(light music) >> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Spain everyone. Lisa Martin here with theCUBE Dave Vellante, my co-host for the next four days. We're live in Barcelona, covering MWC23. This is only day one, but I'll tell you the theme of this conference this year is velocity. And I don't know about you Dave, but this day is flying by already. This is ecosystem day. We're going to have a great discussion on the ecosystem next. >> Well we're seeing the disaggregation of the hardened telco stack, and that necessitates an ecosystem open- we're going to talk about Open RAN, we've been talking about even leading up to the show. It's a critical technology enabler and it's compulsory to have an ecosystem to support that. >> Absolutely compulsory. We've got two guests here joining us, Gautam Bhagra, Vice President partnerships at Dell, and Scott Walker, Vice President of global Telco ecosystem at Wind River. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Nice to be here. >> Thanks For having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So you've got some news, this is day one of the conference, there's some news, Gautam, and let's start with you, unpack it. >> Yeah, well there's a lot of news, as you know, on Dell World. One of the things we are very excited to announce today is the launch of the Open Telecom Ecosystems Community. I think Dave, as you mentioned, getting into an Open RAN world is a challenge. And we know some of the challenges that our customers face. To help solve for those challenges, Dell wants to work with like-minded partners and customers to build innovative solutions, and join go-to-market. So we are launching that today. Wind River is one of our flagship partners for that, and I'm excited to be here to talk about that as well. >> Can you guys talk a little bit about the partnership, maybe a little bit about Wind River so the audience gets that context? >> Sure, absolutely, and the theme of the show, Velocity, is what this partnership is all about. We create velocity for operators if they want to adopt Open RAN, right? We simplify it. Wind River as a company has been around for 40 years. We were part of Intel at one point, and now we're independent, owned by a company called Aptiv. And with that we get another round of investment to help continue our acceleration into this market. So, the Dell partnership is about, like I said, velocity, accelerating the adoption. When we talk to operators, they have told us there are many roadblocks that they face, right? Like systems integration, operating at scale. 'Cause when you buy a traditional radio access network solution from a single supplier, it's very easy. It's works, it's been tested. When you break these components apart and disaggregate 'em, as we talked about David, it creates integration points and support issues, right? And what Dell and Wind River have done together is created a cloud infrastructure solution that could host a variety of RAN workloads, and essentially create a two layer cake. What we're, overall, what we're trying to do is create a traditional RAN experience, with the innovation agility and flexibility of Open RAN. And that's really what this partnership does. >> So these work, this workload innovation is interesting to me because you've got now developers, you know, the, you know, what's the telco developer look like, you know, is to be defined, right? I mean it's like this white sheet of paper that can create all this innovation. And to do that, you've got to have, as I said earlier, an ecosystem. But you've got now, I'm interested in your Open RAN agenda and how you see that sort of maturity model taking place. 'Cause today, you got disruptors that are going to lean right in say "Hey, yeah, that's great." The traditional carriers, they have to have a, you know, they have to migrate, they have to have a hybrid world. We know that takes time. So what's that look like in the marketplace today? >> Yeah, so I mean, I can start, right? So from a Dell's perspective, what we see in the market is yes, there is a drive towards, everyone understands the benefits of being open, right? There's the agility piece, the innovation piece. That's a no-brainer. The question is how do we get there? And I think that's where partnerships become critical to get there, right? So we've been working with partners like Wind River to build solutions that make it easier for customers to start adopting some of the foundational elements of an open network. The, one of the purposes in the agenda of building this community is to bring like-minded developers, like you said like we want those guys to come and work with the customers to create new solutions, and come up with something creative, which no one's even thought about, that accelerates your option even quicker, right? So that's exactly what we want to do as well. And that's one of the reasons why we launched the community. >> Yeah, and what we find with a lot of carriers, they are used to buying, like I said, traditional RAN solutions which are provided from a single provider like Erickson or Nokia and others, right? And we break this apart, and you cloudify that network infrastructure, there's usually a skills gap we see at the operator level, right? And so from a developer standpoint, they struggle with having the expertise in order to execute on that. Wind River helps them, working with companies like Dell, simplify that bottom portion of the stack, the infrastructure stack. So, and we lifecycle manage it, we test- we're continually testing it, and integrating it, so that the operator doesn't have to do that. In addition to that, wind River also has a history and legacy of working with different RAN vendors, both disruptors like Mavenir and Parallel Wireless, as well as traditional RAN providers like Samsung, Erickson, and others soon to be announced. So what we're doing on the northbound side is making it easy by integrating that, and on the southbound side with Dell, so that again, instead of four or five solutions that you need to put together, it's simply two. >> And you think about today how we- how you consume telco services are like there's these fixed blocks of services that you can buy, that has to change. It's more like the, the app stores. It's got to be an open marketplace, and that's where the innovation's going to come in, you know, from the developers, you know, top down maybe. I don't know, how do you see that maturity model evolving? People want to know how long it's going to take. So many questions, when will Open RAN be as reliable. Does it even have to be? You know, so many interesting dynamics going on. >> Yeah, and I think that's something we at Dell are also trying to find out, right? So we have been doing a lot of good work here to help our customers move in that direction. The work with Dish is an example of that. But I think we do understand the challenges as well in terms of getting, adopting the technologies, and adopting the innovation that's being driven by Open. So one of the agendas that we have as a company this year is to work with the community to drive this a lot further, right? We want to have customers adopt the technology more broadly with the tier one, tier two telcos globally. And our sales organizations are going to be working together with Wind Rivers to figure out who's the right set of customers to have these conversations with, so we can drop, drive, start driving this agenda a lot quicker than what we've seen historically. >> And where are you having those customer conversations? Is that at the operator level, is it higher, is it both? >> Well, all operators are deploying 5G in preparation for 6G, right? And we're all looking for those killer use cases which will drive top line revenue and not just make it a TCO discussion. And that starts at a very basic level today by doing things like integrating with Juniper, for their cloud router. So instead of at the far edge cell site, having a separate device that's doing the routing function, right? We take that and we cloudify that application, run it on the same server that's hosting the RAN applications, so you eliminate a device and reduce TCO. Now with Aptiv, which is primarily known as an automotive company, we're having lots of conversations, including with Dell and Intel and others about vehicle to vehicle communication, vehicle to anything communication. And although that's a little bit futuristic, there are shorter term use cases that, like, vehicle to vehicle accident avoidance, which are going to be much nearer term than autonomous driving, for example, which will help drive traffic and new revenue streams for operators. >> So, oh, that's, wow. So many other things (Scott laughs) that's just opened up there too. But I want to come back to, sort of, the Open RAN adoption. And I think you're right, there's a lot of questions that that still have to be determined. But my question is this, based on your knowledge so far does it have to be as hardened and reliable, obviously has to be low latency as existing networks, or can flexibility, like the cloud when it first came out, wasn't better than enterprise IT, it was just more flexible and faster, and you could rent it. And, is there a similar dynamic here where it doesn't have to replicate the hardened stack, it can bring in new benefits that drive adoption, what are your thoughts on that? >> Well there's a couple of things on that, because Wind River, as you know, where our legacy and history is in embedded devices like F-15 fighter jets, right? Or the Mars Rover or the James Web telescope, all run Wind River software. So, we know about can't fail ultra reliable systems, and operators are not letting us off the hook whatsoever. It has to be as hardened and locked down, as secure as a traditional RAN environment. Otherwise they will (indistinct). >> That's table stakes. >> That's table stakes that gets us there. And when River, with our legacy and history, and having operator experience running live commercial networks with a disaggregated stack in the tens of thousands of nodes, understand what this is like because they're running live commercial traffic with live customers. So we can't fail, right? And with that, they want their cake and eat it too, right? Which is, I want ultra reliable, I want what I have today, but I want the agility and flexibility to onboard third party apps. Like for example, this JCNR, this Juniper Cloud-Native Router. You cannot do something as simple as that on a traditional RAN Appliance. In an open ecosystem you can take that workload and onboard it because it is an open ecosystem, and that's really one of the true benefits. >> So they want the mainframe, but they want (Scott laughs) the flexibility of the developer cloud, right? >> That's right. >> They want their, have their cake eat it too and not gain weight. (group laughs) >> Yeah I mean David, I come from the public cloud world. >> We all don't want to do that. >> I used to work with a public cloud company, and nine years ago, public cloud was in the same stage, where you would go to a bank, and they would be like, we don't trust the cloud. It's not secure, it's not safe. It was the digital natives that adopted it, and that that drove the industry forward, right? And that's where the enterprises that realized that they're losing business because of all these innovative new companies that came out. That's what I saw over the last nine years in the cloud space. I think in the telco space also, something similar might happen, right? So a lot of this, I mean a lot of the new age telcos are understanding the value, are looking to innovate are adopting the open technologies, but there's still some inertia and hesitancy, for the reasons as Scott mentioned, to go there so quickly. So we just have to work through and balance between both sides. >> Yeah, well with that said, if there's still some inertia, but there's a theme of velocity, how do you help organizations balance that so they trust evolving? >> Yeah, and I think this is where our solution, like infrastructure block, is a foundational pillar to make that happen, right? So if we can take away the concerns that the organizations have in terms of security, reliability from the fundamental elements that build their infrastructure, by working with partners like Wind River, but Dell takes the ownership end-to-end to make sure that service works and we have those telco grade SLAs, then the telcos can start focusing on what's next. The applications and the customer services on the top. >> Customer service customer experience. >> You know, that's an interesting point Gautam brings up, too, because support is an issue too. We all talk about when you break these things apart, it creates integration points that you need to manage, right? But there's also, so the support aspect of it. So imagine if you will, you had one vendor, you have an outage, you call that one vendor, one necktie to choke, right, for accountability for the network. Now you have four or five vendors that you have to work. You get a lot of finger pointing. So at least at the infrastructure layer, right? Dell takes first call support for both the hardware infrastructure and the Wind River cloud infrastructure for both. And we are training and spinning them up to support, but we're always behind them of course as well. >> Can you give us a favorite customer example of- that really articulates the value of the partnership and the technologies that it's delivering to customers? >> Well, Infra Block- >> (indistinct) >> Is quite new, and we do have our first customer which is LG U plus, which was announced yesterday. Out of Korea, small customer, but a very important one. Okay, and I think they saw the value of the integrated system. They don't have the (indistinct) expertise and they're leveraging Dell and Wind River in order to make that happen. But I always also say historically before this new offering was Vodafone, right? Vodafone is a leader in Europe in terms of Open RAN, been very- Yago and Paco have been very vocal about what they're doing in Open RAN, and Dell and Wind River have been there with them every step of the way. And that's what I would say, kind of, led up to where we are today. We learned from engagements like Vodafone and I think KDDI as well. And it got us where we are today and understanding what the operators need and what the impediments are. And this directly addresses that. >> Those are two very different examples. You were talking about TCO before. I mean, so the earlier example is, that's an example to me of a disruptor. They'll take some chances, you know, maybe not as focused on TCO, of course they're concerned about it. Vodafone I would think very concerned about TCO. But I'm inferring from your comments that you're trying to get the industry, you're trying to check the TCO box, get there. And then move on to higher levels of value monetization. The TCO is going to come down to how many humans it takes to run the network, is it not, is that- >> Well a lot of, okay- >> Or is it devices- >> So the big one now, particularly with Vodafone, is energy cost, right? >> Of course, greening the network. >> Two-thirds of the energy consumption in RAN is the the Radio Access Network. Okay, the OPEX, right? So any reductions, even if they're 5% or 10%, can save tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So we do things creatively with Dell to understand if there's a lot of traffic at the cell site and if it's not, we will change the C state or P state of the server, which basically spins it down, so it's not consuming power. But that's just at the infrastructure layer. Where this gets really powerful is working with the RAN vendors like Samsung and Ericson and others, and taking data from the traffic information there, applying algorithms to that in AI to shut it down and spin it back up as needed. 'Cause the idea is you don't want that thing powered up if there's no traffic on it. >> Well there's a sustainability, ESG, benefit to that, right? >> Yes. >> And, and it's very compute intensive. >> A hundred percent. >> Which is great for Dell. But at the same time, if you're not able to manage that power consumption, the whole thing fails. I mean it's, because there's going to be so much data, and such a intense requirement. So this is a huge issue. Okay, so Scott, you're saying that in the TCO equation, a big chunk is energy consumption? >> On the OPEX piece. Now there's also the CapEx, right? And Open RAN solutions are now, what we've heard from our customers today, are they're roughly at parity. 'Cause you can do things like repurpose servers after the useful life for a lower demand application which helps the TCO, right? Then you have situations like Juniper, where you can take, now software that runs on the same device, eliminating at a whole other device at the cell site. So we're not just taking a server and software point of view, we're taking a whole cell site point of view as it relates to both CapEx and OPEX. >> And then once that infrastructure it really gets adopted, that's when the innovation occurs. The ecosystem comes in. Developers now start to think of new applications that we haven't thought of yet. >> Gautam: Exactly. >> And that's where, that's going to force the traditional carriers to respond. They're responding, but they're doing so very carefully right now, it's understandable why. >> Yeah, and I think you're already seeing some news in the, I mean Nokia's announcement yesterday with the rebranding, et cetera. That's all positive momentum in my opinion, right? >> What'd you think of the logo? >> I love the logo. >> I liked it too. (group laughs) >> It was beautiful. >> I thought it was good. You had the connectivity down below, You need pipes, right? >> Exactly. >> But you had this sort of cool letters, and then the the pink horizon or pinkish, it was like (Scott laughs) endless opportunity. It was good, I thought it was well thought out. >> Exactly. >> Well, you pick up on an interesting point there, and what we're seeing, like advanced carriers like Dish, who has one of the true Open RAN networks, publishing APIs for programmers to build in their 5G network as part of the application. But we're also seeing the network equipment providers also enable carriers do that, 'cause carriers historically have not been advanced in that way. So there is a real recognition that in order for these networks to monetize new use cases, they need to be programmable, and they need to publish standard APIs, so you can access the 5G network capabilities through software. >> Yeah, and the problem from the carriers, there's not enough APIs that the carriers have produced yet. So that's where the ecosystem comes in, is going to >> A hundred percent >> I think there's eight APIs that are published out of the traditional carriers, which is, I mean there's got to be 8,000 for a marketplace. So that's where the open ecosystem really has the advantage. >> That's right. >> That's right. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> So it all makes sense on paper, now you just, you got a lot of work to do. >> We got to deliver. Yeah, we launched it today. We got to get some like-minded partners and customers to come together. You'll start seeing results coming out of this hopefully soon, and we'll talk more about it over time. >> Dave: Great Awesome, thanks for sharing with us. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you for sharing, stopping by, sharing what's going on with Dell and Wind River, and why the opportunity's in it for customers and the technological evolution. We appreciate it, you'll have to come back, give us an update. >> Our pleasure, thanks for having us. (Group talks over each other) >> All right, thanks guys >> Appreciate it. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, Live from MWC23 in Barcelona. theCUBE is the leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante by our estimates aws will generate around nine billion dollars in storage revenue this year and is now the second largest supplier of enterprise storage behind dell we believe aws storage revenue will hit 11 billion in 2022 and continue to outpace on-prem storage growth by more than a thousand basis points for the next three to four years at its third annual storage day event aws signaled a continued drive to think differently about data storage and transform the way customers migrate manage and add value to their data over the next decade hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll give you a brief overview of what we learned at aws's storage day share our assessment of the big announcement of the day a deal with netapp to run ontap natively in the cloud as a managed service and we'll share some new data on how we see the market evolving with aws executive perspectives on its strategy how it thinks about hybrid and where it fits into the emerging data mesh conversation let's start with a snapshot of the announcements made at storage day now as with most aws events this one had a number of announcements and introduced them at a pace that was predictably fast and oftentimes hard to follow here's a quick list of most of them with some comments on each the big big news is the announcement with netapp netapp and aws have engineered a solution which ports the rich netapp stack onto aws and will be delivered as a fully managed service this is a big deal because previously customers either had they had to make a trade-off they had a settle for cloud-based file service with less functionality than you could get with netapp on-prem or it had to lose the agility and elasticity of the cloud and the whole pay-by-the-drink model now customers can get access to a fully functional netapp stack with services like data reduction snaps clones the full multi-protocol support replication all the services ontap delivers in the cloud as a managed service through the aws console our estimate is that 80 of the data on-prem is stored in file format and that's not the revenue but that's the data and we all know about s3 object storage but the biggest market from a capacity standpoint is file storage you know this announcement reminds us quite a bit of the vmware cloud on aws deal but applied to storage netapp's aunt anthony lai told me dave this is bigger and we're going to come back to that in a moment aws announced s3 multi-region access points it's a service that optimizes storage performance it takes into account latency network congestion and the location of data copies to deliver data via the best route to ensure our best performance this is something we've talked about for quite some time using metadata to optimize that that access aws also announced improvements to s3 tiering where it will no longer charge for small objects of less than 128k so for example customers won't be charged for most metadata and other smaller objects remember aws years ago hired a bunch of emc engineers and those guys built a lot of tiering functionality into their boxes and we'll come back to that later in this episode aws also announced backup and monitoring tools to ensure backups are in compliance with regulations and corporate edicts this frankly is table stakes and was was overdue in my view aws also made a number of other announcements that have been well covered in the press around block storage and simplified data migration tools so we'll leave that to your perusal through other outlets i want to come back to the big picture on the market dynamics now as we've reported in previous breaking analysis segments aws storage revenue is on a path to 10 billion dollars we reported this last year this chart puts the market in context it shows our estimates for worldwide enterprise storage revenue in the calendar year 2021. this data is meant to include all storage revenue including primary secondary and archival storage and related maintenance services dell is the leader in the 60 billion market with aws now hot on its tail with 15 of the market in terms of the way we've cut it now in the pre-cloud days customers would tell us our storage strategy is the following we buy emc for block and netapp for file keeping it simple while remnants of this past habit continue the market is definitely changing as you can see here the companies highlighted in red represent the growing hyperscaler presence and you can see in the pi on the right they now account for around 25 percent of the market and they're growing much much faster than the on-prem vendors well over that thousand basis points when you combine them all a couple of other things to note in the data we're excluding kindrel from ibm's figures that's ibm spinout but including our estimates of storage software for example spectrums protect that is sold as part of the ibm cloud but not reported in ibm's income statement by the way pre-kindred spin ibm storage business we believe would approach the size of netapp's business now in the yellow we've highlighted the portion of hyper-converged that comprises storage this includes vmware nutanix cisco and others vmware and nutanix are the largest hci players but in total the storage piece of that market is less than two billion okay so the way to look at this market is changing traditional on-prem is vying for budgets with cloud storage services which are rapidly gaining presence in the market and we're seeing the on-prem piece evolve of course into as a service models with hpe's green lake dell's apex and other on-prem cloud-like models now let's come back to the netapp aws deal netapp as we know is the gold standard for file services they've been the market leader for a long long time and other than pure which is considerably smaller netapp is the one company that consistently was able to beat emc in the market emc developed its its nas business and developed on its own nasdaq and it bought isilon to compete with netapp with isilon's excellent global file system but generally netapp remains the best file storage company today now emerging disruptors like cumulo vast weka they would take issue with this statement and rightly so as they have really promising technology but netapp remains the king of the file hill you can't debate that now netapp however has had some serious headwinds as the largest independent storage player as seen in this etr chart the data shows a nine-year view of netapp's presence in the etr survey presence is referred to by etr as market share it's not traditional market share it measures the pervasiveness of responses in the etr survey over a thousand customers each quarter so the percentage of mentions essentially that netapp is getting and you can see well netapp remains a leader it has had a difficult time expanding its tam and it's become frankly less relevant in the eye in the grand scheme and the grand eyes of it buyers the company hit headwinds when it began migrating its base to ontap 8 and was late riding a number of new waves including flash but generally it is recovered from those headwinds and it's really now focused on the cloud opportunity opportunity as evidenced by this deal with aws now as i said earlier netapp evp anthony lai told me that this deal is bigger than vmware cloud on aws like me you may be wondering how can that be vmware is the leader in the data center it has half a million customers its deal with aws has been a tremendous success as seen in this etr chart the data here shows spending momentum or net score from when vmware cloud on aws was picked up in the etr surveys with a meaningful n which today is approaching 100 responses in the survey the yellow line is there for context it's vmware's overall business so repeat it buyers who responded vmware versus specifically vmware cloud on aws so you see vmware overall has a huge presence in the survey more than 600 n the red line is vmware cloud on aws and that red dotted line you see that that's that's my magic 40 mark anything above that line we consider elevated net score or spending velocity and while we saw some deceleration earlier this year in that line that top line for vmware cloud vmware cloud and aws has been consistently showing well in the survey well above that 40 percent line so could this netapp deal be bigger than vmware cloud on aws well probably not in our view but we like the strategy of netapp going cloud native on aws and aws's commitment to deliver this as a managed service now where could get interesting is across clouds in other words if netapp can take a page out of snowflake and build an abstraction layer that hides the underlying complexity of not only the aws cloud but also gcp and azure where you log into the netapp cloud netapp data cloud if you will just go ahead and steal steal it from snowflake and then netapp optimizes your on-prem your aws your azure and or your gcp file storage we see that as a winning strategy that could dramatically expand netapp's tam politically it may not sit well with aws but so what netapp has to go multi-cloud to expand that tam when the vmware deal was announced many people felt it was a one-way street where all the benefit would eventually accrue to aws in reality this has certainly been a near-term winner for aws and vmware and of course importantly vmware and aws join customers now longer term it's going to clearly be a win for aws because it gets access to vmware's customer base but we also think it will serve vmware well because it gives the company a clear and concise cloud strategy especially if it can go across clouds and eventually get to the edge so with this netapp aws deal will it be as big probably not in our view but it is big netapp in our view just leapfrogged the competition because of the deep engineering commitment aws has made this isn't a marketplace deal it's a native managed service and we think that's pretty huge okay we're going to close with a few thoughts on aws storage strategy and some other thoughts on hybrid talk about capturing mission critical workloads and where aws fits in the overall data mesh conversation which is one of our favorite topics first let's talk about aws's storage strategy overall as with other services aws approach is to give builders access to tools at a very granular level that means it does mean a lot of apis and access to primitives that are essentially building blocks while this may require greater developer skills it also allows aws to get to market quickly and add functionality faster than the competition enterprises however where they will pay up for solutions so this leaves some nice white space for partners and also competitors and especially the on-prem folks but let's hear from an aws executive i spoke to milan thompson bucheveck an aws vp on the cube and asked her to describe aws's storage strategy here's what she said play the clip we are dynamically and constantly evolving our aws storage services based on what the application and the customer want that is fundamentally what we do every day we talked a little bit about those deployments that are happening right now dave that is something that idea of constant dynamic evolution just can't be replicated by on-premises where you buy a box and it sits in your data center for three or more years and what's unique about us among the cloud services is again that perspective of the 15 years where we are building applications in ways that are unique because we have more customers and we have more customers doing more things so you know i i've said this before uh it's all about speed of innovation dave time and change wait for no one and if you're a business and you're trying to transform your business and base it on a set of technologies that change rapidly you have to use aws services i mean if you look at some of the launches that we talk about today and you think about s3's multi-region access points that's a fundamental change for customers that want to store copies of their data in any number of different regions and get a 60 performance improvement by leveraging the technology that we've built up over over time the the ability for us to route to intelligently router requests across our network that and fsx for netapp ontap nobody else has these capabilities today and it's because we are at the forefront of talking to different customers and that dynamic evolution of storage that's the core of our strategy so as you hear and can see by milan's statements how these guys think outside the box mentality at the end of the day customers want rock solid storage that's dirt cheap and lightning fast they always have and they always will but what i'm hearing from aws is they think about delivering these capabilities in the broader context of an application or a business think deeper business integration not the traditional suppliers don't think about that as well but the services mentality the cloud services mentality is different than dropping off a box at a loading dock turning it over to a professional services