>>Good morning friends. Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube Day four of our coverage of AWS. Reinvent continues. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. You >>Can tell it's day four. Yeah. >>You can tell, you >>Get punchy. >>Did you? Yes. Did you know that the Vegas rodeo is coming into town? I'm kind of bummed down, leaving tonight. >>Really? You rodeo >>Fan this weekend? No, but to see a bunch of cowboys in Vegas, >>I'd like to see the Raiders. I'd like to see the Raiders get tickets. >>Yeah. And the hockey team. Yeah. We have had an amazing event, Dave. The cubes. 10th year covering reinvent 11th. Reinvent >>Our 10th year here. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean we covered remotely in during Covid, but >>Yes, yes, yes. Awesome content. Anything jump out at you that we really, we, we love talking to aws, the ecosystem. We got a customer next. Anything jump out at you that's really a kind of a key takeaway? >>Big story. The majority of aws, you know, I mean people ask me what's different under a Adam than under Andy. And I'm like, really? It's the maturity of AWS is what's different, you know, ecosystem, connecting the dots, moving towards solutions, you know, that's, that's the big thing. And it's, you know, in a way it's kind of boring relative to other reinvents, which are like, oh wow, oh my god, they announced outposts. So you don't see anything like that. It's more taking the platform to the next level, which is a good >>Thing. The next level it is a good thing. Speaking of next level, we have a couple of next level guests from T-Mobile joining us. We're gonna be talking through their customers story, their business transformation with aws. Glenn Curing joins us, the director product and technology. And Nick Chris, senior manager, product and technology guys. Welcome. Great to have you on brand. You're on T-Mobile brand. I love it. >>Yeah, >>I mean we are always T-Mobile. >>I love it. So, so everyone knows T-Mobile Blend, you guys are in the digital commerce domain. Talk to us about what that is, what functions that delivers for T-Mobile. Yeah, >>So the digital commerce domain operates and runs a platform called the Digital commerce platform. What this essentially does, it's a set of APIs that are headless that power the shopping experiences. When you talk about shopping experiences at T-Mobile, a customer comes to either a T-Mobile website or goes to a store. And what they do is they start with the discovery process of a phone. They take it through the process, they decide to purchase the phone day at, at the phone to cart, and then eventually they decide to, you know, basically pull the trigger and, and buy the phone at, at which point they submit the order. So that whole experience, essentially from start to finish is powered by the digital commerce platform. Just this year we have processed well over three and a half million orders amounting to a billion and a half dollars worth of business for T-Mobile. >>Wow. Big outcomes. Nick, talk about the before stage, obviously the, the customer experience is absolutely critical because if, if it goes awry, people churn. We know that and nobody wants, you know, brand reputation is is at stake. Yep. Talk about some of the challenges before that you guys faced and how did you work with AWS and part its partner ecosystem to address those challenges? >>Sure. Yeah. So actually before I started working with Glen on the commerce domain, I was part of T-Mobile's cloud team. So we were the team that kind of brought in AWS and commerce platform was really the first tier one system to go a hundred percent cloud native. And so for us it was very much a learning experience and a journey to learn how to operate on the cloud and which was fundamentally different from how we were doing things in the old on-prem days. When >>You talk about headless APIs, you talk, I dunno if you saw Warren a Vogel's keynote this morning, but you're talking about loosely coupled, a loosely coupled system that you can evolve without ripping out the whole system or without bringing the whole system down. Can you explain that in a little bit more >>Detail? Absolutely. So the concept of headless API exactly opens up that possibility. What it allows us to do is to build and operator platform that runs sort of loosely coupled from the user experiences. So when you think about this from a simplistic standpoint, you have a set of APIs that are headless and you've got the website that connects to it, the retail store applications that connect to it, as well as the customer care applications that connect to it. And essentially what that does is it allows us to basically operate all these platforms without being sort of tightly coupled to >>Each other. Yeah, he was talking about this morning when, when AWS announced s3, you know, there was just a handful of services maybe at just two or three. I think now there's 200 and you know, it's never gone down, it's never been, you know, replaced essentially. And so, you know, the whole thing was it's an asynchronous system that's loosely coupled and then you create that illusion of synchronicity for the customer. >>Exactly. >>Which was, I thought, you know, really well described, but maybe you guys could talk about what the genesis was for this system. Take us kind of to the, from the before or after, you know, the classic as as was and the, and as is. Did you talk about that? >>Yeah, I can start and then hand it off to Nick for some more details. So we started this journey back in 2016 and at that point T-Mobile had seven or eight different commerce platforms. Obviously you can think about the complexity involved in running and operating platforms. We've all talked about T-Mobile being the uncarrier. It's a brand that we have basically popularized in the telco industry. We would come out with these massive uncarrier moves and every time that announcement was made, teams have to scramble because you've got seven systems, seven teams, every single system needs to be updated, right? So that's where we started when we kicked off this transformational journey over time, essentially we have brought it down to one platform that supports all these experiences and what that allows us to do is not only time to market gets reduced immensely, but