(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to San Francisco, "theCUBE" is live, our day two coverage of VMware Explore 2022 continues. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Dave and I are pleased to welcome Jason Collier, principal member of technical staff at AMD to the program. Jason, it's great to have you. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> So what's going on at AMD? I hear you have some juicy stuff to talk about. >> Oh, we've got a ton of juicy stuff to talk about. Clearly the Project Monterey announcement was big for us, so we've got that to talk about. Another thing that I really wanted to talk about was a tool that we created and we call it, it's the VMware Architecture Migration Tool, call it VAMT for short. It's a tool that we created and we worked together with VMware and some of their professional services crew to actually develop this tool. And it is also an open source based tool. And really the primary purpose is to easily enable you to move from one CPU architecture to another CPU architecture, and do that in a cold migration fashion. >> So we're probably not talking about CPUs from Tandy, Radio Shack systems, likely this would be what we might refer to as other X86 systems. >> Other X86 systems is a good way to refer to it. >> So it's interesting timing for the development and the release of a tool like this, because in this sort of X86 universe, there are players who have been delayed in terms of delivering their next gen stuff. My understanding is AMD has been public with the idea that they're on track for by the end of the year, Genoa, next gen architecture. So can you imagine a situation where someone has an existing set of infrastructure and they're like, hey, you know what I want to get on board, the AMD train, is this something they can use from the VMware environment? >> Absolutely, and when you think about- >> Tell us exactly what that would look like, walk us through 100 servers, VMware, 1000 VMs, just to make the math easy. What do you do? How does it work? >> So one, there's several things that the tool can do, we actually went through, the design process was quite extensive on this. And we went through all of the planning phases that you need to go through to do these VM migrations. Now this has to be a cold migration, it's not a live migration. You can't do that between the CPU architectures. But what we do is you create a list of all of the virtual machines that you want to migrate. So we take this CSV file, we import this CSV file, and we ask for things like, okay, what's the name? Where do you want to migrate it to? So from one cluster to another, what do you want to migrate it to? What are the networks that you want to move it to? And then the storage platform. So we can move storage, it could either be shared storage, or we could move say from VSAN to VSAN, however you want to set it up. So it will do those storage migrations as well. And then what happens is it's actually going to go through, it's going to shut down the VM, it's going to take a snapshot, it is going to then basically move the compute and/or storage resources over. And once it does that, it's going to power 'em back up. And it's going to check, we've got some validation tools, where it's going to make sure VM Tools comes back up where everything is copacetic, it didn't blue screen or anything like that. And once it comes back up, then everything's good, it moves onto the next one. Now a couple of things that we've got feature wise, we built into it. You can parallelize these tasks. So you can say, how many of these machines do you want to do at any given time? So it could be, say 10 machines, 50 machines, 100 machines at a time, that you want to go through and do this move. Now, if it did blue screen, it will actually roll it back to that snapshot on the origin cluster. So that there is some protection on that. A couple other things that are actually in there are things like audit tracking. So we do full audit logging on this stuff, we take a snapshot, there's basically kind of an audit trail of what happens. There's also full logging, SYS logging, and then also we'll do email reporting. So you can say, run this and then shoot me a report when this is over. Now, one other cool thing is you can also actually define a change window. So I don't want to do this in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. So I want to do this later at night, over the weekend, you can actually just queue this up, set it, schedule it, it'll run. You can also define how long you want that change window to be. And what it'll do, it'll do as many as it can, then it'll effectively stop, finish up, clean up the tasks and then send you a report on what all was successfully moved. >> Okay, I'm going to go down the rabbit hole a little bit on this, 'cause I think it's important. And if I say something incorrect, you correct me. >> No problem. >> In terms of my technical understanding. >> I got you. >> So you've got a VM, essentially a virtual machine typically will consist of an entire operating system within that virtual machine. So there's a construct that containerizes, if you will, the operating system, what is the difference, where is the difference in the instruction set? Where does it lie? Is it in the OS' interaction