organization and then moving on to the next deal now i also had a chance to speak with wayne dusso he's another aws vp in the storage group wayne do so is a long time tech athlete for years he was responsible for building storage arrays at emc aws as i said hired a bunch of emcs years ago and those guys did a lot of tiered storage so i asked wayne what's the difference in mentality when you're building boxes versus cloud services here's what he said you have physical constraints you have to worry about the physical resources on that device for the life of that device which is years think about what changes in three or five years think about the last two years alone and what's changed can you imagine having being constrained by only uh having boxes available to you during this last two years versus having the cloud and being able to expand or contract based on your business needs that would be really tough right and it has been tough and that's why we've seen customers from every industry accelerate uh their use of the cloud during these last two years so i get that so what's your mindset when you're building storage services and data services so so each of the surfaces that we have in object block file movement services data services each of them provides very specific customer value in each are deeply integrated with the rest of aws so that when you need object services you start using them the integrations come along with you when if you're using traditional block we talked about ebs io2 block express when using file just the example alone today with ontap you know you get to use what you need when you need it and the way that you're used to using it without any concern so so the big difference is no constraints in the box but lots of opportunities to blend in with other services now all that said there are cases where the box is gonna win because of locality and and physics and latency issues you know particularly where latency is king that's where a box is gonna be advantageous and we'll come back to that in a bit okay but what about hybrid how does aws think about hybrid and on-prem here's my take and then let's hear from milan again the cloud is expanding it's moving out to the edge and aws looks at the data center as just another edge node and it's bringing its infrastructure as code mentality to that edge and of course to data centers so if aws is truly customer centric which we believe it is it will naturally have to accommodate on-prem use cases and it is doing just that here's how milan thompson-bucheveck explained how aws is thinking about hybrid roll the clip for us dave it always comes back to what the customer is asking for and we were talking to customers and they were talking about their edge and what they wanted to do with it we said how are we going to help and so if i just take s3 for outposts as an example or ebs and outposts you know we have customers like morningstar and morningstar wants outposts because they are using it as a step in their journey to being on the cloud if you take a customer like first adudabi bank they're using outposts because they need data residency for their compliance requirements and then we have other customers that are using outposts to help like dish networks as an example to place the storage as close as account to the applications for low latency all of those are customer driven requirements for their architecture for us dave we think in the fullness of time every customer and all applications are going to be on the cloud because it makes sense and those businesses need that speed of innovation but when we build things like our announcement today of fxs for netapp ontap we build them because customers asked us to help them with their journey to the cloud just like we built s3 and evs for outposts for the same reason so look this is a case where the box or the appliance wins latency matters as we said and aws gets that this is where matt baker of dell is right it's not a zero-sum game this is especially accurate as it pertains to the cloud versus on-prem discussion but a budget dollar is a budget dollar and the dollar can't go to two places so the battle will come down to who has the best solution the best relationships and who can deliver the most rock solid storage at the lowest cost and highest performance let's take a look at mission critical workloads for a second we're seeing aws go after these it's doing a database it's doing it with block storage we're talking about oracle sap microsoft sql server db2 that kind of stuff high volume oltp transactions mission critical work now there's no doubt that aws is picking up a lot of low hanging fruit with business critical workloads but the really hard to move work isn't going without a fight frankly it's not going that fast aws and mace has made some improvements to block storage to remove some of the challenges related but generally we see this is a very long road ahead for aws and other cloud suppliers oracle is the king of mission critical work along with ibm mainframes and those infrastructures generally it's not easy to move to the cloud it's too risky it's too expensive and the business case oftentimes isn't there because very frequently you have to freeze applications to do so what generally what people are doing is they're building an abstraction layer over that putting that abstraction layer maybe in the cloud building new apps that can connect to the back end and the into the cloud but that back end is largely cemented and fossilized look it's all in the definition no doubt there's plenty of mission critical work that is going to move but just really depends on how you define it even aws struggles to move its most critical transaction systems off of oracle but we'll continue to keep an open mind there it's just that today we define the most mission-critical workloads as we define them we don't see a lot of movement to the hyperscale clouds and we're going to close with some thoughts on data mesh so one of our favorite topics we've written extensively about this and interviewed and are collaborating with jamaa dagani who has coined the term and we've announced a media collaboration with the data mesh community and believe it's a strong direction for the industry so we wanted to understand how aws thinks about data mesh and where it fits in the conversation here's what milan had to say about that play the clip we have customers today that are taking the data mesh architectures and implementing them with aws services and dave i want to go back to the start of amazon when amazon first began we grew because the amazon technologies were built in microservices fundamentally a data match is about separation or abstraction of what individual components do and so if i look at data mesh really you're talking about two things you're talking about separating the data storage and the characteristics of data from the data services that interact and operate on that storage and with data mesh it's all about making sure that the businesses the decentralized business model can work with that data now our aws customers are putting their storage in a centralized place because it's easier to track it's easier to view compliance and it's easier to predict growth and control costs but we started with building blocks and we deliberately built our storage services separate from our data services so we have data services like lake formation and glue we have a number of these data services that our customers are using to build that customized data mesh on top of that centralized storage so really it's about at the end of the day speed it's about innovation it's about making sure that you can decentralize and separate your data services from your storage so businesses can go faster so it's very true that aws has customers that are implementing data mess data mesh data mess data mesh can be a data mess if you don't do it right jpmorgan chase is a firm that is doing that we've we've covered that they've got a great video out there check out the breaking analysis archive you'll see that hellofresh has also initiated a data mesh architecture in the cloud and several others are starting to pop up i think the point is the issues and challenges around data mesh are more organizational and process related and less focused on the technology platform look data by its very nature is decentralized so when mylan talks about customers building on centralized storage that's a logical view of the storage but not necessarily physically centralized it may be in a in a hybrid device it may be a copy that lives outside of that same physical location this is an important point as jpmorgan chase pointed out the data mesh must accommodate data products and services that are in the cloud and also on-prem it's got to be inclusive the data mesh looks at the data store as a node on the data mesh it shouldn't be confined by the technology whether it's a data warehouse a data hub a data mart or an s3 bucket so i would say this while people think of the cloud as a centralized walled garden and in many respects it is that very same cloud is expanding into a massively distributed architecture and that fits with the data mesh architectural model as i say the big challenges of data mesh are less technical and more cultural and we're super excited to see how data mesh plays out over time and we're really excited to be part of part of the the community and a media partner of the data mesh community okay that's it for now remember i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and these episodes they're all available as podcasts all you do is search for breaking analysis podcasts you can always connect on twitter i'm at d vellante or email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com i appreciate the comments you guys make on linkedin and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. Happy to welcome back to the program, just had him on at VeeamON at theCUBE's coverage there. David Harvey, he is the Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. David, welcome to our coverage of HPE Discover. >> Thank you. I appreciate the invitation and great to see you again. >> All right, so when I talked to you at VeeamON, of course, you talk about lots of partners and you love all of them, but now we get to hear the truth. HPE, which one of your partners do you love the best? Talk to us a little bit about that HPE relationship. >> Sure, yeah, absolutely and really great to be part of Discover this year. And I think it's a fantastic set up in the way that HPE is running this event. As we've talked about with you guys before as well, HPE's always been a really special relationship for us. It was really the first relationship that we sort of established over eight years ago. And so from our point of view, it's got a long, rich heritage, that level of trust and desire for growth has been fantastic. And in the recent years as well as both of us have really continued to lean in, it's just continued to grow at a fantastic rate. I mean you would've seen some of the recent results there. Veeam's grown over 20% in the second half of 2019 with IBC. I'm really happy to say that the HPE alliance is growing well in excess of that. And so we're really pleased on how things have continued to evolve. >> Well congratulations on that growth. Yeah, boy, eight years so much has changed. So of course, I think about HPE and VMware and one of the earliest partners for server virtualization. But HPE's got a broad portfolio. Bring us through where Veeam sits. You know you got solutions like GreenLake out there, of course, traditional virtualization. So give us a little bit of kind of the breadth and depth of engineering work and partnership that you have. >> Yeah, great question Stu. And I think the interesting part of this is when you look at sort of the ecosystem that's out there now and the evolution HPE's gone through in embracing partners, the focus on the portfolio development and engagement between the two companies has reflected that. There are so many different areas that we could work with HPE on, but when we sat down together and we said where can we really provide the best value to our customers, we focused on a few key parts of the portfolio. Storage, obviously, is key. 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, StorONE, Apollo, areas where we've done really strong work over the years and continue to provide great solutions to the customers. Really pleased with how we've increased into SimpliVity. That's a really big push area for us over the last 12 months. And we're starting to see some great success together with that providing really unique solutions to extend the value of SimpliVity into new use cases, complimenting what they already have. And then obviously at Discover a couple of years ago we did a big push with GreenLake. And we're really pleased with how that's moving forwards as well because that's not really as much as a technology type of play, but that's a philosophy play about how we're satisfying the economic and service needs of the customers. So we're really pleased how that's been moving forwards, and that's another really big push for us this year. >> Well excellent. Maybe it would help to illustrate this. Do you have some customer examples? I understand sometimes, if you can share who the the logo is >> Harvey: Sure. >> that's great, otherwise if it needs to be a little more anonymized, that's fine too. >> No I think that's a great question, and the reason why we like talking about these types of things is we do thousands of orders a year with HPE. It's a really rich partnership on a global basis. If I remember correctly, last time we had over 100 countries where we've done deals together, so it's really nice to see it be appeared as on a global basis. A couple of easy ones that come to mind, certainly is White River Health Services. Big medical system solution serving over half a million customers that are out there. And those guys had a massive growth rate of data, 30% growth year over year, and really needed to make sure that that availability of data was there so that they provided solid solutions to their customers. We partnered up with a solution with StorONE and provided them with a fantastic amount of savings per year on their overall solution but also gave them that business continuity that they were looking at. So I think that's a great example. If we move over to Europe though there's another good market for us where we're seeing really success, great success together. The Metropolitan Thames Valley is a very large housing authorities are a very different virtual but shows the wide applicability of the solution, where they were having trouble looking at the ability to put a full disaster recovery plan into place, And obviously contingencies is a key topic right now. So we worked with HPE and then we've really put in great solution that not only reduced the ability to recover from seven days to less than 30 minutes, but we also managed to be more efficient with the amount rack utilization that was in place for them as well. So economic support, very critical business continuity support, and obviously a unified solution to allow them to be in a scenario where they knew that the IT partners they were working with were fully in unison so there was never any service question if they needed any support. So a couple of really good examples from around the world. >> You know, I wonder if we can touch a little bit on the competitive dynamics here. So eight years ago, HP had its own data protectant. When HP split that piece went over to micro focus so it kind of (murmurs) the swim lanes a little bit. But HP has also been increasing their partnership, so Veeam, you're a good partner but there are other partners out. So how do you help differentiate and how do you make you got clean engagements through HPE's channel and with their field? >> Yeah, that's a really good question, and there's a number of different answers to that, but I think that one of the things that will support what I'm about to touch on is that we're really proud that we just got awarded the Global Technology Partner award again this year. This is the second year running for HPE. Last year was the first time a software application partner was provided and now two years in a row, we've demonstrated that the partnership is really valuable for HPE. And I think to your point, Stuart, it comes down to a couple different areas. The first is just the overall attitude, approach, and relationship. Partnerships work when you can turn your back on each other. They work on the assumption that you really have the same vested interest for success and you can roll through some tough times as well as the good times. With good dialogue, with focus on the objectives you are trying to achieve, but also more importantly that you are excited and you enjoy working together. And so, it's a pleasure to spend hours and hours together to come up with something that satisfies the customer pains that you are solving. Now combined with that attitude because to me that attitude is a core foundation, technology's hugely important but if you can't have a business relationship, you can't actually execute that technology position. Now we're fortunate enough as well that you combine that attitude of partnershipping together with the investments and technology that we've done, and that's why we feel like we continue to differentiate. I think it's great that HPE has such a rich ecosystem. I think it's helpful to get focus on what is a huge topic for customers and frankly, the technology world is a complex ecosystem nowadays. But I think you stand out from the rest by focusing on being the most successful, being the best, having the right attitude, making the right investments together to move forward and that's where we've demonstrated, historically, our engineering commitment and our future roadmap commitment, which we're working on right now together heavily combining with a big marketing and sales investment, so all of the facets and the organization come together in a nice, seamless manner. So, you know, trust, I think it's great that they have the depth of ecosystem that's out there, we're just really proud that we continue to be the preferred partner in this space and we keep getting recognized for the investment that we have with HPE as well. >> Excellent. Yeah, you brought up it is such a complex ecosystem out there. One of the themes that we heard, your show as well as HP Discover, you know, we're talking about customers going through that digital information. You gave us a couple of customer examples, but maybe some big themes, what're you hearing? You know, how do the (murmurs) markets align between Veeam and HPE? >> Yeah, great question. And I think that is another great example where when you use the topic of data transformation, it's a really broad discussion. You know, what we've tried to do is focus on the areas that we provide the most value to customers right now. And I think that focuses us down and data protection powered by intelligence storage, which is a really key topic for a lot of our joint customers that are out there. We really want to make sure we can extend your data management from on-premise to the cloud. That's a really key area we're working with the Simplivity team on. And then finally, the consumption-based data management working very closely with GreenLake. And the (murmurs) of all of those solutions satisfied the plethora of needs that the customers have on storage of data availability. And I think that from that point of view, that's where keeping that focus on what is solving pains today, is why were having such great success together. So I think from that basis, we found that that helps the sales teams identify and satisfy the needs of the customer, It helps us get clarity on execution, and more importantly, keeps us in the scenario where we got really clear bars for success to make sure that this partnership is not just a, I call it a website partnership, but a real partnership that's driving key revenues, key (murmurs) leadership, and frankly, key solutions for the customers. >> Yeah, if you talk about where your data lives and how Veeam could support across multiple environments. There's the technical pieces which Veeam's done a good job on and I think people understand pretty well. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the financial piece of things. How do you make sure, you know, especially with a deep partner like HPE, that you make it seamless as companies are trying to move more towards the SaaS and Opex models, and that it's not getting understanding, full control of what my billing is, and how these things go together. >> Yeah, it's a really good point, and I think there's sort of a capital facet to that. You know, the first part is, on a global basis across all of the segments that we've worked together on, especially if when you look at the success we have at the higher end price together, and the high end commercial. You have to be in a situation where you can support the financial structure that they have as a business. And that's looking at it whether or not it's a traditional Capex employment related to more of the traditional HP solutions, or looking at the flexibility of the Veeam licensing combined with that so they can have the choice that they desire. As well as moving down that path, that if they decide they want to move through a more consumption-based type of position by having that seamless integration with GreenLake as well, you get through a scenario where you can find the right solution for their needs and then the economic structure is really a choice for them, taking away a lot of that pain imposition. Now what we're seeing overall to that point too, which I think is also interesting is customers are going through evolution. If you go back a number of years, every conversation and topic was related to public cloud and it's still a huge area of focus. But, I've also seen a lot of organization especially at the higher end, really start to look at how they can take a lot of their consumption-based economics and bring it on-premise because they want to make sure that the reaction position they got, they're getting their data back is within their premise as well. And so that's why we're really enjoying a lot of success together because we can synergize the flexibility of the HPE offerings with the commercial offerings of (murmurs) Veeam, and be in a scenario where it's almost a perfect fit for most customers. And we try not to force them down a specific path because I think those days are gone, but customers want to look at the economic or the budget constraints they've got today and find the best fit, but they want that best fit without compromising on their overall support they get, and they want the scenario, like we have with HPE where it's fully on their price box, single supplier, single throat to choke, making sure were in unison, and they've got continued investment moving forward in the portfolio (murmurs). >> Excellent. Well final question I have for you is in the general market place, people often get stuck in their head to how they think about a company. Veeam is such a close partner to HPE. (murmurs) has thousands of customers with them. Give our viewers a little bit of how should people be thinking about HPE in 2020, and then also give us the final take away for Veeam and HPE. >> Yeah, great question. I mean, I've been working with HPE now a multitude of, overall over six years now. And the evolution that we're seeing is fantastic. I think that my view on how you should see HPE is, a trusted advisor related to talking about the transformation you're going through your data, and also a clear, solidified portfolio, especially in the storage realm related to the control of the data. Following the data from the origination point of the application all the way through. And so I think from that point of view, there's clarity with portfolio, there's a comprehensive interlock of the portfolio. And so from that point of view, I think there's calmness in the discussion. What I would say is that (murmurs) further and how to look at the HP (murmurs) relationship is. That continued investment on future proofing and hopefully some exciting announcements as we move through the year, will demonstrate that we are constantly making sure that we're differentiating at the frontier (mic cuts) for the customer. And you can see that in the growth of our enterprise business together. You could see that in the growth of high end commercial business together, and you can also see the fact that our customers are growing every single year together. So when we put these solutions in place, they're loving them and they're growing them year over year, and very quickly as well. So we're seeing a very high percentage of our customers reorder within the first year because they're really enjoying the unification of the solution. And so hopefully, the HP customers should look at that, through confidence, through calmness, and be really pleased that the market leader approach will indict protection by Veeam and they're primary (murmurs) leader when it comes to technology with HPE, together provide a really powerful solution, and we're really pleased on the customer satisfaction results we're getting from this work. >> All right. Well, David Harvey, thank you so much for the updates. Looking forward to some of those innovations that you talked about coming later this year. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks so much. I really appreciate the time and enjoying Discover, and I hope everybody's having a great event. >> All right, stay tuned for launch of theCUBE's coverage, HPE Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks as always for watching.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston connecting with alt leaders all around the world, This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this Breaking Analysis. I'm here with Erik Bradley, who's the managing director of ETR and runs their VEN program. Erik good to see you. >> Very nice to see you too Dave. Hope you're doing well. >> Yeah, I'm doing okay hanging in there. You know, you guys in New York are fighting the battle. Looks like we're making some progress here so, you know, all the best, you and your family and the wider community. I'm really excited to have you on today because I had the pleasure of sitting in on a CIO/ CISO panel last week. And we're going to explain sort of what that's all about, but one of the things ETR does that I really like is they go deeper with anecdotal information and it's almost like in-depth interviews in these round tables. So they compliment their quarterly surveys, and their other drill down surveys, with other anecdotal information for people in their community. So it's a tried and true survey practice that adds some color to the dataset. So guys if you bring up the agenda, I want to share with the audience what we're going to talk about today. So, we'll talk a little bit about, you know we just did intros, I want to ask Erik, what ETR VENN is and then we'll go through some of the guests, but if we go back to Erik, explain a little bit about VENN and the whole process and how you guys do that. >> Yeah sure, we should hire you for marketing. You just did a great job, actually, describing that, but about three years ago what we decided was, ETR does an amazing job collecting the data. It can tell you what's happening, who it's happening to and when it's happening. But it can't always tell you why it's happened. So leveraging a lot of my background in twenty-plus years in journalism and institutional Wall Street research, we decided to take the ETR community, the people that actually take the surveys, and start doing interviews with them and start doing events with them. And enable to doing that, we're basically just trying to compliment the survey findings and the data. So what we always say is that ETR will always give you the quantitative answer and VENN will give you the qualitative answer. >> Now guys, let's bring up the agenda slide again, let's take a look at the folks that participated in the round table. Now, for ETR's clients, they actually know the names and the titles and well the company that these guys work for. We've anonymized it for the public. But you had a CIO of a Global Auto Supplier, a CISO of a Diversified Holdings Firm, who actually had some hospitality exposure but also some government contract manufacturing exposure. Chief Architect of a Software ISV and a VP and CISO of a Global Hospitality Resort Chain. So you had three out of the for, Erik, were really in industries that are getting hit hard. Obviously the software company maybe a little bit better. But maybe you can add some color to that. >> Well actually the software company, unfortunately, was getting hit hard as well because they're a software ISV that actually plays into the manufacturing space as well. So, this particular panel of CIOs and CISOs were actually in a very hard hit industries. And are going to make sure we do two more follow-ups with different industry verticals to make sure we're getting a little bit of a wider berth and collect all of that information in a better way. But coming back to this particular call, the whole reason we did this, and as you know, you spoke to my colleague and friend, Sagar Kadakia, who is the Director of Research for ETR, and we were nimble enough to actually change our survey while it was in the field, to start collecting data on what the real-time impact was on the COVID-19 pandemic. We were able to take that information, extrapolate it, and then say okay let's start reading out to these people and dig deeper. Find out why it's happening and even more so, is it permanent? And which vendors are going to win and which vendors might lose from it. So that was the whole reason we set up the series of calls. We've only conducted on so far. We have another one this coming Tuesday as well with four entirely new panelists that are going to be from different industry verticals because, as you astutely pointed out, these verticals were very hard hit and not all of them are as hard as others. So it's important to get a wider cross-section. >> So, guys let's take a look at some of the budget impacts the anecdotal evidence that we gathered here. So let me just scan through it and then Erik, I'll ask you to comment. So, you know, like Erik said, some hard hit industries. All major projects, anything sort of next-generation, have been essentially shelved. That was the ISV. And then another one, we cut at least 70% of the big projects moving forward. He mentioned ServiceNow actually calls them out, but the ServiceNow is a SaaS company they'll probably, you know, weather the storm here. But he did say we've put that on hold. The best comment, you know, "As-a-service has Saved our SaaS." (Erik laughs) That one's great. And then we're going to get into some of the networking commentary. Some really interesting things about how to support the work from home. You know, kind of shifting from a hardened top into remote workers. And then a lot of commentary on security. So, you know, that's sort of a high level scan and there's just so much information here Erik, but maybe you could sort of summarize on some of that commentary. >> Yeah, we should definitely dig into each of those sectors a little more, but to summarize what we're seeing here was the real winners and losers are clear. Not everyone was prepared to have a work from home strategy. Not everyone was prepared to send their workers out. Their VPN wasn't, they didn't have enough bandwidth. So there was a real quick uptick in spending, but longer term we're starting to see that these changes will become more permanent. So the real winners and losers right now, we're going to see on the loser's side traditional networking. The MPLS networking is in a lot of trouble according to all the data and the commentary that we're seeing. It's expensive, it's difficult to ramp to up bandwidth as quickly as you need and it doesn't support remote. So we're seeing that lose out and the winners there are in the SD-WAN space. It's going to be impossible to ignore that going forward and some of our CIO and CISO panelists said that change will be permanent. Also, we're seeing, at the same time, what they were calling a "SaaS and Cloud". Now, we know these trends obviously were already happening but they're being exacerbated. They're happening even more quickly and more strong. And I don't see that changing any time soon. That, of course, is at the expense of network, I'm sorry, data centers. Whether it be your own or hosted. Which has huge ramifications on on-prem hardware. Even the firewall providers. So what we're seeing here is obviously we know things are going to be impacted by this situation. We didn't necessarily