS re:Invent, I would expect to see several major financial service companies announcing cloud strategy. >> Yeah, and Fenero's a big user of the AWS cloud. They talk about it pretty aggressively, and really interesting use case there. So, yeah, so we got to end. What's next for you guys? You've mentioned you're going to be at re:Invent, you're going to be at World of Watson (laughs)? Where are we going to find you next? >> Both of those. Obviously, the white label with IBM is a really interesting deal for us. I can't talk about deal flow yet 'cause it's our end of quarter at the moment, but I can tell you that they're doing a pretty damn good job of selling, so we're in execution mode at the moment, where we've already announced some key partnerships. There'll be more key partnerships to come, I'm sure. We're obviously chasing deals down with some of the other cloud vendors, and I'd expect to see us announcing some interesting new customer wins in the coming days and weeks. >> Dave: Great. Well, congratulations on the momentum and the renewed strategy. I love it, and I appreciate you coming to theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live at Big Data NYC, Strata and Hadoop World. Be right back. (spacey electronica music)