>> (Narrator) The CUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding by Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Fira Barcelona. It's theCUBE live at MWC23 our third day of coverage of this great, huge event continues. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. We've got Dell and Dish here, we are going to be talking about what they're doing together. Andy Sheahen joins as global director of Telecom Cloud Core and Next Gen Ops at Dell. And Marc Rouanne, one of our alumni is back, EVP and Chief Network Officer at Dish Wireless. Welcome guys. >> Great to be here. >> (Both) Thank you. >> (Lisa) Great to have you. Mark, talk to us about what's going on at Dish wireless. Give us the update. >> Yeah so we've built a network from scratch in the US, that covered the US, we use a cloud base Cloud native, so from the bottom of the tower all the way to the internet uses cloud distributed cloud, emits it, so there are a lot of things about that. But it's unique, and now it's working, so we're starting to play with it and that's pretty cool. >> What's some of the proof points, proof in the pudding? >> Well, for us, first of all it was to do basic voice and data on a smartphone and for me the success would that you won't see the difference for a smartphone. That's base line. the next step is bringing this to the enterprise for their use case. So we've covered- now we have services for smartphones. We use our brand, Boost brand, and we are distributing that across the US. But as I said, the real good stuff is when you start to making you know the machines and all the data and the applications for the enterprise. >> Andy, how is Dell a facilitator of what Marc just described and the use cases and what their able to deliver? >> We're providing a number of the servers that are being used out in their radio access network. The virtual DU servers, we're also providing some bare metal orchestration capabilities to help automate the process of deploying all these hundreds and thousands of nodes out in the field. Both of these, the servers and the bare metal orchestra product are things that we developed in concert with Dish, working together to understand the way, the best way to automate, based on the tooling their using in other parts of their network, and we've been with you guys since day one, really. >> (Marc) Absolutely, yeah. >> Making each others solutions better the whole way. >> Marc, why Dell? >> So, the way the networks work is you have a cloud, and you have a distributed edge you need someone who understands the diversity of the edge in order to bring the cloud software to the edge, and Dell is the best there, you know, you can, we can ask them to mix and match accelerators, processors memory, it's very diverse distributed edge. We are building twenty thousands sides so you imagine the size and the complexity and Dell was the right partner for that. >> (Andy) Thank you. >> So you mentioned addressing enterprise leads, which is interesting because there's nothing that would prevent you from going after consumer wireless technically, right but it sounds like you have taken a look at the market and said "we're going to go after this segment of the market." >> (Marc) Yeah. >> At least for now. Are there significant differences between what an enterprise expects from a 5G network than, verses a consumer? >> Yeah. >> (Dave) They have higher expectations, maybe, number one I guess is, if my bill is 150 dollars a month I can have certain levels of expectations whereas a large enterprise the may be making a much more significant investment, are their expectations greater? >> (Marc) Yeah. >> Do you have a higher bar to get over? >> So first, I mean first we use our network for consumers, but for us it's an enterprise. That's the consumer segment, an enterprise. So we expose the network like we would to a car manufacturer, or to a distributor of goods of food and beverage. But what you expect when you are an enterprise, you expect, manage your services. You expect to control the goodness of your services, and for this you need to observe what's happening. Are you delivering the right service? What is the feedback from the enterprise users, and that's what we call the observability. We have a data centric network, so our enterprises are saying "Yeah connecting is enough, but show us how it works, and show us how we can learn from the data, improve, improve, and become more competitive." That's the big difference. >> So what you say Marc, are some of the outcomes you achieved working with Dell? TCO, ROI, CapX, OpX, what are some of the outcomes so far, that you've been able to accomplish? >> Yeah, so obviously we don't share our numbers, but we're very competitive. Both on the CapX and the OpX. And the second thing is that we are much faster in terms of innovation, you know one of the things that Telecorp would not do, was to tap into the IT industry. So we access to the silicon and we have access to the software and at a scale that none of the Telecorp could ever do and for us it's like "wow" and it's a very powerful industry and we've been driving the consist- it's a bit technical but all the silicone, the accelerators, the processors, the GPU, the TPUs and it's like wow. It's really a transformation. >> Andy, is there anything anagallis that you've dealt with in the past to the situation where you have this true core edge, environment where you have to instrument the devices that you provide to give that level of observation or observability, whatever the new word is, that we've invented for that. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean has there, is there anything- >> Yeah absolutely. >> Is this unprecedented? >> No, no not at all. I mean Dell's been really working at the edge since before the edge was called the edge right, we've been selling, our hardware and infrastructure out to retail shops, branch office locations, you know just smaller form factors outside of data centers for a very long time and so that's sort of the consistency from what we've been doing for 30 years to now the difference is the volume, the different number of permutations as Marc was saying. The different type of accelerator cards, the different SKUS of different server types, the sheer volume of nodes that you have in a nationwide wireless network. So the volumes are much different, the amount of data is much different, but the process is really the same. It's about having the infrastructure in the right place at the right time and being able to understand if it's working well or if it's not and it's not just about a red light or a green light but healthy and unhealthy conditions and predicting when the red lights going to come on. And we've been doing that for a while it's just a different scale, and a different level of complexity when you're trying to piece together all these different components from different vendors. >> So we talk a lot about ecosystem, and sometimes because of the desire to talk about the outcomes and what the end users, customers, really care about sometimes we will stop at the layer where say a Dell lives, and we'll see that as the sum total of the component when really, when you talk about a server that Dish is using that in and of itself is an ecosystem >> Yep, yeah >> (Dave) or there's an ecosystem behind it you just mentioned it, the kinds of components and the choices that you make when you optimize these devices determine how much value Dish, >> (Andy) Absolutely. >> Can get out of that. How deep are you on that hardware? I'm a knuckle dragging hardware guy. >> Deep, very deep, I mean just the number of permutations that were working through with Dish and other operators as well, different accelerator cards that we talked about, different techniques for timing obviously there's different SKUs with the silicon itself, different chip sets, different chips from different providers, all those things have to come together, and we build the basic foundation and then we also started working with our cloud partners Red Hat, Wind River, all these guys, VM Ware, of course and that's the next layer up, so you've got all the different hardware components, you've got the extraction layer, with your virtualization layer and or ubernetise layer and all of that stuff together has to be managed compatibility matrices that get very deep and very big, very quickly and that's really the foundational challenge we think of open ran is thinking all these different pieces are going to fit together and not just work today but work everyday as everything gets updated much more frequently than in the legacy world. >> So you care about those things, so we don't have to. >> That's right. >> That's the beauty of it. >> Yes. >> Well thank you. (laughter) >> You're welcome. >> I want to understand, you know some of the things that we've been talking about, every company is a data company, regardless of whether it's telco, it's a retailer, if it's my bank, it's my grocery store and they have to be able to use data as quickly as possible to make decisions. One of the things they've been talking here is the monetization of data, the monetization of the network. How do you, how does Dell help, like a Dish be able to achieve the monetization of their data. >> Well as Marc was saying before the enterprise use cases are what we are all kind of betting on for 5G, right? And enterprises expect to have access to data and to telemetry to do whatever use cases they want to execute in their particular industry, so you know, if it's a health care provider, if it's a factory, an agricultural provider that's leveraging this network, they need to get the data from the network, from the devices, they need to correlate it, in order to do things like automatically turn on a watering system at a certain time, right, they need to know the weather around make sure it's not too windy and you're going to waste a lot of water. All that has data, it's going to leverage data from the network, it's going to leverage data from devices, it's going to leverage data from applications and that's data that can be monetized. When you have all that data and it's all correlated there's value, inherit to it and you can even go onto a forward looking state where you can intelligently move workloads around, based on the data. Based on the clarity of the traffic of the network, where is the right place to put it, and even based on current pricing for things like on demand insists from cloud providers. So having all that data correlated allows any enterprise to make an intelligent decision about how to move a workload around a network and get the most efficient placing of that workload. >> Marc, Andy mentions things like data and networks and moving data across the networks. You have on your business card, Chief Network Officer, what potentially either keeps you up at night in terror or gets you very excited about the future of your network? What's out there in the frontier and what are those key obstacles that have to be overcome that you work with? >> Yeah, I think we have the network, we have the baseline, but we don't yet have the consumption that is easy by the enterprise, you know an enterprise likes to say "I have 4K camera, I connect it to my software." Click, click, right? And that's where we need to be so we're talking about it APIs that are so simple that they become a click and we engineers we have a tendency to want to explain but we should not, it should become a click. You know, and the phone revolution with the apps became those clicks, we have to do the same for the enterprise, for video, for surveillance, for analytics, it has to be clicks. >> While balancing flexibility, and agility of course because you know the folks who were fans of CLIs come in light interfaces, who hate gooeys it's because they feel they have the ability to go down to another level, so obviously that's a balancing act. >> But that's our job. >> Yeah. >> Our job is to hide the complexity, but of course there is complexity. It's like in the cloud, an emprise scaler, they manage complex things but it's successful if they hide it. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> It's the same. You know we have to be emprise scaler of connectivity but hide it. >> Yeah. >> So that people connect everything, right? >> Well it's Andy's servers, we're all magicians hiding it all. >> Yeah. >> It really is. >> It's like don't worry about it, just know, >> Let us do it. >> Sit down, we will serve you the meal. Don't worry how it's cooked. >> That's right, the enterprises want the outcome. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> They don't want to deal with that bottom layer. But it is tremendously complex and we want to take that on and make it better for the industry. >> That's critical. Marc I'd love to go back to you and just I know that you've been in telco for such a long time and here we are day three of MWC the name changed this year, from Mobile World Congress, reflecting mobilism isn't the only thing, obviously it was the catalyst, but what some of the things that you've heard at the event, maybe seen at the event that give you the confidence that the right players are here to help move Dish wireless forward, for example. >> You know this is the first, I've been here for decades it's the first time, and I'm a Chief Network Officer, first time we don't talk about the network. >> (Andy) Yeah. >> Isn't that surprising? People don't tell me about speed, or latency, they talk about consumption. Apps, you know videos surveillance, or analytics or it's, so I love that, because now we're starting to talk about how we can consume and monetize but that's the first time. We use to talk about gigabytes and this and that, none of that not once. >> What does that signify to you, in terms of the evolution? >> Well you know, we've seen that the demand for the healthcare, for the smart cities, has been here for a decade, proof of concepts for a decade but the consumption has been behind and for me this is the oldest team is waking up to we are going to make it easy, so that the consumption can take off. The demand is there, we have to serve it. And the fact that people are starting to say we hide the complexity that's our problem, but don't even mention it, I love it. >> Yep. Drop the mic. >> (Andy and Marc) Yeah, yeah. >> Andy last question for you, some of the things we know Dell has a big and verging presents in telco, we've had a chance to see the booth, see the cool things you guys are featuring there, Dave did a great tour of it, talk about some of the things you've heard and maybe even from customers at this event that demonstrate to you that Dell is going in the right direction with it's telco strategy. >> Yeah, I mean personally for me this has been an unbelievable event for Dell we've had tons and tons of customer meetings of course and the feedback we're getting is that the things we're bring to market whether it's infrablocks, or purposeful servers that are designed for the telecom network are what our customers need and have always wanted. We get a lot of wows, right? >> (Lisa) That's nice. >> "Wow we didn't know Dell was doing this, we had no idea." And the other part of it is that not everybody was sure that we were going to move as fast as we have so the speed in which we've been able to bring some of these things to market and part of that was working with Dish, you know a pioneer, to make sure we were building the right things and I think a lot of the customers that we talked to really appreciate the fact that we're doing it with the industry, >> (Lisa) Yeah. >> You know, not at the industry and that comes across in the way they are responding and what their talking to us about now. >> And that came across in the interview that you just did. Thank you both for joining Dave and me. >> Thank you >> Talking about what Dell and Dish are doing together the proof is in the pudding, and you did a great job at explaining that, thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guest and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from MWC 23 day three. We will be back with our next guest, so don't go anywhere. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020, brought to you by Mirantis. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020. Big event, multiple tracks powered by theCUBE365. Happy to welcome you to the program. We have a first time guest, Willem du Plessis. He's the Director of Customer Success and Operations with Mirantis. Willem, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu, thanks for having me. >> So customer success, of course, a big topic in the industry last few years. CX a is so important. Employee success and enabling that, but what, give us a little bit, your background and the purview that you and your team cover. >> Exactly, yeah, so everything under my umbrella would be basically post-sales. The whole customer experience after the point of a sale's been made so the whole account management, thereafter, the success of the accounts, as well as the health of the account, thereafter, that will be anything basically post-sales would be under my umbrella. >> Wonderful, well, the big piece is the shift. As we know, software went from shrink wrapped, and hardware talking about CapX to the cloud really ushered in OpX we're touching more subscription managed services and the like, so Mirantis has a subscription offering. Why don't you lay out for us the new pieces of this and how Mirantis puts together its offerings? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with the launch of our new product, Docker Enterprise Container Cloud, we're making two subscriptions available as well, named ProdCare, which is a 24/7 mission critical support offering and OpsCare, being a fully managed platform as a service subscription. Now, these offerings have been available on the Mirantis Cloud platform side of our business for quite some time, we've been very successful with them, so it's really excited making them available to our Docker Enterprise customers. So what we're trying to achieve with these accounts or with these subscriptions, rather, you know, 30% of the Fortune 100 companies are Mirantis customers, so we work on a day to day basis with their container and Kubernetes initiatives. So when we speak to these customers, there are really two trends that are becoming very clear, the first being the requirements of service providers or vendors being able to provide a true 24/7 experience. What I mean by that is not the ability to just react to an incident on a 24/7 basis. That's what I mean, what I mean is all of these companies would have operation centers spread across the globe. So it is at every hour of the day, it would be business as usual. And what these companies require is a, a partner or a service provider that can match that level, that way of operating. That is the first trend that we're noting. The second piece is really the, the evolution of the dev environment. The dev environment is no longer really seen as a secondary or a lower class citizen, if you want to call it, it's really become part of the whole DevOps pipeline, so it is really part of a mission critical process so that what customers, what we hear from our customers is that they require a real enterprise-grade subscription that they can cover this whole pipeline under and, you know, have the same quality of service from whether that is a dev or a production environment. So if you have a failure on your dev environment and your developer cannot push code, that is, is the same level of criticality than there would then they would be on if the failure was on the production environment. So this whole pipeline is decidedly seen as a mission critical component. And that's a great, that's really where ProdCare comes in. It is really this 24/7 mission critical follow the sun, enterprise-grade subscription that provides our customers with enhanced SLAs that, like I said, we've been running on the Mirantis Cloud platform side for quite some time, we've had some significant success with some really large companies. The second offering that we're making available with, like I said, is OpsCare. Now OpsCare is an ITIL-based managed service subscription, where we provide a platform as a service experience to a customer on their infrastructure of choice. So it is really irrelevant for us what your infrastructure is, whether that is on-prem or in the public cloud, as long as the product can support the infrastructure, you know, the subscription would be available for you and the experience would be very much the same. So what OpsCare, like I said, entails is, is this whole ITIL framework that would include, you know, the monitoring and managing of your alerts, the incident management process, the problem management process, as well as change management that would include the lifecycle management of the whole environment. And that would just enable our customers to run on the latest and greatest offer of our product at all times. And same as with ProdCare that's been available for our brass cloud platform customers for quite a while, and have seen some significant success with that, as well. >> Well, we definitely have seen that growth of the managed care offerings like you're talking about with OpsCare, you know, shift left is so important for companies to be able to focus on what's critically important. As you said, developers need to be enabled, it can't just be waiting for things or be, you know, relegated to, you know, have to wait in line or use something that's not optimal. What are some of those outcomes? What can companies do that they weren't able before? What are some of those successes that you're seeing with the managed care OpsCare solution? >> Yeah, so the real way we OpsCare really comes to its own is allowing the customer ability to focus on what is important to their business and spend less time on what we call, keep the lights on. What I mean by that is they're solely focused on developing the application, developing the workload and spend basically no time on managing the infrastructure and, you know, maintaining it, or, you know, providing, do whatever to, to keep the platform stable, because that is done by Mirantis, already. So for example, if we take 2020 year to date, all the platforms running under OpsCare has an availability number of above four nines, and that is a significant number. So that really just sets such a strong foundation for a customer to just have that sole focus on, on what is important to them and, you know, just sets that foundation for them to develop their workload, to develop their business, and achieve their goals. >> Well, what about when it comes to the managing and monitoring of the environment? What kind of metrics are your customers having? Help us understand what the customer still does themselves or the reporting they're getting and what Mirantis, I'm assuming there's probably a Tam involved for at least some of the larger accounts there. Help us understand that shared responsibility, if you would for these type of environments. >> Yeah, exactly. So the whole ITIL framework, as I explained earlier, incident management, problem management, change, all of that, this is wrapped around why a customer success manager that is, you know, brings a single level of ownership on an accountability, and just have a customer direct for a single point of contact as a business partner. So all this is all our customers, their primary KPI or metric that we look at is just the availability of the platform. That is the primary SLA and thereafter, all of the other things happening, you know, the success of the workload and so on, because there's a lot of things that makes the result of the workload, not just the platform or the infrastructure, it's the quality of the workload, and so on, and so forth. But the main metric our customer would be looking at is that availability number, you know, how available and how stable and accessible is the environment, and, you know, like I said, just removing that requirement for them to spend, basically, no time on the platform or the infrastructure, and just focusing on the workload. >> Yeah, when it comes to in the field, your field, your partners, that line between ProdCare and OpsCare, obviously, the trend is going towards, you know, the fully managed option, but what guidance do you have out there, or what trends do you seeing? Is it a certain size company, that tends to be trending that way? Are there certain verticals that may be are further ahead? What's the reality, today? What do you expect to see over the next kind of six, 12 months? >> Yeah, so most of the companies that we see that as, that is engaging with us on an OpsCare, or managed service engagement, you know, they have the ambitions to go down the block model and build, operate, transfer, you know, to take the operations over themselves, at some point, and we have that option available to them, if they wish to choose it further along the line. What we do find is, is that they, that they don't really, you know, exercise that later on. It is, we do find it is such a smooth integration with our customers, that they tend to stay on OpsCare and see the value. This is actually a money saver for them, if they could, just focus their efforts on building, you know, focusing their time on the workload on top of the platform. From a vertical perspective, it's really anything and everything. We have customers in the science and research, we have TELCOs, large manufacturing, manufacturing, a lot of large organizations. There's really the breadth of the verticals that we see that are utilizing OpsCare and not even to mention ProdCare, that's really everything in there, as well. So it is not a really a subscription that is, that is custom for one vertical. It is basically something that we, that any vertical can actually utilize and find a significant amount of value in. >> All right, well, what final words do you have that you want to leave everyone with today? >> Yeah, so over the last six to nine months, you know, we've invested a significant amount of resources in the Docker Enterprise support business and we just with one focus, and that is just to take the support business to the next level and improve or give the customers an optimal customer experience. So with the availability of all these new subscriptions, I'm really excited to engage with our Docker Enterprise customers with these new, enhanced SLAs and just be able to work with them on these, like I said, enhanced subscriptions and just see, just give them a better customer experience. So, I'm really looking forward to working with them on the subscriptions. >> Willem, thank you so much for all the updates and want to welcome everyone to be sure to check out all the rest of the tracks on the Launchpad 2020 event. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to London everybody, this is Dave Vellante with The Cube, the leader in tech coverage, and we're here at AWS. We wanted to cover deeper the public sector activity. We've been covering this segment for quite some time, with the public sector summit in DC, went to Bahrain last year, and we wanted to extend that to London. We're doing a special coverage here with a number of public sector folks. Anjenesh Babu is here, he's a network manager at Oxford GLAM. Thanks very much for coming on The Cube, it's good to see you. >> Thank you.], thanks. >> GLAM, I love it. Gardens, libraries and museums, you even get the A in there, which everybody always leaves out. So tell us about Oxford GLAM. >> So we are part of the heritage collection side of the University. And I'm here representing the gardens and museums. In the divisions we've got world renown collections, which has been held for 400 years or more. It comprises of four different museums and the Oxford University Botanic Gardens and Arboretum. So in total, we're looking at five different divisions, spread across probably sixteen different sites, physical sites. And the main focus of the division is to bring out collections to the world, through digital outreach, engagement and being fun, bringing fun into the whole system. Sustainment is big, because we are basically custodians of our collections and it has to be here almost forever, in a sense. And we can only display about 1% of our collections at any one point and we've got about 8.5 million objects. So as you can imagine, the majority of that is in storage. So one way to bring this out to the wider world is to digitize them, curate them and present them, either online or in another form. So that is what we do. >> In your role as the network manager is to makes sure everything connects and works and stays up? Or maybe describe that a little more. >> So, I'm a systems architect and network manager for gardens and museums, so in my role, my primary focus is to bridge the gap between technical and the non-technical functions, within the department. And I also look after network and infrastructure sites, so there's two parts to the role, one is a BAU business as usual function where we keep the networks all going and keep the lights on, basically. The second part is bringing together designs, it's not just solving technical problems, so if I'm looking at a technical problem I step out and almost zoom out to see, what else are we looking at which could be connected, and solve the problem. For example, we could be looking at a web design solution in one part of the project, but it's not relevant just to that project. If you step out and say, we could do this in another part of the program, and we may be operating in silence and we want to breakdown those, that's part of my role as well. >> Okay, so you're technical but you also speak the language of the organization and business. We put it in quotes because you're not a business per say. Okay, so you're digitizing all these artifacts and then making them available 24/7, is that the idea? What are some of the challenges there? >> So the first challenge is only 3% of objects are actually digitized. So we have 1% on display, 3% is actually digitized, it's a huge effort, it's not just scanning or taking photographs, you've got cataloging, accessions and a whole raft of databases that goes behind. And museums historically have got their own separate database collection which is individually held different collection systems, but as public, you don't care, we don't care, we just need to look at the object. You don't want to see, that belongs to the Ashmolean Museum or the picture does. You just want to see, and see what the characteristics are. For that we are bringing together a layer, which integrates different museums, it sort of reflects what we're doing in out SIT. The museums are culturally diverse institutions and we want to keep them that way, because each has got its history, a kind of personality to it. Under the hood, the foundational architecture, systems remain the same, so we can make them modular, expandable and address the same problems. So that's how we are supporting this and making it more sustainable at the same time. >> So you have huge volume, quality is an issue because people want to see beautiful images. You got all this meta data that you're collecting, you have a classification challenge. So how are you architecting this system and what role does the Cloud play in there? >> So, in the first instance we are looking at a lot of collections were on premises in the past. We are moving as a SaaS solution at the first step. A lot of it requires cleansing of data, almost, this is the state of the images we aren't migrating, we sort of stop here let's cleanse it, create new data streams and then bring it to the Cloud. That's one option we are looking at and that is the most important one. But during all this process in the last three years with the GLAM digital program there's been huge amount of changes. To have a static sort of golden image has been really crucial. And to do that if we are going down rate of on premise and trying to build out, scale out infrastructures, it would have a huge cost. The first thing that I looked at was, explore the Cloud options and I was interested in solutions like Snowball and the Storage Gateway. Straightforward, loads up the data and it's on the Cloud, and then I can fill out the infrastructure as much as I want, because we can all rest easy, the main, day one data is in the Cloud, and it's safe, and we can start working on the rest of it. So it's almost like a transition mechanism where we start working on the data before it goes to the Cloud anyway. And I'm also looking at a Cloud clearing house, because there's a lot of data exchanges that are going to come up in the future, vendor to vendor, vendor to us and us to the public. So it sort of presents itself a kind of junction, who is going to fill the junction? I think the obvious answer is here. >> So Snowball or Gateway, basically you either Snowball or Gateway the assets into the Cloud and you decide which one to use based on the size and the cost associated with doing that, is that right? >> Yes, and convenience. I was saying this the other day at another presentation, it's addictive because it's so simple and straight forward to use, and you just go back and say it's taken me three days to transfer 30 terabytes into a Snowball appliance and on the fourth day, it appears in in my packets, so what are we missing? Nothing. Let's do it again next week. So you got the Snowball for 10 days, bring it in transfer, so it's much more straightforward than transferring it over the network, and you got to keep and eye on things. Not that it's not hard, so for example, the first workloads we transferred over to the file gateway, but there's a particular server which had problems getting things across the network, because of out dated OS on it. So we got the Snowball in and in a matter of three days the data was on the Cloud, so to effect every two weeks up on the Snowball, bring it in two weeks, in three days it