it also allows us to basically reduce our operational cost. Cuz we don't have to have teams running seven, eight systems. It's just one system with one team that can focus on making it a world class, you know, platform. >>Yeah, I think one of the strategies that definitely paid off for us, cuz going all the way back to the beginning, our little platform was powering just a tiny little corner of the, of the webspace, right? But even in those days we approached it from we're gonna build functions in a way that is sort of agnostic to what the experience is gonna be. So over time as we would build a capability that one particular channel needed primary, we were still thinking about all the other channels that needed it. So now over a few years that investment pays off and you have basically the same capabilities working in the same way across all the channels. >>When did the journey start? >>2016. >>2016, yeah. It's been, it's been six years. >>What are some of the game changers in, in this business transformation that you would say these are some of the things that really ignited our transformation? >>Yeah, there's particularly one thing that we feel pretty proud about, which is the fact that we now operate what we call active active stacks. And what that means is you've got a single stack of the eCommerce platform start to finish that can run in an independent manner, but we can also start adding additional stacks that are basically loosely coupled from each other but can, but can run to support the business. What that basically enables is it allows us to run in active active mode, which itself is a big deal from a system uptime perspective. It really changes the game. It allows us to push releases without worrying about any kind of downtime. We've done canary releases, we are in the middle of retail season and we can introduce changes without worrying about it. And more importantly, I think what it has also allowed us to do is essentially practice disaster recovery while doing a release. Cuz that's exactly what we do is every time we do a release we are switching between these separate stacks and essentially are practicing our DR strategy. >>So you do this, it's, it's you separate across regions I presume? Yes. Is that right? Yes. This was really interesting conversation because as you well know in the on-prem world, you never tested that disaster recovery was too risky because you're afraid you're gonna take your whole business down and you're essentially saying that the testing is fundamental to the implementation. >>Absolutely. >>It, it is the thing that you do for every release. So you know, at least every week or so you are doing this and you know, in the old world, the active passive world on paper you had a bunch of capabilities and in in incidents that are even less than say a full disaster recovery scenario, you would end up making the choice not to use that capability because there was too much complexity or risk or problem. When we put this in place. Now if I, I tell people everything we do got easier after that. >>Is it a challenge for you or how do you deal with the challenge? Correct me if it's not a, a challenge that sometimes Amazon services are not available in both regions. I think for instance, the observability thing that they just announced this week is it's not cross region or maybe I'm getting that wrong, but there are services where, you know, you might not be able to do data sharing across region. How do you manage that? Or maybe there's different, you know, levels of certifications. How do you manage that discontinuity or is that not an issue for you? >>Yeah, I mean it, it is certainly a concern and so the stacks, like Glen said, they are largely decoupled and that what that means is practically every component and there's a lot of lot of components in there. I have redundancy from an availability zone point of view. But then where the real magic happens is when you come in as a user to the stack, we're gonna initially kind of lock you on one stack. And then the key thing that we do is we, we understand the difference between what, what we would call the critical data. So think of like your shopping carts and then contextual data that we can relatively easily reload if we need to. And so that critical data is constantly in an async fashion. So it's not interrupting your performance, being broadcast out to a place where we can recover it if we need to, if we need to send you to another stack and then we call that dehydration. And if you end up getting bumped to a new stack, we rehydrate you on that stack and reload that, that contextual data. So to make that whole thing happen, we rely on something we call the global cart store and that's basically powered by Dynamo. So Dynamo is highly, highly reliable and multi >>Reason. So, and, and presume you're doing some form of server list for the stateless stuff and, and maybe taking control of the run time for the stateful things you, are you leaning into to servers and lambda or Not yet cuz you want control over the, the, the EC two and the memory configs. What, what's, I mean, I know we're going inside the plumbing a little bit, but it's kind of fun. >>That's always fun. You >>Went Yeah, and, and it has been a journey. Back in 2016 when we started, we were all on EC twos and across, you know, over the last three or four years we have kind of gone through that journey where we went from easy two to, to containers and we are at some point we'll get to where we will be serverless, we've got a few functions running. But you know, in that journey, I think when you look at the full end of the spectrum, we are somewhere towards the, the process of sort of going from, you know, containers to, to serverless. >>Yeah. So today your team is setting up the containers, they're fencing 'em off, fencing off the app and doing all that sort of sort of semi heavy lifting. Yeah. How do you deal with the, you know, this is one of the things Lisa, you and I were talking about is the skill sets. We always talk about this. What's that? What's your team look like and what are the skill sets that you've got that you're deploying? >>Yeah, I mean, as you can imagine, it's a challenge and it's a, a highly specialized skill set that you need. And you talk about cloud, you know, I, I tell developers