expect all of our community members and IT decision-makers to talk about them being possibly permanent. So that on a high level was something that was extremely interesting. And the last one that I would bring up is that as we make this shift towards working from home, towards remote access, you also have to align yourself with the security that can support that. And one of the things that we're seeing in our data side on ETR, is a widening bifurcation between the next-generation security vendors and the more traditional security or the legacy security players. That bifurcation just keeps getting wider and wider and this situation could be the last straw. >> So I want to follow up on a couple of those things. You're talking about sort of the network shift you know, towards the SD-WAN. What people have described to me is that they got a, you know, a hardened top. It's a hierarchical network. It's very well understood and it's safe, right? And now all of a sudden you got all those remote workers and so you've got to completely soft of rethink your whole network architecture. The other thing I want to drill into is your Cloud commentary. There's a comment that I saw, Erik, that really stood out. One of the folks said, "I would like to see the data centers "be completely deleted, if you will, or closed down." I think we're going to see, you know, a lot more of this obviously. Not only from the standpoint of, and you heard this a lot, the kind of paid by the drink. But just generally getting rid of all that sort of so-called non-differentiated heavy-lifting as we often hear about. >> That is a extreme comment. I don't think everyone feels that way. But, yes, the comment was made and we've heard the comment from other people. As you and I both know, the larger the enterprise the harder that is to go completely SaaS. But yeah, when a situation like this has and see the inflexibility of their on-prem infrastructure, yes it becomes something that really has to be addressed and it can become a permanent change. I was also shocked about that comment. That gentleman also stated that his executives outside of the ITs area, the CEO, the CFO, had never ever, ever wanted to discuss Cloud. They did not want to discuss work from home. They did not want to discuss remote access. He said that conversation has changed immediately and to the credit of the actual IT companies out there, the technology companies, they're doing everything they can with this opportunity to make that happen. >> Yeah, and so you're right the whole work from home conversation. To your point earlier, Erik, big chunks of COVID, the post-COVID world are going to remain permanent. Guys bring up the SaaS slide if you will. The SaaS commentary, "As-a-Service Saved our SaaS." "The wittiest quip award" going to the ETR. You know, but you had, what's very interesting to hear folks, in fact I think somebody even called out, "Hey," you know, "we expected Oracle to," you know, "be auditing us but they're actually being supportive "as is IBM." Salesforce was an interesting common, Erik. One of the folks said they would share accounts on-prem, but when they all do the work from home they had to actually buy some more. You also got Cisco with big props. Microsoft was called out. A lot of organizations actually allowing them to defer payments. So the SaaS vendors actually got very high marks didn't they? >> They really did and even I wrote that summary and it was difficult to write that about Oracle because we all know that they're infamous for auditing their own customers in 2009 right after we came out of financial crisis. They have notoriously been a-- I don't know if they found religion and they decided to be nice to their customers, but every-single person mentioned them as one of the vendors that was actually helping. That was very shocking. And we all know that when bad situations happen people become opportunistic. And right now it's really seeming that the SaaS vendors understand that they need a longterm relationship with these customers and they're being altruistic instead. Which is really nice. >> Yeah I think that anybody with a Cloud realizes that hey, we have an opportunity here that the lifetime value of that customer, whereas maybe in 2009 when Oracle didn't have a Cloud, they had to get people in a headlock to try to persevere their, you know, income statement. Let's go to the networking drill down guys, that next slide because Fortinet, some of the things we've been reporting on is the sort of divergence in evaluations between Fortinet and Palo Alto before this whole thing hit, Fortinet has done a really good job with its Cloud offerings. Palo Alto struggles a little bit with trying to figure out the sales compensation, is maybe a little bit behind. Although both companies got strong props and I've talked to a number of customers, Palo Alto is going to be in the mix. Fortinet, from a Cloud standpoint, seems to be doing quite well? Obviously networking, Cisco is the big gorilla there. But we also got call outs from guys like Trend Micro which was interesting, from some of the folks. So, your thoughts on this Erik. >> Yeah, I'll start on the networking side because this is something that I've really, I've dug into quite amount, in not only this panel, but a lot of interviews and it really seems as if as networking refresh starts to come up, and it's coming up with a lot of large enterprises, when your network refresh comes up people are going to do an RFP for SD-WAN. They are sick and tired of paying MPLS network vendors and they really want to look at something else. That was even prior to this situation. Now what we're hearing is this is a permanent change. I particularly had one person say, I wanted to find this quote real quickly if I can, but basically they basically saying that, "From a permanency perspective, the freedom from MTLS "will reduce our networks spend by over half "while more than doubling or tripling our bandwidth." You can't ignore that. You're going to save me money and triple my bandwidth, and hey by the way, my refresh is due. It's something that's coming and it's going to happen. And yes, you mentioned the few right? There's Viptela, there's Velocloud, there's some big players like Cisco. The Palo Alto just acquired CloudGenix in the midst of all of this. They just went and got an SD-WAN player themselves. And they just keep acquiring a portfolio to shift from their on-prem to next-generation. It's going to take some time, because 70% plus of their revenues is still on-prem hardware, but I do believe that their portfolio that they're creating is the way the world is moving. And that's just one comment on the traditional networking versus the next-generation SD-WAN. >> And the customers have indicated, you know it's not easy just to get off of their MPLS network. I mean it takes time, it's like slowly pulling of the bandaid. But, like many things, COVID-19 is sort of accelerating that. We haven't talked about digital transformation. That came up as a maybe more strategic initiative. But one that very clearly has legs. >> You know, David, it's very simple. You just said it. People, when things are going well and they're comfortable, they don't change. And that's the same for an enterpriser company. Hey, everything's great, our revenue's fine. Why would we do this? We'll worry about that next year. Then something like this happens and you realize wow, we've been dragging our feet. That digital transformation that we've been talking about, and we've been a little bit slow to accept, we need to accept it, we need to move now. And yes, it was another one of the major themes and it sounds silly for researchers like you and I because we know this is a theme. We know Clouded option is there, we know digital transformation is there. But, there are still a lot of people that haven't moved as quickly as they should and this is going to be that final catalyst to get them there, without a doubt. Quickly on your point of Fortinet, I was actually very impressed with the commentary that came from that because Fortinet is sometimes one of those names that you think of that maybe plays in a smaller pool or isn't as big as some of the 800 pound gorillas out there. But in other other interviews besides this I've heard the phrase coined of "Forti-everything". So through RND and through acquisition, Fortinet has really expanded the portfolio and right now is their time to shine because when you have smaller satellite, you know, offices and branches that you need to connect, they're really, really good at it. And you don't always want to call a Palo Alto and pay that price when you have smaller branch offices. And I actually, I was glad you brought up Fortinet because it's not a name that we get to herald that often and it was deserving from this panel. >> Yeah and, you know, companies that can secure gateways, secure endpoints, obviously going to have momentum. Zscaler came up, you know I think that, and I'll tell ya, looking at, I've done a couple of breaking analysis on security and Fortinet has been strong in two dimensions. You know ETR is, as our audience is I think getting to know. We really look at two key metrics. One is net score, which is a measure of spending momentum, and the other is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness. And companies like Fortinet, in security, show up on both of those dimensions so it's notable. >> Yes, it certainly is, it is. And I'm glad you brought up Zscaler too. Very recently by client request, we did a very in-depth research on Zscaler versus Palo Alto Prisma Access and they were very interested. This was before all this happened, you know. Does Palo Alto have a chance of catching up, taking share from Zscaler. And I've had the pleasure, myself, personally hosting Jay the CEO of Zscaler at an event in New York City. And I have nothing but incredible respect for the company. But what we found out through this research is Zscaler, at the moment, their technology is still ahead, according to their answers. There's no doubt. However, there doesn't seem to be any real secret sauce that will stop Palo Alto from catching up. So we do believe the parody of feature set will shrink over time. And then it will come down to Palo Alto obviously has a wider and user base. Now, what's happening today might change that. Because if I had to make a decision right now, for my company on secure web gateway, I'm still probably going to go to Zscaler. It's the name. If I had to choose that in a year from now, Palo Alto might have had a better chance. So in this panel, as you brought up, Zscaler was mentioned numerous times as just the wave of the future. Along with CASB brokers right? Whether you're talking about a Netskoper or Forcepointer. All those people that also play in CASB space to secure your access. Zero trust is no longer a marketing-hype term. It is real and it is becoming more real by the week. >> And so, I want to kind of end on one of the other comments that really struck me because we're constantly talking about okay, do you go with a portfolio of a suite of services or do you go with best of breed? What about startups? Are startups more risky in a crisis like this? And one of your panelists, I just love this comment, he said, "One of things that I've always done," he said, "You always hear about the guy, "oh we're going to go to the gardener, we're going to "check out the magic water, we'll pick out three guys "in the upper right hand corner and test them out." He says, "One of the things I always like to do, "I'll pick two from the upper right "and I'll take one from the lower left." One of the emerging, text, "And I'll give em a shot." It won't win every time, but then he called out FireEye as one of the organizations that he found early that gave them competitive advantage. >> Right. >> Love that comment. >> It's a great comment. And honestly if you're in charge of procurement you'd be stupid not to do that. Not only just to see what the technology is, but now I can play you off the big guys because I have negotiating leverage and I can say oh, well I could always just take their contract. So it's silly not to do it from a business perspective. But from technology perspective, what we kept hearing from these people with the smaller vendors. My partner Peter Steube, my colleague and I, we did the host together, we asked this question really believing that the financial insecurity of the moment and the times would make smaller vendors not viable. We heard the exact opposite. What our panelists said was, "No, I'd be happy "to work with a smaller vendor right now "because they're going to give me pricing flexibility, "they're going to work with me right now. "I don't need to pay them upfront "because we're seeing a permanent shift from CapEx to OpEX, "and the smaller vendors are willing to work with me and I can pay them later." So we were actually surprised to hear that and glad to hear it because, to connect to your other point, the other person who was talking about security and the platform approach versus best of breed, he said "Listen, platform approaches you're already "with the vendor, you can bundle a little bit. "But the problem is, if you're just going to acquire "a new technology every time there's a new threat, "the bad guys are just going to switch the threat. "And you can't acquire indefinitely. "So therefore, best of breed with security "will always beat platform." And that's kind of a message to Palo Alto and Cisco, in my opinion, because they seem to be the ones fighting that out. Even Microsoft now, trying to say they're a platform approach in security. >> Well and this says to me the security business, as we predicted, is going to stay fragmented because you're still going to get that best of breed. You know, just like Cloud is going to be fragmented and it's, you know, multiple vendors. Ever since I've been in this business people are trying to consolidate the number of vendors, but technology moves so quickly, it gives competitive advantage. Erik, awesome! Thank you so much for joining us. I'm looking forward to next Tuesday with the next vendor and love to have you back and talk about it anytime. You're a great guest, thanks so much. >> Certainly, I'll do my best to get a better AV connection the next time guys, I apologize for that. But it was great talking to you tonight. >> Hey we're all learning, you know so, thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Coupa Inspire'19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. (gentle music) >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin, on the ground in London, at Coupa Inspire'19. Very pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, we have Dean Henry, the EVP of Business Financing and Supplier Management from American Express. Dean, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> So let's talk about payments. Those of us in our day lives as consumers, the B2C transactions, they're so easy these days, right? You can transact from your phone, from your watch. We're doing everything. We're paying bills, we're buying things. Yet in the B2B space, business payments haven't had as rapid as innovation, as we've seen on the consumer side. Talk to me a little bit about the business-to-business payments industry from AMEX's perspective, before we get in to what you guys are doing with Coupa. >> Yeah well, first comment on the innovation you're absolutely right. The innovation that's happening in retail payments, hasn't made it's way to B2B payments. I think that's mostly a function of a consumer having the ease to try something new. Download an app, and change the way that they transact a bit at a store. Or, a bit with whomever they're paying. Whereas, a big business has a lot of processes that drive their business spend. And the way that they manage it, and systems. As we're here talking with Coupa today, the processes that they automate, that they bring, are critical to making payments happen. Because of that, there's just barriers to entry, that make B2B payments harder to mirror the speed, that you see in the retail side. That said, there's a lot of exciting things happening. B2B payments is a $127 trillion market globally. It's a big profit pool that a lot of players are innovating in. And when you look into the landscape and you consider who's playing out there. There's the traditional big banks, that have been sort of the stalwarts of global payments. There's obviously a large and growing fintech community, with new companies everyday that are in the media, offering new capabilities to clients. And then there's players like American Express. And I think we're actually uniquely positioned in that landscape, with not too many exactly like us. And when you look at the big banks and some of the challenges that they have. When I talk to our customers about fees, and processes that take awhile. Or money that moves with relative uncertainty, in terms of, how much is actually going to show up in the beneficiary's account, based on lifting fees, as money moves between banks. And then you look at the fintech community. That's new innovative solutions, but you're not sure that they're always going to be around, after the next funding cycle. I think we're trying to play in the middle. Where we're a great alternative to the fintech community. We're a global platform for payments. We're a global platform for lending. So we can really do all the things that a fintech can do. All the things that a bank can do, in many instances. And do that with the brand, and the certainty, that is AMEX. So we're excited about the space. And we're investing a lot of time, and energy. And partnering where we need to, in order to make sure our customers can transact where they want us to help them facilitate commerce. >> Right, that point of enabling a customer to transact where they want. What influences are you, is American Express, seeing and being able to infuse into your partnerships, from the consumer side? From that consumer who buys something with a click, or a swipe on Amazon, and wants to be able to do something similar, in their business day job. Tell me about the influence that American Express is seeing. And what that position that you just described, is allowing you guys to say, all right this is the direction that we're going to go in. Because we know we need to meet you, Mr. Customer, where you are. >> Right, well look I think part of it is demographics to be perfectly honest with you. Look at Gen Y, and Gen Z. They're more of the decision makers in today's management. They will be even more in tomorrow's management. And so they, to your point, have that expectation that their business life shouldn't be that much more complex, than their personal life. So, what we're trying to do is find the partners that have the best user experience. And make sure our solutions work seamlessly there. That's step one, that's what we're doing here with Coupa. Step two, is we're also trying to make sure that our capabilities on Amex, a digital real estate works just as easily as a our retail side of our business. And we're doing that with the unifying principles of American Express, which is the trust, and the service, and the brand that we offer to our clients. But then, also the merchant rewards. So there's a rich history of American Express providing a differentiated value proposition, with the credit card rewards that exist. And we take that capability into our business relationships, and make sure that it's a value add to those customers that want it. >> So let's talk about what American Express is doing with Coupa. What was just announced with Coupa Pay? >> So yeah, Coupa Pay, I was impressed by the stats that Rob put up there. They're growing quickly, and we want to be part of it. We're candidly following the requests of our clients who want American Express, as a payment option inside Coupa Pay. We offer a tremendous value prop inside of Coupa Pay. The data that flows with a payment, the data that we're able to collect, that differentiates us from our competition. Helps our clients reconcile their payments, eliminate the paper, realize the efficiencies that Coupa's clients are excited about. And so, we're there simply enabling American Express to be a payment option. And my hope, and I think Coupa's hope, is that that's step one of a partnership. And we'll be able to do more together, to serve our collective clients. >> So this is enabling American Express virtual cards to be available as a payment option, within Coupa Pay? >> Dean: Yes. >> And what is a virtual card? >> So a virtual card is a virtual credit card number. It can be a one-time use, or multi-use. >> Okay. >> Our clients use it for several different reasons. Buyers of goods use a virtual card, in order to make the payment of a supplier easier. To get more data, along with the transaction, so that they can reconcile a payment to a purchase order, and to associated invoices. The suppliers get benefit as well. In that, they too get enhanced data to reconcile a payment, that they receive on their end. There's also working capital benefit. In that, if a buyer chooses to pay early an invoice, we can extend financing, and pay the supplier earlier. So that they have more working capital to operate their business. So it's a real balanced value prop, where both parties are realizing value. >> Is this going to enable a buyer to have benefits, like increased security, with the way the virtual card works? >> Increase security, in so far as a virtual card is encrypted. The fact that American Express stands behind all of our card payments, with our brand and our promise. That differentiates from a traditional bank payment. You know ACH, and other low value clearings, that don't have those guarantees along with it. So that is a big differentiator. But I think candidly, the biggest benefit our clients see is the enhanced data, and the working capital. I think that's where we're trying to enrich both sides of the transaction. Give more data to enable the automation that's happening in the industry. And extend credit, so that businesses can operate more efficiently. And buy the things they need to buy. And hire the people they need to hire. >> Is this also something that will give suppliers, and buyers, more visibility? You talk about enhanced data. Will they now have more visibility over buyers, like different supplier options? Or suppliers, with different ways that they can get paid? >> So certainly, enhanced visibility on when a supplier is getting paid. And relative to the invoice date. And what we're trying to do is work with Coupa, and work with our partners around, well how do we enhance the data so that as Coupa talks about the community of suppliers, that their buyers utilize. How can we be part of that? How do we support the buyers in making decisions? The suppliers in utilizing American Express as a source to be a verified business, that has gone through all the legal checks, that are required in commerce. And bring both of those capabilities, to a transaction on the Coupa network. >> One of the stats that Rob mentioned this morning. I love stats, I really geek out over them, I don't know why. He said there's five million plus suppliers on the Coupa platform. Is that an advantage, that American Express sees, to help extend the footprint of your virtual cards? >> Absolutely, what I'm candidly more excited about is the millions, and millions, of suppliers that are on the American Express network. And that's an asset that I see personally, as something that we can work with Coupa, and other partners, to bring the businesses that are already verified. That are on our network, that we personally talk to every year. And bring those verified profiles to the commerce networks, like Coupa, so that it's easier to transact on Coupa, if you have an American Express card. >> Got it, and then last question for you is if we look at this partnership, what was announced today, this is launching in the UK and Australia first. And then, you'll roll it out more globally. Can you tell me a little bit about why those two regions? When that's going to be available for customers to use? >> So the honest answer is we wanted to be fast to market, quick out to our customer base. The UK and Australia, are two very important geographies for us. So we're launching first in those places, by the end of the year. And then, looking at rolling out in the US in early 2020. And then, from there expanding alongside Coupa globally. >> Tell me, as we're sitting here in London. Some of the interesting things going on, it's a lot of geopolitical challenges. Everybody knows about Brexit, and the election coming up, on the 12th of December. Tell me a little more about the UK market for American Express. What were some of the market dynamics that Amex said, hey there's an opportunity here for, I'll use a word that Coupa uses, acceleration, like accelerated time to market. Give me a little more about that. >> Yeah I mean candidly, like the geopolitics haven't really played into our launch. But the UK has been a strong market for Amex, for a very, very long time. Brighton, where we have a very big presence with the local football team in Brighton. That's just a metaphor for the broader extension, and client base, and employee presence that we have here. And so we wanted to make a big partnership announcement, in an important place. And the UK felt like the right market to do it in. >> Excellent, well Dean thank you for joining me on theCUBE this afternoon. Sharing what's new, with Amex and Coupa. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. >> Oh excellent. For Dean Henry, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, from Coupa Inspire London '19. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cube covering ifs world conference 2019 brought to you by ifs. >>Well going back to Boston and everybody, this is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here day one at the ifs world conference at the Hynes convention center in Boston. Cindy shutdown is here. She's the president of America's at ifs and she's joined by to my right, K in Blackwell, who's a controller at PPC partners, one of the divisions of PPC Metro power. And rod is the CIO of PPC partners. Welcome folks. Good to see you. I said, let me start with you. So you were on last year in the cube down at Atlanta. You still kind of set some, set some goals, you're a little competitive with your other brethren within then ifs. We love it. You know, we're Americans. Okay. So how's it going in North America? >>Um, well it's, it's growing well. We've had fantastic growth and it's been, you know, a little bit of competition within ifs, but you know, certainly we were very proud. We were named region of the year last year. So we won the coveted cup, which, uh, means, uh, we, uh, we want to keep that cup. So that's some of the, some of the competition that we've got going, right? >>Yeah. Well, of course, most of us based companies, they'll do, they'll start up 79, you know, 90% of their businesses, U S if not 100%, and then they'll slowly go overseas as some of the opposite. Right? >>Very much. I mean, ifs is a European based company. We've been in the, in the U S for quite awhile and, but we've really been investing in our growth and we've had fantastic growth over the last few years. And I think, you know, one of the reasons for that growth is our customer satisfaction in the fact that we really want to listen to our customers. You know, I, um, I, I travel quite a lot as you can imagine. And when I travel, I always try to make sure I can visit customers and hear what they have to say, you know, and of course we love to hear the good things, but I also like to hear when they can give us some ideas for improvement and um, you know, then that gives us something to work on and to, you know, to keep moving forward. Um, I also think that, you know, the good thing about that is, um, it gives us a chance to listen and um, you know, I heard something really great from one of our customers, they went live two weeks ago and they called up and said, Hey, can we do a customer story? I love things like that. Yeah. >>I always love that. Uh, let me think about it. I'll get back to you. Okay. What's your relationship between ifs and PPC part? >>Well, PPC partners is one of our newer customers in there in the middle of an implementation and they're doing some great things around digital transformation. And when I had this opportunity to be here on the cube, I thought it would be great to invite rod and can with me and to, you know, tell some of the things that they're doing. >>Cool. So I kind of recruited Cindy as my cohost, your, they're going to be the defective coho. So welcome to the queue and then we're going to show you right to the fire. Okay. So, uh, can you describe your, your role, your when one of the divisions of PPC partners, right? So maybe maybe set up sort of PPC partners and then your role. >>Right. Okay. So PPC is a specialty contracting company and we have four subsidiary companies that operate in the upper Midwest and then also the Southeastern United States. And we provide, um, um, customers within a base innovative, innovative solutions in the electrical and mechanical contracting. So there are those four companies. I was one of the controllers, um, of those four companies for a lot of years. And now I'm on the core team. There's four of us, five of us now, um, that are involved in the implement. >>Okay. So you got all the numbers in your head. And then rod, you're the CIO and you guys are a service organization for all the divisions. Is that correct? That is correct. >>We sit at the holding company and we're responsible for technology across all four of those specialty contractor companies that can just mention. >>So I love these segments, Cindy, because you know, we, here you go, we go to a lot of conferences in the cube and um, you hear a lot about digital transformation, but, so I'd like to ask the practitioners, what does that mean for you guys? We've got somebody who's very close to the line of business, like I say, knows the numbers, but at the end of the day you've got to deliver the technology services. So what does digital transformation mean to you? What's the company doing in that regard? So a great question actually. >>Um, you'll find companies like ours that have been on the same platform for quite a while, uh, 50 plus years, uh, five zero five, six, zero, uh, probably North of five zero, but we'll go with five zero. Uh, and what happens over time is just, you know, with the system can't grow with the organizations, you resort to a lot of manual paper pushing a lot of file flinging, lots of Excel. And so there's just a ton of duplication of effort and those types of things going on. So from a technology standpoint, that's really the stuff that I come in and see and go, you know. Um, but overall I think that getting to the ifs platform, getting a lot of those redundant processes, a lot of the file flinging out of there, it's just going to be beneficial for all of them. >>Okay. So you guys have had to make the business, you're in the middle of the implementation, right? Is that correct? So she had to go through the business case. Um, it sounds like the business case was, you know, we're, we're basically struggling with running our business because, you know, data's all over the place. We don't have a single view of our business, our customers, et cetera. So we have to come to grips with that. But, but, so what was the business case like? I presume that you were involved as well. >>Right. So I've was really involved in building the software that we've used for that 40 plus years though I haven't used it all of them two years. Um, and, and it was really. It was built by accountants. We, you know, intended for it to meet the needs of the whole, the whole organization. But really it was built by accountants. So, um, we've found that we just really weren't able to keep up with meeting the needs of all of the users. Um, so when we started looking at that, we also had, we were running on a couple of different, um, I'm going to call them boxes. We run it on IBM. So, um, we were not able to look across the entire organization and see a consolidated view of the whole organization. So that was one of the things that we were looking to do, was to really bring all four companies under one umbrella and be able to get a picture of the whole mainframe or, yes, we had a couple of mainframes and all of that software was internally written. Um, and it was good. It was, it was good, but it met, you know, just the needs that those of us within the company saw. Um, so I think we were missing a whole lot of opportunity, um, to really, you know, see what else was out there and see new things and really get outside of our sphere of understanding, you know, >>so PPC, >>no, I was going to say as