goes up back on the Cloud. So there's huge, it doesn't cost us any more to keep it there, so the matter of deletions are no longer there. So just keep it on the Cloud shifting using lifecycle policies, and it's straight forward and simple. That's pretty much it. >> Well you understand physics and the fastest way to get from here to there is a truck sometimes, right? >> Well, literally it is one of the most efficient ways I've seen, and continues to be so. >> Yeah, simple in concept and it works. How much are you able to automate the end-to-end, the process that you're describing? >> At this point we have a few proof of concept of different things that we can automate, but largely because a lot of data is held across bespoke systems, so we've got 30 terabytes spread across sixteen hard disks, that's another use case in offices. We've got 22 terabytes, which I've just described, it's on a single server. We have 20 terabytes on another Windows server, so it's quite disparate, it's quite difficult to find common ground to automate it. As we move forward automation is going to come in, because we are looking at common interface like API Gateways and how they define that, and for that we are doing a lot of work with, we have been inspired a lot by the GDS API designs, and we are just calling this off and it works. That is a road we are looking at, but at the moment we don't have much in the way of automation. >> Can you talk a bit more about sustainability, you've mentioned that a couple of times, double click on that, what's the relevance, how are you achieving sustainability? Maybe you could give some examples. >> So in the past sustainability means that you buy a system and you over provision it, so you're looking for 20 terabytes over three years, lets go 50 terabytes. And something that's supposed to be here for three years gets kept going for five, and when it breaks the money comes in. So that was the kind of very brief way of sustaining things. That clearly wasn't enough, so in a way we are looking for sustainability from a new function say, we don't need to look at long-term service contracts we need to look at robust contracts, and having in place mechanisms to make sure that whatever data goes in, comes out as well. So that was the main driver and plus with the Cloud we are looking at the least model. We've got an annual expenditure set aside and that keeps it, sustainability is a lot about internal financial planning and based on skill sets. With the Cloud skill sets are really straightforward to find and we have engaged with quite a few vendors who are partnering with us, and they work with us to deliver work packages, so in a way even though we are getting there with the skills, in terms of training our team we don't need to worry about complex deployments, because we can outsource that in sprints. >> So you have shipped it from a CAPX to an OPX model, is that right? >> Yes >> So what was that like, I mean, was that life changing, was it exhilarating? >> It was exhilarating, it was phenomenally life changing, because it set up a new direction within the university, because we were the first division to go with the public Cloud and set up a contract. Again thanks to the G-Cloud 9 framework, and a brilliant account management team from AWS. So we shifted from the CAPX model to the OPX model with an understanding that all this would be considered as a leased service. In the past you would buy an asset, it depreciates, it's no longer the case, this is a leased model. The data belongs to us and it's straight forward. >> Amazon continues to innovate and you take advantage of those innovations, prices come down. How about performance in the cloud, what are you seeing there relative to your past experiences? >> I wouldn't say it's any different, perhaps slightly better, because the new SDS got the benefit of super fast bandwidth to the internet, so we've got 20 gigs as a whole and we use about 2 gigs at the moment, we had 10 gig. We had to downgrade it because, we didn't use that much. So from a bandwidth perspective that was the main thing. And a performance perspective what goes in the Cloud you frankly find no different, perhaps if anything they are probably better. >> Talk about security for a moment, how early on in the Cloud people were concerned about security, it seems to have attenuated, but security in the Cloud is different, is it not, and so talk about your security journey and what's your impression and share with our audience what you've learned. >> So we've had similar challenges with security, from security I would say there's two pots, one's the contractual security and one is the technical security. The contractual security, if we had spun up our own separate legal agreement with AWS or any other Cloud vendor, it would have taken us ages, but again we went to the digital marketplace, used the G-Cloud 9 framework and it was no brainer. Within a week we had things turned around, and we were actually the first institution to go live with and account with AWS. That is the taken care of. SDS is a third party security assessment template, which we require all our vendors to sign. As soon as we went through that it far exceeds what the SDS requires, and it's just a tick box exercise. And things like data encryption at rest, in transit it actually makes it more secure than what we are running on premise. So in a way technically it's far more secure than what we could ever have achieved that's on premise, and it's all taken care of, straight forward. >> So you've a small fraction of your artifacts today that are digitized. What's the vision, where do you want to take this? >> We're looking at, I'm speaking on behalf of gardens, this is not me, per say, I'm speaking on behalf of my team, basically we are looking at a huge amount of digitization. The collection should be democratized, that's the whole aspect, bringing it out to the people and perhaps making them curators in some form. We may not be the experts for a massive collection from say North America or the Middle East, there are people who are better than us. So we give them the freedom to make sure they can curate it in a secure, scalable manner and that's where the Cloud comes in. And we backend it using authentication that works with us, logs that works with us and roll-back mechanisms that works with us. So that's were we are looking at in the next few years. >> How would you do this without the Cloud? >> Oh. If you're doing it without the Cloud-- >> Could you do it? >> Yes, but we would be wholly and solely dependent on the University network, the University infrastructure and a single point. So when you're looking at the bandwidth it's shared by students using it network out of the university and our collection visitors coming into the university. And the whole thing, the DS infrastructure, everything's inside the university. It's not bad in its present state but we need to look at a global audience, how do you scale it out, how do you balance it? And that's what we're looking at and it would've been almost impossible to meet the goals that we have, and the aspirations, and not to mention the cost. >> Okay so you're going to be at the summit, the Excel Center tomorrow right? What are you looking forward to there for us from a customer standpoint? >> I'm looking at service management, because a lot of our work, we've got a fantastic service desk and a fantastic team. So a lot of that is looking at service management, how to deliver effectively. As you rightly say Amazon is huge on innovation and things keep changing constantly so we need to keep track of how we deliver services, how do we make ourselves more nimble and more agile to deliver the services and add value. If you look at the OS stack, that's my favorite example, so you look at the OS stack you've got seven layers going up from physical then all the way to the application. You can almost read an organization in a similar way, so you got a physical level where you've got cabling and all the way to the people and presentation layer. So right now what we are doing is we are making sure we are focusing on the top level, focusing on the strategies, creating strategies, delivering that, rather than looking out for things that break. Looking out for things that operationally perhaps add value in another place. So that's where we would like to go. >> Anjenesh, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you >> It was a pleasure to have you. All right and thank you for watching, keep right there we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching The Cube, from London at Amazon HQ, I call it HQ, we're here. Right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering .conf2018 brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back to Splunk's .conf2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're here in Orlando. Day one of two days of wall to wall coverage, this is our seventh year doing Splunk .conf, Stu amazing show, a lot of action, partnership is growing, ecosystem is growing. And we're going to to talk to one ecosystem partner, Gemini Data. J.R. Murray's here as the vice president of technical services. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Happy to be here. >> Yeah so when we first started this, Splunk ecosystem was really tiny and it's just sort of growing and growing and now is exploding. But tell us about Gemini Data what are you guys all about. What's your role? >> Sure, so my role is VP of technical services. I manage our sales engineers and professional services consultants as well as our managers services practice, based in the United States. So what I do is I go through and help make sure all the operations go pretty smoothly. And in terms of the company and what we do we've got a couple different things that we work on. Primarily our focus is around big data platforms and making them easier to deploy and manage. We offer a hardware appliances as part of that package and we also have an investigate software platform that we feed data into and it helps analysts jobs be a little bit more easier and quicker to do investigations. >> And you guys started the company three and a half, four years ago, is that right? >> That's right, that's right. >> Back when big data was and kind of still is a mess. >> That's right. >> Doug even said that in his conversations today. He said that we live in a world filled with change. The messiest landscape is the data. >> That's right. >> The bigger, the faster, the more complex the data, the messier it is. So you guys kind of started to solve a problem. Why did you start the company? What was the problem you were trying to solve? >> So really where we started is we focused on there's a problem with deploying big data platforms, customers have poor experiences in terms of it's too complicated, there are a lot of very technical details you have to worry about. And if you're a little bit lower on the maturity curve of technology solution implementation you might need some help along the way or if you are a little bit further along in the technical maturity curve you may actually need some help in getting something that's more turn-key in order to alleviate a lot of the challenges that go along with IT bureaucracy. You've got maybe something that you need that's purpose built because you've got something that's very central to your security strategy. You need to make sure that it's up and running, and reliable, and dependable. So that's where we come in. We have a platform that we allow you to implement. It's a turn-key solution, multiple systems get your Splunk deployment up and running. >> And when you do that on your website looking at, you support various technologies, I see Splunk on there, FireEye, Cloud Era, Service Now, Amazon, Azure, so those are sort of systems, RSA. I mean they've got a lot of products and a lot of cases it's cloud or, they've got a platform like Splunk. Will you actually do like bottoms up stuff with Hadoop and pig and hive or are you really focused on sort of that higher level helping customers integrate those platforms that they brought in. >> Right. >> Kind of helping them be a platform of platforms if you will, is it the former or the latter? >> Yeah so that's kind of the idea right? We come in and we go through and we say what are your actual goals here do you just want to go through and install Splunk or do you actually have a big data strategy that we can help you execute on. So it's kind of a cohesive holistic approach in terms of, what you need to deploy and how we help you get there. So if you need to deploy Splunk we help you install Splunk. If you want to do Splunk and have a Hadoop data role for example you can have hadub just alongside your Splunk all on the same platform. You can go through and manage that centrally and make it a little bit easier to manage via policy push out jobs centrally all the automation and orchestration is there and the under pendings for all those solutions. >> Yeah J.R. who who are you typically selling to? One of the things we look at data is pervasive in the company in companies but who owns it, I've talked to a number of people at this company that are like well I've got Splunk and everybody comes and asks me questions right now. So where do you fit in in the organization? >> So we've got a few different things going on. So in terms of who we sell to and where we focus, its kind of across the board we've got very large enterprises who are pushing tens of terabytes into the deployment, and we help them out with getting a solution that's going to be something that's a little bit more manageable. You've got a limited staff, the knowledge of Splunk is hard to hard to actually cultivate and then actually keep and retain folks that know Splunk. They are generally very well paid. So its easy for them to find opportunities elsewhere. You've invested a lot in these people, your success is very critical and they're a critical part of it. And it's important to keep those people around. So we've got a manage service to help with customers like that. We call it Gemini Care. We come in and we are actually able to have an automated monitoring and break fix type of resolution service that factors into those types of deployments. And as part of that we go through and offer some services and touch points throughout the month to make sure they're getting what they need from a value standpoint. I mean its one thing to have the platform and the deployment, and the data but in fact if you're not getting any value out of that what good is it? So if you don't have the talent the skills you're able to go through it and use us to implement some of those used cases and things like that. >> Yeah yeah one of the other things that changed a lot in the last 3, 4 years is the on the premises of course is where a lot of the customers are and a lot of data is but partner with the cloud, you partner with the Ager's and Amazon's in the world even if you start talking about edge that diversity of where my data lives. How how is that playing into your solution? >> So it's funny you mention that we came to arka we led with and applied base solution and we said customers that are having problems either getting hardware common thing is you want to put a box in or 10 or 20 boxes but you've got the storage team saying hey we need to hook up to our our sand we spent millions of dollars on this, we're going to get some use out of it and guess what Splunk you're going to be our biggest consumer of all of our storage internally on this brand new sand we got. A lot of times its not attractive to a lot of interim customers. You've got IOPS requirements, you've got all these other requirements. Folks don't understand you've got hard requirements for CPU's and and the band width there. So if you're using virtual solutions which a lot of customers are forced into doing you actually have a very difficult time getting reserved resources on those virtual hosts. So you get a bare metal box in there, you get a platform on it you have none of those issues. So in terms of where we pivoted from there the industry is obviously going towards cloud. So what we're trying to do is actually, we have a solution in the market today. Customers are really interested in us helping them on that journey so we've got plenty of customers who are on premise today they have a cloud strategy they want to get out of the data center business and they need to get into cloud. So what we're doing is we're helping them we've got equipment who in a code located data center and what we're doing is migrating customers over to that infrastructure as more of a subscription basis. So it's the same platform but now it's in the cloud. There are benefits to that. >> So I want to I want to actually let me follow up now, so the subscription basis >> Right. How does that work? So it used to be what sort of an upfront perpetual license and then here you go and then we'll you when there's another upgrade. >> Right >> And now how's it work I know 75% last