when we bring new folks in, in the old days, you could just be like really good at Java and study that for and be good at that for decades. But in the cloud world, you have to be wide in, in your breadth. And so you have to understand those 200 services, right? And so one of the things that really has helped us is we've had a partner. So UST Global is a digital services company and they've really kind of been on the journey up the same timeline that we were. And I had worked with them on the cloud team, you know, before I came to commerce. And when I came to, to the commerce team, we were really struggling, especially from that operational perspective. >>The, the team was just not adapting to that new cloud reality. They were used to the on-prem world, but we brought these folks in because not only were they really able to understand the stuff, but they had built a lot of the platforms that we were gonna be leveraging for commerce with us on the cloud team. So for example, we have built, T-Mobile operates our own customized Kubernetes platform. We've done some stuff for serverless development, C I C D, cloud security. And so not only did these folks have the right skill sets, but they knew how we were approaching it from a T-mobile cloud perspective. And so it's kind of kind of fun to see, you know, when they came on board with this journey with us, we were both, both companies were relatively new and, and learning. Now I look and, you know, I I think that they're like a, a platinum sponsor these days here of aws and so it's kind of cool to see how we've all grown together, >>A lot of evolution, a lot of maturation. Glen, I wanna know from you when we're almost out of time here, but tell me the what the digital commerce domain, you kind of talked about this in the beginning, but I wanna know what's the value in it for me as a customer? All of this under the hood plumbing? Yeah, the maturation, the transformation. How does it benefit mean? >>Great question. So as a customer, all they care about is coming into, going to the website, walking into a store, and without spending too much time completed that transaction and walkout, they don't care about what's under the hood, right? So this transformational journey from, you know, like I talked about, we started with easy twos back in the day. It was what we call the wild west in the, on a cloud native platform to where we have reached today. You know, the journey we have collectively traversed with the USD has allowed us to basically build a system that allows a customer to walk into a store and not spend a whole hour dealing with a sales rep that's trying to sell them things. They can walk in and out quickly, they go to the website, literally within a couple minutes they can complete the transaction and leave. That's what customers want. It is. And that has really sort of helped us when you think about T-Mobile and the fact that we are now poised to be a leader in the US in telco at this whole concept of systems that really empower the customers to quickly complete their transaction has been one of the key components of allowing us to kind of make that growth. Right. So >>Right. And a big driver of revenue. >>Exactly. >>I have one final question for each of you. We're making a Instagram reel, so think about if you had 30 seconds to describe T-Mobile as a technology company that sells phones or a technology company that delights people, what, what would you say if you had a billboard, what would it say about that? Glen, what do you think? >>So T-Mobile, from a technology company perspective, the, the whole purpose of setting up T-mobile's, you know, shopping experience is about bringing customers in, surprising and delighting them with the frictionless shopping experiences that basically allow them to come in and complete the transaction and move on with their lives. It's not about keeping them in the store for too long when they don't want to do it. And essentially the idea is to just basically surprise and delight our customers. >>Perfect. Nick, what would you say, what's your billboard about T-Mobile as a technology company that's delivering great services to its customers? >>Yeah, I think, you know, Glen really covered it well. What I would just add to that is I think the way that we are approaching it these days, really starting from that 2016 period is we like to say we don't think of ourselves as a telco company anymore. We think of ourselves as a technology company that happens to do telco among other things, right? And so we've approached this from a point of view of we're here to provide the best possible experience we can to our customers and we take it personally when, when we don't reach that high bar. And so what we've done in the last few years as a transformation is really given us the toolbox that we need to be able to meet that promise. >>Awesome. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you on the program, talking about the transformation of T-Mobile. Great to hear what you're doing with aws, the maturation, and we look forward to having you back on to see what's next. Thank you. >>Awesome. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guests and Dave Ante, I'm Lisa Martin, you watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in the cube in Las Vegas Raiders reinvent 2021. I'm Jeffrey hosted the key we're in person this year. It's a hybrid event online. Great action. Going on. I'm rolling. Vice-president of ADF analytics. David is great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>It's great to be here, John. Thanks for having me again. >>Um, so you've got a really awesome job. You've got serverless, you've got analytics. You're in the middle of all the action for AWS. What's the big news. What are you guys announcing? What's going on? >>Yeah, well, it's been an awesome reinvent for us. Uh, we've had a number of several us analytics launches. So red shift, our petabyte scale data warehouse, EMR for open source analytics. Uh, and then we've also had, uh, managed streaming for Kafka go serverless and then on demand for Kinesis. And then a couple of other big ones. We've got RO and cell based security for AWS lake formation. So you can get really fine grain controls over your data lakes and then asset transactions. You can actually have a