with the CPU or is it between the construct that is the sort of wrapper around the VM that is the difference? >> It's really primarily the OS, right? And we've not really had too many issues doing this and most of the time, what is going to happen, that OS is going to boot up, it's going to recognize the architecture that it's on, it's going to see the underlying architecture, and boot up. All the major operating systems that we test worked fine. I mean, typically they're going to work on all the X86 platforms. But there might be instruction sets that are kind of enabled in one architecture that may not be in another architecture. >> And you're looking for that during this process. >> Well usually the OS itself is going to kind of detect that. So if it pops up, the one thing that is kind of a caution that you need to look for. If you've got an application that's explicitly using an instruction set that's on one CPU vendor and not the other CPU vendor. That's the one thing where you're probably going to see some application differences. That said, it'll probably be compatible, but you may not get that instruction set advantage in it. >> But this tool remediates against that. >> Yeah, and what we do, we're actually using VM Tools itself to go through and validate a lot of those components. So we'll look and make sure VM Tools is enabled in the first place, on the source system. And then when it gets to the destination system, we also look at VM Tools to see what is and what is not enabled. >> Okay, I'm going to put you on the spot here. What's the zinger, where doesn't it work? You already said cold, we understand, you can schedule for cold migrations, that's not a zinger. What's the zinger, where doesn't it work? >> It doesn't work like, live migrations just don't work. >> No live, okay, okay, no live. What about something else? What's the oh, you've got that version, you've got that version of X86 architecture, it-won't work, anything? >> A majority of those cases work, where it would fail, where it's going to kick back and say, hey, VM Tools is not installed. So where you would see this is if you're running a virtual appliance from some vendor, like insert vendor here that say, got a firewall, or got something like that, and they don't have VM Tools enabled. It's going to fail it out of the gate, and say, hey, VM Tools is not on this, you might want to manually do it. >> But you can figure out how to fix that? >> You can figure out how to do that. You can also, and there's a flag in there, so in kind of the options that you give it, you say, ignore VM Tools, don't care, move it anyway. So if you've got less, some VMs that are in there, but they're not a priority VM, then it's going to migrate just fine. >> Got It. >> Can you elaborate a little bit on the joint development work that AMD and VMware are doing together and the value in it for customers? >> Yeah, so it's one of those things we worked with VMware to basically produce this open source tool. So we did a lot of the core component and design and we actually engaged VMware Professional Services. And a big shout out to Austin Browder. He helped us a ton in this project specifically. And we basically worked, we created this, kind of co-designed, what it was going to look like. And then jointly worked together on the coding, of pulling this thing together. And then after that, and this is actually posted up on VMware's public repos now in GitHub. So you can go to GitHub, you can go to the VMware samples code, and you can download this thing that we've created. And it's really built to help ease migrations from one architecture to another. So if you're looking for a big data center move and you got a bunch of VMs to move. I mean, even if it's same architecture to same architecture, it's definitely going to ease the pain of going through and doing a migration of, it's one thing when you're doing 10 machines, but when you're doing 10,000 virtual machines, that's a different story. It gets to be quite operationally inefficient. >> I lose track after three. >> Yeah. >> So I'm good for three, not four. >> I was going to ask you what your target market segment is here. Expand on that a little bit and talk to me about who you're working with and those organizations. >> So really this is targeted toward organizations that have large deployments in enterprise, but also I think this is a big play with channel partners as well. So folks out there in the channel that are doing these migrations and they do a lot of these, when you're thinking about the small and mid-size organizations, it's a great fit for that. Especially if they're kind of doing that upgrade, the lift and shift upgrade, from here's where you've been five to seven years on an architecture and you want to move to a new architecture. This is really going to help. And this is not a point and click GUI kind of thing. It's command line driven, it's using PowerShell, we're using PowerCLI to do the majority of this work. And for channel partners, this is an excellent opportunity to put the value and the value add and VAR, And there's a lot of opportunity for, I think, channel partners to really go and take this. And once again, being open source. We expect this to be extensible, we want the community to contribute and put back into this to basically help