quarter of Splunk's bookings or revenue I'm not sure which one. Were subscription based irratible and there was a big long discussion about whatever it was 606 and all the Wall Street guys trying to part through it. What does it mean for the customer? What does that transition like? >> Okay >> Is it like hey good news. >> Right >> We're not going to go through the spike cycles we're going to smooth things out for you. But what's that conversation like? >> We've got a lot of flexibility with customers. We've got the ability to do OPX or CAPX, we've got the ability to ship as an appliance kind of as an all in one solution. However what we've really migrated to as what the market has demanded is customer feedback. Is, "hey we can buy this box anywhere" and we're like, "you know what you're right. If you want to go right ahead here's the software subscription. So now we have the option to sell the appliance and the software subscription together as one package that's also partially subscription but what happens when you migrate that into the cloud, is now you've got a cloud based subscription infrastructure and that software license is sort of included in that. >> I want to ask you about use cases. You were talking a little bit before but if you pre go back before the term big data came to fruition, you kind of had the EDW was the so called data big data used case and you had maybe a couple of analysts that knew the decision support systems and could build a cube and they were like the data gods. So big data comes in and you had used cases like a cheaper EDW that was kind of a really popular one. Certainly fraud detection was one, precision marketing, ad serving, obviously Splunk and the security and IT operations base although Splunk never really used the term big data so its only sort of more recent and line of business analytics. So you see all these sort of new uses for data very complex as you pointed out. You guys started the company to sort of help squint through some of that complexity and actually build solutions. So the brief history of big data by Dave Vellante. So given all that how has your customers use of data changed over the last since you guys have started and where do you see it going? >> So we originally started, originally we had some customers that came over into this new business venture existing relationships and what not they were using a different sim platform. You one of our primary objectives were to was to get them all in to Splunk and that's something that we were able to do successfully. So they were doing security analysis, log retention, those were their primary goals and that's it. Maybe compliance, okay. So their really focusing on that. Now today we're doing entirely different things. We're focusing on as you mentioned anti-fraud. Huge opportunity in the space there with Splunk the tools in that space today are prohibitively expensive, very complex and we come in with Splunk we're able to take in data from all sorts of places and technologies really know really know understanding of the data at that point required yet and then we convert that into business value for the customer by means of services. Because there's very little in the way of precan used cases for that and frankly when it comes to the fraud space a lot of customers their requirements are all different. There aren't really many shops that are very much alike at all. So you've got to sort of manage around that. Now that's one way but we're also seeing folks who want to do executive reporting out of their Splunk data. You're talking about being able to go through and do year to year reporting how are we doing from a risk management standpoint. These are the things you are starting to see trickle up to the Csuite in terms of what does that mean for us and the way we need to make these business decisions. >> So I understand that. So really started out kind of hard core IT and certainly security used cases. What I'm hearing is Splunk is expanding into lines of business actually using data in in ways that perhaps others were trying to do in the past but not really succeeding. >> That's right >> What is it about Splunk that allows you to do that. We heard a lot about 7dot2 today, performance improvements, some efficiency in your granular storage and compute. I'm sure that Csuite doesn't know or care about that but being able to analyze more data is something that they probably would care about, mobile is probably something that they care about. >> Absolutely. So what is that Splunk's doing that maybe others aren't doing or can't do, architecturally or technology wise? >> Now a couple things stand out right off the top. So you've got the ability to scale, you've got horizontal distribution of data which means you can spread that load across many many nodes. We're able to go through and distribute that load and it makes things actually perform. So we get an acceptable user experience and that means everything to a customer, right? So that's one thing. The second thing with Splunk you've skemead read you're able to pull in as much data as you want for as long as you want without having to understand that data. You can actually come back through later and and parse, interpret, report on, and get value out of that data historically without having to necessarily having to understand it upfront. That's in my personal experience been a huge impediment right up front to onboarding data with other we'll call them legacy solutions. But there still some in the market today that require and depend on that is knowing the data upfront. We can't pull in this data unless we know exactly what its supposed to look like and can sanitize it and parse it into fields. >> So Stu I want to follow up if I may. So a lot of people in the big data world talk about no scheme on write or scheme on read >> Sure >> And what they do is they toss everything into a data lake. The big joke is the lake becomes a swamp, they got to go and clean it up. Why is that not the case with Splunk? What's different about Splunk and that they're able to, I forget exactly how Doug said it but essentially structure the data when you need it. >> That's right >> In the moment >> So the difference with Splunk is that you're able to you're able to foster and really pull together the community resources more or less crowdsourcing how to parse all these data sources. You no longer have individuals at every given company with a very specific data source say Windows event logs that might be universal to many other applications and organizations, needing to roll their own. So you're able to socialize and share those things on a place like Splunk base and then suddenly everyone's able to really capitalize on the data, so I see that as more like a force multiplier. You've got the entire community behind you helping you parse your data because they have the same data and that's really what I think makes the difference. >> Whereas the so called data lake would be like the big data metaphor for a god box where only a few people know how to get to the data, right? >> Basically yeah, thats right? And the amount of skill required, okay, that's another big piece when you're in Splunk everything is very well documented so if you need to write a search and its there are plenty of resources you've got the Splunk community, you've also got all of the documentation, you've got the quick reference sheets. Its not hard to get into its hard to become an expert but if you just need to do something very quickly it's not that difficult. >> Well if we look at where Splunk is going next you talk a lot about the AI and the ML and one of the tensions you hear out there is, "how much am I willing to let the system just take that action?" So I'm curious on your product line and working with Splunk what you hear how real people are, the advances that we're getting with AI, ML and deep learning and are users ready to embrace that yet? >> Yeah so that's a technology that's truly made leaps and bounds even over the past five years. Right. So what we're seeing is customers are able to use machine learning to go through and do predictive analytics and to be able to have the machines to sort of speculate as to and you can say predict but its really I think speculation more like what a given categorical value might be. Is it yes or no, maybe for the answer to a question based on what those events say, or is it is there an outage coming up that potentially you could predict based on different values. And there all sorts of applications for that and all sorts of platforms that are trying to do that. Now what Splunk's done is sort of bring that to the masses with machine learning toolkit and made that a little bit easier to really digest for the common person. What they haven't done at least until very recently from what my understanding is that they're doing is that they're actually taking more of that function out and making it more intuitive helping customers understand the most common challenges I'll say. So you're really lowering the bar in terms of the amount of information or knowledge rather and skills to be able to leverage some of these more advanced algorithms and computing resources to go through and get the types of results you expect out of machine learning. >> Well J.R. Murray thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Pleasure. Thank you >> Great to meet you. Alright everybody keep it right there Stu and I will be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Splunk .Conf18 in Orlando. We'll be right back.

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum, DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> We are back this afternoon here in Washington, D.C., at the Walter Washington Convention Center. As we continue our coverage here of Inforum 2018 along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, and we now welcome Mr. Cormack Watters to the program today, EVP of Emea and APAC at Infor. Cormack, good to see you sir. >> Nice to be here. >> So, we're going to talk about Guinness, over in Ireland (chuckling). Cormack's from Dublin, so we had a little conversation. We're getting a primer here. >> It's actually the best conversation we should have, right? >> Right, we'll save that for the end. How about that? So, you're fairly new, right? About a year or so. >> Ten months or so, not that I'm counting it by the day >> No no no, always going forward, never backward. But a big plate you have, right, with EMEA and APAC? Different adoptions, different viewpoints, different perspectives... We've talked a lot really kind of focusing domestically here for the past couple of days. Your world's a little different than that though, right? >> It is. It is. And it's very good that you've actually recognized it because that's actually the biggest challenge that we have. To be a little bit humble about it, I think we've got world-class products and solutions. I actually fundamentally believe that. But we have lots of different languages, cultures, and localization requirements in the multiple Countries that we look after. So, it's great to have great products, but it needs to be in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finish, Arabic, which most of them are. Customers realize that we are actually international and localized for many, many markets. But now we've become an intriguing option for them, if you're a multi-national business, with subsidiaries all over the world. So, it's good that Infor is big enough to do that. We need to do a better job of letting everybody know that we've done that, if that makes any sense. >> Sure. >> So what's happening in Europe? Europe's always pockets, there's no..I mean.. Yes, EU but there's really still no one Europe. What's going on? Obviously, we have Brexit hanging over our head. I felt like U.S. markets are maybe a little bit overheated in Europe has potential upside. >> Yeah >> And it seems like others seem to agree with that. What happening on the ground? Any specific, interesting areas? Is Southern Europe still a concern? Maybe you can give us an update? >> Yeah, so Brexit is quite a dominant conversation. I am from Ireland. I live in Dublin, but I'm working all over Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Far East. So, I don't get to be at home very often, except the weekends. London is really our regional headquarters from a European perspective, and Brexit is on everybody's mind. Interestingly, when you go outside the UK, Brexit is not such a big topic because... That's Europe. And they kind of go, "Well if you don't want to be here, then you don't need to be here." Right? So it's a little bit of that, and they're saying, "Well, we'd like for them to stay, but if they don't want to stay, well, don't wait around." But in the UK, it's causing a lot of uncertainty. And the UK's one of our biggest markets. It's a lot of uncertainty, and what would be best is if we just knew what was going to happen, and then we could deal with it. And actually, once we know what's going to happen, that's going to bring a degree of change. And change, from our industry perspective means there's going to be some requirements that emerge. So, we need to be ready to serve those, which is opportunity. But the uncertainty is just slowing down investment. So, we need that to be resolved. >> So, clarity obviously is a good thing obviously a good thing in any market. Are there any hotspots? >> Yeah, actually for us, we're doing, for us the Hotspots right now, we're doing incredibly well in Germany. Which, one of our lesser known competitors is a small Company called SAP. And they're headquartered in Germany. It's quite interesting to see that we're actually taking a lot of market there in Germany, which is fantastic. That's a little bit unexpected, but it's going very well right now. We're seeing a ton of activity in the Asia Pacific, I would say that region is probably our fastest growing in all of Infor. And consistently so for several quarters and maybe past a year at this point. So Asia Pacific, Germany, U.K., and then as it happens, we are doing very well in Southern Europe, which is a combination of countries really. France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. Hard to put it down to which particular Country is doing well, but there seems to be a general uplift in that region. Because they were hit the hardest, arguably, by the crash back in 2008. So they've definitely come out of that now. >> And when they come out, excuse me I'm sorry John, but, they come out, Cloud becomes more important to them, Right? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Anyone who's been delaying investment for years, can actually leapfrog what's been happening and jump straight to what you might call the future. So lots of Companies, lots of our Customers, are trying to simplify their Business. So Cloud is a great equalizer. We believe in your, what we call Last Mile of Functionality per industry. And that should make the projects shorter, more compact more predictable and the infrastructure worries go away, because that's our responsibility to the Customers. >> We definitely so that in the U.S., 2008-2009, CFO's came in said shift to the Cloud, because we want to shift Capx to Opx, and when we came out of the downturn, they said "wow this stuff works pretty well, double down on it" and then there were other business benefits that they wanted to accelerate, and so maybe Southern Europe was a little bit behind >> I think that may be the case right, and they are picking up. And what we're seeing are a lot of other advantages. Not to make this a sale's pitch, but, I am here so >> Go for it >> You've got a microphone >> I've got a microphone and I'm Irish, so I've got to talk right? What the Cloud is actually doing is, lots of Companies have put in big ERP over the years, the decades. And then they get stuck at various points and maybe years behind, because upgrades become painful and really want to avoid them. So what they're seeing is, if they can get onto the Cloud, they never need to upgrade again. Because it's always current, because we upgrade it every week, or every month and they're never falling behind. So they want to be ready to take advantage of the innovations that they know about and those that they don't even know about. So by keeping on the latest version, that opportunities open to them. Also, there's a big issue in Europe specifically about a thing called GDPR, which is data protection. Security. So we believe that we can do a better job of providing that, than any individual Company. Because we provide it for everybody, our resources can be deployed once and then deployed many times. Where as if you're an individual customer, you've got to have that speciality and put it in place. So GDPR is a genuine issue in Europe, because, the fines are absolutely huge if a Company is found to breach it. >> It's become a template for the globe now, California's started moving in that direction, GDPR has set the frame work. >> Well and just to follow up on that, and now you're dealing with a very different regulatory climate, then certainly here in the United States. And many U.S. Companies are finding that out, as we know. Overseas right now. So how do you deal with that in terms of, this kind of balkanized approach that you have, that you know that what's working here doesn't necessarily translate to overseas, and plus you have, you know, you're serving many masters and not just one or two. >> What's happening is the guys in our RND have done very well, is they understand the requirement of, in this instance, GDPR. They look at the other regulatory requirements, lets say in Australia, which is subtly different, but it is different, and they can take, well what do we have to do? What's the most extreme we have to achieve? And if we do that across our suite into our platform suite, the N4RS, that can then be applied to all the applications. And then becomes relevant to the U.S. So it's almost like some requirement across the seas, being deployed then becoming really relevant back here because over here you do need to be aware of the data protection, as well, it's just not as formalized yet. >> It's coming >> A Brewing issue right? >> What about Asia Pacific? So you have responsibility for Japan, and China, and the rest of the region. >> Right >> Which you are sort of re-distinct... >> Really are right? There are several sub regions in the one region. The team down there, as I say, arguably the most successful team in Infor right now, so Helen and the crew. So you see Australia, New Zealand then you see Southeast Asia, then you see China, Japan and so on. So different dynamics and different markets, some more mature than others, Japan is very developed by very specific. You do need very specialized local skills to succeed. Arguably Australia, New Zealand is not that similar from say some of the European Countries. Even though there are differences and I would never dream to tell an Australian or a New Zealander that they are the same as Europeans, cuz I get it. I smile when people say "you're from the U.K and you're not from Ireland?" I understand the differentiation. (laugher) And Southeast Asia, there's a ton of local custom, local language, local business practice that needs to be catered for. We seem to be doing okay down there. As I say, fastest growing market at scale. It's not like it's growing ridiculously fast but from a small base. It's as a big market already and growing the fastest. >> And China, what's that like? You have to partner up? >> Oh yeah >> To the JV in China? >> You have to partner up, there are several of the key growth markets that it's best to go in with partners. Customers like to see we've got a presence. So that they can touch and feel that Infor entity. We can't achieve the scale we need, and the growth we want fast enough without partnering. So we have to go with partners to get us the resources that we need. >> And in the Middle East, so my business partner, Co-Host, John Furrier, is on a Twenty Hour flight to Bahrain. The Cube Bahrain. Bahrain was the first Country in the Middle East to declare Cloud first. AWS is obviously part of that story, part of your story. So what's going on over there? Is it a growing market? Is it sort of something you're still cracking? >> No, no, again it's growing. We have several key markets down there, big in hospitality in that part of the world. Hotels, tourism obviously. Shopping, very interesting markets, and Healthcare, interestingly enough. I think arguably some of the worlds best Hospitals are in that region. Definitely the best funded Hospitals. >> Probably the most comfortable. (laughter) >> So again part of our stent is the number of industries we serve, so if you can put in our platform as it were, then you could have multiple of the industry flavors applied. Because what's interesting in that part of World, there seem to be a number of, I guess we call them conglomerates. So maybe family owned, or region owned, and they have just a different array of businesses all under the one ownership. So you would have a retailer that's also doing some tourism, that's also doing some manufacturing. So we can put our platform in, and then those industry flavors they can get one solution to cover it all. Which is a little bit unusual, and works for us. >> Your scope is enormous. I mean essentially you're the head of Non-U.S. I mean is that right? >> Yeah, and Latin America as well. >> That's part of it? That's not... >> Excluding the Americas. So there's Americas and then everything else, and you're everything else. >> I missed a meeting you see so they just gave it to me >> What you raised your hand at the wrong time? >> I wasn't there (laughter) >> So how do you organize to be successful? You obviously have to have strong people in the region. >> Right. So the key is people, right. We organize somewhat differently to over here. We've gone for a regional model, so I have six sub-regions, that I worry about. So four in Europe, the Nordic Countries. Scandinavian, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark. We call Western, which is Ireland, U.K. and the Benelux. Germany is Central and East, and then Southern is the Latin Country, Spain, Portugal, Greece and so. Then we've got the Middle East, and Africa, and then we got Asia Pacific. I've got six regional teams, all headed by a regional leader, and each of them are trying to be as self contained as they can. And where we see we've got an opportunity to move into something new, we've got one team working with me directly as an incubator. For example, we're driving a specific focus on Healthcare, in our part of the world, because it's very big over here. We haven't quite cracked the code over there. When we get some scale, then it'll move into the regions, but for now that's incubating under me. >> And, what about in Country? Do you have Country Managers? One in the U.K., one in France, one in Germany. >> We have what we call local leaders, right? So in some cases it could be a sales oriented individual, it could be consulting, others it could be the local HR guy. So that's more for us to make sure we're building a sense of community within Infor. Rather than it being more customer facing. We're still trying to make sure that there is a reasonably scarcity of senior skills. So regionalizing lets us deploy across several Countries, and that works with the customer base, but for employees we need local leaders to give them a sense of feeling home and attached. >> So the regions are kind of expertise centers if you will? >> Yes >> So I was going to ask about product expertise, where does that come from? It's not parachuted in from the U.S. I presume? >> No, we're pretty much self-sufficient actually, which is great. So from both what we call solution consulting, which is the product expertise, and then consulting which is the product deployment. And we're doing more and more of our deployments with Partners. As I say, we need to really rapidly embrace that partner ecosystem to give us the growth opportunity. RND, is all over the World. That's not under my direct control. So for a major suites, take for example, LN, happens to be headquartered out of Barneveld, in the Netherlands. From a Historic perspective, which is great. And Stockholm, which is also great. But a lot of the development resource room in Nila and in India. So we work closely with the guys, even though they don't actually report to me. >> And out of the whole area, the area of your responsibility what's the best growth opportunity? We all think of China, but that's been fits and starts for a lot of people. >> Yeah, yeah I think we've got multiple opportunities, you can look at it a few ways. You can look at it geographically, and you would say China. You can look at Eastern Europe, and you can look at Africa. There's a ton of opportunity in those regions, geographically. Interestingly we are also at a point where I think the Nordics, and we've got a very solid base Historically, and so on. But we probably haven't put enough focus on there in recent times, that the opportunities are really scaled in Nordics is really quite significant. And then they can look at it from a Product Perspective. So for example, we have, what we believe to be World Leading, and actually a Company called Gartner would equally agree with us. Enterprise Asset Management, EAM, that's a product suite that can fit across all of our industries. I think that could well be the significant growth area for us across the entire six regions. And it's a huge focus for us here at the conference actually. So we can do it by product, EAM, Healthcare, or by Region. I think Eastern Europe, China, and Africa, as well as the Nordics. >> And the other big opportunity is just share gains, market share gains, particularly in Europe, I would think, with your background. >> Yup. Completely, I mean, that's why I said, it's really interesting that we are winning market share in Germany. Who'd of thought that a few years ago? That's a big market, I mean, Germany, U.K., France, Italy. They're huge. Right, I mean U.K., is what, Sixty-Five Million People? It's a big economy, so we've got many of the worlds G7, in our backyard. So we just really need to double down on those, and give them the opportunities to grow that we need. >> And just back to Japan for a second. Japan has traction, it takes a long time to crack Japan. I know it first from personal experiences. >> Yeah, Okay, Interesting. >> Yeah you just got to go many many times and meet people. >> That's it, Right. And it's a different culture, of when you think they're saying yes and you think they're there, that's just yes to the next step. (laughter) >> Alright, so it does take time to get there. We've actually cracked it to some extent, that we've now got some solid referenceability, and some good wind. We need local leaders in Japan, to really crack the code there. >> And then once you're in, you're in. >> I think that once you've proven yourself, it's a lot of word of mouth and referencing. >> Well I hope you get home this weekend. Are you headed home? >> Yes! Actually I'm lucky enough. My Wife is originally from Chicago. So she and our Daughter have come over for the weekend, to go sight seeing in Washington. So that'll be fun. So we'll be going home on Sunday. >> Your adopted home for the weekend then. >> That's exactly right. >> Well we'll talk Guinness in just a bit. Thanks for the time though, we appreciate it. >> Thank you Gentlemen. >> Good to see you, Sir. Alright, back with more here from Inforum 2018, and you're watching Live, on theCube, here in D.C. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are continuing our coverage of VMworld 2018 day 3. I'm Lisa Martin, with two very stylish men next to me. I'm quite impressed. Dave Vellante, my esteemed co-host. >> Oh shucks. >> Rocking the salmon, King Salmon Vellante. And The Zog is back, Eric Herzog. Great to have you back. I was looking at you on Twitter and you have been on theCUBE 17 times. Is this 18 or 19? >> You know, I think Dave said I was on one of the very first CUBEs way back in 2010. So I've been on a few. >> That's a whole other criteria of VIP level. Well thank you for coming back. You have been, not only is he, you can't do a CUBE without Eric Herzog. You've been everywhere all over VMworld. I saw you're speaking at IBM booth on VMware and IBM, you're at Cisco, you're giving sessions. How do you fit it all in and still have time for us? >> Well, I always make time for theCUBE. >> Always? Thank you, thanks for that. >> Always make time for you guys. Love talking to CUBE. You guys have been very helpful. We appreciate everything that you do. Love doing shows, love 'em. I may be 60 years old, but I'm really 18 down underneath, so if I only sleep three hours a night, not a problem. >> What do you love about them? I mean, is it? >> Number one is meeting customers. Customers and channel partners, right? Well, all of the employees of all the various companies here get a paycheck from whoever that may be, me, IBM, someone from other companies, people from VMware. That's not who pays your salary. It's the end-users and the channel partners, if they buy through the channel. They're the ones that really pay your salary. So being close to the customers and the partners is number one. Second thing, of course, is seeing all the cool technology. You know, seeing what's going on, what's hot, what can we leverage from our perspective, what can we tie ourselves to. So for example, the hot things, that IBM's really been doing from a storage perspective. Cloud and modern data protection. Those are the two big things we've been focused on for the last couple of years. And how do we integrate our storage solutions and our modern data protection with cloud infrastructure, and then also how do we, if you're not in the cloud, how do we help customers protect their data better in a modern way and reuse their secondary data, instead of making 27,000 copies of the same data. >> So when theCUBE first started at VMworld, modern data protection at the time was dealing with the lack of physical resources, 'cause you went from 10 servers down to one, and you didn't have all that excess capacity to do a run up back up job anymore. Today, modern data protection is all around cloud and multi-cloud and software defined, so I wonder if you can help us sort of paint a picture of what modern data protection is for IBM? >> Sure, I think there's a couple, couple aspects too. So, first of all, you have to support the cloud, and that's two ways. So for us, several of our backup products are used by cloud service providers. In some cases they use our name, and say, "Featuring IBM Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus." Other cases, they have their own brand but it's our software underneath the hood so that if the end user is backing up to their cloud, they're actually using our software. So that's item number one. The second thing is you need to make sure that your traditional storage software can TEAR to the cloud, can migrate data to the cloud, can transparently move data to the cloud in an automated fashion using AI. So using artificial intelligent when the data's hot if you connote a target, and that target could be a cloud, and when the data's hot it TEARs the data to the cloud. Sorry, when it's cold. When it's hot it pulls it back in and that needs to be all automated through AI base. So we've done both, we have our backup software which is available from several cloud providers as a backup as a service, we also offer it through the cloud so IBM Cloud actually sells spectrum protect backup as a service solution All of our primary storage software and even our spectrum scale software can automatically TEAR data to a cloud target device. >> Eric I got to ask you so TEARing used to be predominantly, correct me if you disagree but, it used be a one way trip to the bit-bucket. You just described going there and coming back. Has cloud changed that because of big data, analytics? Where people want to pull back data increasingly? >> So I think of a couple of things. So first of all, there's no doubt that the world is data driven. The most valuable asset isn't gold, it's not silver, it is absolutely not oil, it's not diamonds. It is data. And it doesn't matter whether you're one of the largest banks in the world, you're in manufacturing, you're in the government, or whether you're Herzog's barn grill. The data is your most valuable asset. What you do with your customer data, how you manage your business, what you do with your supply chain if your a services company, how are you servicing, what are you charging, what are you billing, all of that is the most critical thing that you have. So in a data driven world, its critical that you use the data. And that also means that because of valued data, when you backup the data or you snapshot or replicate the data, you now created a secondary copy. Well what if you could use it to do tests? What if you could use it to do big data analytics? What if you could use it for DevOps? So instead of making one copy for tests, one copy for disaster recovery, one copy for this, and have basically a plethora of copies all over the place, with what we've provided in modern data protection, you can use a backup, you can use a snap or a replica, and you can use that to do tests or development or to do big data analytics. And using that one copy not making multiple copies. So that's- >> I just want to pick up on something you said there's going to be some folks in our audience like, "yeah yeah we hear that data is more valuable than oil or more valuable than gold, et cetera, more valuable than platinum." There's evidence, if you look at the market value of the top five companies, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, they've surpassed the banks, they've surpassed the energy companies, and I would argue its cuz of data. People are recognizing that they're data companies, you agree? >> But if you look at that name the only one that actually builds anything of substance, as a fair amount of their volume of revenue, is Apple. >> Is Apple, right. >> Amazon doesn't, they ship stuff. Facebook clearly doesn't, Google has a few things but not really builds stuff its really about the data. Absolutely and if your a more traditional company like a bank or someone building the table. Whoever builds this table if they have their act together and they're using that data right, they're building the table cheaper than anyone else, they're shipping it to theCUBE cheaper than anyone else could ship it to you. They got more colors because they know what their doing. And they ship you the right color table and they don't screw it up and send you a black table when you want it this color table because black won't show up on theCUBE very well. The more you do that the more money you make. Even something as simple as a table manufacturer. And that's all about the data and how you use that data. >> So Eric you love talking with customers which is great as the CMO for IBM storage. Got to talk to those customers. Let's talk about how you're seeing customers take the efficiencies of what IBM is doing with data protection, storage, et cetera. to be able to harness the power of AI, the superpowers that Pat Gelsinger talked about on Monday, and transform their businesses. Give us some of your favorite customer examples where its really revolutionary. >> So we had a great example today, we did a panel with a bunch of end users as part of the show agenda. And one of the customers is a provider of softwares of service to universities and schools. 