>> Announcer: From Milpitas, California at the edge of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering autonomous vehicles. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick, here with theCUBE. We're in Milpitas, California, at Western Digital, at the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicle Event. About 300 people, really deep into this space. It's a developing ecosystem. You know, we think about Tesla, that's kind of got a complete, closed system. But there's a whole ecosystem of other companies getting into the autonomous vehicle space, and as was mentioned in the keynote, there are, literally thousands of problems. A great opportunity for startups. So we're excited to have Oded Sagee, he's a senior director of product marketing from Western Digital. Oded, great to see you. >> Thank you very much, Jeff. >> So you were just on the panel and, really that was a big topic, is there are thousands of problems to solve and this ecosystem's trying to come together, but it's complicated, right? It's not just the big car manufacturers anymore, and the tier one providers, but there's this whole ecosystem that's now growing up to try to solve these problems. So what are you seeing from your point of view? >> Yes, correct. So, definitely in the past automotive was a tough market to play in, but it was simple from the amount of players and people you needed to talk to to design your product inside. With the disruption of connectivity, smart vehicles, even before autonomous, there are so many new systems in the car now that generate data or consume data. And so, for us, to kind of figure out what's the use case, right? How is this going to look in the future? Who's going to define it? Who's going to buy it? Who's going to pay for it? It has become more and more complex. Happily, storage is in the center of all this. >> Jeff: Right. >> So we get a seat at the table and everyone wants to talk to us, but yes, it's a very big ecosystem now. And trying to resolve that problem, it's going to take some time. >> So what are some of the unique characteristics, from a storage point of view, that you have to worry about? Obviously environmental jumps out. We had the guy on before talking about bumpy roads, you know, the huge impacts on vibration. And now you spent a lot of money for a Toughbook back in the day to put a laptop in a cop car, this is a whole other level of expense, investment, and data flow. >> Right. So, for us, I think with all this disruption happening of full autonomous, people are, very much focused on making that autonomous work, right? So, for them it's all about connectivity, it's all about the sensor, whether it's Lidar, or, you know, cameras. Just making that work, right? All the algorithms and the software. And so, for them storage, currently is an afterthought, right? They were saying, once we meet mass production we'll just go and buy some storage and everything's going to be fine. So while they're prototyping, right? They can use any storage that they want. But, if you think about a full autonomous vehicle out there driving, not two hours a day like we are driving today, right? 20 hours a day, from cold to hot, going through areas without connectivity. Suddenly, the storage requirements are very, very different. And this is what we're trying to drive and explain that, if we don't design the future storage solutions today, What's going to end up, is that people are going to pay much more for storage just to make a basic use case work. >> Right. >> But if we start working now, and I'm talking about five, seven years out, we can have affordable solutions to make those business models work. >> And is that resonating in the industry, or are they just too focused on, you know, better cameras? >> It definitely does, but as companies change, right? So let's just take the car makers for a second. They didn't necessarily have a CTO in place, right? To drive engineering and semi-conductor. So you got to find those figures, and you got to start working and educating them. It definitely resonates if you have the right person. Once you find him, yes, it's on the list of priority. So we need to push. But it is happening. Yes, it is resonating. >> And it's so different because you do have this edge case. You have so much data being collected out in the field, if you will, within that vehicle. Some, to go back to the cloud, but you've got latency is always an issue, right? For safety. So, a little different storage challenge. So are there significant design thoughts that you guys are bringing into play on why this is so different and what is it going to take to really have kind of an optimal solution for autonomous vehicles? >> Yes, definitely there are a couple of vectors I would say, or knobs we need to work on. One of them is temperature. So, again vehicles do tend to go between hot and cold. Unlike many other components that just need to make sure that they operate between hot and cold, we actually have a big challenge on keeping data being accurate between hot and cold. So if you program cold and read hot and vice versa, data gets corrupted. >> Oh, even within the structures within the media? >> Yes. >> Okay. >> And people don't know that. So, for us to figure out, what's the temperature range that the car, through its lifetime, is going to go through. And make sure that we meet the use case, that's a big one. What we call the endurance on the cycling of the storage, again, if you cannot rely on connectivity, cannot rely on cloud because of latency, you need to record a lot of data in the car. So, again, a car drives for seven years, 15 years, and you want to record constantly, how much do you need to record? We don't necessarily have the technology today to meet that use case and we need to work with the ecosystem, in figuring it out. So these are just two examples. >> And I would imagine clean power, as you're saying these things, but they can need others. You're not in daddy's data center anymore. This is a pretty harsh environment, I would imagine. >> Very harsh. >> Ugly power, inconsistent power, turning off the car before everything is spun down. There's all kinds of little, kind of environmental impacts in that whole realm that you would never think of in, kind of a typical data center, for instance. >> Correct. And even, you touched power, that's very interesting because even some people think, oh, there's not power limitation in a car. You can just enjoy how much power you want. Actually, it's very, very sensitive. The battery, if you think about an EV car now has so many components to run and so even the power consumption, right? Just the energy that you need to consume is becoming critical for each, and every component >> in the vehicle. >> Right. And it's everybody's AI comparison, right? Is if Kasparov had to fight the computer with the same amount of power, it wouldn't have been much of a match. So the power to run all this AI stuff is not insignificant, so it is going to be a huge drain on these electric vehicles. Pretty exciting times. So when you get up in the morning, what's the biggest thing, when you talk to people about autonomous vehicles, that they just don't get? That people should really be thinking about. >> Yeah, so it goes back to some of the things we've discussed. Definitely, again, we're seeing the use cases change. We are working again with the broad ecosystem to explain the fundamental challenges that we have, right? What is our design cycle? What are the challenges that we have? So we start with educating the ecosystem, so they know what we have. And from that we trigger a discussion because they realize, oh, okay, because I do have a use case that, probably, you don't have a solution for, how do we go together? And we're doing it across the board. It's not only happening in automotive. It's happening in surveillance. It's happening in the home space. A lot of people don't know, but the home space, if you think about it, again, set-top boxes used to be huge, sat outside in the room. People are moving to these sticks, right? And they're behind the TV and they have no ventilation and they're small and they record all the time. And they get to temperatures that we've never seen in the past. So we even need to educate the telcos of the world, the set-top box makers. Everything is changing. Automotive is definitely ahead in a lot of innovation and disruption, but everything is changing for us. >> Right, a lot of those are fond of just the bright shiny object that everybody can see, right? We can't necessarily see a lot of IOT that GE's putting in to connect their factories. Alright, Oded, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day and I really appreciate the insight. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, he's Oded, I'm Jeff, You're watching theCUBE from Western Digital at The Autonomous Vehicle Event for the Autotech Council. Thanks for watching. Catch you next time. (electronic music)