grow it and make it a more useful tool for doing these cold migrations between CPU architectures. >> Have you seen any in the last couple of years of dynamics, obviously across the world, any industries in particular that are really leading edge for what you guys are doing? >> Yeah, that's really, really interesting. I mean, we've seen it, it's honestly been a very horizontal problem, pretty much across all vertical markets. I mean, we've seen it in financial services, we've seen it in, honestly, pretty much across the board. Manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, we have seen kind of a strong interest in that. And then also we we've actually taken this and presented this to some of our channel partners as well. And there's been a lot of interest in it. I think we presented it to about 30 different channel partners, a couple of weeks back about this. And I got contact from 30 different channel partners that said they're interested in basically helping us work on it. >> Tagging on to Lisa's question, do you have visibility into the AMD thought process around the timing of your next gen release versus others that are competitors in the marketplace? How you might leverage that in terms of programs where partners are going out and saying, hey, perfect time, you need a refresh, perfect time to look at AMD, if you haven't looked at them recently. Do you have any insight into that in what's going on? I know you're focused on this area. But what are your thoughts on, well, what's the buzz? What's the buzz inside AMD on that? >> Well, when you look overall, if you look at the Gartner Hype Cycle, when VMware was being broadly adopted, when VMware was being broadly adopted, I'm going to be blunt, and I'm going to be honest right here, AMD didn't have a horse in the race. And the majority of those VMware deployments we see are not running on AMD. Now that said, there's an extreme interest in the fact that we've got these very cored in systems that are now coming up on, now you're at that five to seven year refresh window of pulling in new hardware. And we have extremely attractive hardware when it comes to running virtualized workloads. The test cluster that I'm running at home, I've got that five to seven year old gear, and I've got some of the, even just the Milan systems that we've got. And I've got three nodes of another architecture going onto AMD. And when I got these three nodes completely maxed to the number of VMs that I can run on 'em, I'm at a quarter of the capacity of what I'm putting on the new stuff. So what you get is, I mean, we worked the numbers, and it's definitely, it's like a 30% decrease in the amount of resources that you need. >> That's a compelling number. >> It's a compelling number. >> 5%, 10%, nobody's going to do anything for that. You talk 30%. >> 30%. It's meaningful, it's meaningful. Now you you're out of Austin, right? >> Yes. >> So first thing I thought of when you talk about running clusters in your home is the cost of electricity, but you're okay. >> I'm okay. >> You don't live here, you don't live here, you don't need to worry about that. >> I'm okay. >> Do you have a favorite customer example that you think really articulates the value of AMD when you're in customer conversations and they go, why AMD and you hit back with this? >> Yeah. Actually it's funny because I had a conversation like that last night, kind of random person I met later on in the evening. We were going through this discussion and they were facing exactly this problem. They had that five to seven year infrastructure. It's funny, because the guy was a gamer too, and he's like, man, I've always been a big AMD fan, I love the CPUs all the way since back in basically the Opterons and Athlons right. He's like, I've always loved the AMD systems, loved the graphics cards. And now with what we're doing with Ryzen and all that stuff. He's always been a big AMD fan. He's like, and I'm going through doing my infrastructure refresh. And I told him, I'm just like, well, hey, talk to your VAR and have 'em plug some AMD SKUs in there from the Dells, HPs and Lenovos. And then we've got this tool to basically help make that migration easier on you. And so once we had that discussion and it was great, then he swung by the booth today and I was able to just go over, hey, this is the tool, this is how you use it, here's all the info. Call me if you need any help. >> Yeah, when we were talking earlier, we learned that you were at Scale. So what are you liking about AMD? How does that relate? >> The funny thing is this is actually the first time in my career that I've actually had a job where I didn't work for myself. I've been doing venture backed startups the last 25 years and we've raised couple hundred million dollars worth of investment over the years. And so one, I figured, here I am going to AMD, a larger corporation. I'm just like, am I going to be able to make it a year? And I have been here longer than a year and I absolutely love it. The culture at AMD is amazing. We still have that really, I mean, almost it's like that underdog mentality within the organization. And the team that I'm working with is a phenomenal team. And it's actually, our EVP and our Corp VP, were actually my executive sponsors, we were at a prior company. They were one of my