45,000 customers between the universities, junior colleges, schools districts, et cetera. In North America so Canada and the U.S. And they are doing softwares of service so for them performance is critical, they can't go down. All of the college bookstores, if you go into a college bookstore, all of the infrastructure behind that is them. So they're called Follet. So a couple of things, one because they're doing softwares of service and managing all that. Its critical, can't go down. Got to be available, it's got to be performant, it's got to be resilient, it's got to be reliable. So that's how the storage melds in. From modern data protection the way it melds in is how many books did Dave buy? What did Eric buy? Oh is Dave buying a used book? Or is Eric buying a new book? Okay say we know that the propensity is certain of members of the community. I went to UC Davis, University of California Davis, are going to buy used books, Dave, whereas Herzog's going to buy new. They can figure that out, how many used books they need, how many new books they need, that's all about efficiency and how they make more money. What are the store hours? Certain universities it's this, other universities it's that. What do they do in the winter time? At UC Davis you can go in the winter time, I know you went to school in Boston its probably snowing, no one's going in the bookstore in the wintertime. >> Trend towards book rentals, how do we capitalize on that? >> That's all they do. One of the things they talked about was how they always have to protect that data and back it up. The other thing they talked about was they have to assume a lot of capacity. So what they do is they bought assuming they would have to refresh in 18 months. And because our storage arrays have a ton of different data reduction technology whether that be block, D2, compression, et cetera. And they have petabytes of data. Petabytes. 12 Petabytes. They've actually calculated it out they won't need to buy new storage for 36 months instead of 18 so they just saved on CapX. Through the intelligence of the storage. So in that case you've got both modern data protection and you've got a storage message. One of our other customers who's a public reference, not here at the show, which is a hospital, they were backing up all their data, both cloud and on premise with our backup software, and they went down and their entire system went down and they didn't lose one stitch of data and its a hospital. It's a teaching hospital, think they're in Pennsylvania, and in the public reference in the video he said, "and we went down and off that backup we were able to get all of the data back. We didn't lose any patient data, we didn't lose any research data, we didn't lose any billing data, if you break your arm they do bill you, they didn't lose anything." >> That's not just money, that's lives so that's huge. >> Absolutely. >> I want to ask you about you know that table example you were giving, and we were talking about the big five companies in terms of market cap being data orientated. There seems to be a gap between those sort of traditional companies and those data companies and that gap tends to be the data is often is often in silos its human expertise or expertise around a bottling plant or the manufacturing plant or whatever it is versus a data model with humans who understand how to leverage that data. Do you see, whether its through new data protection techniques or other storage techniques that IBM is working on, ways to help customers break down those data silos so they can become more digital and be able to take advantage of data? >> So I think there's a couple of things. So first of all at the very tactical level we provide this automated IA based data TEARing. We can tear from anything to anything so we can take data from an IBM array and TEAR it to an EMC array. We can take data from an EMC array and TEAR it to a net app array. A net app array to a Tachi array, an HP array back to our array, so we can do this transparent data move based on hot and cold. Not only does that allow you to control CapX and OpX you can move the data from array to array, and once you move that data set it might be working that other array could be hooked up to a different set of servers through the SAN that's running a different workload and then takes that dataset and use it with that other piece of software out on the server side. So that's item number one. Item number two is IBM not just in the storage but overall has a global program where IBM is promoting, through universities all over the world, data scientists. Part of that is training data scientists not only how to do the science of data and analyzing data and mining data and doing it, but to break down those walls. The value is more there. And we also have from a storage perspective some products are spectrum scale products, one of our customers who's one of the largest banks in the world they run 300,000 servers attached to a giant spectrum scale repository, petabytes and petabytes, and they do real time data analytics to see if Dave Vellante or Lisa's credit card was stolen. >> Thank you! >> Oh yes, thank you! >> So that's real world analytics they run but they need petabytes of data. And then with our IBM cloud object storage technology where we have several customers at the exabyte level in production with an exabyte of data, you put the data out when its cold but guess what, if you want to mine it you might want to pull it back and guess what, you can TEAR data from spectrum scale to IBM cloud object storage and then spectrum scale can pull it back in to do the big data analytic workloads. >> And that AI you're using is it heavy open source? Is there a little bit of Watson sprinkled in there? >> It's stuff the storage division developed years ago and then has peppered in the AI based technology into that software to determine when the dataset is hot or cold and then move it back or forth. We also do the old style, so if you go back 10 years ago, the automation of storage was policy based. So we had it way back when which was if the data is 30 days old move it to this array. >> The old HSM kind of... >> Yeah and it was automated so once it hit 30 days, but now what we've done is, we started with that, what I would call automation, and now we've moved that to AI. And by the way, if you still want to do it the old way and say move this data when its 60 days old, you can still do that. But the modern way is let the storage figure out for you and move it back and forth whether it be to the cloud or whether it be on premises. >> So it's intelligent hierarchical storage management? So if the characteristics change the system knows what to do as opposed to- >> So when it's hot it'll pull the data back into flash, for example, when its cold it'll put it out to cloud, it'll put it out to tape or it'll put it out to slow hard drives, either way. >> Alright Eric, so we're almost out of time here. You've been at IBM a long time, IBM's been around a long time, you said you even have customers at exabyte scale. I'm hearing heterogeneity, customer choice, but if I'm a small hospital in the middle of America and I have choice with data protection vendors, storage vendors, some smaller than IBM that might be able to move faster, what are the top three differentiators of why I would want to go with IBM's storage solutions? >> Sure so the first thing is our broad portfolio. Whether it be file block or object, whether it be modern data protection, whether it be archiving if you still want to use tape, we're the number one provider of tape in the world and we sell gobs of it to the web scale guys. >> Of course you do. >> They're the guys that buy it. >> Cuz its cost effective. >> So we've got one throat to choke, all of it talks to each other, and happens to work with all the cloud vendors not just IBM cloud. We work with Amazon, we work with Microsoft, we work with Google, and we work with IBM's own cloud. So we can work with anything. That's out of mind. Second thing, for smaller shops we have a network of business partners all over the world, some of them even deal with the big global Fortune 500 and others deal with small accounts. And then really the third thing is that IBM makes sure that our stuff works with everyone else's stuff. Whether that be cloud, our spectrum tech software which has been around for years and is the leading enterprise backup package, the bulk of what it backs up is not IBM storage. The vast bulk of it is from two of the competitors on the floor of this show, they also back up our stuff too. And we backup everyone's. There's probably 20 storage vendors we backup every one of their data. So if someone buys storage from XYZ, call me, we can back it up. If someone buys it from one of the big competitors we back it up, from us we back it up. So the fact that our software works with everyone's gear is of an advantage for both the small shop and the big shop. We make sure that our software, whether its embedded in our arrays or whether we sell it as just a pieces storage software and we are the number one storage software provider on the planet as well, we can meet the needs of any company big or small because we have this flexibility of working with our stuff and working with everybody else stuff and most of the other guys don't do that. If its a small shop their stuff usually only works with their stuff. >> And from a support perspective, you play with everybody? >> Global network. I mean we're known for our support whether it be IBM direct or what we do with our partners all the partners are certified, its a big certification process, and if they can't certify the product they can't sell IBM's stuff. That's just how we operate. Other people, if they can move a lot of boxes but they don't have anyone pick up the phone or can come out to Dave's house to install, they let them sell, we don't do that at IBM. We don't use those box mover types we go for guys that add value and know how to work with the cloud, know how to do hybrid cloud. One of our resellers designed a Watson based AI system that's used in bottle factories. Packaging. Beer, soda, milk, and it can figure out if its full or not full, if the bottle or can or carton is damaged. And they used Watson to do it. Now they're regular resell. They resell all the storage, they resell our power, they resell mainframe, but they've gone into the software development side using this Watson thing and they're selling a full solution with the software included to bottling plants all over the world. >> Wow, Eric. This has been a super charged conversation. Thanks for stopping by and talking with Dave and me about not just your excitement about talking with customers but really how IBM is really empowering customers of any size worldwide to succeed. We know we'll see you again soon but thanks for stopping by a couple of times this week. >> Great well thank you. Thank you, really appreciate the time. >> And the outfit choices are just on point guys, you blend well too. For Eric, Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2018 day 3. Stick around, we'll be back with our next guest after a short break. (electro music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are continuing our coverage of VMworld 2018 day 3. I'm Lisa Martin, with two very stylish men next to me. I'm quite impressed. Dave Vellante, my esteemed co-host. >> Oh shucks. >> Rocking the salmon, King Salmon Vellante. And The Zog is back, Eric Herzog. Great to have you back. I was looking at you on Twitter and you have been on theCUBE 17 times. Is this 18 or 19? >> You know, I think Dave said I was on one of the very first CUBEs way back in 2010. So I've been on a few. >> That's a whole other criteria of VIP level. Well thank you for coming back. You have been, not only is he, you can't do a CUBE without Eric Herzog. You've been everywhere all over VMworld. I saw you're speaking at IBM booth on VMware and IBM, you're at Cisco, you're giving sessions. How do you fit it all in and still have time for us? >> Well, I always make time for theCUBE. >> Always? Thank you, thanks for that. >> Always make time for you guys. Love talking to CUBE. You guys have been very helpful. We appreciate everything that you do. Love doing shows, love 'em. I may be 60 years old, but I'm really 18 down underneath, so if I only sleep three hours a night, not a problem. >> What do you love about them? I mean, is it? >> Number one is meeting customers. Customers and channel partners, right? Well, all of the employees of all the various companies here get a paycheck from whoever that may be, me, IBM, someone from other companies, people from VMware. That's not who pays your salary. It's the end-users and the channel partners, if they buy through the channel. They're the ones that really pay your salary. So being close to the customers and the partners is number one. Second thing, of course, is seeing all the cool technology. You know, seeing what's going on, what's hot, what can we leverage from our perspective, what can we tie ourselves to. So for example, the hot things, that IBM's really been doing from a storage perspective. Cloud and modern data protection. Those are the two big things we've been focused on for the last couple of years. And how do we integrate our storage solutions and our modern data protection with cloud infrastructure, and then also how do we, if you're not in the cloud, how do we help customers protect their data better in a modern way and reuse their secondary data, instead of making 27,000 copies of the same data. >> So when theCUBE first started at VMworld, modern data protection at the time was dealing with the lack of physical resources, 'cause you went from 10 servers down to one, and you didn't have all that excess capacity to do a run up back up job anymore. Today, modern data protection is all around cloud and multi-cloud and software defined, so I wonder if you can help us sort of paint a picture of what modern data protection is for IBM? >> Sure, I think there's a couple, couple aspects too. So, first of all, you have to support the cloud, and that's two ways. So for us, several of our backup products are used by cloud service providers. In some cases they use our name, and say, "Featuring IBM Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus." Other cases, they have their own brand but it's our software underneath the hood so that if the end user is backing up to their cloud, they're actually using our software. So that's item number one. The second thing is you need to make sure that your traditional storage software can TEAR to the cloud, can migrate data to the cloud, can transparently move data to the cloud in an automated fashion using AI. So using artificial intelligent when the data's hot if you connote a target, and that target could be a cloud, and when the data's hot it TEARs the data to the cloud. Sorry, when it's cold. When it's hot it pulls it back in and that needs to be all automated through AI base. So we've done both, we have our backup software which is available from several cloud providers as a backup as a service, we also offer it through the cloud so IBM Cloud actually sells spectrum protect backup as a service solution All of our primary storage software and even our spectrum scale software can automatically TEAR data to a cloud target device. >> Eric I got to