inserts, updates and deletes on data lakes, which is a big step forward. >>Uh, so Swami on stage and the keynote he's actually finishing up now. But even last night I saw him in the hallway. We were talking about as much as about AI. Of course, he's got the AI title, but AI is the outcome. It's the application of all the data and this and a new architecture. He said on stage just now like, Hey, it's not about the old databases from the nineties, right? There's multiple data stores now available. And there's the unification is the big trend. And he said something interesting. Governance can be an advantage, not an inhibitor. This is kind of this new horizontally scalable, um, kind of idea that enables the vertical specialization around machine learning to be effective. It's not a new architecture, but it's now becoming more popular. People are realizing it. It's sort of share your thoughts on this whole not shift, but the acceleration of horizontally scalable and vertically integrated. Yeah, >>No, I think the way Swami put it is exactly right. What you want is the right tool for the right job. And you want to be able to deliver that to customers. So you're not compromising on performance or functionality of scale, but then you wanted all of these to be interconnected. So they're, well-integrated, you can stay in your favorite interface and take advantage of other technologies. So you can have things like Redshift integrated with Sage makers, you get analytics and machine learning. And then in Swami's absolutely right. Governance is actually an enabler of velocity. Once you've got the right guardrails in place, you can actually set people free because they can innovate. You don't have to be in the way, but you know that your data is protected. It's being used in the way that you expect by the people that you are allowing to use that data. And so it becomes a very powerful way for customers to set data free. And then, because things are elastic and serverless, uh, you can really just match capacity with demand. And so as you see spikes in usage, the system can scale out as those dwindle, they can scale back down, and it just becomes a very efficient way for customers to operate with data at scale >>Every year it reinvented. So it was kind of like a pinch me moment. It's like, well, more that's really good technology. Oh my God, it's getting easier and easier. As the infrastructure as code becomes more programmable, it's becoming easier, more Lambda, more serverless action. Uh, you got new offerings. How are customers benefiting for instance, from the three new offerings that you guys announced here? What specifically is the value proposition that you guys are putting out there? Yeah, so the, >>Um, you know, as we've tried to do with AWS over the years, customers get to focus on the things that really differentiate them and differentiate their businesses. So we take away in Redshift serverless, for example, all of the work that's needed to manage clusters, provision them, scale them, optimize them. Uh, and that's all been automated and made invisible to customers, the customers to think about data, what they want to do with it, what insights they can derive from it. And they know they're getting the most efficient infrastructure possible to make that a reality for them with high performance and low costs. So, uh, better results, more ability to focus on what differentiates their business and lower cost structure over time. >>Yeah. I had the essential guys on it's interesting. They had part of the soul cloud. Continuous is their word for what Adam was saying is clouds everywhere. And they're saying it's faster to match what you want to do with the outcomes, but the capabilities and outcomes kind of merging together where it's easy to say, this is what we want to do. And here's the outcome it supports that's right with that. What are some of the key trends on those outcomes that you see with the data analytics that's most popular right now? And kind of where's that, where's that going? >>Yeah. I mean, I think what we've seen is that data's just becoming more and more critical and top of mind for customers and, uh, you know, the pandemic has also accelerated that we found that customers are really looking to data and analytics and machine learning to find new opportunities. How can they, uh, really expand their business, take advantage of what's happening? And then the other part is how can they find efficiencies? And so, um, really everything that we're trying to do is we're trying to connect it to business outcomes for customers. How can you deepen your relationship with your customers? How can you create new customer experiences and how can you do that more efficiently, uh, with more agility and take advantage of, uh, the ability to be flexible. And you know, what is a very unpredictable world, as we've seen, >>I noticed a lot of purpose-built discussion going on in the keynote with Swami as well. How are you creating this next layer of what I call purpose-built platform like features? I mean, tools are great. You see a lot of tools in the data market tools are tools of your hammer. You want to look for a nail. We see people over by too many tools and you have ultimately a platform, but this seems to be a new trend where there's this connect phenomenon was showing me that you've got these platform capabilities that people can build on top of it, because there's a huge ecosystem of data tools out there that you guys have as partners that want to snap together. So the trend is things are starting to snap together, less primitive, roll your own, which you can do, but there's now more easier ways. Take me through that. Explain that, unpack that that phenomenon role rolling your own firm is, which has been the way now to here. Here's, here's some prefabricated software go. >>Yeah. Um, so it's a great observation and you're absolutely right. I mean, I think there's some customers that want to roll their own and they'll start with instances, they'll install software, they'll write their own code, build their own bespoke systems. And, uh, and we provide what the customers need to do that. But I think increasingly you're starting to see these higher level abstractions that take away all of that detail. And mark has Adam put it and allow customers to