executive sponsors when I was at Scale. And so my now VP boss calls me up and says, hey, I'm putting a band together, are you interested? And I was kind of enjoying a semi-retirement lifestyle. And then I'm just like, man, because it's you, yes, I am interested. And the group that we're in, the work that we're doing, the way that we're really focusing on forward looking things that are affecting the data center, what's going to be the data center like three to five years from now. It's exciting, and I am having a blast, I'm having the time of my life. I absolutely love it. >> Well, that relationship and the trust that you will have with each other, that bleeds into the customer conversations, the partner conversations, the employee conversations, it's all inextricably linked. >> Yes it is. >> And we want to know, you said three to five years out, like what? Like what? Just general futurist stuff, where do you think this is going. >> Well, it's interesting. >> So moon collides with the earth in 2025, we already know that. >> So we dialed this back to the Pensando acquisition. When you look at the Pensando acquisition and you look at basically where data centers are today, but then you look at where basically the big hyperscalers are. You look at an AWS, you look at their architecture, you specifically wrap Nitro around that, that's a very different architecture than what's being run in the data center. And when you look at what Pensando does, that's a lot of starting to bring what these real clouds out there, what these big hyperscalers are running into the grasps of the data center. And so I think you're going to see a fundamental shift. The next 10 years are going to be exciting because the way you look at a data center now, when you think of what CPUs do, what shared storage, how the networking is all set up, it ain't going to look the same. >> Okay, so the competing vision with that, to play devil's advocate, would be DPUs are kind of expensive. Why don't we just use NICs, give 'em some more bandwidth, and use the cheapest stuff. That's the competing vision. >> That could be. >> Or the alternative vision, and I imagine everything else we've experienced in our careers, they will run in parallel paths, fit for function. >> Well, parallel paths always exist, right? Otherwise, 'cause you know how many times you've heard mainframe's dead, tape's dead, spinning disk is dead. None of 'em dead, right? The reality is you get to a point within an industry where it basically goes from instead of a growth curve like that, it goes to a growth curve of like that, it's pretty flat. So from a revenue growth perspective, I don't think you're going to see the revenue growth there. I think you're going to see the revenue growth in DPUs. And when you actually take, they may be expensive now, but you look at what Monterey's doing and you look at the way that those DPUs are getting integrated in at the OEM level. It's going to be a part of it. You're going to order your VxRail and VSAN style boxes, they're going to come with them. It's going to be an integrated component. Because when you start to offload things off the CPU, you've driven your overall utilization up. When you don't have to process NSX on basically the X86, you've just freed up cores and a considerable amount of them. And you've also moved that to where there's a more intelligent place for that pack to be processed right, out here on this edge. 'Cause you know what, that might not need to go into the host bus at all. So you have just alleviated any transfers over a PCI bus, over the PCI lanes, into DRAM, all of these components, when you're like, but all to come with, oh, that bit needs to be on this other machine. So now it's coming in and it's making that decision there. And then you take and integrate that into things like the Aruba Smart Switch, that's running the Pensando technology. So now you got top of rack that is already making those intelligent routing decisions on where packets really need to go. >> Jason, thank you so much for joining us. I know you guys could keep talking. >> No, I was going to say, you're going to have to come back. You're going to have to come back. >> We've just started to peel the layers of the onion, but we really appreciate you coming by the show, talking about what AMD and VMware are doing, what you're enabling customers to achieve. Sounds like there's a lot of tailwind behind you. That's awesome. >> Yeah. >> Great stuff, thank you. >> It's a great time to be at AMD, I can tell you that. >> Oh, that's good to hear, we like it. Well, thank you again for joining us, we appreciate it. For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE Live" from San Francisco, VMware Explore 2022. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners >> Hello and welcome to Day three Live coverage of the Cube here in Las Vegas Fridel Technologies World twenty nineteen I'm jut forward, David Lot They Davis del Technologies world. This is our tenth year If you count DMC World twenty ten first ever Cube event where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. Now we're the number one and tech coverage. Howard Elias has been with us the entire way. Our next guest. Keep alumni Howard allies who is currently the President of Services and Digital for Del Technologies. Howard, great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. Dave. Always great to be back with you. Thank you. >> You've been with us throughout our entire cube jury. It's our tenth year has been great ride and one of the benefits of doing the queue besides learning a lot and having great conversations is as the industry of balls from true private private cloud to, you know, big day that meets technology, all the different iterations of the business. We're gonna have the conversation and look back and see who's right. You >> get to go back and see what we said and holds you >> accountable. Not that you guys said anything crazy, but you were unique because we've had many conversations and most notably during the acquisition of the M. C. You're on the team leading the effort with your partner in crime from the del side to make sure the acquisition goes smoothly. And, you know, a lot of people were saying, Oh my God, icebergs ahead. We're pretty positive. So history treats us fairly in the queue way. Tend to got it right. But you said some bold things. That was pretty much the guiding principle of the acquisition, and I just I just tweeted it out this morning. So you got it right. You said some things. Looking back two years later, almost two, three years later. >> Well, look, you know John first, I appreciate that. Appreciate the opportunity to be back with with you, and it's amazing. It's been ten years, but yeah, so, you know, over the last couple of years, I did help Kohli the integration, and we said, Look, first and foremost, we're going to do no harm the way customers transact with us byproducts. The way we service them, that's not going to change. But then, that's not enough, right? It's not just about doing no harm. It's how do we add value? Over time, we talked about aligning our teams in front of our customers. Then we talked about unifying the approach not just in the go to market, but in services and in technology and ultimately delivering Mohr integrated solutions. And we've accepted here down that a CZ you rightly say so thank you for pointing that out. And you know, this week was a great embodiment of that. Because not only are we listening, Tio, what our customers want we're delivering on it were actually delivering these integrated solutions the Del Technologies Cloud unified workspace for client, these air things that we've delivered over time, you know, we stitch it together, and now we're unifying it, integrating it, actually now even embedding services into it. So that's the journey we've been on. And we've been very pleased with the reception, >> and Michael to also was very bull. But the key on all the conversations we had on this was and we'LL get to the current situation now because that's important is that you guys saw the growth opportunities on the synergies we did, and we kind of had those conversations. So a line you align the team's unify and integrate you're the integration phase. Now we're starting to see some of the fruit come off the tree with business performance significant. Well, we appreciate >> that we're gaining market share across the board, and we had a hypothesis with, you know, coming together. We had a complementary product, portfolios, complimentary customer segments way. We're very thoughtful and how we organized our go to market, and we're seeing that we're seeing that and market share games. But more importantly, we're seeing the customer conversation saying Thank you for that. Now I want more. How do you deliver more value faster? So I think we're past the integration stays. Now we're into the accelerating the value stage. >> Howard, you've been through and seen a lot of acquisitions, large acquisitions. I mean, I think of the compact digital, you know, not a lot of not a lot of overlap. HP with compact, much more overlap maybe didn't go so as well. Or maybe a smoothly massive acquisition here. Why do you think it worked so well here? Because there was a failure. A fair amount of overlap, you know, definitely some shared values, but maybe some different cultures. You've been on both sides. It's just seems to be working quite well. You seem to be through that knothole of maybe some of that uncomfortable early days. Why do you think it works so well? What was kind of the secret sauce there? >> I think a couple of reasons. First, the hypothesis of coming together was all very customer centric. Customers wanted fewer more strategic partners. They ultimately from infrastructure, want Mohr integration. Mohr automation. They wanted a CZ. Pat said yesterday on states they wantto look upto absent data and somebody else worry about looking down and taking care of the infrastructure. So the hypothesis was very strong. Michael had a bold vision, but the boldness of actually execute on that vision as well, I would say second we have. Yeah, while the cultures, in terms of how things got done were a bit different, the values were frankly not just similar. They were identical. We may have talked about this before, but When we did the integration planning, we actually surveyed half the population of about Delanie emcee. The top five values in order were the same from both team members. Focus on customers Act with integrity. Collaborate When is a team results? Orientation? It was phenomenal. I would say. You know, third, it's