ask you so TEARing used to be predominantly, correct me if you disagree but, it used be a one way trip to the bit-bucket. You just described going there and coming back. Has cloud changed that because of big data, analytics? Where people want to pull back data increasingly? >> So I think of a couple of things. So first of all, there's no doubt that the world is data driven. The most valuable asset isn't gold, it's not silver, it is absolutely not oil, it's not diamonds. It is data. And it doesn't matter whether you're one of the largest banks in the world, you're in manufacturing, you're in the government, or whether you're Herzog's barn grill. The data is your most valuable asset. What you do with your customer data, how you manage your business, what you do with your supply chain if your a services company, how are you servicing, what are you charging, what are you billing, all of that is the most critical thing that you have. So in a data driven world, its critical that you use the data. And that also means that because of valued data, when you backup the data or you snapshot or replicate the data, you now created a secondary copy. Well what if you could use it to do tests? What if you could use it to do big data analytics? What if you could use it for DevOps? So instead of making one copy for tests, one copy for disaster recovery, one copy for this, and have basically a plethora of copies all over the place, with what we've provided in modern data protection, you can use a backup, you can use a snap or a replica, and you can use that to do tests or development or to do big data analytics. And using that one copy not making multiple copies. So that's- >> I just want to pick up on something you said there's going to be some folks in our audience like, "yeah yeah we hear that data is more valuable than oil or more valuable than gold, et cetera, more valuable than platinum." There's evidence, if you look at the market value of the top five companies, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, they've surpassed the banks, they've surpassed the energy companies, and I would argue its cuz of data. People are recognizing that they're data companies, you agree? >> But if you look at that name the only one that actually builds anything of substance, as a fair amount of their volume of revenue, is Apple. >> Is Apple, right. >> Amazon doesn't, they ship stuff. Facebook clearly doesn't, Google has a few things but not really builds stuff its really about the data. Absolutely and if your a more traditional company like a bank or someone building the table. Whoever builds this table if they have their act together and they're using that data right, they're building the table cheaper than anyone else, they're shipping it to theCUBE cheaper than anyone else could ship it to you. They got more colors because they know what their doing. And they ship you the right color table and they don't screw it up and send you a black table when you want it this color table because black won't show up on theCUBE very well. The more you do that the more money you make. Even something as simple as a table manufacturer. And that's all about the data and how you use that data. >> So Eric you love talking with customers which is great as the CMO for IBM storage. Got to talk to those customers. Let's talk about how you're seeing customers take the efficiencies of what IBM is doing with data protection, storage, et cetera. to be able to harness the power of AI, the superpowers that Pat Gelsinger talked about on Monday, and transform their businesses. Give us some of your favorite customer examples where its really revolutionary. >> So we had a great example today, we did a panel with a bunch of end users as part of the show agenda. And one of the customers is a provider of softwares of service to universities and schools. 45,000 customers between the universities, junior colleges, schools districts, et cetera. In North America so Canada and the U.S. And they are doing softwares of service so for them performance is critical, they can't go down. All of the college bookstores, if you go into a college bookstore, all of the infrastructure behind that is them. So they're called Follet. So a couple of things, one because they're doing softwares of service and managing all that. Its critical, can't go down. Got to be available, it's got to be performant, it's got to be resilient, it's got to be reliable. So that's how the storage melds in. From modern data protection the way it melds in is how many books did Dave buy? What did Eric buy? Oh is Dave buying a used book? Or is Eric buying a new book? Okay say we know that the propensity is certain of members of the community. I went to UC Davis, University of California Davis, are going to buy used books, Dave, whereas Herzog's going to buy new. They can figure that out, how many used books they need, how many new books they need, that's all about efficiency and how they make more money. What are the store hours? Certain universities it's this, other universities it's that. What do they do in the winter time? At UC Davis you can go in the winter time, I know you went to school in Boston its probably snowing, no one's going in the bookstore in the wintertime. >> Trend towards book rentals, how do we capitalize on that? >> That's all they do. One of the things they talked about was how they always have to protect that data and back it up. The other thing they talked about was they have to assume a lot of capacity. So what they do is they bought assuming they would have to refresh in 18 months. And because our storage arrays have a ton of different data reduction technology whether that be block, D2, compression, et cetera. And they have petabytes of data. Petabytes. 12 Petabytes. They've actually calculated it out they won't need to buy new storage for 36 months instead of 18 so they just saved on CapX. Through the intelligence of the storage. So in that case you've got both modern data protection and you've got a storage message. One of our other customers who's a public reference, not here at the show, which is a hospital, they were backing up all their data, both cloud and on premise with our backup software, and they went down and their entire system went down and they didn't lose one stitch of data and its a hospital. It's a teaching hospital, think they're in Pennsylvania, and in the public reference in the video he said, "and we went down and off that backup we were able to get all of the data back. We didn't lose any patient data, we didn't lose any research data, we didn't lose any billing data, if you break your arm they do bill you, they didn't lose anything." >> That's not just money, that's lives so that's huge. >> Absolutely. >> I want to ask you about you know that table example you were giving, and we were talking about the big five companies in terms of market cap being data orientated. There seems to be a gap between those sort of traditional companies and those data companies and that gap tends to be the data is often is often in silos its human expertise or expertise around a bottling plant or the manufacturing plant or whatever it is versus a data model with humans who understand how to leverage that data. Do you see, whether its through new data protection techniques or other storage techniques that IBM is working on, ways to help customers break down those data silos so they can become more digital and be able to take advantage of data? >> So I think there's a couple of things. So first of all at the very tactical level we provide this automated IA based data TEARing. We can tear from anything to anything so we can take data from an IBM array and TEAR it to an EMC array. We can take data from an EMC array and TEAR it to a net app array. A net app array to a Tachi array, an HP array back to our array, so we can do this transparent data move based on hot and cold. Not only does that allow you to control CapX and OpX you can move the data from array to array, and once you move that data set it might be working that other array could be hooked up to a different set of servers through the SAN that's running a different workload and then takes that dataset and use it with that other piece of software out on the server side. So that's item number one. Item number two is IBM not just in the storage but overall has a global program where IBM is promoting, through universities all over the world, data scientists. Part of that is training data scientists not only how to do the science of data and analyzing data and mining data and doing it, but to break down those walls. The value is more there. And we also have from a storage perspective some products are spectrum scale products, one of our customers who's one of the largest banks in the world they run 300,000 servers attached to a giant spectrum scale repository, petabytes and petabytes, and they do real time data analytics to see if Dave Vellante or Lisa's credit card was stolen. >> Thank you! >> Oh yes, thank you! >> So that's real world analytics they run but they need petabytes of data. And then with our IBM cloud object storage technology where we have several customers at the exabyte level in production with an exabyte of data, you put the data out when its cold but guess what, if you want to mine it you might want to pull it back and guess what, you can TEAR data from spectrum scale to IBM cloud object storage and then spectrum scale can pull it back in to do the big data analytic workloads. >> And that AI you're using is it heavy open source? Is there a little bit of Watson sprinkled in there? >> It's stuff the storage division developed years ago and then has peppered in the AI based technology into that software to determine when the dataset is hot or cold and then move it back or forth. We also do the old style, so if you go back 10 years ago, the automation of storage was policy based. So we had it way back when which was if the data is 30 days old move it to this array. >> The old HSM kind of... >> Yeah and it was automated so once it hit 30 days, but now what we've done is, we started with that, what I would call automation, and now we've moved that to AI. And by the way, if you still want to do it the old way and say move this data when its 60 days old, you can still do that. But the modern way is let the storage figure out for you and move it back and forth whether it be to the cloud or whether it be on premises. >> So it's intelligent hierarchical storage management? So if the characteristics change the system knows what to do as opposed to- >> So when it's hot it'll pull the data back into flash, for example, when its cold it'll put it out to cloud, it'll put it out to tape or it'll put it out to slow hard drives, either way. >> Alright Eric, so we're almost out of time here. You've been at IBM a long time, IBM's been around a long time, you said you even have customers at exabyte scale. I'm hearing heterogeneity, customer choice, but if I'm a small hospital in the middle of America and I have choice with data protection vendors, storage vendors, some smaller than IBM that might be able to move faster, what are the top three differentiators of why I would want to go with IBM's storage solutions? >> Sure so the first thing is our broad portfolio. Whether it be file block or object, whether it be modern data protection, whether it be archiving if you still want to use tape, we're the number one provider of tape in the world and we sell gobs of it to the web scale guys. >> Of course you do. >> They're the guys that buy it. >> Cuz its cost effective. >> So we've got one throat to choke, all of it talks to each other, and happens to work with all the cloud vendors not just IBM cloud. We work with Amazon, we work with Microsoft, we work with Google, and we work with IBM's own cloud. So we can work with anything. That's out of mind. Second thing, for smaller shops we have a network of business partners all over the world, some of them even deal with the big global Fortune 500 and others deal with small accounts. And then really the third thing is that IBM makes sure that our stuff works with everyone else's stuff. Whether that be cloud, our spectrum tech software which has been around for years and is the leading enterprise backup package, the bulk of what it backs up is not IBM storage. The vast bulk of it is from two of the competitors on the floor of this show, they also back up our stuff too. And we backup everyone's. There's probably 20 storage vendors we backup every one of their data. So if someone buys storage from XYZ, call me, we can back it up. If someone buys it from one of the big competitors we back it up, from us we back it up. So the fact that our software works with everyone's gear is of an advantage for both the small shop and the big shop. We make sure that our software, whether its embedded in our arrays or whether we sell it as just a pieces storage software and we are the number one storage software provider on the planet as well, we can meet the needs of any company big or small because we have this flexibility of working with our stuff and working with everybody else stuff and most of the other guys don't do that. If its a small shop their stuff usually only works with their stuff. >> And from a support perspective, you play with everybody? >> Global network. I mean we're known for our support whether it be IBM direct or what we do with our partners all the partners are certified, its a big certification process, and if they can't certify the product they can't sell IBM's stuff. That's just how we operate. Other people, if they can move a lot of boxes but they don't have anyone pick up the phone or can come out to Dave's house to install, they let them sell, we don't do that at IBM. We don't use those box mover types we go for guys that add value and know how to work with the cloud, know how to do hybrid cloud. One of our resellers designed a Watson based AI system that's used in bottle factories. Packaging. Beer, soda, milk, and it can figure out if its full or not full, if the bottle or can or carton is damaged. And they used Watson to do it. Now they're regular resell. They resell all the storage, they resell our power, they resell mainframe, but they've gone into the software development side using this Watson thing and they're selling a full solution with the software included to bottling plants all over the world. >> Wow, Eric. This has been a super charged conversation. Thanks for stopping by and talking with Dave and me about not just your excitement about talking with customers but really how IBM is really empowering customers of any size worldwide to succeed. We know we'll see you again soon but thanks for stopping by a couple of times this week. >> Great well thank you. Thank you, really appreciate the time. >> And the outfit choices are just on point guys, you blend well too. For Eric, Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2018 day 3. Stick around, we'll be back with our next guest after a short break. (electro music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE media's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost Keith Townsend, happy to welcome back to the program Tom Burns, who's the SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. Tom, great to see ya. >> Great to see you guys as well. Good to see you again. >> All right, so I feel like one of those CNBC guys. It's like, Tom, I remember back when Force10 was acquired by Dell and all the various pieces that have gone on and converged in infrastructure, but of course with the merger, you've gotten some new pieces to your toy chest. >> Tom: That's correct. >> So maybe give us the update first as to what's under your purview. >> Right, right, so I continue to support and manage the entire global networking business on behalf of Dell EMC, and then recently I picked up what we called our converged infrastructure business or the VxBlock, Vscale business. And I continue also to manage what we call Enterprise Infrastructure, which is basically any time our customers want to extend the life of their infrastructure around memory, storage, optics, and so forth. We support them with Dell EMC certified parts, and then we add to that some third-party componentry around rack power and cooling, software, Cumulus, Big Switch, things like that. Riverbed, Silver Peak, others. And so with that particular portfolio we also cover what we call the Dell EMC Ready Solutions, both for the service provider, but then also for traditional enterprises as well. >> Yeah, well luckily there's no change in any of those environments. >> Tom: No, no. >> Networking's been static for decades. I mean they threw a product line that I mean last I checked was somewhere in the three to four billion dollar range. With the VxBlock under what you're talking there. >> Yeah it's a so, yeah-- >> Maybe you could talk, what does this mean? 