SKM pointed out and the sort of running joke within the companies is the system we have today does numbers really well. Words not so much because it was designed by accountants for accounting, tracking the financials primarily. Yeah. >>In PPC you do construction of course, or construction club, but you also do some service as well, right? You've got people out in the field that are, that are doing, doing service. So when you were looking, um, I'm assuming that you were trying to find a system that could do both, both solutions. Yeah. Did. >>Absolutely. Uh, one of the things that's been concerning to the entire core team is it's great to go out and find a system and there's plenty of them that can handle your back office. Most systems do that fairly well. But what about you feel services, uh, any in our particular industry, electrical contracting, you might have residential, you know, we could very well be working on the buck stadium or a military installation or even the school, you know, those folks have to be able to process invoices, do all sorts of things from a handheld, et cetera, et cetera. That was a big, big driving factor for us. So has a lot of COBOL code running? Is that, is there right here? So you said 50 years, I mean, um, so now I'm interested in the, in the, in the migration and, and you know what that looks like. >>Yeah, I'll bet. So do you, do you have to freeze the existing sort of systems and then sort of bring the other ones up to speed? Is this cloud-based? What does that all look like? That great question. So, uh, we are, uh, we subscribe to the managed cloud solution. Um, you know, for most construction companies, electrical contracting companies like ours, you know, technology is important, but it is not what really makes our wheels turn. It's a con. It's a competitive advantage if you use it wisely. And so, um, you know, for us it was very important to think about this holistically and try to figure out if we're gonna bring in a solution, what does that solution need to look like and will it work for all of our companies, not just one, not just residential, commercial, et cetera. Okay. All right. So, so w w what's that journey look like? I mean, um, when did, when did it start? What's your >>sort of timeline? So about two and a half years ago, we really started looking at what we had in on hand now and what we had in place and thinking about did we really want to make a move? And so, um, we had a team that came together about 15 people across the organization from operations and also the back office to really evaluate what we had evaluated our needs. Um, we decided, yes, we needed something new. And then we actually brought in a second team, um, that started looking at what that new thing would be. We had a consultant assisting us with that and uh, we kinda narrowed it down to two players if you will. And ifs was one of those. Um, and we, even though, um, one of the things that we liked was the fact that that ifs had, um, a broad reach over different types of industries and we felt like that would give us, um, something in addition to a construct and centric view know domain expertise. Yeah, >>exactly. You know, and you know, with our core industries, you know, construction is a big part of that. But one of the things that we're seeing in the construction industry today is the trend to go to what we call prefabrication. The fact that you know, you can really speed up a project if you aren't trying to build everything on site and you can also do it much more cheaper. McKinsey has a study out and they believe that over time if, if of comp of construction company will engage with prefabrication, they can reduce the project timelines 20 to 50% and lower the cost up to 20% and with ifs is heritage in manufacturing. It's really a perfect marriage for construction companies because construction companies need the project management, the installation, you know, the change management that goes along with some of those back-office things. They also a lot of time have to do service. But if you really want to get that competitive advantage, if you can take advantage of the prefab, which is really manufacturing high, if this is heritage, he could really have a, a full, complete S, you know, solution from one supplier. >>There's a huge trend in home-building actually. You would, you see, you know, modular homes and kind of the future of it. But uh, so how does that affect you guys? I mean you, you prefab something that resonates with you, is that sort of more of a generic statement across the customer base or >>it's certainly an area where we're focusing on more. Um, we also have an automation, uh, division that really focuses on, um, automation for industries. And that's an area that it's kind of a manufacturing type of thing. They build panels and those sorts of things. So we're definitely seeing it >>well. So, okay. So I got to ask you, so when you pulled out the Gartner magic quadrant, I said, okay, it always is. Ifs isn't the leader that, that, that, that might've helped. Right. Okay. So you don't get fired now, but choose the leader, but then you started peeling the onion. He had to do due diligence. So what kinds of things did you look at? What kind of tires did you kick? Piers, did you talk to and be, I'm interested in what your, what you learned. Well, I'll touch on one key element and >>we can get in as many sub elements as you like. The selection process for us took several months. Um, I think initially we really pared it down to about eight packages that we were seriously considering. Then down to four and then eventually down to two. And what really, really intrigued us about ifs was the fact that they are not construction centric. So we really had a big decision to make internally, which was do we want to just get on the bandwagon and do what everyone else in construction is doing or do we really wanna you know, risk versus reward and go after something special. So ifs, they are in, you name it, manufacturing is obviously key. Aerospace engineering, race cars I saw today, I didn't know that. So that was a big selling point for us. And the plan is to retire your mainframe and go into the cloud. >>Yes, yes, yes. So IBM got you in a headlock. >>We've been friends for a long time. Good company. Um, w what's that been like just to sort of, uh, that the thought of, you know, going to the cloud. W how, how is, you know, the it folks you know, responded to that. Um, how has that changed their sort of role brokers versus all? Again, I think in construction organizations, technology is important, but it is not what makes the wheels turn. So I'm trying to bring in all of that iron and infrastructure and build it out and configure it ourselves and then maintain it for the long haul. Just not something that was value added for us. In addition, um, if you've ever worked with Oracle, which is a close partner of ifs, but there is a lot of licensing caveats and a lot of things you've got to worry about if you're going to go it alone by going with the managed cloud solution, we're sort of partnering and trusting ifs to take that on for us so we can focus on taking care of our companies, our customers, and doing what we do best. Right? So, okay, so you're still going to be an Oracle. You just won't be, it won't be as visible. We use Oracle too. We're a Salesforce customer, so Hey, Oracle is behind there, but no offense. >>Ah, I know you guys did >>for the distinction as well, right? Because even if you are going to have portions of Oracle that are running your system, you've got to have some Oracle experts on staff. You know, if you're going to have all of the infrastructure, you gotta have infrastructure folks who understand how it all ties together. So on the surface it could seem like a simple decision to do it in house or go to the cloud. Far from it. >>Yeah. You know, I think certainly one of the things that we see in a lot of different industries, but certainly in construction, the plant had always been that you bring together different, different solutions and you try to both and together and then some of that becomes a lot more concerning. You know, some of the technology behind it. But one of the things that with the ifs solution is the fact that from one provider you can do, you know, do the whole life cycle. So then some of the have it in the managed cloud where we take care of it for you. So then that takes away some of those technology issues and then you can focus on your core competencies. So Rhonda would agree generally >>with what you're saying. I mean some probably say that for most companies that you know, the technology is not the core differentiator. Obviously this for Google, sure. For Amazon, for Facebook, but for CIO is I talked to, they go people process, technology, technology is the least of my problems. It's like I was going to come and go, it's going to change. I can deal with that. It's the, if the people in the process issues. So having said that, I'm still interested in how concerned you were about peeling the onion on the cloud, what's behind it, the security model, all that stuff in terms of your due diligence, you know, with any cloud based solution, there's some concern obviously. But, but in working with ifs, we, we asked a ton of questions and they gave us a ton of answers. So the comfort level was there. Um, the industry's been going to the cloud now for quite some time. And to be brutally honest, if you're not going there, um, you need to be strongly considered >>in Microsoft is our partner with the cloud. We're on, you know, using Microsoft Azure. So it's not like, you know, it's one of the largest cloud provider. So it's not like, you know, it's, it's something that you have to worry about. You've got the, you know, the backstop of Microsoft behind you as well. You know, I'm sorry, go, go, go. I was going to say, I think one of the things that's interesting is you talk about all your different divisions and you're really trying to bring a lot of different companies together on one system. And one of the things that I, you know, as I've seen the things that's change management becomes really something that you really have to consider. I mean, how have you seen that part of the implementation going? Has there been stepping in the easy piece for you? It's not been an easy piece and that's one of the pieces that we're still working on. >>Um, I don't know if any organization that says that they're really, really good at change. Um, but we've recognized that really the, our organization is a group of entrepreneurs and we've encouraged people to have their own business, but we're really trying to streamline and get some consistency across the organization. That's a little bit of a culture shift for us. So that change management piece is a piece that we're really trying to get our arms around now and prepare, um, the organization for that team. Just trying to get my head around your software still. You guys do change management? I TSM. Well, you'll change management is really some of the, um, consulting that goes along with it and certainly ifs and AR, we've got many partners who can, you know, help our customers go through that. Because when you're going through a digital transformation, you know, you're taking people who have been using something for 50 years, being out, especially out in the field doing those things. And now you're trying to figure out what are the right processes to put in place to get what the business needs. And in some cases they might have to do things differently. So you really have to think that through and how you're going to roll those out. >>So now, is this your first ifs world? Yes, it is. It is. What final thoughts, you know, things you've, you've taken away or you're going to bring back to your teams? >>Well, yeah, Boston is a favorite city of mine. I was just glad to be here just for that. But, and we've just been here a little bit. I've already picked up some things on leadership. I was involved the um, >>Oh, the women's leadership breakfast this morning. So there's already been some things that I think we can take back to users and share with them, particularly around change management and trying to get people comfortable and understanding why they're uncomfortable with change. You know? So it, rod, you're next on the line. So I'm sure you were taking notes, pretty attentive in the sessions and just getting started, right? >>No, you know, I have, and one of the things for me that was most, I guess rewarding is, is the partner network. All of the vendors. There's a number of things with our implementation that we're still trying to sort out OCR for example, being one of them. Are we going to go there or are we gonna wait until later? Just different technologies and maybe add ons that we may want to take advantage of. All you've got to do is walk down the hallways and there's, there's people ready to talk to you about it. So that's, that's been kind of intriguing. >>Okay. Excellent. Well yeah, I said earlier I was, I was surprised and impressed at the sort of size of the ecosystem and its great. Well good luck to you guys. Really wish you the best and thanks so much for coming on the cube and sharing your story Cindy. Great to see you. Always pleasure. All right, take care. Thank you for watching everybody. We're back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the cube from Boston ifs world 2019 right back.

(upbeat music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We here have Dave Nuti, who is the Head of Channels for Open Systems. Open Systems just recently launched their partner network in 2019. Dave, welcome to theCUBE conversation. >> Thank you John, good to be here. >> So, security obviously is the hottest area we've been covering it like a blanket these days. It's only getting better and stronger in terms of number of players and options for customers. But that's also a double-edged sword. There's more options, more for customers. And security problems aren't going away. They're just getting more compounded. It's complicated global marketplace, global scale, regional clouds on-premise, no surface area. We've had these conversations with you guys a lot and it's super important, but opportunity to deliver solutions with channel partners has become a huge thing at Amazon re:Inforce, we had a big conversation what that even looks like. It's a new market opportunity for security players. You guys are forging there. Tell us about your partner's channel, just launched, give us a quick overview. >> Yeah I have a growing smile as you talk about the complexity of the space and how difficult it can be because we're the ones that eliminate that complexity, make it very simple. And for our partners that we've been engaging with, I joined the company just over a year ago and we began laying the groundwork of transitioning from a direct sales model to a partner only model and you fast forward to where we are today, we've already made that 180 degree turn and are working exclusively through partners throughout North America and executing around the world in that way. What's exciting for the partners is that they have a new supplier in the portfolio in the form of Open Systems that while it is a new name to them, is anything but new in experience and execution. It might arguably be one of the more seasoned suppliers in their entire portfolio they have today and it is opening doors and breaking down barriers to entry in a number of security categories that for years they've been on the outside looking in trying to figure out, how can I participate in these areas and how can I really unify a conversation around value for my customers that I am the trusted advisor to? And those are the exciting networks of hundreds and thousands of trusted advisors out there that we're engaging with today. >> You know, the security space is interesting. It's changing a lot, it's not just the one supplier, multiple suppliers, there are now hundreds and thousands of suppliers of something, the security market. There's a lot of venture capital being funded for startups, you got customers spending money so there's a lot of spend and activity flow and money flow and huge value creation opportunity. Yet customers are also looking at the cloud technologies as a disruptive enabler of how to deal with new things but also they're looking at their supplier relationships right now, they're evaluating you know, who do I want to do business with, they don't want to get another tool, they don't want to new thing. They don't want to get more and more sprawl. You guys have been Open System and been very successful with word of mouth customer growth. The CEO talked about that in the last interview, it's like you guys have been getting a lot of wins. Classic word of mouth, good product offerings. So you have success on the product side. As you go into the channel and enable the people in front of the customers every day to bring a solution to the table, what's the value proposition to the partners? Because they're fighting to be relevant, they want to be in front of the customers. The customers want their partners as well. So the opportunity for the people in front of your customers for the channel is big. What's the value proposition? >> Well establishing trust with the channel is critical. For years they've had solutions that roll into the portfolio that were written in a conference room a year and a half ago and they're only selling off of PowerPoint slides and now you're coming in with Open Systems and you have 20 years of experience accumulated, maturity and automation into a platform that they rarely see that type of door opened up for them. So when they lean in and they really start asking questions about Open Systems, we really check off boxes in a fantastic way for our partners. You talk about vendor sprawl and complexity and it all boils back, you're exactly correct, to the embracing of the cloud and that diversity of application origin, the diversity of the users trying to access those corporate resources, wherever they happen to be hosted and how do I unify a strategy and it's resulted in what is not uncommon having to engage 30, 40, 50, different vendors and then trying to unify that environment, let alone the problem that you can't hire the people to go and do it anyway. There's a negative unemployment issue in IT security categories today. So you know, there's a very, very fortune few that have the ability, the bench, the depth, the resource to do that and then an even fewer number of people who can lead an enterprise down that path and then you turn the corner and where usually there's this tug of war between agility and security. If I'm really agile, it means I'm compromising security. Or if I'm super secure, I'm going to be as slow as a sloth in doing anything. And then you have Open Systems sitting in the middle who says, that's not necessarily the case. You can have world class deployment in an agile platform where all that complexity and service chaining unification is handled for you and that really, that is mind boggling and I'll tell you, it's a whole lot of fun to demonstrate it. >> You know, Dave, we talked a lot of customers and user customers through our media business, CIOs, and now CISOs and they're all kind of working together. They have partners, they have partners they've worked with for many, many years from the old days of buying servers and rack and stacking 'em to software to applications but now the touch points for services are those traditional suppliers, application developers, but security's being bolted in everywhere, so almost all services need security, that's essentially what the main message with cloud is. So that gives the service opportunities for you guys but partners to enable you guys in there. As a partner, if I'm a partner of Open Systems, what do I get? 'Cause I want to make my, I want to keep my customer. I want to deliver security. What do I talk to my customer, what's the pitch that I can give as a partner to customer to ensure that they're going to get what they need from Open Systems? >> What I tell our partners is that we should be the services conversation that you lead with. There are a lot of other options out there and even if you don't mention it by name, if you approach the conversation in an open way with a customer with the mindfulness of the wide net of capabilities and value that you're able to execute on with Open Systems, it gives you your strongest footing. One of the big problems and you mentioned it, is that so often for years these technology conversations have been siloed and isolated and that always creates problems. I talked to a partner who works their way downstream on an SD-WAN conversation and at the very end they say, "This looks great, we just have "to get it passed by our security team." And the wind falls out of everybody's sails because that should've been part of the conversation all along or vice versa, starting from a security conversation and now I've got to get the network team to sign off on it. Open Systems really comes with a model that says all those viewpoints need to be in the room at the same time. That's how you execute and that's how you unify an environment so that you're not running into those bottlenecks later on. It's just madness, it needs to be simpler. >> We were talking before we came on camera about what it means to be disruptive and valuable to partners and to customers and you mentioned convergence of capabilities and manage services. What do you mean by that? I get convergence of services, we talk about that all the time from industrial IoT, we've been doing some segments on that to manage services, people get what that means. What do you mean by convergence of services and and manage services with respect to security and Open Systems? >> Absolutely. I mean convergences, we all carry one in our pocket so how many people carry a separate GPS device with a separate digital camera with a separate phone and a separate- Converging technologies just simplifies my environment and often times is a viewpoint of I'm compromising in certain areas that if I break everything out myself I can probably do it better off myself. And in some cases that's absolutely true. When you look at how Open Systems has taken a very diverse set of services and network and security categories and unified it into a single platform, we've taken, if you will, we've taken that stack of boxes and turned it into one by building a main services platform that's delivered as a service but what we've layered on top of it is the ability to manage it for our customers and I talk about modern managed services. It's very different. Before maintainence services was, I'm just too incapable to do something myself so I need somebody else to do it. When I talk to a partner, I like pointing out that I don't try to find somebody too dumb to do the things we do and they have to rely upon us. No, our best customers are very forward-leaning 'cause they realize that the automation that we've accumulated over 20 years that we're 85 to 90% of our detected incidents are handled by AI automation and Machine Learning and that type of monitoring automation that we have at the edge and the engine and the team of 115 level three plus engineers that are executing on our customer's behalf is we're force multiplier for our end customers to an ability that they will never achieve on their own, they'll never build that on their own. Those are the two, I think two of the biggest pillars in disruption are convergence and managed services and they are two enormous check boxes for Open Systems where it's hard to find someone more experienced in that than the team at Open Systems. >> And those are realities that the customers are dealing with but also the other reality on top of that to make it even more complicated and better for you guys and partners is you have more surface area to deal with. So the AI and the automation really play into the hands of, on the delivery side, so if I'm a partner, I'm standing up Open Systems, it's working. >> So you can't just develop that in a conference room. That's something that's accumulated over time, that's what comes with experience. And I usually really lean heavily into our maturity and our experience. We're in 183 countries with customers today. We have a 98% retention rate, a 58 NPS score. When I show the monitoring portals, the visibility tools, the maturity, and what has been developed isn't just Open Systems, you know, stubbornly telling the world what they need and should be doing. It's actually a very aggressive two way conversation with our existing customers and their guidance telling us, this is what we want, what we need to see, what we need to be able to pull and what we need your help in enforcing. I met with a customer in Pacific Northwest and he dropped a line on me that was terrific. He said, "I'm looking for a partner "that can tell us the questions we should be asking "that we haven't and the technologies "we should be evaluating that we haven't looked at yet." And I told him I was going to steal that line and I'm using it here today. Because that is an absolutely brilliant description of exactly the type of customer experience that we expect to deliver from Open Systems to our customers. >> So if I'm rep, I'm a person who's got a portfolio of customers and I want to bring Open Systems to the table, take me through that. I mean, am I asking the questions, what are some of those questions I should be asking, what's my engagement posture look like to my customer? >> That's a great question. I've been to a number of events and sat through kind of advanced training seminars and at the beginning of a seminar, you have somebody on stage saying, talk about security categories. If you talk about security, then you have a pathway to sell anything else on there. And then at the end of the event, all the SD-WAN guys were sitting on the stage saying, "Talk about SD-WAN, it's the glue "that holds everything together and if you can sell SD-WAN, "it'll give you pathway to everything else." And meanwhile I'm in the back of the room smiling just wondering, what if you didn't have to pick? What if you could just have a wide open conversation with your customer around application origins and remote users and how you're unifying security and application performance and routing intelligence for any application origin to any type of user trying to access it, how are you addressing that? And that's really at the core of what Open Systems has developed for its clients is that type of agility and flexibility where you're never trapped and opening up considerations around new and emerging threats and capabilities that you should be looking at where if it's not the time for you today, we've still already designed it in for you, so when you're ready it's there for you. >> Now the real question on the rep's mind, while he's asking those basic questions. How do I make money from this? Which is essentially, money making certainly is a great channel formula. It's indirect sales for you guys but also you have to have a couple table stakes. One, it's got to be a product that can be sold. The delivery has to be elegant enough where there's margin for the partner. And benefit the customer. So the money making is certainly the big part of not only trust as the supplier to the channel, but also as an engine of innovation and wealth creation. What's your pitch there, how am I making money? >> Well as a managed services model, that's always the beauty is you get to configure to the requirement of the individual customer so no one's force fed capability they don't need or an over subscription for what they might need in a year so just in case they want to, we're able to right size and deliver the capability that's specifically configured to the individual customer level but then also show them that they have a pathway to capability laid out for them and integrated and modern, we never go end of life, we never get shelved, this is something that is living, breathing, you're never buying boxes, again and service chaining and handling the complexity so we make that very simple for our partners in categories around security and SOC and manage services, and SIM, and CASB, these are things that they hear about but they don't know how to address them with their customers. And now Open Systems makes that very simple because we fully integrated the capabilities around those categories and many more into the same service-- >> So one of the psychology, I was just reading from that as a rep, if I was a rep I would be like, oh, I don't have to overplay my hand. I can get an engagement with my customer, they can get a feel for the service, grow into it because it's a managed service and go from there, it's not a big ask. >> Right. >> It's instant alignment. >> Yeah, often times what we do is a timing issue. Somebody just bought boxes in one category so fine, we'll coexist with that. We sit in parallel and in framework with current investments and subscriptions that happen to be in place but we give them a pathway that allows them to integrate it into fully unified and I like to really point this out is that, we don't go to a customer and say, "What do you need? "We'll build it for you." It's, what do you need? We've already built it, we just want to know how we configure it for you to match up to what your requirements are and maybe suggest some areas that should be a part of that consideration as well based upon 20 plus years of doing this with customers that we already have under our belt. >> Yeah, it gives them confidence that the operating model of say cloud, it's been around, it's proven and now you have a model there. Final question for you Dave is okay, my fear might be, are you going to be around tomorrow 'cause people want to know, are you going to be there for the long haul? What's your answer to that? >> We're a 30 year old security company founded out of Zurich and started in 1990 and transitioned as a service in 1999 and have grown on the backs, we're customer funded. So this is as battle-tested and bulletproof as anything that they may have in their portfolio and it shows extremely well in front of a customer. I spend more time talking to partners saying be the first one in the door to talk about Open Systems with your customer, don't let somebody else do it. Or certainly use the mindfulness of the net of capabilities of Open Systems and don't go in narrow-viewed because if somebody comes in behind you with our conversation, I don't think you're going to like what happens. >> One more question just jumped in my head, you reminded me of, we were talking before we came on camera around how channels are great leverage, great win-win, but we're in a modern area of computing, delivery of services, cloud has certainly shown that, whole nother wave coming behind it, security obviously the biggest challenge. You've been in the channel business for awhile, what's your take on what's happening in the channel business because it is changing, there's opportunities there, what's your take? >> Yeah, this is the second company I've had the opportunity to introduce into the channel and this one is a lot of fun, I'll say that. But the channel's traditionally thought of in more of a telecom space and for many of our partners, that's where they've been literally for decades in some cases is selling technology but is selling connectivity rather, networks, but what has happened is that technology has found its way into the network layer and because of cloud and SaaS app origins and remote users from coffee shops or theCUBE or our customer site accessing those applications, it's created a massive set of diversity in requirements on the IT team at the enterprise and how do you accommodate for all that? How do you keep up with it and maintain it? And now these things transition from these Capex buying boxes and maintenance agreements and rotating those out and that model is constantly being assaulted in the same way that we've seen so many services that we have come to our house. Nobody digs a well for water anymore, I've got a water company. Or makes their own electric power plant in the backyard, I've got the electric company. >> Everything's as a service. >> Absolutely. >> Dave Nuti, head of channels at Open Systems. Thanks for sharing the insight on your partner congratulations. Thanks for coming in. >> Pleasure, thank you. >> I'm John Furrier here at CUBE conversation in Palo Alto, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody Dave Volante here with Stu minumum we have some breaking analysis we're gonna break down the acquisition of IBM Red Hat by IBM was announced today that it closed Stu was originally announced in October a 34 billion dollar acquisition so not a surprise surprise that it closed a little bit earlier than people thought people would thinkin you know