just the moment in time. Uh, and it's really a continuation. You think about the ten year partnership that Dell and GMC had back in the two thousands that actually helped us get to know each other, how we worked and helped form those shared values. So and then, finally, approximate one hundred fifty thousand team members signed up to the mission. You know, the tech industry is starved for star for tech talent. On the fact of the matter would that we have approximately one hundred fifty thousand team members of prostate all technologies signed up to our vision, signed upto our strategy, executing every day on behalf of customers. It's just awesome to see >> So digital transformation, of course, is the big buzz word. So we're gonna put on you guys what do you do it for your own digital transformation? You know, proof of the pudding. What gives you the right to even talk about that? What do you doing? Internal? >> Yeah, you know, it's a great question. And to your point, we talked with customers all the time. In addition to looking after our services businesses worldwide, I also am responsible for Del Digital inside of Del Technologies. That's our organization. We purposely named Adele Digital because we are on our digital journey as well. And so we are transforming everything that we do the way we do. We actually call it the Del Digital Way. We've had a couple of nice breakouts. Our booth in the showcase has got Ted talk style conversations around this, and it's really embracing this notion of agile, balanced team's getting close to the business, actually, the business in the dojo, with our developers moving more to a product orientation versus a project orientation, and it's really focused on outcomes on T. You hear us talk about this all the time. Technology strategy is now business strategy, and whether it's in sales or marketing or services. Doug's doing great work and support assist using telemetry and artificial intelligence and machine learning recommendation engines in our dotcom. The on boarding within hours. Now with what we used to take weeks with our business customers in our premier portal, Wei are looking at every opportunity everything from the introduction of bots and our p a all the way through machine learning. Aye aye and true digital transformation. We are walking that talk. >> Really? You're going hard after our p A. That's what Do Yu result. We've >> actually been doing arpa for many, many years and for you know, especially when you have a complex system complex ecosystem As you're rewriting and developing either re platform, every factoring or cloud native, you still got to get work done. So I'll give you a great example. You know, in a online world of today, it's amazing to know that we still get millions of orders by email and facts. And instead of outsourcing that and having humans retyped the order, we just have robotics, read it automatically translated. And >> so the narrative in the media you hear a lot of coordination is going to kill jobs. But I've talked to several our customers and they've all said the opposite. We love this because it's replacing mundane tasks it allows us to do other things. What's your experience you are >> spot on? I'm a technology optimist, and I believe that a machine learning robotics will do the task that humans are either not good at or don't want to do or don't like to do and allow humans to be more human. Creative thinking, creative problem solving, human empathy, human compassion. That's what humans are good at. And we need more people focused on those things and not row test. >> One of the things that Michael Dell on key themes in The Kino Day one and Day two in some day. Three lot of societal impacts of I Love That's kind of touchy feely. But the reality is of Reese killing people. The skills gap is still a huge thing. Culture in the Enterprise is moving to a cloud operation was his favors your strategy of end to end consistent operational excellence as well as you know, data driven, you know, value of the AP player. Great straight, but we've been seeing in the queue with same thing for years. Horizontally, scaleable, vertically specialized in all industries. Yeah, with data center so good. Good strategy, gaps in culture and skills are coming up How are you guys doing services? You mean you've got a lot of people on them on the streets? A lot of people that need to learn more about a I dashboards taking the automation, flipping a new opportunity to create a value for people in the workplace. We >> have this conversation continuously inside of our teams and inside of our company. Look, we have a responsibility to make sure that we bring everybody along this journey. It starts by painting the vision being that technology optimist. Technology is a force for good on how do we apply the technology and the digitization and, you know, creating our digital future, bringing our team members along. So setting that vision, it is about culture behavior. Set the tone from the top. But we also have a responsibility and retraining and re skilling and bringing you know, team members. New opportunities, new ways to learn our education services team, for example. You see it here, the certifications, the accreditations. We do the hands on labs that we do. It's all about allowing opportunities for people to up