compose these. And we think it's important when you do that, uh, to be modular. So customers don't have to have these big bang all or nothing approaches you can pick what's appropriate, uh, but you're never on a dead end. You can always evolve and scale as you need to. And then you want to bring these ideas of unified governance and cohesive interfaces across so that customers find it easy to adopt the next thing. And so you can start off say with batch analytics, you can expand into real time. You can bring in machine learning and predictive capabilities. You can add natural language, and it's a big ecosystem of managed services as well as third parties and partners. >>And what's interesting. I want to get your thoughts while I got you here, because I think this is such an important trend and historic moment in time, Jerry chin, who one of the smartest VCs that we know from Greylock and coin castles in the cloud, which kind of came out of a cube conversation here in the queue years ago, where we saw the movement of that someone's going to build real value on AWS, not just an app. And you see the rise of the snowflakes and Databricks and other companies. And he was pointing out that you can get a very narrow wedge and get a position with these platforms, build on top of them and then build value. And I think that's, uh, the number one question people ask me, it's like, okay, how do I build value on top of these analytic packages? So if I'm a startup or I'm a big company, I also want to leverage these high level abstractions and build on top of it. How do you talk about that? How do you explain that? Because that's what people kind of want to know is like, okay, is it enabling me or do I have to fend for myself later? This is kind of, it comes up a lot. >>That's a great question. And, um, you know, if you saw, uh, Goldman's announcement this week, which is about bringing, building their cloud on top of AWS, it's a great example of using our capabilities in terms of infrastructure and analytics and machine learning to really allow them to take what's value added about Goldman and their position to financial markets, to build something value, add, and create a ton of value for Goldman, uh, by leveraging the things that we offer. And to us, that's an ideal outcome because it's a win-win for us in Goldman, but it's also a win for Goldman and their customers. >>That's what we call the Supercloud that's the opportunity. So is there a lot of Goldmans opportunities out there? Is that just a, these unicorns, are these sites? I mean, how do you, I mean, that's Goldman Sachs, they're huge. Is there, is this open to everybody? >>Absolutely. I mean, that's been one of the, uh, you know, one of the core ideas behind AWS was we wanted to give anybody any developer access to the same technology that the world's largest corporations had. And, uh, that's what you have today. The things that Goldman uses to build that cloud are available to anybody. And you can start for a few pennies scale up, uh, you know, into the petabytes and beyond >>When I was talking to Adams, Lipski when I met with him prior to re-invent, I noticed that he was definitely had an affinity towards the data, obviously he's Amazonia, but he spent time at Tableau. So, so as he's running that company, so you see that kind of mindset of the data advantage. So I have to ask you, because it's something that I've been talking about for a while and I'm waiting for it to emerge, but I'm not sure it's going to happen yet. But what infrastructure is code was for dev ops and then dev sec ops, there's almost like a data ops developing where data as code or programmable data. If I can connect the dots of what Swami's saying, what you're doing is this is like a new horizontal layer of data of freely available data with some government governance built in that's right. So it's, data's being baked into everything. So data is any ingredient, not a query to some database, it's gotta be baked into the apps, that's data as code that's. Right. So it's almost a data DevOps kind of vibe. >>Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And you know, you've seen it with things like ML ops and so on. It's all the special case of dev ops. But what you're really trying to do is to get programmatic and systematic about how you deal with data. And it's not just data that you have. It's also publicly available data sets and it's customers sharing with each other. So building the ecosystem, our data, and we've got things like our open data program where we've got publicly hosted data sets or things like the AWS data exchange where customers can actually monetize data. So it's not just data as code, but now data as a monetizeable asset. So it's a really exciting time to be in the data business. >>Yeah. And I think it's so many too. So I've got to ask you while I got you here since you're an expert. Um, okay. Here's my problem. I have a lot of data. I'm nervous about it. I want to secure it. So if I try to secure it, I'm not making it available. So I want to feed the machine learning. How do I create an architecture where I can make it freely available, but yet maintain the control and the comfort that this is going to be secure. So what products do I buy? >>Yeah. So, uh, you know, a great place to start at as three. Um, you know, it's one of the best places for data lakes, uh, for all the reasons. That's why we talked about your ability scale costs. You can then use lake formation to really protect and govern that data so you can decide who's allowed to see it and what they're allowed to see, and you don't have to create multiple copies. So you can define that, you know, this group of partners can see a, B and C. This group can see D E and F and the system enforces that. And you have a central point of control where you can monitor what's happening. And if you want to change your mind, you can do that instantly. And all access can be locked down that you've got a variety of encryption capabilities with things like KMS. And so you can really lock down your data, but yet keep it open to the parties that you want and give them specifically the access that you want to give them. And then once you've done that, they're free to use that data, according to the rules that you defined with the analytics tools that we