well into the second half closed in July they got through all the all the issues in Europe what does this mean in your view to the industry yeah so Dave we did a lot of analysis when the deal was announced absolutely the the cloud and the ripples of change that are happening because of cloud are the impetus for this and you know the the question we've been having for years Dave is you know how many companies can stay kind of independent in you know their swimlane to what they're doing or are we going to see more massive consolidations we're not that far off of the 67 billion dollar acquisition of Dell buying EMC to go heavily into the enterprise market and of course there are cloud implications what happened there and you know we're watching the growth of cloud what's happening in the developer world you know we've watched Red Hat for a long time and you know Red Hat has a nice position in the world and it carved themselves out a nice role into what has been emerging as hybrid and multi cloud and in my opinion that's you know the number one reason why arvind and the IBM team you know when to take that 20-year partnership and turn it into you know now just part of the IBM portfolio Arvind Krishna executive at IBM a longtime player there so the the the deal is so you talked about Dells acquisition we've talked a lot about the VMware model keeping the company separate and of course Red Hat is not going to be a separately traded public company it is going to be a distinct unit inside of IBM's cloud and cognitive software group as I understand it is that right so the question is will it be reported separately or is it going to be oh we're gonna throw everything into our cloud number yeah so Dave this is where all of us that have watched and known IBM you know for our entire careers because they've been around over a hundred years on ask what's going to happen so from a reporting structure Jim Whitehurst reports to Ginny from a Wall Street standpoint it sounds like it's gonna be just thrown into the cloud piece you know Dave isn't it that the the the standard practice today that you throw lots of stuff in there so we can't figure out what your cloud business really is I mean let's look at Oracle or even Microsoft and what they had you know Amazon's probably the only one that clearly differentiates you know this is revenue that we all understand is cloud and can you know touch and feel it so sure I IBM you know you've got all of the the piece that used to be soft layer it's now the IBM cloud piece there are lots of software pieces in that mix the cloud and cognitive is a big umbrella and you know Red Hat adds a few billion dollars worth of revenue into that stream so IBM's assumptions here juni talks a lot about chapter two chapter one was a lot of front-end systems that sort of the growth was everybody thought everything was going into the cloud that's really not the way it is 80% of the workloads are still on Prem and in Chapter two was all about you know connecting those to any cloud multi-cloud heard her words the IBM cloud or the Amazon Google or Microsoft cloud etc etc she made the statement that that we are the only hybrid multi-cloud open source company okay I guess that's true does it matter that they're the only hybrid multi-cloud open source company and are they yeah so I mean Dave anytime a vendor tries to paint themselves as the number one or you know leader in the space it's you know that's how they're defining it that's not how customers think of it customers you know don't think is much about whether it's multi cloud or hybrid cloud they're doing cloud and they're working with you know more than one supplier it is very rare that you find somebody I'm all-in and then you dig in oh yeah wait I'm using office 365 and Salesforce and oh wait there was that cool new thing that Google announced that somebody off on the sides doing so we understand that today it's a multi cloud world tomorrow to be a multi cloud we're absolutely open source is growing you know at great leaps and bounds Red Hat is you know the you know best example we've had of that that trend something I've been watching for the last 20 years and you know it is impressive to see it but you know even when you talk to customers of you know most customers are not you know flag-waving I must do everything open-source you know that they have a little bit more nuanced view of it sure lots of companies are participating in contributing to open source but you know I've yet to talk to too many companies that were like well when I'm making this decision you know this is absolutely what it is am i concerned about my overall costs and I'm concerned about transparency am i concerned about you know security and how fast I can get things resolved and by the way open-source can help with a lot of those things that's what they need to think about but look IBM you know had a longtime partnership with Red Hat Red Hat has a strong position in the marketplace but they're not the only ones there you know you mentioned VMware Dave VMware cross has a strong play across multi cloud environments you know we see Red Hat at all of the cloud shows you see yeah IBM at many of the cloud shows but you've got Cisco out there with their play it is still you know this this chapter - if you agree with Ginny's terminology we are relatively early in that but you know IBM I believe is strengthened in their positioning I don't think it radically changes the landscape just because you know Red Hat is still going to stay you know working with the Amazons and Microsoft and Google's and and and other players out there so it doesn't dramatically change the landscape it just consolidates two players that already worked closely let me ask a question so I mean was clearly positioning this as a cloud play you know generally and you know in a multi cloud specifically is this a cloud play okay um so I'll say yes but Dave so absolutely the future and where the growth for Red Hat and where IBM and for this thirty four billion dollars to be successful the tip of the spear is open shift and therefore you know how does that new cloud native multi cloud environment you know where do they play but at its core you know red heads still Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux you know is it stills you know that is the primary driver of revenue and Linux isn't going away as a matter of fact Linux is growing Microsoft you know just revealed that there are more Linux workloads sitting in Azure than there are windows we already knew that there were you know strong Linux out there and Microsoft is embrace Linux we saw Satya Nadella at Red Hat summit and you know we've seen that proliferation of linux out there so linux is still you know growing in it where it's being used out there and in the cloud you know linux is what most people are using so the reason why I think this acquisition is interesting Jim Whitehurst today said publicly that it was a great deal that IBM was getting but then he couched he said of course it's a great deal for our shareholders too so and Ginni chimed in and said yes it was a fair deal okay fine 34 billion you know we'll see the reason why I think IBM likes this deal and IBM you know generally has been been good over in history with acquisitions you know clearly some mega acquisitions like PwC which was transformative me we have time to talk about that Cognos and some of the other software acquisitions done quite well not a hundred percent but the reason why I think IBM likes this deal is because it's a good cash flow deal so I think in many ways and they don't talk about this because it's not sexy marketing but iBM is a services company over 60% of the company's revenue comes from professional services IBM loves complexity because they can bring in services throw the big blue blanket around you and do a lot of integration work and the reason is that I think this is an interesting acquisition from from a financial standpoint and Ginny says this all the time this is not about cost synergies this is about revenue opportunities when you try to put everything in the cloud you always run into the back-end systems and her point is that those back-end systems need to be modernized how do you modernize those back-end systems openshift it's not trivial to do that you need services and so iBM has a large install base probably by my estimate you know certainly tens of billions of dollars of opportunity there to modernize back-end systems using Red Hat technology and that means that it's a front-loaded deal from a cash flow standpoint that they will find automatically revenue Cyn to plug in to IBM's captive install base what are your thoughts yeah Dave III think that your analysis is spot-on so RedHat has been one of these most consistent you know revenue companies out there you steadily when they went from a billion dollars to now they're right around three billion dollars they had the March to five billion dollars they had a couple of minor blips in their quarterly earnings but if you plug in that IBM services organization you really have the opportunity to supercharge this is not the opportunity is to have that that huge IBM services organization really helped you know grow those engagements do more openshift you know get more Linux help ansible you know really become the standard for you know automation in the modern workplace the challenge is that too many IBM people get involved because the the thing that everybody's a little worried about is IBM's done well with a lot of those acquisitions but they don't leave them stand alone even you know VMware for many years was a standalone company today VMware in Dell they're one company they're in lockstep from a management standpoint and they're working closely together what differentiates RedHat is you know iBM has groups that are much larger than RedHat that do some of the same things but RedHat with their open-source mission and and where they're driving things and the innovation they drive they move a little bit faster than IBM traditionally does so can will the Red Hat brand the Red Hat people and Red Hat still stay independent enough so that they can till you know hop on that next wave you know they they jumped early into kubernetes and that was the wave that really helped them drive for what they're doing the open shift you know even Dave you know Red Hat ahead bought core OS which was a smaller company moving even faster than Red Hat and while they've done a really good job of integrating those people absolutely from what I've heard it is slowed things down a little bit just because Red Hat compared to core OS was a much bigger company and of course IBM is a be a myth compared to Red Hat so will they throw these groups together and you know who will be making the decisions and can they you know maintain that that culture and that growth mindset well the point is structure we bring up VMware a lot as the model and of course when EMC bought VMware for paltry six hundred million six thirty five million dollars it folded it in and then spun it back out which was the right move certainly allowed the ecosystem to blossom I don't think IBM is gonna take that same approach blue wash is the term they'll probably blue wash that now cuz no Dave they said iBM has said they will not blue eyes there's no purple red stay separate absolutely there's concerns you know so to get those revenue synergies there's there's you're gonna have to plug into IBM systems and that requires some some work and IBM generally good at that so we'll see we'll keep our eyes on that it's but but I would predict that IBM is not going to do a VMware like well it's going to be some kind of hybrid Dave one of the other things is you talked about so Jim Whitehurst you know executive respective had him on the cube a lot he's reporting to Ginny you know the question is is this Ginny's last big move and who replaces her yeah let's talk about succession planning so a lot of a lot of rumors that Whitehurst is is next he's 52 years old I've said I don't I don't think they would do that but but let's talk about it first of all just you know Jim white her side sort of interviewed him the number of times but but you know I'm quite well you think even watch the job so you know I talked with Jim a little bit at red hat summit you know he kind of makes light of it he said you know knowing IBM the way we all know IBM IBM has always taken somebody from inside to do that he feels that he has a strong mission still to drive Red Hat he is super passionate about Red Hat he wrote a book book about the open source culture and is still driving that so I think from everything I see from him that's still the job that he loves and wants to do and you know it's a very different challenge to run IBM I'm not saying he would turn it down if that was the direction that it went if it went down to it but I did not see him angling and positioning like that would be where he wants to go well and of course you know Jim is from North Carolina he's got that kind of southern folksy demeanor you know comes across as the so the nicest guy in the room he's also the smartest guy in the room but oh we'll see we'll see what happens there I've said that I think Martin Schroder is going to be the next CEO of IBM Martin Schroder did three years of combat duty as the CFO in in what was a tough time for IBM to be a CFO they were going through those big transitions talking about you know they had to had to do the the SoftLayer acquisition they had to put together those strategic initiatives and so he's has he has CFO chops so he understands finance deeply he ran you know when IBM's big services business he's now responsible for IBM's revenue generation he's a spokesperson you know in many ways for the company he's like the prototypical choice he would not be surprising at all to see IBM plug him right in a little bit of history as you know still him a bit of a history historian of the industry have been around for a while John Akers back in the early 1990s when IBM's mainframe business was was tanking and the whole company was was tanking and it was at the risk of actually believe it or not running out of money they were gonna split up the company because the industry was breaking apart Intel and microprocessors Microsoft and software C gated disk drives you know Oracle and databases and to be more competitive from a product standpoint they were gonna split the company up into pieces Gerstner came in and said no way Gerson it was you know CEO of American Express said no that's not how customers want to buy he bought PwC for a song compared to what Carly Fiorina at HP a Carly Fiorina at HP wanted to pay I think 15 billion for it I want to say IBM paid five billion or maybe even less for PwC it completely transformed the company it transformed IBM into a services company and that's where what IBM is today they don't like when you say that but that's where the revenue was coming from what that did now and they also started to buy software companies IBM was restricted from getting into applications for years and years and years because of the DOJ because they owned the mainframe they had a monopoly while Microsoft and Intel changed all that IBM started to buy software companies and bought lots of them so they became a services company with a collection of software assets and the main mainframe and you know the power they have a storage business and you know Finance I'd be a global finance business etc etc so my my point is I'm not sure Jim Whitehurst would want to run that you know it's it's kind of messy now what you need run that is somebody who really understands finance knows how to turn the knobs and that's why I think you know Martin Schroeder is actually an excellent pick for that to keep the cash flow going to keep the dividend going to keep the stock buybacks going it's still in my view not a growth play I think there's certainly near-term growth that can be had by modernizing applications but I don't look at IBM as a growth company I look at IBM as a portfolio company that throws off a lot of cash and if and when the market stops rewarding growth and profit list growth a company like IBM will become more favorable to investors yeah and the question at the end of the day is after spending thirty four billion dollars for red hat does IBM help weather the storm of what is happening with the phenomenal growth of AWS the changes happening in Microsoft build more of a relationship than they've already had with Google and help position themselves for this next wave of IT there's IBM helped create a lot of the waves that you know happen in IT well the pure play cloud players are in it for the long game you know you know Amazon's philosophy is give tools to builders and allow them to disrupt the you know traditional old guard whether it's old guard technology companies or old guard industry players and you've seen the stat of how many Fortune 1000 companies or you know have gone out of business in the last 20 or 30 years or whatever it is that's going to continue and Amazon and and certainly Google and Microsoft want to support that disruption by providing cloud tooling and put the data in the hands of people that allows them to create new business models now that doesn't mean everybody's gonna throw up there mainframes it's it's not gonna happen it's certainly not gonna happen overnight and probably will never happen but I just don't see how IBM becomes a growth company in that scenario the growth is going to be continue to be with the cloud well but Dave we had seen IBM I'd say struggle a little bit when it comes to the the developers these days and the Red Hat acquisition is definitely going to be a boon to them in this space because Red Hat all about the developers that that's what you know that their customers are so you know that that's such a huge community that they've already tapped into so Ginny has said this hybrid multi-cloud is a chapter two with a trillion dollar opportunity so who else is going after that trillion dollar opportunity let's let's lay it out there who are the multi cloud players VMware obviously IBM Red Hat with open shift is in there Google with anthos Cisco is coming at it from a network perspective so they have coming at it from their position of strength even though you know you know they're relatively new entrants well ever everybody wants to be the new management layer in this multi cloud environment what VMware had done is had you know vCenter became you know the console for everyone as they were consolidating all of their silos and when I go to a multi cloud environment right where do I live you know Microsoft has a strong play there that's the other you know VMware IBM Red Hat anthos Google Mentos Cisco and Microsoft yeah and of course the one that while they won't say that they are multi cloud you can't talk about multi cloud without talking about Amazon because Amazon is a piece of everyone's cloud environment we were seeing what they're doing with outpost there so they are the kind of Spectre looming over this entire multi-cloud discuss yeah right on I think you got to put Amazon into that mix they will be an entrance into this multi cloud play and it's not gonna be a winner-take-all deal I could say cisco is coming at it from a position of networking strength Microsoft has its software estate and it's gonna do very well there IBM Red Hat coming at it from a standpoint of modernizing applications and there's a services could play and services component there and VMware of course coming at it from the the infrastructure operating system I don't see Oracle as interested in that market there may be some smaller players like turbo anomic you know who probably get gobbled up by one of these guys that we just mentioned but that really is the landscape and this is you know five six companies a trillion dollars there's plenty to go around all right Stu final thoughts on on the the Red Hat news the IBM news that they've finalized the Red Hat acquisition yes so you know what you want to look for is you know first of all you know what's happening organizationally you know if open shift is the primary you know the the tip of the sphere what we're talking about here for this you know cloud native multi-cloud world you know what does you know the IBM Cloud messaging looked like they're gonna have an analyst event here in a couple of weeks that you know that they've invited all the analysts to going into what does that cloud portfolio looks like how do they sort through all of the kubernetes options that they've had today do they try to elevate IBM cloud to be a stronger player or will they let Red Hat continue to play across all of the cloud environments that they have so you know organization and product positioning of the two things that I'm looking at the most Tom Siebel said publicly yesterday that IBM is a great company national international treasure but they miss cloud and they missed a I I wouldn't agree totally they didn't miss cloud they were late to cloud they had to buy software they're in cloud just like Oracle's in cloud not as competitive as the AWS cloud but they're they've got a cloud yeah HP doesn't have a cloud Dell doesn't have a cloud these these two companies that I just mentioned do AI yeah they're not sound of generalized AI like what Google and Amazon and Facebook and Microsoft are doing IBM's trying to solve you know big chewy problems iBM is a services company as they said so you know Watson you see a lot of negative stories about Watson but Watson requires a lot of services to make it work and it's as they say solving different problems so they're a player in AI multi cloud is new and this move the acquisition of red hat yes thirty four billion dollars expensive it's not gonna be pretty on the balance sheet but they get good cash flow so they'll deal with that over time it puts them right in the mix as a leader in multi cloud so thanks to for breaking down the the acquisition and thank you for watching this is Dave Volante what's do min and then we'll see you next time

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering del technology's world 2019 brought to you by Dell technologies and it's ecosystem partners okay welcome back everyone we live in Las Vegas with a cube tech cue coverage of Dell technology world I'm Jean for @d Volante we're here in Cuba Lumley MERIS house who's the president and chief commercial officer Dell technologies great to see you again always great to be here sir so the the movie just gets better and sequels and Dell 3 into the year 3 of the acquisition I love look I love the script and we're gonna keep going you guys are access to the Game of Thrones it's not going to end it's gonna one of the themes I want to get your thoughts on first of all welcome back to look you good to see you what's going on right now give us an update Mars you've you've seen the chessboard of MMA of big firms on the private equity side you worked at HP during those days you came to Dell with Michael early on partnering on the going private and then looking at the overall plan which is now in full execution mode at the integration part of integrating it all together it's working really good mill the fairway revenues at ninety plus billion where are we right now well I'll tell you I think you and I were just discussing it a second ago scale does matter but if you can align scale with ax in your portfolio that it's so well aligned to the trends in the industry and you're representing an opportunity for a customer to select a partner like Dell technologies to help them solve their key business channel and just not just for today we're into the future and then if you can do at scale right portfolio at the velocity we're doing it's a trifecta that we love it's a that you know I recently talked to Tom Tom sweet we grew the business eleven billion dollars on an already big number just last year alone so and we're gaining sharing all of our key lines of business so the Folies aligning really well customers have been extraordinary and obviously building those big trusted relationships not just now to the but into the future that's you guys ready and you guys got a great team the ability to attract the talent has been phenomenal give you guys props on that but I keep coming back to we had a few years ago which is okay the big waves coming everyone kind of got cloud they saw the scale of Amazon great gel sign that continues to do great for AWS now it's multi cloud now IT the original consolidation of IT that you guys were going after had good growth and value creation just out of the box and now the tail winds as you mentioned so I got to ask you about this end to end this is a land grab this end to end operational consistency thing because it's a very unique it's hard to copy it's in the middle if you can continue to pull that off that's going to be a great opportunity that's gonna feed up up the stack if you will talk about the challenges and why you guys are going this end to end and the benefits the customers there's there is no doubt that the customers are getting smarter every day in understanding what workloads what applications what data sets ought to reside in which ecosystems to better serve them and to better align to their overall economic needs and desires that they want and their flexibility and agility to be able to move those workloads in that data seamlessly to best address their particular needs the beauty of what we've been able to do is integrate the VMware architecture into the public cloud ecosystems and we've got many others that are ready knocking on the door to the beat want to be part of it so now what a customer can have is that true agility that true flexibility of moving applications and data seamlessly but all control through one mechanism because at the end of the day what's going to happen is they're gonna have their day to resign on multiple different sources but they want to be able to see it they want to be able to accident they want to be able to analyze it and once you're able to analyze it regardless of where it resides and then draw the conclusions from it that's what's enables them to then create a predictive model that almost a cost to zero so on day one of the keynotes Michael said he showed the be of a video he said if you're you know bank with two trillion and assets or your two-story farmhouse we care about you know that's kind of music to your ears you obviously you're a big part of that what's different about the commercial customers and and what's going on in that base in terms of their transformation their trends and how is that different from I mean in commercial customers Lisa my and my patch I've got the biggest of the public-sector account so I've got them of all different sizes and shapes and different stages of the journey and that's what we're finding everywhere even if you're a big account small account medium account everyone is on there's digital transformation journey and there's an intersection that we can play a very big part of in and then enabling them to create a playbook as to how do I go through this journey effectively but what we're finding is when we took the overall architecture kind of or indeed tenants if you will around making sure that we have a scale out architecture model it doesn't able to have our customers adopt things and then be able to scale it out as their economic or as their business grows as an example so you can jump into having leading-edge capabilities and technology to help you drive your your company today but know that we're there with you all the way to then scale at whatever rate you want to scale at Mars I got to ask you we had Tom sweet on as you just mentioned CFO he talked about the multiple levers to create multiple levers you guys are pulling to create shareholder value which is ultimately comes from free cash flow which is happy customers great to pay down the debt that's his job margin expansion get good product development increase go to market efficiencies okay and then so philosophy supply chain go to market efficiencies this is your wheelhouse as you guys go talk to the customers and go to the market now with the sets of partnerships one of the changes that we're seeing is in IT it shifted the conversation shifted from not just cost reduction but revenue generating so with these new tailwind is creating a business model opportunity for your customers this is not the old school best in breed got great storage low cost I I've you know low cost per storage gigabyte this is about I don't want to deal with infrastructure anymore you guys handle that this is what you're going after how are you guys going to market under the new reality that customers are critical do you agree with that and how are you going to market with this new shift in the customers mindset Mike the mindset is now that change or dying if I don't drive the digital transformation within my company someone else will do it and more than likely will be a competitor so you see it having on the the uber front air B&B front you can go down the list every single one of these industries are figuring out I better Drive this aggressively and make sure that I take advantage of what's happening in the technology landscape in order to progress and grow my business to be more relevant and more differentiated so instead of IT being a let me lower my cost structure model IT is now the enabler of changing the business model the enabler of a scaling at a much faster rate to take advantage of the options and how does that change the customer selection on vendor supplier because obviously this is obviously gonna probably good for saying you know one supplier gel but that's gonna change how they evaluate procure consume and they're partnering how is that going to change their selection they they want to move more and more towards having the conversation around what do we need to do to scale our business and again create a differentiated advantage right well last thing they want to be is a systems integrator of all the different IT suppliers so when you have a partner like Dell technologies that truly does have the broadest and and and what I'd say best capabilities on the planet to then become that partner of choice for them to move them in this direction faster that's a very simple decision for them to make and how is that dynamic translating into public sector where you know there's a lot of turnover in terms of administration's you might have edicts in terms of you know multi vendor what are you seeing there but I think this is consistent we have a built a a practice what we call smart digital cities that we seeing the need everywhere at the end of the day regardless what public sector entity you go to what country you go to whatever mean it's about you go to every single one of them are thinking about how can I create more jobs how can I create build and grow the economic engine of my city my state my country and guess what they're leaning on technology to do that so everywhere we go it's a conversation about how can we drive efficiencies and productivity improvements across all the things you do and provide a greater level of service to every one of your it's constituencies through technology anything from securing the environment driving protecting our citizens to providing better health care services to providing better traffic management to providing better education and reach waste management you just go down the list every single city every single Enterprise a public sector entity around the globe is thinking about it and what's again the beautiful thing is we can come in we can bring in our overall partner ecosystem because it is a broader ecosystem that is needed in order to be able to deliver those end-to-end capabilities but very much on demand everywhere I gotta ask you about first of all is on the IT side those four public sector entities have a huge job ahead of them and they're not IT huge that staffs they need nimbleness and they need horsepower basically out of the gate and the beauty of what we are able to do is we share the best practices of what we see around the world you can imagine that a city of Dubai very progressive right clearly have the budget clearly have less restrictions on data privacy clearly have less restrictions on legacy integrations into past solutions so they can move pretty quickly with a pretty broad base view as to where they want to go so you take those ideas take those best practices and then you you showcase that to the rest of the world it's - ok what can we use what can they use - to move their agenda forward quickly I want to switch gears talk about competition I saw the Tom sweets presentation the analyst briefing around competition I didn't see any cloud vendors on their office T going multi cloud with your own cloud I see that but just in the traditional IT space the numbers are great in your and you got bigger