skill, learn new skills, learn new opportunities that are available, and customers need this higher value. Helping support? What >> about the transformation that's been impacting the workflow on work streams of your services group with customers as they are? Maybe not as far ahead as you guys are on the transformation. Maybe they're They're cloud native in one area kind of legacy in the other. How was the impact of delivering services? One. Constructing them services, formulating the right products and service mix to delivering the value. How is technology change that you mentioned Rp? What if some of the highlights in your mind >> Well, it's It's a journey and you know it. Mileage varies here, right? Depends on what you're trying to accomplish, but we never do wrong by focusing on what's right for the customers. So what our customers looking for? What are their business outcomes they're looking for? Uh, here's a great example in the unified workspace. You know, we've been doing PC has a service for a while even before PC has a service. We're delivering outcomes, delivering Peces, doing some factory into get gration Cem image management, lifecycle management deployment services. But now what we've done is really taken not just the end and view, but we packaged it and integrated it into a single solution offering across the life cycles. So now, once we understand the the customer and users personas weaken factory, image the configuration, ship it to the team members deaths not just to a doctor the place but right to the team members desk have auto deployment auto support telemetry back and manage that life cycle, we package that up now. End to end this a new capability that customers are really looking for >> before I know. Do you have a question? I want to get your reaction to a quote I'm reading from an analyst. Bigtime firm New Solutions launched at Del. World Show that worked to align seven businesses for the last eighteen months is starting to pay off. We just talked about that. Cross Family Solutions minimizes time on configurations and maintenance, which opens up incremental, total addressable market and reduces complexity. Michael Dell yesterday said that there's a huge swath of market opportunity revenue wise in kind of these white space gap areas that were servicing, whether its image on PCs and you kind of mentioned peces of service analysts. E this is tam expansion, your common reaction. >> I couldn't say it better myself and look. The to integrate solutions we announced this week is a great example of that of the seams. It's workspace won its security from SecureWorks. It's the you know, del Endpoint management capabilities. It's the PC hardware itself. It's the services life cycle from Pro support Pro Deploy Pro Manage, all integrated in the end and easily Mohr consumable were even Do any are consulting business with our new pro consult advisory offer offer. But look at the Del Technologies Cloud del Technology infrastructure. With VM wear we'LL be adding PC after as a service. On top of that, this is exactly what customers >> So what's your marching orders to the team? Take that hill. Is it a new hills? The same hill? What's the marching orders down to the >> teaching orders is Get out and visit customers every single day. Make sure we understand how our technology and services are being utilized, consumed and impacted. And where do we add more value over time? >> So I wantto askyou for from a customer standpoint, we were talking about digital transformation earlier, and, you know the customer's always right is the bromide. You guys are very customer focused However, when it comes to digital, a lot of customers is somewhat complacent about obviously technology companies like yours embrace digital transformation. But I hear from a lot of companies. Well, we're doing really well. You know, I'm gonna be long gone, but before this really disrupts my industry, it's somewhat of a concern. Now, do you see that? And and how do you I mean, I think one of the reasons just so successful in your careers you take on hard problems and you don't freak out about it. You just have a nice even keel. What do you do when Because you reached you encounter that complex, Eddie, do you coach them through it? You just say okay. Customer's always right. But there's a concern that they'LL get disrupted in there. Your customer, they're spending money with you today. So how do you get through breakthrough? That complacence >> adds a great question and you know, one of the other marching orders I give tow my team is that things were going so well is time to change. And so this is what we have to take to our customers as well. And, uh, look, way have to be respectful about it. But we also have to be true telling, and so we will meet with our customers, hear them out and where they're doing well, well pointed up. But where they're not or where we've got different examples, we'LL just lead by example our own internal example, other customer examples in a very respectful way, but in a very direct way, especially at the senior levels where that's what they need to hear sometimes. >> So you have a question, because I got I wantto sort of switch topics like >> one of us falls on the one problem statement I heard it was really announces a problem statement, but it was a theme