offer to go drive value, create insight, and do something >>That's lake formation. And then you got a Thena querying. Yes, we got all kinds of tooling on top of it. >>It's all right. You can have, uh, Athena query and your data in S3 lake formation, protecting it. And then SageMaker is integrated with Athena. So you can pull that data into SageMaker for machine learning, interrogate that data, using natural language with things like QuickSight Q a like we demoed. So just a ton of power without having to really think too deeply about, uh, developing expert skill sets in this. >>So the next question I want to ask you is because that first part of the great, great, great description, thank you very much. Now, 5g in the edges here, outpost, how was the analytics going on that as edge becomes more pervasive in the architecture? >>Yeah, it's going to be a key part of this ecosystem and it's really a continuum. So, uh, you know, we find customers are collecting data at the edge. They might be making local ML or inference type decisions on edge devices, or, you know, automobiles, for example. Uh, but typically that data with some point will come back into the cloud, into S3 will be used to do heavy duty training, and then those models get pushed back out to the edge. And then some of the things that we've done in Athena, for example, with federated query, as long as you have a network path, and you can understand what the data format or the database is, you can actually run a query on that data. So you can run real-time queries on data, wherever it lives, whether it's on an edge device, on an outpost, in a local zone or in your cloud region and combine all of that together in one place. >>Yeah. And I think having that data copies everywhere is a big thing deal. I've got to ask you now that we're here at reinvent, what's your take we're back in person last year was all virtual. Finally, not 60,000 people, like a couple of years ago, it's still 27,000 people here, all lining up for the sessions, all having a great time. Um, all good. What's the most important story from your, your area that people should pay attention to? What's the headline, what's the top news? What should people pay attention to? >>Yeah, so I think first off it is awesome to be back in person. It's just so fun to see customers and to see, I mean, you, like, we've been meeting here over the years and it's, it's great to so much energy in person. It's been really nice. Uh, you know, I think from an analytics perspective, there's just been a ton of innovation. I think the core idea for us is we want to make it easy for customers to use the right tool for the right job to get insight from all of their data as cost effectively as possible. And I think, uh, you know, I think if customers walk away and think about it as being, it's now easier than ever for me to take advantage of everything that AWS has to offer, uh, to make sense of all the data that I'm generating and use it to drive business value, but I think we'll have done our jobs. Right. >>What's the coolest thing that you're seeing here is that the serverless innovation, is it, um, the new abstraction layer with data high level services in your mind? What's the coolest thing. Got it. >>It's hard to pick the coolest that sticks like kicking the candies. I mean, I think the, uh, you know, the continued innovation in terms of, uh, performance and functionality in each of our services is a big deal. I think serverless is a game changer for customers. Uh, and then I think really the infusion of machine learning throughout all of these systems. So things like Redshift ML, Athena ML, Pixar, Q a just really enabling new experiences for customers, uh, in a way that's easier than it ever has been. And I think that's a, that's a big deal and I'm really excited to see what customers do with it. >>Yeah. And I think the performance thing to me, the coolest thing that I'm seeing is the graviton three and the gravitron progression with the custom stacks with all this ease of use, it's just going to be just a real performance advantage and the costs are getting lowered. So I think the ECE two instances around the compute is phenomenal. No, >>Absolutely. I mean, I think the hardware and Silicon innovation is huge and it's not just performance. It's also the energy efficiency. It's a big deal for the future reality. >>We're at an inflection point where this modern applications are being built. And in my history, I'm old, my birthday is today. I'm in my fifties. So I remember back in the eighties, every major inflection point when there was a shift in how things were developed from mainframe client server, PC inter network, you name it every time the apps change, the app owners, app developers all went to the best platform processing. And so I think, you know, that idea of system software applications being bundled together, um, is a losing formula. I think you got to have that decoupling large-scale was seeing that with cloud. And I think now if I'm an app developer, whether whether I'm in a large ISV in your ecosystem or in the APN partner or a startup, I'm going to go with my software runs the best period and where I can create value. That's right. I get distribution, I create value and it runs fast. I mean, that's, I mean, it's pretty simple. So I think the ecosystem is going to be a big action for the next couple of years. >>Absolutely. Right. And I mean, the ecosystem's huge and I think, um, and we're also grateful to have all these partners here. It's a huge deal for us. And I think it really matters for customers >>What's on your roadmap this year, what you got going on. What can you share a little bit of a trajectory without kind of, uh, breaking the rules of the Amazonian, uh, confidentiality. Um, what's, what's the focus for the year? What do you what's next? >>Well, you know, as you know, we're always talking to customers and, uh, I think we're going to make things better, faster, cheaper, easier to use. And, um, I think you've seen some of the things that we're doing with integration now, you'll see more of that. And, uh, really the goal is how can customers get value as quickly as possible for as low cost as possible? That's how we went to >>Yeah. They're in the longterm. Yeah. We've always say every time we see each other data is at the center of the value proposition. I've been saying that for 10 years now, it's actually the value proposition, powering AI. And you're seeing because of it, the rise of superclouds and then the superclouds are emerging. I think you guys are the under innings of these emerging superclouds. And so it's a huge treading, the Goldman Sachs things of validation. So again, more data, the better, sorry, cool things happening. >>It is just it's everywhere. And the, uh, the diversity of use cases is amazing. I mean, I think from, you know, the Australia swimming team to, uh, to formula one to NASDAQ, it's just incredible to see what our >>Customers do. We see the great route. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Pleasure to be here as always John. Great to see you. Thank you. Yeah. >>Thanks for, thanks for sharing. All of the data is the key to the success. Data is the value proposition. You've seen the rise of superclouds because of the data advantage. If you can expose it, protect it and govern it, unleashes creativity and opportunities for entrepreneurs and businesses. Of course, you got to have the scale and the price performance. That's what doing this is the cube coverage. You're watching the leader in worldwide tech coverage here in person for any of us reinvent 2021 I'm John ferry. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital coverage. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm excited to be talking with one of Dell Technologies' customers EarthCam. Joining me is Bill Sharp, the senior VP of product development and strategy from EarthCam. Bill, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> So talk to me a little bit about what EarthCam does. This is very interesting webcam technology. You guys have tens of thousands of cameras and sensors all over the globe. Give our audience an understanding of what you guys are all about. >> Sure thing. The world's leading provider of webcam technologies, you mentioned content and services, we're leaders in live streaming, time-lapse imaging, primary focus in the vertical construction. So with a lot of these, the most ambitious, largest construction projects around the world that you see these amazing time-lapse movies, we're capturing all of that imagery basically around the clock, these cameras are sending all of that image content to us and we're generating these time-lapse movies from it. >> You guys are headquartered in New Jersey. I was commenting before we went live about your great background. So you're actually getting to be onsite today? >> Yes, yes. We're live from our headquarters in upper Saddle River, New Jersey. >> Excellent, so in terms of the types of information that you're capturing, so I was looking at the website, and see from a construction perspective, some of the big projects you guys have done, the Hudson Yards, the Panama Canal expansion, the 9/11 museum. But you talked about one of the biggest focuses that you have is in the construction industry. In terms of what type of data you're capturing from all of these thousands of edge devices, give us a little bit of an insight into how much data you're capturing per day, how it gets from the edge, presumably, back to your core data center for editing. >> Sure, and it's not just construction. We're also in travel, hospitality, tourism, security, architecture, engineering, basically any industry that need high resolution visualization of their projects or their performance or their product flow. So it's high resolution documentation is basically our business. There are billions of files in the Isilon system right now. We are ingesting millions of images a month. We are also creating very high resolution panoramic imagery where we're taking hundreds and sometimes multiple hundreds of images, very high resolution images and stitching these together to make panoramas that are up to 30 gigapixel sometimes. Typically around one to two gigapixel but that composite imagery represents millions of images per month coming into the storage system and then being stitched together to those composites. >> So millions of images coming in every month, you mentioned Isilon. Talk to me a little bit about before you were working with Dell EMC and PowerScale, how were you managing this massive volume of data? >> Sure, we've used a number of other enterprise storage systems. It was really nothing was as easy to manage as Isilon really is. There was a lot of problems with overhead, the amount of time necessary from a systems administrator resource standpoint, to manage that. And it's interesting with the amount of data that we handle, being billions of relatively small files. They're, you know, a half a megabyte to a couple of megabytes each. It's an interesting data profile which Isilon really is well suited for. >> So if we think about some of the massive changes that we've all been through in the last, in 2020, what are some of the changes that EarthCam hasn't seen with respect to the needs for organizations, or you mentioned other industries like travel, hospitality, since none of us can get to these great travel destinations, have you seen a big drive up in the demand and the need to process more data faster? >> Yeah, that's an interesting point with the pandemic. I mean, obviously we had to pivot and move a lot of people to working from home, which we were able to do pretty quickly, but there's also an interesting opportunity that arose from this where so many of our customers and other people also have to do the same. And there is an increased demand for our technology. So people can remotely collaborate. They can work at a distance, they can stay at home and see what's going on in these project sites. So we really saw kind of an uptick in the need for our products and services. And we've also created some basically virtual travel applications. We have an application on the Amazon Fire TV which is the number one app in the travel platform, and people can kind of virtually travel when they can't really get out there. So it's, we've been doing kind of giving back to people that are having some issues with being able to travel around. We've done the fireworks at the Washington Mall around the Statue of Liberty for July 4th. And this year we'll be webcasting New Years in Times Square for our 25th