bigger is better so HPE when smaller they thought that focus would be better for them maybe it is but now you have existing competitors from the classic IT market it's a new new ground you're going after you got Alienware here it's a gaming world you're partnering with it's a beautiful set up so that's the future of TCS so you're in all these markets what's the competitive view how did you talk about your companies for competitive strategy - what we first talked about if you if you've got scale and you have a broad broad portfolio they can address the the core trends that are emerging for the next decade or two and you can do it at speed I'd say a very nice formula and that's what we're starting to really operate at that kind of cadence with the the the strategically aligned businesses like VM were like like pivotal like secure works that are all coming together very nicely to be able to drive these transformations collectively as one portfolio where's the partner coopertition kind of thing going on because you think Cisco for instance you know you guys partner with Cisco in some level but also at the same time NSX on the VMware family side looking like us competing directly with Cisco so this is this you're going to have direct competition and then other ones that are coopertition where you're working as a partner or maybe and it's evolving so how do you guys bet to have those balance conversations it's it's been like that for decades right and there's you you've got big players in the market at the end of the day as long as you service your customer and deliver to them what they want and how they want it at the end of the day we need to collaborate to make that happen - same exact reason why we announced our partnership with Microsoft and Azure earlier this week customer draw was there they said we want you to be that single that single broker that enables me to move my my data in my application seamlessly and securely containerized to any public cloud well guess what Azure needs to be part of that equation so when the customer drives it and it's clearly aligned to their particular needs the the IT ecosystem comes together the best serve that when you have when you meet with the top customers and the top senior people what's the pitch Mario's when you go in and say hey you know here's get we're just gel technology we've got all the puzzle pieces they'll be be successful what's your pitch when you go in what's the mean message that you guys say to those customers I like for the last couple of years we've been talking about that the transformations that are happening right at the highest level it's just a digital transformation journey that people are on the work force transformation they're doing the overall IT transformation that enables that then of course how do you the whole environment on top of that they're having the conversation about okay let's go build the blueprint as to what that looks like for me as a customer and then show me how I'm gonna you're gonna deliver to me the platforms that enables me to grow and make sure that I'm making the right batch long term right I don't want a solution that's just there for today I want to make sure that I've got a solution that good that that will take me into the future and that makes me ultra competitive so when you think about it if I wanted a an app development platform that clearly needs to be cloud native in mind I need to have agile development capabilities and I need to be able the time to value needs to continue to shrink well guess what we got that with pivotal right you want to be able to now do your data management ecosystem seamlessly and and across multiple platforms clearly we have assets like Bumi that enable that to happen very very well and and then you want to virtualize your overall infrastructure layer as much as possible so you truly can scale up or scale down any of your infrastructure capabilities in order to meet the needs of that particular workload seamlessly when you have the data platform when you have the app platform when you have the virtualization platform and you have all of the infrastructure platform so well aligned to the overall trends and transformations our customers are doing it's almost a no-brainer I mean it is an IQ test that all of our customers are clearly passing and okay and what you just laid out it's probably like a ten year he's gonna play out over the next ten years and there's still a lot of invention to be required if you guys aren't doing a lot of M&A right now you know paying down the debt tom was clear on that but as an M&A person I want if we can pick your brain and I'm more familiar with the tech M&A it's where myspace but most M&A much of it anyway fails and and from your perspective why is that and why are some successful why or some not I think it is the how do you how do you when you add a new entity into the broader entity what are the synergies that you're aligning to to make sure that that new entity has the opportunity scale and grow right and that's why you have meant you have sometimes smaller deals are interesting from an IP perspective but if you don't tie it back into how are you gonna go scale to go to market to make it available to your broader set of customer base you or it gets lost in the equation that's a problem and I think what we've done is a very good job making sure that we understand how each piece of the IP portfolio comes together and is aligned to our overall approach and how we how we how we help you have the conversation with the customer that we've been able to see what we call our cross synergies of all the acquisitions we've made significantly exceed any and all of our expectations and and that's important part to do ahead of time before you make the acquisition know not just how it fits into the IP stack but how it fits into your overall go to market stack and how it fits in your overall value proposition to the customer Marcus thanks for spending the time know you're really busy coming on the cube I got to ask you one final question of this showed here Dell technology world over three days what are the three top highlights that happened to you that give a tell sign of the next 10 years with Dell technology I mean we've always said that we do what we say so I think and I've had many of analyst tell us that my god you guys consistently have delivered what you said you would deliver so the early skepticism of hey this this is a big company there's multiple cultures not sure that operationally you will execute well guess what I think it's fair to say the teams are executing and then when you see the results of taking share in every line of business you see the results where the customer satisfaction is higher than it's ever been our partner satisfaction is higher than it's ever been our partner growth is higher is the fastest-growing route to market for us all of that is just a testament that we are operating on all cylinders but what's more exciting is the yet to come part and and the fortuity so big right the market is what three and a half trillion ninety billion is a fraction of that so this is what our our team members see it's what our customers see our partners see so that momentum it's just a tsunami that's just gonna keep on growing well the cube barometer certainly showing activity to sets when we get four you know you're doing well so we're gonna keep an eye on the pulse of the cube pan and we got here Mari it's great to see you always a pleasure great insight thanks for sharing John awesome grant appeared a virus awesome thank you so much Myers house president chief commercial officer Dell technologies Friends of the cube great executive tech athlete as we say live coverage day three here the cube coverage of Delta knows we will be right back with more after the short break [Music]

(electronic music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris. Welcome to Wikibon action item from theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California. So today we've got a great conversation and what we're going to be talking about is hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud's been in the news a lot, lately. Larger consequences, from changes made by AWS, as they announced Outpost, and acknowledged for the first time that there's going to be a greater distribution of data and a greater distribution of function as enterprises, move to the cloud. We've been on top of this for quite some time, and have actually coined what we called true hybrid cloud. Which is the idea that increasingly we're going to see a need for a common set of capabilities and services, in multiple locations, so that the cloud can move to the data, and not the data automatically being presumed to move to the cloud. Now to have that conversation and to reveal some new research on what the cost and value propositions of the different options are that are available today. We've got David Foyer, David welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So David, let's start, when we talk about hybrid cloud, we are seeing, a continuum of different options starting to emerge. What are the defining characteristics? >> So, yes, we're seeing a continuum emerging. We have a what we call stand alone of course at one end of the spectrum, and then we have multi cloud, and then we have loosely and tightly coupled, and then we have true, and as you go up the spectrum. So the dependents upon data depend on the data plain, dependents upon low latency, dependents on writing a systems of record, records. All of those increase as we're going from high latency and high bandwidth all the way up to low latency. >> So let me see if I got that right. So true hybrid cloud is at one end. >> Yes. >> And true hybrid cloud is, low latency, right on your work loads, simple as possible administration. That means we are typically going to have, a common stack in all locations. >> Yes. >> Next to that is this notion of tightly coupled, hybrid cloud, which could be higher latency, write oriented, could probably has a common set of software, on all nodes, that handles state. And then kind of this notion of loosely coupled. Multi well hybrid cloud, which is high latency, read oriented, which may have just API level coordination and commonality on all nodes. >> Yep that's right, and then you go down even further to just multi cloud, where you're just connecting things and each of them is independent of each other. >> So if I'm a CIO and I'm looking at a move to a cloud, I have to think about green field applications and the natural distribution of data for those green field applications, and that's going to help me choose which class of hybrid cloud, I'm going to use. But let's talk about the more challenging set of scenarios for most CIO's, which is the existing legacy applications. >> The systems of record. >> Yeah, the systems of record as I try to bring those, those cloud like experience to those applications, how am I going through that thought process? >> So, we have some choices, the choices are I could move it up too lift and shift, up to one of the cloud's, one of the large cloud's, many of them are around, and what if I, if I do that, what I need to be looking at is, what is the cost of moving that data, and what is the cost of pushing that up into the cloud, and what's the conversion cost, if I needed to move, to another database. >> And I think that's the biggest one, so that's just the cost of moving the data, which is just an ingress cost, it's a cost of format changes. >> Absolutely >> You know, migration and all the other elements, conversion changes et cetera. >> Right, so what I did in my research was focus on systems of record, the highly expensive, very, very important systems of record, which obviously are fed by a lot of other things, you know, systems of engagements, analytics et cetera. But those systems of record have to work. You need to know if you've taken an order. You need to have consistency about that order. You need to know always that you can recover any data, you need in your financials et cetera, all of that is mission critical systems of record. And that's the piece that I focused on here, and I focused on. >> So again these are low latency. >> Very, low latency, yes. >> Write oriented. >> Very write oriented, types of applications, and, I focused on Oracle because the majority, of systems of record, run on Oracle databases, the large scale ones at least. So, that's what we are focusing on here. So I, looking at the different options for a CIO, of how they would go, and there are three main options open at the moment, there's Oracle, Cloud, Cloud at customer, which gives the cloud experience. There is Microsoft Azure Stack, which has a Oracle database version of it, and Outposts, but we eliminated Outposts not because, it's not going to be any good, but because it's not there yet. >> You can't do research on it if it doesn't exist yet. >> (laughs) That's right. So, we focused on Oracle and Azure, and we focused on, what was the benefit of moving from a traditional environment, where you've got best of breed essentially on site, to this cloud environment. >> So, if we think about it, the normal way of thinking about this kind of a research, is that people talk about R.O.I, and historically that's been done by looking, by keeping the amount of work that's performed, as given, constant and then looking at how the different technology components compare from a call standpoint. But a move to Cloud, the promise of a move to Cloud is not predicated on lowering costs per say. You may have other financial considerations of course but, it's really predicated on the notion of the cloud experience. Which is intended to improve business results, so if we think about R.O.I, as being a numerator question, with the value is the amount of work you do, versus a denominator question which is what resources are consumed to perform that work. It's not just the denominator side, we really need to think about the numerator side as well. >> The value you are creating, yes. >> So, what kind of thing's are we focused on when we think about that value created, as a consequence of possibilities and options of the Cloud. >> Right, so both are important, so obviously when you move, to a cloud environment, you can simplify operations in particular, you can simplify recovery, you can simplify a whole number of things within the IT shop and those give you extra resources. And then the question is, do you just cash in on those resources and say okay I've made some changes, or do you use those resources to improve the ability of your systems to work. One important characteristic of IT, all IT and systems of record in particular, is that you get depreciation of that asset. Over time it becomes less fitted, to the environment, that it started with, so you have to do maintenance on it. You have to do maintenance and work, and as you know, most work done in an IT shop is on the maintenance side. >> Meaning it's an enhancement. >> It's maintenance and enhancement, yes. So making more resources available, and making it easier to do that maintenance, and making less things that are going to interfere with that, faster time to maintenance, faster time to new applications or improvements. Is really fundamental to systems of record. So that is the value that you can bring to it and you also bring value with lower better availability, higher availability as well. So those are the thing's we have put into the model, to see how the different approaches, and we were looking at really a total, one supplier being responsible for everything, which was the Oracle environment, and Oracle Cloud at Customer, to a sort of hybrid environment, more hybrid environment, where you had. >> Or mixed, or mixed. >> Mixed environment, yes. Where you had the equipment coming from different places. >> One vendor. >> The service, the Oracle, the Azure service, coming from Microsoft, and of course the database coming then from Oracle itself. And we found tremendous improvement in the value that you could get because of the single source. We found that a better model. >> So, the common source lead to efficiencies, that then allowed a business to generate new classes, of value >> Correct. >> Cause' as you said, you know, 70 plus percent of an IT or business is spent on technology, is associated with maintaining what's there, enhancing what's there, and a very limited amount is focused on new green field, and new types of applications. So if you can reduce the amount of time and energy, that goes into that heritage set of applications, those systems of record, then that opens up, that frees up resources to do some other things. >> And, having the flexibility now with things like Azure Stack and in the future AWS, of putting that resource either on premise or in the cloud, means that you can make decisions about where you process these things, about where the data is, about where the data needs to be, the best placement for the data for what you're trying to do. >> That decision is predicated on things like latency, but also regulatory environment, intellectual property control. >> And the cost of moving data up and down. So the three laws of the cloud, so having that flexibility of keeping it where you want to is a tremendous value in again, in terms of, the speed of deployment and the speed of improvement. >> So we'll get to the issues surrounding the denominator side of this. I want to come back to that numerator side. So the denominator again is, the resources consume, to deliver the work to the business, but when we talk about that denominator side, perhaps opening up additional monies, to do new types of development, new types of work. But, take us through some of the issues like what is a cloud experience associated with, single vendor, faster development, give us some of the issues that are really driving the value proposition above the line. >> The whole issue about Cloud is that you take away all of the requirements to deal with the hardware, deal with the orchestration of the storage, deal with all of these things, so instead of taking weeks, months to put in extra resources, you say, I want them, and it's there. >> So you're taking administrative tasks, out of the flow. >> Out of the flow yes. >> And as a consequence, things happen faster, so time of value is one of the first ones, give us another one. >> So, obviously the ability to have. It's a cloud environment, so if you're a vendor, of that cloud, what you want to be able to do, is to make incremental changes, quickly as opposed to waiting for a new release and work on the release basis. So that fundamental speed to change, speed to improve, bring in new features, bring in new services, a cloud first type model, that is a very powerful way for the vendor to push out new things, and for the consumer to absorb them. >> Right, so the first one is time to value, but also it's lower cost to innovation. >> Yes, faster innovation, ability to innovate. And then the third most important part is, if you re-invest those resources that you have saved into new services, new capabilities of doing that, to me the most important thing, long term for systems of record is to be able to make them go faster, and use that extra latency time there to bring in systems of analytics, AI systems, other systems, and provide automation of individual business processes, increased automation. That is going to happen overtime, that's a slow adding to it, but it means you can use those cloud mechanisms, those additional resources, wherever they are. You can use those to provide, a clear path to, improving the current systems of record. And that is a more faster and more cost effective way, than going in for a conversion, or moving the data up to the cloud or lift and shift, for these types of applications. >> So these are all kind of related, so I get superior innovation speeds, because I'm taking new technology and faster, I get faster time to value, because, I'm not having to perform a bunch of tasks, and I can get, I can imbue additional types of work, in support of automation, without dramatically, expanding the transactional latency and a rival way of transactions within the system of record. Okay so, how did Oracle and Azure, with Oracle, stack up in your analysis? >> So first of all important is both are viable solutions, they both would work. Okay, but the impact in terms of the total business value including obviously any savings on people and things like that, was 290 nearly, $300 million additional, this was for a >> For how big a company? >> For a fortune 2000 customer, so it was around two billion dollars, so a lot of money, over five years, a lot of money. Either way, you would save 200 million, if you were with the Azure, but 300 with the Oracle. So that to me is far, far higher than the costs of IT, for that particular company, it's a strategic decision, to be able to get more value out quicker, and for this class of work load, on Oracle, then Oracle at Cloud was the best decision, to be absolutely fair, if you were on Microsoft's database, and you wanted to go to Microsoft Azure, that would be the better bet. You would get back a lot of those benefits. >> So stay within the stack if you can. >> Correct. >> Alright, so, two billion dollars a year, five years. $10 billion revenue, roughly. >> Between 200 million in saving, for One Microsoft, Azure, plus Oracle. 300 million so a 1% swing, talk to us about speed, value what happens in, a numerator side of that equation? >> So, it is lower in cost, but you have a higher, the cost of the actual cloud, is a little higher, so, overall the pure hardware, equipment class is a wash, it's not going to change much. >> Got it. >> It might be a little bit more expensive. You make the savings, as well because of the people, less operators, simpler environment. Those are the savings you're going to make, and then you are going to push those back, into the organization, as increase value that can be given to the line of the business. >> So the conclusion to the research is that if you are a CIO, you look at your legacy application, it's going to be difficult to move and you go with the stack that's best for those, legacy applications. >> Correct. >> So the vast majority of systems of record, are running on Oracle. >> Large scale. >> Large scale, then that means Oracle Cloud at Customers, is the superior fit for most circumstances. >> For a lot of those. >> If you're not there though then look at other options. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, David Foyer. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, very much for being on the cube today. And you've been watching another Wikibon action item, from theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto California, I'm Peter Burris, thanks very much for watching. (electronic music)

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burroughs Wellcome to wicked bon action >> item from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, California So today we've got a great conversation, and what we're going to be talking about is hybrid cloud hybrid. Claude's been in the news a lot lately. Largest consequences from changes made by a Ws is they announced Outpost and acknowledged for the first time that there's going to be a greater distribution of data on a greater distribution of function as enterprise has moved to the cloud. We've been on top of this for quite some time, and it actually coined what we call true hybrid cloud, which is the idea that increasingly, we're going to see a need for a common set of capabilities and services in multiple locations so that the cloud could move to the data and not the data automatically being presumed to move to the cloud. >> Now to have that >> conversation and to reveal some new research on what the cost in value propositions of the different options are available. Today. We've >> got David Foyer. David. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So, David, let's start. When we talk about Hybrid Cloud, we're seeing a continuum of different options start to emerge. What are the defining characteristics? >> Yes, we're seeing it could continue him emerging. We have what we've called standalone off course. That one is end of the spectrum on DH. There we have multi cloud, and then we have loosely and tightly coupled, and then we have true and as you go up the spectrum. So the dependence upon data depends on the data plane dependence upon low latent see dependance on writing does a systems of record records. All of those increase as we going from from lonely for High Leighton Sea and High Band with all way up to low late. >> So let me see if I got this right. It's true. I've a cloud is at one end and true. Either cloud is low late and see right on into workloads simplest possible administration. That means we're typically goingto have a common stack in all locations. Next to that is this notion of tightly coupled hybrid cloud, which could be higher late. And see, right oriented could probably has a common set of software on all no common mental state. And then, kind of this. This notion of loosely coupled right multi or hybrid cloud, which is low, high late and see, write or read oriented, which may have just a P I level coordination and commonality and all >> that's right. And then you go down even further to just multi cloud, where you're just connecting things, and each of them is independent off each other. >> So if I'm a CEO and I'm looking at a move to a cloud, I have to think about Greenfield applications and the natural distribution of data for those Greenfield applications. And that's going to help me choose which class of hybrid clawed him and he used. But let's talk about the more challenging from a set of scenarios for most CEOs, which is the existing legacy applications as I cry that Rangel yeah, systems of record. As I try to bring those those cloud like experience to those applications, how am I going through that thought process? >> So we have some choices. The choices are I could move it up to lift and shift up to on a one of the clouds by the large clouds, many of them around. And what if I if I do that what I'm need to be looking at is, what is the cost of moving that data? And what is the cost of pushing that up into the cloud and lost the conversion cast if I need to move to another database, >> and I think that's the biggest one. So it just costs of moving the data, which is just uninterested. It's a cost of format changes at our migration and all the other out conversion changes. >> So what I did in my research was focus on systems of record, the the highly expensive, very, very important systems of record, which obviously are fed by a lot of other things their systems, the engagement analytics, etcetera. But those systems of record have to work. They you need to know if you've taken on order, you need to have consistency about that order. You need to know always that you can recover any data you need in your financials, etcetera. All of that is mission critical systems of record. Andi, that's the piece that I focused on here, and I focused on >> sort of. These are loaded and she >> low, very low, latent, right oriented, very right orientated types of applications. And I focused on the oracle because the majority ofthe systems of record run on Oracle databases on the large scale ones, at least so that's what we're we're focusing on here. So I looking at the different options for a C I O off. How they would go on DH. There are three main options open at the moment. There's there's Arkalyk Cloud Cloud, a customer, which gives thie the cloud experience. There is Microsoft as your stack, which has a a Oracle database version of it on DH outposts. But we eliminated outposts not because it's not going to be any good, but because it's not there yet, is >> you get your Razor John thing. >> That's right. So we focused on Oracle on DH as you and we focused on what was the benefit of moving from a traditional environment where you've got best of breed essentially on site to this cloud environment. >> So if we think about it, the normal way of thinking about this kind of a research is that people talk about R. A Y and historically that's been done by looking by keeping the amount of work that's performed has given constant and then looking at how the different technology components compare from a call standpoint. But a move to cloud the promise of a move to cloud is not predicated on lowering costs per se, but may have other financial considerations, of course, but it's really predicated on the notion of the cod experience, which is intended to improve business results. So we think about our lives being a numerator question. Value is the amount of work you do versus the denominator question, which is what resources are consumed to perform that work. It's not just the denominator side we really need to think about. The numerator side is well, you create. So what? What kind of things are we focused >> on? What we think about that value created his consequence of possibilities and options of the cloud. >> Right? So both are important. So so Obviously, when you move to a cloud environment, you can simplify operations. In particular, you can simplify recovery. You, Khun simplify a whole number of things within the shop and those give you extra resources on. Then the question is, Do you just cash in on those resources and say OK, I've made some changes, Or do you use those resources to improve the ability of your systems to work and one important characteristic off it alight and systems of record in particular is that you get depreciation of that asset. Over time, it becomes less fitted to the environment it has started with, so you have to do maintenance on it. You have to do maintenance and work, and as you know most means most work done in my tea shop is on the maintenance side minutes. An enhancement. It's maintenance. An enhancement, yes. So making more resources available on making it easier to do that maintenance are making less, less things that are going to interfere with that faster time to to to maintenance faster time. Two new applications or improvements is really fundamental to systems of record, so that is the value that you can bring to it. And you also bring value with lower of better availability, higher availability as well. So those are the things that we put into the model to see how the different approaches. And we were looking at really a total one. One supplier being responsible for everything, which was the Oracle environment of Oracle clouded customer to a sort of hybrid invite more hybrid environment where you had the the the work environment where you had the equipment coming from different place vendor that the service, the oracle, the as your service coming from Microsoft and, of course, the database coming then from Arkham itself. And we found from tremendous improvement in the value that you could get because of this single source. We found that a better model. >> So the common source led to efficiencies that then allowed a business to generate new classes of value. Because, as you said, you know, seventy plus percent of a night organ orb business is spending. Biology is associate with maintaining which they're enhancing. What's there in a very limited amount is focused on new greenfield or new types of applications. So if you can reduce the amount of time energy that goes into that heritage set of applications those systems of record, the not opens up that frees up resources to do some of the things >> on DH Having inflexibility now with things like As your stack conned in the future E. W. S off. Putting that resource either on premise or in the cloud, means that you can make decisions about where you process things things about where the data is about, where the data needs to be, the best placement of the data for what you're trying to do >> and that that decision is predicated on things like late in sea, but also regulatory, environment and intellectual property, controlling >> the custom moving data up and down. So the three laws of off off the cloud so having that flexibility of moving, keeping it where you want to, is a tremendous value in again in terms ofthe the speed of deployment on the speed of improved. >> So we'll get to the issues surrounding the denominator side of this. I want to come back to that numerator sites that the denominator again is the resources consumed to deliver the work to the business. But when we talk about that denominator side, know you perhaps opening up additional monies to do new types of development new times of work. But take us through some of the issues like you know what is a cloud experience associated with single vendor Faster development. Give us some of the issues that are really driving the value proposition. Look above the line. >> I mean, the whole issue about cloud is that you go on, take away all of the requirements to deal with the hardware deal with the orchestration off the storage deal with all of these things. So instead of taking weeks, months to put in extra resources, you say I want them on is there. >> So you're taking out administrate your taking administrative tasks out of the flow out of the flow, and as a consequence, things happen. Faster is the time of values. One of the first one. Give us another one. >> So obviously the ability to no I have it's a cloud environment. So if you're a vendor of that cloud, what you want to be able to do is to make incremental changes quickly, as opposed to awaiting for a new release and work on a release basis. So that fundamental speed to change speed to improve, bring in new features. Bringing new services a cloud first type model that is a very powerful way for the vendor to push out new things. And for the consumer, too, has absorbed them. >> Right? So the first one is time to value, but also it's lower cost to innovation. >> Yes, faster innovation ability to innovate. And then the third. The third most important part is if you if you re invest those resources that you've saved into new services new capabilities of doing that. To me, the most important thing long term for systems of record is to be able to make them go faster and use that extra Leighton see time there to bring in systems off systems of analytics A. I systems other systems on provide automation of individual business processes, increased automation that is gonna happen over time. That's that's a slow adding to it. But it means you can use those cloud mechanisms, those additional resources, wherever they are. You can use those to provide a clear path to improving the current systems of record. And that is a much faster and more cost effective way than going in for a conversion or moving the data upto the cloud or shifting lift and shift. For these types of acts, >> what kind of they're all kind of related? So I get, I get. I get superior innovation speeds because I'm taking new technology and faster. I get faster time to value because I'm not having to perform much of tasks, and I could get future could imbue additional types of work in support of automation without dramatically expanding the transactional wait and see on arrival rate of turns actions within the system of record. Okay, So how did Oracle and Azure with Oracle stack up in your analysis? >> So first of all, important is both a viable solutions. They both would work okay, but the impact in terms of the total business value, including obviously any savings on people and things like that, was two hundred nineteen eighty three hundred million dollars additional. This was for Robert to come in for a a Fortune two thousand customer, so it was around two billion dollars. So a lot of money over five years, a lot of money. Either way, you would save two hundred million if you were with with the zero but three hundred with the oracle, so that that to me, is far, far higher than the costs of I T. For that particular company, it's It is a strategic decision to be able to get more value out quicker. And for this class of workload on Oracle than Arkalyk, Cloud was the best decision to be absolutely fair If you were on Microsoft's database. And you wanted to go to Microsoft as you. That would be the better bet you would. You would get back a lot of those benefits, >> so stay with him. The stack, if you can't. Correct. All right, So So two billion dollars a year. Five years, ten billion dollars in revenue, roughly between two hundred million and saving for one Congress all around three. Treasure Quest. Oracle three hundred millions were one percent swing. Talk to us about speed value. What >> happens in the numerator side of that equation >> S Oh, so it is lower in caste, but you have a higher. The cast of the actual cloud is a little a little higher. So overall, the pure hardware equipment Cass is is awash is not going to change much. It might be a little bit more expensive. You make the savings a cz? Well, because of the people you less less operators, simpler environment. Those are the savings you're going to make. And then you're going to push those back into into the organization a cz increased value that could be given to the line of business. >> So the closure of the researchers If your CEO, you look at your legacy application going to be difficult to move, and you go with stack. That's best for those legacy applications. And since the vast majority of systems of record or running all scale large scale, then that means work. A cloud of customers is a superior fit for most from a lot of chances. So if you're not there, though, when you look at other options, all right, David Floy er thank you. Thanks very much for being on the Cube today, and you've been watching other wicked bon action >> item from the Cube Studios and Power Rialto, California on Peter Burke's Thanks very much for watching.