throughout all the breakout sessions in the keynotes, and you guys are aware of it. So it's not a surprise to the Del senior people. You guys recognize that as things are going well on the acquisition and the integration tell technologies there's still a focus on still working better with customers taking away the friction of doing business with del technologies. It's a hard problem statement. You guys are working the problem. What's your view on that? Because we hear that from your customers and partners we'd love work with. Kelly's going to get easier. We >> still have more work to do. Actually, Karen Contos and I are partnered up our chief customer officer on easy doing business and look it it. We are a complex company. We have a lot of different business units. Technologies brands were working toe, bring them together, and Mohr integrate solutions like we saw this week. But we still can be complex, sometimes in front of our customers, and we're working on that. It's a balance because on the one hand, customers want Maura line coordinated, sometimes single hand to shake. We get that. But the balance is they also want access to the right subject matter experts at the right time. And we don't want Teo inhibit that either. Either way, so whether it's with our customers directly with our partners were on that journey, we will find the right balance here. We've got new commercial contract mechanisms in place now to unify our Cordelia, AMC as we're packaging Mohr VM were content more security content into the offer and be able to delivered is a package solution. In one quote one order one service dogs doing some great thing and in the back end of services connecting our service request systems are CR M systems, actually, even with VM wear and Cordelia emcee technicians co locating and support centers to solve the custom of customers problem in one call, not in three calls. We still have a ways to go, but we are making progress. >> So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and you and I, Howard have known each other for decades, and you've never wanted to talk about yourself. You always wanna talk about the team, your customers, your company. But I wanted to talk about your career a little bit because John Ferrier did an interview with John Chambers, and it was an amazing interview. We talked about when he was, you know, Wang and one one twenty eight. There is no entitlement, and you've seen a lot of the waves. You started out your career, your electrical engineer back when, you know that was like *** physics assembly language. It was sort of the early days of computer science, awesome, and then you had a number of different roles. You as I mentioned there was digital, there was compact. It was h p and then you'LL Forget RadioShack Radio second. Alright, That's right, Theo PC days on. And then you joined the emcee in two thousand three, which which marked the next era. We were coming out of the dot com boom, and You and Joe Tucci and a number of other executives built, you know, and the amazing next chapter of AMC powerhouse. And then now you're building the next new chapter with Del. You've really seen a lot of major industry shift you see have been on the wave. I wonder if you could reflect on that. Reflect on your career a little bit for our audience. >> I'm just amazed and blessed to be where I am. I couldn't be more pleased. Sometimes I wonder how even got here. But when I do reflect back, it is my love of the technology. It's my love of what technology Khun do for businesses, for customers, for consumers and, frankly, my love of the customer interaction. This is, you know, from that first time in the Radio Shack retail store and you know, the parent coming in and learning about this new TRS eighty and I've heard about this and what does this really mean and being able to help that person understand the use of the technology? How Teo, you make it happen for them, it has always given me great satisfaction. And so, you know, from those early days and I've worked with a lot of great people that I just, you know, listen and learn from over the time. But, you know, when I mentor, you know, people coming up in their career, I always say, Look, you know, it's not at work. If you get up every morning, you love what you do, you see the impact that you make you'LL like the people you're working with. You're making a little money and having some fun on DH. Those things have always been true for me. I have been so lucky and so blessed in life to be able to have that be the case >> and your operational to you understand, make operations work, solve problems, Day pointed out. It's been great for my first basic program I wrote was on a TRS eighty in high school. So thank you for getting those out here and then I've actually bought a Tandy, not an IBM with a ten Meg Hard drive. I bought my motive. Peces Unlimited. Some small company that was selling modems at the time. Michael, remember those date Howard? Great to have you on The key was the Distinguished Cube alumni. Great career and always we got We got it all documented. We have all the history. There you go, calling the shots. Howard Elias calling the future, predicting it and executing it Living is living the dream here in the Cube More keep coverage here, del technology world after >> this short break