'Cause if I give you your networking guy. >> Right. >> Keith and I are networking guys by background, obviously networking's a piece of this, but give us a little bit of how the sausage is made inside to-- >> Tom: Sure. >> Get to this stuff. >> Well I think when you talk about all these solutions, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Public Cloud, when you think about software-defined X, the network is still pretty darn important, right? I often say that if the network's not working, it's going to be a pretty cloudy day. It's not going to connect. And so the fabric continues to remain one of the most critical parts of the solution. So the thought around the VxBlock and moving that in towards the networking team is the importance of the fabric and the capability to scale out and scale up with our customers' workloads and applications. So that's probably the reason primarily the reason. And then we can also look at how we can work very closely with our storage division 'cause that's the key IP component coming from Dell EMC on the block side. And see how we can continue to help our customers solve their problems when it comes to this not your do-it-yourself but do-it-for-me environment. >> All right, I know Keith wants to jump in, but one just kind of high-level question for you. I look at networking, we've really been talking about disaggregation of what's going on. It's really about disaggregated systems. And then you've got convergence, and there's other parts of the group that have hyper convergence. How do you square the circle on those two trends and how do those go together? >> Well, I think it's pretty similar on whether you go hyper converge, converge, or do-it-yourself, you build your own block so to speak. There's a set of buyers that want everything to be done for them. They want to buy the entire stack, they want it pre-tested, they want it certified, they want it supported. And then there's a set of customers that want to do it themselves. And that's where we see this opportunity around disaggregation. So we see it primarily in hyperscale and Cloud, but we're seeing it more and more in large enterprise, medium enterprise, particular verticals where customers are in essence looking for some level of agility or capability to interchange their solutions by a particular vendor or solutions that are coming from the same vendor but might be a different IP as an example. And I'm really proud of the fact that Dell EMC really kicked off this disaggregation of the hardware and software and networking. Some 4 1/2 years ago. Now you see some of the, let's say, larger industry players starting to follow suit. And they're starting to disaggregate their software as well. >> Yeah, I would have said just the commonality between those two seemingly opposed trends it's scale. >> Right. >> It's how do customers really help scale these environments? >> Exactly, exactly. It depends a lot around the customer environment and what kind of skill sets do they have. Are they willing to help go through some of that do-it-yourself type of process. Obviously Dell EMC services is there to help them in those particular cases. But we kind of have this buying conundrum of build versus buy. I think my old friend, Chad Sakac, used to say, there's different types of customers that want a VxRail or build-it-themselves, or they want a VxBlock. We see the same thing happen in a networking. There's those customers that want disaggregated hardware and software, and in some cases even disaggregated software. Putting those protocols and features on the switch that they actually use in the data center. Rather than buying a full proprietary stack, well we continue to build the full stack for a select number of customers as well because that's important to that particular sector. >> So again, Tom, two very different ends of the spectrum. I was at ONS a couple of months ago, talked to the team. Dell is a huge sponsor of the Open Source community. And I don't think many people know that. Can you talk about the Open Source relationship or the relationship that Dell Networking has with the Open Source community? >> Absolutely, we first made our venture in Open Source actually with Microsoft in their SONiC work. So they're creating their own network operating software, and we made a joint contribution around the switch abstraction interface, or side. So that was put into the Open Compute Project probably around 3 1/2, maybe four years ago. And that's right after we announced this disaggregation. We then built basically an entire layer of what we call our OS10 base, or what's known in the Linux foundation as OPX. And we contributed that to the OPX or to the Linux foundation, where basically that gives the customer the capability through the software that takes care of all the hardware, creates this switch subtraction interface to gather the intelligence from the ASIC and the silicon, and bringing it to a control plane, which allows APIs to be connected for all your north-bound applications or your general analysis that you want to use, or a disaggregated analysis, what you want to do. So we've been very active in Linux. We've been very active in OCP as well. We're seeing more and more of embracing this opportunity. You've probably seen recently AT&T announced a rather large endeavor to replace tens of thousands of routers with basically white box switches and Open Source software. We really think that this trend is moving, and I'm pretty proud that Dell EMC was a part of getting that all started. >> So that was an awful lot of provider talk. You covered both the provider's base and the enterprise space. Talk to us about where the two kind of meet. You know the provider space, they're creating software, they're embracing OpenStack, they're creating plug-ins for disaggregated networking. And then there's the enterprise. There's opportunity there. Where do you see the enterprise leveraging disaggregation versus the service provider? >> Well, I think it's this move towards software-defined. If you heard in Michael's keynote today, and you'll hear more tomorrow from Jeff Clarke. The whole world is moving to software-defined. It's no longer if, it's when. And I think the opportunity for enterprises that are kind of in that transformation stage, and moving from traditional software-defined, or excuse me, traditional data centers to the software-defined, they could look at disaggregation as an opportunity to give them that agility and capability. In a manner of which they can kind of continue to manage the old world, but move forward into the new world of disaggregation software-defined with the same infrastructure. You know it's not well-known that Dell EMC, we've made our switching now capable of running five different operating softwares. That's dependent upon workloads and use cases, and the customer environment. So, traditional enterprise, they want to look at traditional protocols, traditional features. We give them that capability through our own OS. We can reduce that with OS partners, software coming from some of our OS partners, giving them just the protocols and features that they need for the data center or even out to the edge. And it gives them that flexibility and change. So I think it really comes at this point of when are they going to move towards moving from traditional networking to the next generation of networking. And I'm very happy, I think Dell Technologies is leading the way. >> So I'm wondering if you could expand a little bit about that. When I think about Dell and this show, I mean it is a huge ecosystem. We're sitting right near the Solutions Expo, which will be opening in a little bit, but on the networking side, you've got everything from all the SD-WAN pieces, to all the network operating systems that can sit on top. Maybe, give us kind of the update on the overview, the ecosystem, where Dell wins. >> Yeah, yeah I mean, if you think about 30-something years ago when Michael started the company and Dell started, what was it about. It was really about transforming personal computing, right? It was about taking something that was kind of a traditional proprietary architecture and commoditizing it, making sure it's scalable and supportable. You think of the changes that's occurred now between the mainframe and x86. This is what we think's happening in networking. And at Dell Technologies in the networking area whether it's Dell EMC or to VMware, we're really geared towards this SDX type of market. Virtualization, Layer two, day or three disaggregated switching in the data center. Now SD-WAN with the acquisition of Velocloud by VMware. We're really hoping customers transform at the way networking is being managed, operated, supported to give them much more flexibility and agility in a software-defined market. That being said, we continue to support a multitude of other partners. We have Cumulus, Big Switch, IP infusion, and Pluribus as network operating software alternatives. We have our own, and then we have them as partners. On the SD-WAN area while we lead with Velocloud, we have Silver Peak and we also have Versa Technology, which is getting a lot of upkick in the area. Both in the service provider and in the enterprise space. Huge area of opportunity for enterprises to really lower their cost of connectivity and their branch offices. So, again, we at Dell, we want to have an opinion. We have some leading technologies that we own, but we also partner with some very good, best-of-breed solutions. But being that we're open, and we're disaggregated, and we have an incredible scaling and service department or organization, we have this capability to bring it together for our customers and support them as they go through their IT transformation. >> So, Dell EMC is learning a lot of lessons as you guys start to embrace software-defined. Couple of Dell EMC World's ago, big announcement Chad talked about, ScaleIO, and abstracting, and giving away basically, ScaleIO as a basic solution for free. Then you guys pulled back. And you said, you know what, that's not quite what customers want. They want a packaged solution. So we're talking on one end, total disaggregation and another end, you know what, in a different area of IT, customers seem to want packaged solutions. >> Tom: Yeah. >> Can you talk to the importance of software-defined and packaged solutions? >> Right, it's kind of this theory of appliances, right? Or how is that software going to be packaged? And we give that flexibility in either way. If you think of VxRail or even our vSAN operating or vSAN ready node, it gives that customer the capability to know that we put that software and hardware together, and we tested it, we certified it, most importantly we can support it with kind of one throat to choke, one single call. And so I think the importance for customers are again, am I building it myself or do I want to buy a stack. If I'm somewhere in the middle maybe I'm doing a hybrid or perhaps a Rail type of solution, where it's just compute and storage for the most part. Maybe I'm looking for something different on my networking or connectivity standpoint. But Dell EMC, having the entire portfolio, can help them at any point of the venture or at any part of the solution. So I think that you're absolutely right. The customer buying is varied. You've got those that want everything from a single point, and you got others that are saying I want decision points. I think a lot of the opportunity around the cost savings, mostly from an Opex standpoint are those that are moving towards disaggregated. It doesn't lock 'em in to a single solution. It doesn't get 'em into that long life cycle of when you're going to do changes and upgrades and so forth. This gives them a lot more flexibility and capability. >> Tom, sometimes we have the tendency to get down in the weeds on these products. Especially in the networking space. One of my complaints was, the whole SDN wave, didn't seem to connect necessarily to some of the big businesses' challenges. Heard in the keynote this morning a lot of talk about digital transformation. Bring us up to speed as to how networking plays into that overall story. What you're hearing from customers and if you have any examples we'd love to hear. >> Yeah, no so, I think networking plays a critical part of the IT transformation. I think if you think of the first move in virtualization around compute, then you have the software-defined storage, the networking component was kind of the lagger. It was kind of holding back. And in fact today, I think some analysts say that even when certain software-defined storage implementations occur, interruptions or issues happen in the network. Because the network has then been built and architected for that type of environment. So the companies end up going back and re-looking at how that's done. And companies overall are I think are frustrated with this. They're frustrated with the fact that the network is holding them back from enabling new services, new capabilities, new workloads, moving towards a software-defined environment. And so I think this area again, of disaggregation, of software-defined, of offering choice around software, I think it's doing well, and it's really starting to see an uptick. And the customer experiences as follows. One is, open networking where it's based upon standard commodity-based hardware. It's simply less expensive than proprietary hardware. So they're going to have a little bit of savings from the CapEx standpoint. But because they moved towards this disaggregated model where perhaps they're using one of our third-party software partners that happens to be based in Linux, or even our own OS10 is now based in Linux. Look at that, the tools around configuration and automation are the same as compute. And the same as storage. And so therefore I'm saving on this configuration and automation and so forth. So we have examples such as Verizon that literally not only saves about 30% cost savings on their CapEx, they're saving anywhere between 40 and 50% on their Opex. Why? They can roll out applications much faster. They can make changes to their network much faster. I mean that's the benefit of virtualization and NSX as well, right? Instead of having this decisions of sending a network engineer to a closet to do CLI, down in the dirt as you would say, and reconfigure the switch, a lot of that now has been attracted to a software lever, and getting the company much more capability to make the changes across the fabric, or to segregate it using NSX micro segmentation to make the changes to those users or to that particular environment that needs those changes. So, just the incredible amount of flexibility. I think SDN let's say six, seven years ago, everyone thought it was going to be CapEx. You know, cheaper hardware, cheaper ASICs, et cetera. It's all about Opex. It's around flexibility, agility, common tool sets, better configuration, faster automation. >> So we all have this nirvana idea that we can take our traditional stacks, whether it's pre-packaged CI configurations that's pre-engineered, HCI, SDN, disaggregated networking. Add to that a software layer this magical automation. Can you unpack that for us a little bit? What are you seeing practically whether it's in the server provider perspective or on the enterprise. What are those crucial relationships that Dell EMC is forming with the software industry to bring forth that automation? >> Well obviously we have a very strong relationship with VMware. >> Keith: Right. >> And so you have vRealize and vROps and so forth, and in fact in the new VxBlock 1000, you're going to see a lot of us gearings, a lot of our development towards the vRealize suite, so that helps those customers that are in a VMware environment. We also have a very strong relationship with Red Hat and OpenStack, where we've seen very successful implementations in the service provider space. Those that want to go a little bit more, a little bit more disaggregated, a little bit more open, even it from the storage participation like SAP and so forth. But then obviously we're doing a lot of work with Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, for those that are looking for more of a common open source set of tools across server, compute, networking storage and so forth. So I think the real benefit is kind of looking at it at that 25,000-foot view on how we want to automate. Do you want to go towards containers, do you want to go traditional? What are the tool sets that you've been using in your compute environment, and can those be brought down to the entire stack? >> All right, well Tom Burns, really appreciate catching up with you. I know Keith will be spending a little time at Interop this week too. I know, I'm excited that we have a lot more networking here at this end of the strip also this week. >> Appreciate it. Listen to Pat's talk this afternoon. I think we're going to be hearing even more about Dell Technology's networking. >> All right. Tom Burns, SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. I'm Stu Miniman and this is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat music)