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're live here, day three of three days of coverage of theCUBE at Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Paul Gillin and special guest on our day-three opening, Peter Burris, head of research of SiliconANGLE Media, general manager of wikibon.com research. Guys, good to see you on day three. We're goin' strong. I mean, I think I feel great, a lot of activity. So many story lines to talk about. Obviously the big one is the combination, not merger, I slipped yesterday, or acquisition, the combination of equals, Dell, EMC. Some will question did EMC acquire Dell or Dell acquire EMC? Certainly Michael Dell's still captain of the ship. But that's the top story. But a lot of product line conversations. Not a lot of overlap. Peter, you've been at all the analyst sessions. We had David Furrier on yesterday, teasing it up, but I'd like to get you, your perspective and reaction to your thoughts as you look at the giants in the industry. Michael Dell bought EMC for a record 60 billion plus. You've been around the block. You've seen many waves. You've analyzed many generations of the computer industry. What does this actually mean. Where are they, what's your thoughts and reaction? >> So John, I'll give you three different story lines here, right? The meta-picture, the good, and the what the hell's goin' on kind of picture. The first one, the meta-picture is, and SiliconANGLE said this, it was a really well written article, you might have even written it Paul, that there has never really been a successful mega-merger in the tech industry. And historically I think that's because, well here's the bottom line. This one may actually work. And it may actually work nicely. And the reason is is that most of the other mergers or combinations were companies with problems and companies that didn't have problems. Or companies with problems and companies with problems. And if you take a look at Dell and EMC, neither of them had problems. They weren't buying each other's problems. It was a nice combination and complimentary in that EMC had a great consumer business, great channel business, and had a pretty strong financial position. And EMC had a great enterprise business, great, you know-- >> Sales organizations. >> Great sales organization. And they had, they were strong in where the industry's going around how do you handle data and how do you handle storage. So it's got, what we're seeing here is everybody singing out of the same hymnal. I'm not seeing any tension. And that is an indication that this one may actually go well. I think it's a very, very good early sign. >> Paul, you and I were talking on the day one open and also, we kind of hit it a little bit yesterday with David Furrier, talking about this mega-merger. Compare and contrast that to HBE, which is been kind of, being de-positioned by some of the Dell executives. They don't actually call 'em out by name, but HP Enterprise is taking a different approach. They're taking a, you know, smaller is better approach. Obviously, Michael Dell has a complete different philosophy. We're still going to analyze that as well. We've got HPE Discover coming up as well. Thoughts on the compare and contrast, guys, reaction to the strategies of HPE, smaller, faster, as they say. Or Dell, bigger, more powerful. >> I think both are viable strategies. It's just a matter of if they can pull it off. I mean, HP, you talk about bad mergers, Peter, I mean you think of HP Compact, HP Autonomy, this is a company that has had a terrible track record of big mergers. Although they've had some successful ones certainly. >> By the Meg Whitman inherited those. >> Yes. >> Prior to Meg Whitman coming on board. >> Oh she was a board member for some of them. >> Okay, so she was at the table. Now, we don't know, okay but your thoughts, continue. >> But Dell, clearly going the other direction. They, I mean, they're building sort of an IBM-like model, the way IBM was in the '80s when it dominated every market that it played in. And it played at even more markets than Dell does now. So I think that the model makes sense. I think Peter's absolutely right, I'm not sensing any tension at this conference. There seems to be, the most important thing is there seems to be a lot of communication going on. The executives are spending a lot of time with each other and they're talking a lot to the people. And when you look back, and I live, and Peter, you remember the DEC, you know, the fiasco with DEC being purchased by Compaq. That was clearly a takeover. And that was Compaq came in, took over the company and didn't tell anybody anything. And the DEC people were living in the dark and it was clear that they had no value to the acquiring company. That, clearly, they're not making those mistakes here. >> For the younger, for the younger audience, DEC is Digital Equipment Corporation which was a behemoth winner in the micro, mini-computer era and then now defunct company. >> Except the one, one thing I'd add to that, Paul, is that, and this is why, it's why this first sign is so important. That they are seem to be, that executives here seem to be collaborating and working together. DEC had been one of those mini-computer companies dominated by an OEM business, which means you had a common set of components and then everybody was competing for customers with how you put those components together. So there was, it was a, it was a maelstrom of internal competition at DEC. When Compaq got ahold of DEC, that DEC sense of internal competition took over Compaq. And then when Compaq, when HP acquired Compaq, that maelstrom and internal competition took over HP. >> They didn't know what they were getting into. >> We used to call it the red-blue wars and it was ugly. And that's not happening here. That's a first sign. >> Yeah, I would agree Peter. I want to get your thoughts to all that. I would agree that this is, I've been tryin' to sniff out where the wind's blowin' on this for a year and to my knowledge, and my insight and sources, it's not going bad at all. It's going great. The numbers are performing, they're winning some deals, but let's compare to HP because I asked Mark Heard at their Oracle media event last week, cause they were touting number one in every market. So I said, "Well, there's a digital transformation "going on, a whole new way to do business "for the next 33 years, "not looking back at the past 33 years." Which metrics are you using? Everyone's claiming to be number one at something. So, the question is, maybe HP does have it right. Maybe their strategy will work. What are the, what are going to be those metrics for this next generation? If cloud becomes the connective tissue to data, value of data, and that apps are going to be very agile. Maybe this decentralized approach from HP might be a better strategy for the growth. Thoughts. >> Well, look, let's, so let's, I want to get back to the, what's good about what we're seeing and some other things that probably need to be worked on, but, but here's what I'd say, John. And this is what Wikibon believes. That customers is always going to be the most important metric. So, the first metric is, is HP gaining customers? Is HP losing customers? Is Dell gaining customers? Or is Dell losing customers? That's the number one most important metric. Always will be as far as I'm concerned. But the second one is, and this, and I'll pre-say something I'm going to talk about in a little bit. The second one is, I'll call it data under management. If we think about, if we think about this notion of data as an asset, data as a source of value, how much does HP, through it's customers, how much data does, does HP have under management? How much data does Dell/EMC have under management? And I think that's going to be an important way of thinking about the intensity of the relationships, which relationships are going to steer towards which types of environments. Is it going to be a procurement relationship or a real strategic relationship? By procurement, I mean, it's fundamentally focused on driving cost out of the deal. Strategic, I mean it's fundamentally focused by jointly creating value. So this notion of data under management, to me, is going to be something we're going to be talking about in five years. >> So, Bill Schmarzo, friend of both of ours, was, came by the set before we came on here and he's the dean of big data as coined by theCUBE but now he's takin' on it his own, like he's actually a dean now teaching big data. We are talking about some of the research that you're doing and taking a stand on, it's important, I want to put a plug in for the Wikibon research team that you're leading, is the business value of data. >> Peter: Oh absolutely. >> And that you're looking at data as a valuation mechanism, not an accounting, compliance thing. And this is something, I think, is way ahead of the curve. So props to you guys for puttin' the stake in the ground. To your point, the new metric might just be the valuation of how they use data, whether that's customer data, product services data, application development concepts to reconfiguring how they do business. >> And it's the reconfigure that's the smart, that's the absolutely right word. So, from our perspective John, the difference between a business and a digital business is a business uses data one way, a digital business uses data another way. A business uses data as an, something to just handle coordination and administration. >> Paul: Bookkeeping. >> Yeah, exactly. A digital business uses data as a strategic asset to differentiate how to engage to markets. That's where the industry's going, and that's what we want to talk about. >> And by the way, in previous business constructs or business books people have, might have read over the years certainly, you know, the Peter Druckers and so on, management consultants, never actually factored data into the value chains of-- >> Oh they did, they did, they did. They just didn't actually, so Drucker, for example did. >> John: Digital data? >> Oh, he talked about information and the role that information played. >> John: I stand corrected. >> Herbert Simon talked about this kind of stuff 50 years. Unfortunately it all got lost when we went through things like, jeez, you know, there was a very famous economist who said in the late 80s, "Information technology "shows up everywhere but in the productivity numbers." So, you old guys would-- >> I remember that, I remember that quote. >> So, the idea ultimately is we now have to get very discrete and very specific about what that means. And that's a challenge. But let's come back to, let's come back to at least what we think is really working here, if I may. >> John: Absolutely, go ahead. >> So the first thing is, at a more tactical level, number one is the Hyperconvert story is exciting. And it's starting to come together. And again, I'm not, we're not seeing tension between the folks that are selling servers and the folks that are doing Hyperconversion. Both are introducing new technology that are going to create new opportunities for customers, and they're not as, as, as your good friend Michael Dell said, a couple times over the past year, here in theCUBE, "We are not going to "artificially constrain any of our businesses." And, as Amazon said at re:Invent, "If you're going to do it at scale, "eventually you're going to put in hardware." And he wants to demonstrate that all this great software stuff that's happening, that ultimately Dell's going to be the leader at designing these new capabilities into the hardware and he wants to show how that's going to show up in all his product lines. >> That's a great point. I think the most interesting dynamic I've been seeing out of the interviews we've been doing the last two days is that the problem Dell has to struggle with now, and it'll be interesting to watch how they, how they figure this out, is all of their, used to be called the Federation, now they're called the Strategic Business Alliances I think. The, you know, the VMwares, the RSAs, the Pivotals, how are they going to make sense of those in the context of this bigger whole? On the one hand, they've got some competing priorities here. Dell has a very strong relationship with Microsoft, VMware is a competitor to Microsoft. So you got to figure out how to get those, how to make sense of those different alliances. Pivotal is potentially a competitor to Microsoft. >> Potentially? >> Well, Microsoft is in the pass business, yeah. >> No, it is yeah, it's going to compete. >> So you've got a, you've got some paradoxes here in the businesses that Dell has acquired. They really still, I sense they still haven't made sense of what they're going to do with them. >> Yeah, great point. I mean, first of all, you guys are pros and we have a historical view here of the collective intelligence of all of us old guys here. We've seen a lot of ways. But Rob Hof wrote an article on SiliconANGLE, our Editor-in-Chief Rob Hof, who's also an industry veteran and journalist himself. After the Oracle media event, and the headline reads, "In Oracle's Cloud Pitch to Enterprises, "an Echo of a Bygone Tech Era." And his point with this story is, I want to get your reaction to this, cause I think we're seeing a trend here, you guys are teasing out here. We're kind of going back down to the old tech days. You were the Editor-in-Chief of Computerworld back in the day with the mainframe world and then the minis. Seeing Marius Haas on here using words like "Single pain of glass." "One throat to choke." "End to end." We're almost seeing the bygone era coming back again where maybe they might have the rights to it. Certainly Oracle saying, "Hey, you know, "reorganize our sales force." So the question. Is the cloud the de-centralized mainframe. Is it now the new centralized, with edge, intelligent edge, is that, are we going back to the old ways, in a way, not fully but, unifying the sales forces. >> So, the computing industry-- >> Thoughts. >> Has been been on an inexorable march to greater utilization of public infrastructure. What an economist would say is we've always found ways to reduce asset specificities. I buy something, and I apply it to one purpose. I can't apply it to another purpose. Software changes that. Commodity pricing and hardware changes that. Public infrastructure changes that. So we're going to continue to see that inexorable march to the use of public infrastructure or somethin' that looks like public infrastructure. And that's going to continue. And the industry's always been very, very good at that. That does not mean, however, that we're going to have one supplier. So what we're seeing is a lot of FUD right now. Amazon FUD, Dell FUD, Oracle FUD. There is a real tension in the model and the real tension is, more than likely, the future is going to be composites of services operating on multiple different cloud-like instances, including on premise. And who's going to offer the best end-to-end control plane? >> Paul, I want to get your thoughts. Cause you remember goin' back to the days, IBM had SNA network stack, DEC had DECnet, we had, they had propietary stacks. Cloud, Azure stack, this stack, that. Are we seeing this again? Your thoughts. >> Well I think Peter's absolutely right but the variable, and you're right, we are seeing this again. We're seeing a trend of return to simplicity. Because what IT organizations have been wrestling with for the last 20 years is everything is just getting more complex. There's more vendors, there's more piece parts, and they've got to fit them all together, and it sucks. And so they want someone to simplify this. Now, cloud vendors simplify it on one level. But software-defined, on another level. We've been talking here about software defined storage, about software-defined networking, massive virtualization. And that's on an open source or at least an open API-based model. Which I think is the twist here. Are we going back to the days of IBM? Yeah. But IBM, But the IBM may actually be software-defined. >> Or five different companies that look like IBM. >> I know what you're saying Paul, and I'm not going to disagree with you. But here's the opposite-- >> But you disagree with him. >> No, no, but no I'm not going to, I'm going to put a slightly different spin on it. It used to be that the most valuable asset in an IT organization was the mainframe. And the entire organization was organized and the interactions with the business were organized and put in place to handle the value of that mainframe. We are not going back to a day where the IT organization, the way business uses IT is organized around the mainframe as an asset. Or even around the provision of infrastructure as an asset. We are going to start seeing organization and frameworks that are fundamentally built around this idea of data as an asset. And that is going to be a lot more complex with a lot more buyers and a lot more opportunities for differentiation creating value. So we will see more complexity in IT at the software and the use case level, less complexity at the infrastructure levels. >> Which is why machine learning and automation gets a lot of hype, but to Paul, I'm going to get your point and tie Peter's point together and introduce Jeff Bezos' comment last week on NDC. He mentioned that most things take 10 years to bake out in terms of getting things right. Ten year kind of horizon. Kind of an order of magnitude. But he says, "All these startups say they have "disruptive technology, it's not their technology that's "disruptive, it's what's the customer is disrupted." So we're talkin' about customers being disrupted. It's not some company having disruptive technologies. >> And disrupting. >> So are we saying that customers are being disrupted by reconfiguring their businesses, hence with the mainframe disrupted, a new way to do things, we're seeing clouded-data as a new way to do things. So, that's causing some reconfiguration and disruption, allows them to say, "Shit, just when I thought it was simple "it got more complex." >> But the disruptive element is the data as Peter says. >> I mean the machines are becoming, the machines are already a commodity. The, with open source, the platforms are a commodity. What's disruptive is how you use the data in different ways. And to your point Peter, yes, it's going to be a much more complex world. >> Peter: Much more. >> Because there's a lot more data and there's a lot more things we can do with data. >> And data can, that's exactly right. We can do so much more with data. So again, let's go back to the fundamental metric that at least I suggested. Who gets more customers? There are going to be more buyers of this stuff in five years than there are today. More buyers in the sense that within an organization, there's going to be more people involved in the decision and there's going to be more businesses. Because if this stuff actually works, the transaction costs are going to go down and you can then organize your businesses, institutionalize how you do work differently so you can have more partnerships. All that means that fundamentally, what we're talkin' about here is going to lead to greater complexity in business, greater opportunity therefore, but what I've always said, and I don't know if you've heard this Paul, but I know you have John, and I've said it on theCUBE. That the fundamental demarcation is that the first 50 years of this industry featured known process, unknown technology. And what do you we focus on? The technology. What's the next 50 years? Unknown process, known technology. What are we going to focus on? How to build that software, how to handle those data assets. What are we going to focus less attention on? The technology. What does everybody want to talk about at this show? >> The technology. >> Technology. That's a disconnect. So going to one of the things that we now have to think about from a DELL/EMC standpoint is where's the story about how Dell is going to appreciate the value of your data assets over time. We need more of that. >> And let me point out, you now, you didn't mention IBM but one company that is doing that well right now, they aren't getting the business benefit for it yet, is IBM. Where they are really taking, they are not technology, I mean they don't talk about power aid anymore. They talk about Watson, they talk about what you can do with analytics, they talk about a smarter planet. They haven't been able to turn this into a successful business yet but they're doing, I think, exactly what you're talking about. >> Well the product, they have some product challenges. I mean, so let's get back down to the customer thing. I like that angle. You got to have the customer, you got to have the products that customers will be buying. That's the value, exchange that customers will value and then hence by your service or product. Andy Jassy and Pat Gelsinger, when they did the Amazon deal, VMware. Jassy, Andy Jassy CEO of AWS said to me, "We are customer focused." So I believe that you're right on this 100%. Whoever can get the customers. And this is not about who's the better stack, if the customers like it, they're going to buy it. >> And very importantly, John, they are going to invest in it to make it valuable in their business. And that's what you want. You want to see your customers become a centerpiece of value-creation in your ecosystem. >> And I think Amazon Web Services proves that the dark horse could come out of nowhere and be the behemoth that they are because they served the customers. >> So that's the second thing that I'm missing at this show. And I know, I think I know why, is where is the additional details, even a little bit more, about VMware and AWS. Now, I know that they're going to wait for the VMware World, that's the story. >> They showed a little preview in the keynote, it's still baking out. >> Yeah, but it would be nice to have a little bit more. >> That's one of those tough relationships they need to manage, right? >> Yeah, exactly right. >> I mean VMware and IBM also have an alliance. They are allied with their foes now through the acquisition. The point about, about the value of data, you know, I think Amazon has done a good job of building platforms that are very flexible for customers to use but they abstract a lot of the underlying complexity. >> Alright, so with the data, I want to just double-down on that for a second and get your reaction, thoughts on, obviously, one of the themes here is IOT and we heard Michael Dell saying it's going to be centralized, pushed out to the edge, you got in research from Wikibon intellegent edge. You and David Floy and the rest of the team doing some real amazing work at Wikibon.com. Check it out, subscription required. What's the edge strategy? What does that actually mean for IT practitioners out there? It's, certainly we heard from Bask Iyer, who's the CIO of Dell said, "Most CIOs are conservative "and don't usually jump on these waves." They missed mobile, they missed some other waves. His mandate was, CIOs, don't miss the IOT wave. So what is the IOT, this edge of the network thing mean for a CIO. >> Well, the first thing is in hardcore circumstances, many CIOs aren't even involved in the edge. So if you take a look, if you go into where a lot of the edged domains are really crucial, you see a plant manager that's more responsible for what's going on in the edge than the CIO. The CIO is handling the corporate systems. The plant manager is handling what's actually happening at the edge. The operational technology stuff. So the first thing is we're going to see a slow circling of the IT and OT organizations about who's going to win-- >> OT meaning Operational Technology. >> Operational Technology. Just as we saw a slow circling back in the 1990s when TCPIP came in, and blew away DEC and blew away everybody, and started blowing away the TELECOM divisions, or TELECOM's functions within side large enterprises. >> So you think that IOT is going to be as disruptive as TCPIP was in standardizing in the network layer. >> Oh absolutely, absolutely. It's going to be, it's going to have an enormous impact because there's so many new sources. The data is going to have, how to think about it, and that was the second point I was going to make, John, is we do not currently have architectural standards in place for thinking about how this stuff is going to come together. And it's something that David Furrier and I and the Wikibon team are working on and I hope to come up with, I hope to come out with some research, actually probably next month, on what we call automation zones or data zones or probably edge zones. Which is, how do, just we think about security zones today, how do we think about edge zones. Where the edge zone is defined by a moment, an automation moment, cannot have data outside of that zone. And that needs to become an architectural principle where OT and IT can work together and say, "What data has to be in that zone? "I'll make sure my data gets there, "you make sure you're data gets there. "We'll figure out how control happens, "and that's how we drive this thing forward." >> Well, just to give you a prop here on theCUBE here is, Wikibon was right about Flash, they were right about Hyperconvergence and convergent infrastructure. Big bets early on that were kind of like, people were like, "What?" And certainly Vstand, ServiceStand although some people will disagree with this. >> They were right about the edge. >> Now you're right about, I think you're right on, way right on the edge and you're way right on value of data. >> Yeah. >> I think those are two stands that you're taking that will be-- >> And let's give great props to David Furrier who was a catalyst for thinking many of these things through. >> Alright Paul, final word from you. Obviously, you know, as a veteran, you've covered it all. Okay, what's your take? I mean, what's the, how's the wind blowing, what's your instinct tell you of what's happening. >> I think it's generally good, but it's hard to tell from conferences. As you know John, the reason most conferences are so boring is that there's no tension, there's no conflict. It's all good, it's all everybody's happy and everybody's doin' a great job. That's the very same thing that we're seeing here. >> Rah rah, Kool-aid injection. >> One thing I can't help notice is on the keynote, if you look at the keynote agenda for the three days, there's not a single customer on the, on the keynote agenda. Which I think is a problem. Or I don't think that says good things about where Dell is really focusing it's message right now. You want to have, at most big company conferences, there's lots and lots of customers who come up on stage. I think Dell is still thinking about, I mean it's a technology-focused company. They're thinking about technology integration right now. >> So speeds and feeds. >> Yeah, you hear a lot of speeds and feeds. >> Everybody wants to be the most important thing in the enterprise, and they still want hardware to be the most important thing. >> Well, I think I mean, I would agree with you 100%, but I just think, just, in this acquisition, I mean, sorry, merger of equals, they have a lot of herding cats going on right now. There's a lot of herding of portfolio and not a lot of overlap but I can see them kind of making room on the stage for that. But I do agree, I mean, customers do tell the best story. >> And in the long run, that's, as Peter said, that is what is going to make the difference. Are the customers happy? >> Guys, amazing exchange. Thanks so much, Peter, for comin' out and takin' some time out of your busy schedule to come on theCUBE and share your insight. The daily on-cue Paul, as always, we're havin' another three days. Third day of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE. Great commentary, great analysis, more live coverage from day three of Dell/EMC World 2017. We'll be right back, stay with us, we'll be right back after this short break.

>> Voiceover: From San Jose, California, it's The Cube, covering big data Silicon Valley 2017. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live in Silicon Valley for BigData SV, BigData Silicon Valley. This is Silicon Angles, The Cube's event in Silicon Valley, with our companion event, BigData NYC, in conjunction with O'Reilly, Strata, Hadoop, Hadoop World, our eighth year. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Jeff Frick, breaking down all the action, and our superguest, Abhi Mehta, the CEO of Tresata. He's been on every year since 2010, and the CEO of very successful Tresata, building out the vertical approach in financial net health. Welcome back, good to see you. Thank you, John, always good to see you. >> The annual pilgrimage to have you on The Cube. >> Abhi: This is literally a pilgrimage. I was exchanging messages with your co-host here, and he was pinging me, saying, "You got to come here, you got to get to this thing." I made it. The pilgrimage is successful. >> Yeah, a lot's happened, right? Data's the new oil. We've heard it over again. You had the seminal first interview in 2010, calling the oil refineries the data refineries. Turns out that was true. We always love to talk about that prediction every time you're on, but it's so much going on now. You can't believe the shift. Certainly, Hadoop has got a nice little niche position as Batch, but real time processing, you've seen the convergence of Batch, and streaming, and all that good stuff in real time, with the advances of clouds, certainly, more compute, Intel processors are getting more powerful, 5G over the top, you have connective cars, smart cities, on and on, IoT, Internet of things, all powering this new deep learning and AI trend. Man, it is game changes. I see this as a step-up function. What's your thoughts? This is going to create more data, more action. >> I agree with you. I always remind myself, John, especially when I talk to you guys, and we were chatting about this right before we went on air, which is, as smart as we as humans are, trends repeat themself. I'll be talking about AI. We all went to school, and did things in AI, you know? The whole neural networks thing has not been new. It's almost like fashion. Bell bottoms come in fashion every 20 years. I will never be seen in them again. Hopefully, neither will you. AI seems to be like that. I think the thing that hasn't changed, and yes, absolutely agree with you, that as escrows shift, as you've said, almost at this point a decade ago, there's a fundamentally new technology escrow shift under way, and escrow shifts take time. We will look back at this 10 years saying it was literally the first, second inning of this new escrow shift. I think we are entering the second innings where the conversation around Batch, real time storage, databases, the stacks, is becoming less important, and AI and deep learnings are examples of it, conversations on, how can you leverage cheaper, better, faster technology to solve and answer unanswered problems is becoming interesting. I think the basics haven't changed though. What we have spoken with you for almost eight years remain the same. The three basics around every technology trend remain the same. I think you guys will agree with me. Let me just play it by you and you can either contest it or agree with me. Data is the new competitive effort. It is unequivocally clear that the new asset, the most valuable enterprise asset has become data, and we've seen it in data companies, Facebook, Google, Uber, Airbnb, they're all fundamentally data companies. Data is the new competitive effort. The more you have of it, the better off you are. I always love people who say, "Big Data, this is a bad term." It isn't, because big data, fundamentally, in those two words, defines the very pieces of what we built Tresata on, which is, the more data you have, and if you can process and extract intelligence from it, borrowing your term, extract signal from the noise, you can make a lot of money on it. I think that fundamental basic hasn't changed. >> Big Data, to me, was always about big storage kind of a view. We coined the term Fast Data on The Cube, so that now speaks to the real time. It's interesting. I just see that the four main new areas that are being talked about outside of the Big Data world are autonomous vehicles, smart cities, smart home, and media and entertainment, and each one of those, I would say that the data is the new weaponization. There's an article that was great this month called "Weaponizing AI," and it had to do with Breitbart, and the election, and that's media and entertainment. You've got Netflix, all these new companies. Data is content, content is data. It's a digital asset. This AI component fits into autonomous vehicles, it fits into media and entertainment, fits into smart cities, and smart home. >> You also raise a very interesting point. I think that we can take comfort in the fact that we have seen this happen. This is not an idea anymore, or it's not just a wild idea anymore, which is, we have seen massive disruption happen in consumer industries. Google has created a brand new industry in how to market stuff, could be any stuff. Facebook created a brand new way of not just being in touch with your friends globally, 'cause people have thousands of friends, not true, but also, how do you monetize deep preferences, right? A twist on deep learning, but deep, deep preferences. If I know what Jeff likes, I can market to him better. I think we're about to see, the industries you just mention, is, where will success come from in enterprise software? I always ask myself that question when I come to any of these conferences, Strata, others, there's now an AI conference. What will the disruption that we have seen happen in consumer industries, we'll just mention automobiles, media entertainment, et cetera, what is going to happen to enterprise software? I think the time is ripe in the next five years to see the emergence of massive scale creation. I actually don't think it'll get disrupted. I think we will see, just like with Facebook, Google, Uber, the creation of brand new industries in enterprise software. I think that's going to be interesting. >> Mark Cuban said at South by Southwest this week, where The Cube was with the AI lounge with Intel, he was on stage saying, "The first tech trillionaire "will come out of deep learning," and deep learning is kind of the underpins for AI, if you look at all the geek stuff. To your point that a new shift of opportunity, whether it comes in from the enterprise side, or consumer, or algorithmic side, is that there's never been a trillionaire. >> Abhi: No, there hasn't. >> I want to push back a little bit, because I don't think it always was that way with data. We used to have sampling. It was all about sophistication on sampling, and data was expensive to store, expensive to collect, and expensive to manage. I think that's where the significant change is. The economics of collecting, and storing, and analyzing are such that sampling is no longer the preferred method. To your point, it's the bigness. >> Absolutely, you know exactly where I stand on that. >> Jeff: Now it's an asset. >> You know exactly where I stand on that. I said on The Cube, at this point, almost a decade ago, sampling is dead, and it's for that particular reason. I think the reality is that it has become a very tricky area to be in. Buzzwords aside, whether it's deep learning, AI, streaming, Batch, doesn't matter, Flash, all buzzwords aside, the very interesting thing is, are we seeing, as a community, the emergence of new enterprise software business models? I think ours is an example. We are now six years old. We announced Tresata on The Cube. We have celebrated our significant milestones on The Cube. We'll announce today that we are now a valuable member of society in terms of you pay tax as a company, another big milestone for a company. We have never raised venture money. We had a broad view when we started that every single thing we have learned as a industry enterprise software, the stack, databases, storage, BI, algorithms are free. Dave was talking about this earlier this week. Algorithms, analytical tools, will all become free. What is this new class of enterprise software that creates value that can then be sold as value? Buyers, corporations are becoming smart to realize and say, "Maybe I can't hire people "as smart as some of the web industries "on this side of the coast, "but I can still hire good talent, the tool set is free. "Should I build versus buy?" It fundamentally changes the conversation. Databases is a $2 trillion industry. Where does that value shift to if databases are free? I think that's what is going to be interesting to see, is, what model creates the new enterprise software industry? What is that going to be? I do agree with Mark Cuban's statement, that the answer is going to lie in, if the building blocks are free and commoditized, you guys know exactly where I stand on that one, if the building blocks are commoditized, how do you add value in the building block? It comes from the point you made, industry knowledge, data, owning data and domain knowledge. If you can combine deep domain expertise to be an advanced application that solve business problems, people don't want to know if the data is stored in a free HDFS system, or in some other system, or quantum computing, people don't care. >> I got to get your take on the data layer because this is where it's come. We had a lot of guests on saying, with the cloud, you can rent things, algorithms are free, so essentially, commoditization has happened, which is a good thing, more compute, everything else is all great, all the goodness around that. You still own your data. The data layer seems to be the LAN grab, metadata. How do you cross-connect the data layer to be consistent fabric? >> Here's how we think of it, and this is something we haven't shared publicly yet, but I believe you see us talk a lot more about this. We believe there are three new layers in the technology fabric. There is what we call the hardware operating system. The battle has been won by a company that we all like a lot, Red Hat, I think mostly won. Then there is what we call the data operating system, what you call the data layer. I think there's a new layer emerging where people like us sit. We call it the analytics operating system. The data layer will commoditize as much as the hardware operating system, what I call the layer, commoditized. The data operating system fight is moot. Metadata should not be charged for. Massive data management, draining the swamp, whatever you want to call it, every single thing in the data operating system is a commodity where you need volumes, you all are businessmen, you need volumes, in the P times V game, you need volumes to sustain a profit business model. The interesting action, in my opinion, is going to come in the analytics operating system. You are now automating hardcore, what I call, finding intelligence questions, whether it's using deep learning, AI, or whatever other buzzword the industry dreams up in the next five years, whatever the buzzwords may be, immaterial, the layer that automates the extraction of intelligence from massive amounts of data sitting in the data layer, no matter who owns it, our opinion is, Tresata, as an enterprise software player, is not interested to be a data owner. That game, I can't play anymore, right? You guys are a content company, though. You guys are data owners, and you have incredible value in the data you're building. For us, it is, I want to be the tool builder for this next gold rush. If you need the tools to extract intelligence from your data, who's going to give you those tools? I think all that value sits in what we call the analytics operating system. The world hasn't seen enough players in it yet. >> This is an interesting mind bender, if you think about it. When you said, "analytics operating system," that rings a few bells and gets the hair standing on the back of my head up because we're in a systems world now. We kind of talk about this in The Cube where operating systems concepts are very much in play. If you look at this ecosystem and who's winning, who's losing, who's struggling, who's falling away, is, the winners are nailing the integration game, and they're nailing the functional game, I think, a core functional component of an operating environment, AKA, the cloud, AKA data. >> Agreed. >> Having those functional systems, as an operating system game. What is your view of what an analytics operating system? What are some of those components? I mean, most operating systems have a linker, loader, filer, all these things going on. What's your thoughts on this analytical operating system? What is it made of? >> It's made of three core components that we have now invested six years in. The first one is exactly what you said. We don't use the word integration. We now call it the same word, we have been saying it for six years, we call it the factory, but it's very similar, which is, the ability to go to a company or enterprises with unique data assets, and enrich, I will borrow your term, integrate, enrich. We call it the data factory, the automation of 90% of the workload to make data sitting in a swamp usable data, part one. We call that creation of a data asset, a nice twist or separation from the word data warehousing we all grew up on. That's number one, the ability to make raw data usable. It's actually quite hard. If you haven't built a company squarely on data, you have to be able to buy it because building is very hard, number one. Number two is what I call the infusion of domain-centric knowledge. Can industries and industry players take expert systems and convert them into machine systems? The moment we convert expert systems into machine systems, we can do automation at very large scale. As you can imagine, the ability to add value is exponentially higher for each of those tiers, from data asset to now infusion of domain knowledge, to take an expert into a machine system, but the value trade is incredibly large as well. If you actually have the system built out, you can afford to sell it for all the value. That's number two, the ability to take expert system, go to machine systems. Number three is the most interesting, and we are very early in it. I use the term on The Cube, I'm going to be more forward-thinking over here, which is automation. Today, the best we can do with leveraging incredibly smart machines, algorithms, at scale on massive amounts of data is augmenting humans. I do fundamentally believe, just like self-driving cars, that the era where software will automate a tremendous amount of business processes in all industries is upon us. How long it takes, I think we will see it in our lifetimes too. When you and I have both a little bit more gray hair, we're saying, "Remember, we said about that? "I think automation's going to come." I do believe automation will happen. Currently, it's all about augmentation, but I do believe that business-- >> John: Cubebots are coming. We're going to have some Cubebots. >> We will have Cubebots. >> John: Automated Cube broadcasting. >> John, we'll give them your magnificent hair, and they know they'll do it. I do believe automation of complex human processes, the era of enlightenment, is upon us, where we will be able to take incredibly manual activities, like hailing a car today, to complex activities, looking at transaction information, trading information, in split second time, even quicker than real time, and making the right trading decision to make sure that Jeff's kids go to college in a robo-advisor-like mode. It's all early, but the augmentation will transform to automation, and that will take some time to do them at three tiers in the AOS. >> Then, if we are successful at converting the expert to machine system, will the value of that expert system quickly be driven to zero due to the same factors that automation has added to many other things that have been sucked in? >> You guys always blow my mind. You always push my thinking when I come here. >> I just love the concept, but then, will the same economics that have driven asumtotically approaching zero costs, then now go to these expert systems? >> You know the answer. The answer is absolutely, yes. The question then becomes, how long of an era is it? What we have learned in technology is escrow shifts take time. This era of enlightenment, what I'm calling the era of enlightenment, that enterprise software is about to enable, and leaving aside all other buzzwords, whether it's deep learning, AI, machines, chatbot, doesn't matter, the era of enlightenment is absolute. I think there'll be two things. First of all, it'll take time to mature. Yes, whether it's 50 years, 40 years, or 30 years, does it, at some point, become it's own commodity? Absolutely. The marginal value we can deliver with a machine, at some point, does go to zero, because it commoditizes it, at scale, it commoditizes it, absolutely, but does that mean the next 30 years will not be a renaissance in enterprise software? Absolutely not. I think we will see ... Let's take the enterprise IT market, what, two to three trillion dollars a year? All of it is up for grabs, and we will see in the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years that, as it is up for grabs, tremendous amount of value will be re-traded and recreated in completely new industry models. I think that's the exciting part. I won't live for 50 years, so it's okay. >> I know we got a minute or so left. I want to get your thoughts on something that we're seeing here, The Cube this year pointed out. We've kind of teased around it, but again, Batch and real time process streaming, all that's coming together. The center of that's IoT data and AI, is causing product gaps. There are some gaps that are developing, either a pure play Batch player, or your real time, some people have been one or the other, some are integrating in. When you try to blend it together, there's product gaps, organizational gaps, and then process gaps. Can you talk about how companies are solving that? Because one supplier might have a great Batch solution, data lake, some might have streaming and whatnot. Now there seems to be more of an integrated approach, bringing those worlds together, but it's causing some gaps. How do companies figure that out? >> I believe there's only one way, in the near term, and then potentially even moreso in the long term, to bridge that divide that you talk about. There absolutely is a divide. It's been very interesting for us especially. I'll use our example to answer your question. We have a very advanced health analytics application to go after diabetes. The challenge is, in order to run it, not only do you need lots and lots of data, IoT, streamed, real time from sensors you wear on your body, you need that. Not only do you need the ability and processing power to crunch all that data, not only do you need the specific algorithms to find insights that were not findable before, the unanswered questions, but the last point, you need to be able to then deliver it across all channels so you can monetize it. That is a end-to-end, what I call, business process around data monetization. Our customers don't care about it. They come to Tresata and they say, "I love your predictive diabetes outcomes application. "I have rented the system from the cloud," Amazon, Azure, I think at this point, only two players. We don't see Google much in it. I'm sure they're doing something in it. We have rented you the wheels, and the steering, and the body, so if you want to put it together to run your car on the track, you could. Everything else is containerized by us. I call them advanced analytics applications. They're fully managed. They run on any environment that is given to them because they are resource ready, whatever environment they play in, and they are completely backwards and forwards integrated. I think you will see the emergence of a class of enterprise software, what we call advanced analytics applications, that actually take away the pain from enterprises to worry about those gaps, 'cause in our case, in that example I just gave you, yes, there are gaps, but we have done it enough off a automation cycle on the business process itself, that we can title with the gaps. >> Abhi, we got to go. Glad we could squeeze you in. >> Abhi: Thank you. >> Quick 30 seconds, the show this year, what are you seeing? What's the buzz coming out of? What's the meat, what's the buzz from the show here? What's the story? >> I continue to believe that we are in an era that will redefine what we have seen humans do. The people at the show continue to surprise me because the questions they've been asking over the last eight years have slightly changed. I'm done with buzzwords. I don't pay attention to buzzwords anymore. I see a maturation. I think I said it to you before. I see more bald heads and big pates. When I see that in shows like these, it gives me hope that, when people who grew up in a different escrow have borrowed a new escrow, the pace would strengthen. As always, phenomenal show, great community. The community's changing and looking different in a good way. >> We feel your pain in the buzzword. As we proceed down this epic digital transformation, over the top, 5G, autonomous vehicles, Big Data analytics, moving the needle, all this headroom, future proofing, AI, machine learning, thanks for sharing. >> Abhi: Thank you so much, as always. >> More buzzwords, more signal from the noise here on The Cube. I'm John Furrier, Jeff Frick, and George Gilbert will be back right after this short break. (electronic music)