year, actually. So again, helping people travel virtually and maintain connectivity with each other, and with their projects. >> Which is so essential during these times where for the last six, seven months, everyone is trying to get a sense of community and most of us just have the internet. So I also heard you guys were available on the Apple TV, someone should fire that up later and maybe virtually travel. But tell me a little bit about how working in conjunction with Dell Technologies and PowerScale. How has that enabled you to manage this massive volume change that you've experienced this year? Because as you said, it's also about facilitating collaboration which is largely online these days. >> Yeah, and I mean, the great things of working with Dell has been just our confidence in this infrastructure. Like I said, the other systems we've worked with in the past we've always found ourselves kind of second guessing. We're constantly innovating. Obviously resolutions are increasing. The camera performance is increasing, streaming video is, everything is constantly getting bigger and better, faster, more, and we're always innovating. We found ourselves on previous storage platforms having to really kind of go back and look at them, second guess where we're at with it. With the Dell infrastructure it's been fantastic. We don't really have to think about that as much. We just continue innovating, everything scales as we need it to do. It's much easier to work with. >> So you've got PowerScale at your core data center in New Jersey. Tell me a little bit about how data gets from these tens of thousands of devices at the edge, back to your editors for editing, and how PowerScale facilitates faster editing, for example. >> Well, basically you can imagine every one of these cameras, and it's not just cameras. It's also, you know, we have 360 virtual reality kind of bubble cameras. We have mobile applications, we have fixed position and robotic cameras. There's all these different data acquisition systems we're integrating with weather sensors and different types of telemetry. All of that data is coming back to us over the internet. So these are all endpoints in our network. So that's constantly being ingested into our network and saved to Isilon. The big thing that's really been a time saver working with the video editors is instead of having to take that content, move it into an editing environment where we have a whole team of award-winning video editors creating these time lapses. We don't need to keep moving that around. We're working natively on Isilon clusters. They're doing their editing there, and subsequent edits. Anytime we have to update or change these movies as a project evolves, that's all, can happen right there on that live environment. And the retention is there. If we have to go back later on, all of our customers' data is really kept within that one area, it's consolidated and it's secure. >> I was looking at the Dell Tech website, and there's a case study that you guys did, EarthCam did with Dell Tech saying that the video processing time has been reduced 20%. So that's a pretty significant increase. I can imagine with the volumes changing so much now, not only is huge to your business but to the demands that your customers have as well, depending on where those demands are coming from. >> Absolutely. And just being able to do that a lot faster and be more nimble allows us to scale. We've added actually, again, speaking of during this pandemic, we've actually added personnel, we've been hiring people. A lot of those people are working remotely as we've stated before. And it's just with the increase in business, we have to continue to keep building on that, and this storage environment's been great. >> Tell me about what you guys really kind of think about with respect to PowerScale in terms of data management, not storage management, and what that difference means to your business. >> Well, again, I mean, number one was really eliminating the amount of resources. The amount of time we have to spend managing it. We've almost eliminated any downtime of any kind. We have greater storage density, we're able to have better visualization on how our data is being used, how it's being accessed. So as these things are evolving, we really have good visibility on how the storage system is being used in both our production and also in our backup environments. It's really, really easy for us to make our business decisions as we innovate and change processes, having that continual visibility and really knowing where we stand. >> And you mentioned hiring folks during the pandemic, which is fantastic, but also being able to do things in a much more streamlined way with respect to managing all of this data. But I am curious in terms of innovation and new product development, what have you been able to achieve? Because you've got more resources presumably to focus on being more innovative rather than managing storage. >> Well, again, it's, we're always really pushing the envelope of what the technology can do. As I mentioned before, we're getting things into, you know, 20 and 30 gigapixels, people are talking about megapixel images, we're stitching hundreds of these together. We're just really changing the way imagery is used both in the time lapse and also just in archival process. A lot of these things we've done with the interior, we have this virtual reality product where you can walk through and see in a 360 bubble, we're taking that imagery and we're combining it with these BIM models. So we're actually taking the 3D models of the construction site and combining it with the imagery. And we can start doing things to visualize progress, and different things that are happening on the site, look for clashes or things that aren't built like they're supposed to be built, things that maybe aren't done on the proper schedule or things that are maybe ahead of schedule, doing a lot of things to save people time and money on these construction sites. We've also introduced AI and machine learning applications directly into the workflow in the storage environment. So we're detecting equipment and people and activities in the site where a lot of that would have been difficult with our previous infrastructure. It really is seamless and working with Isilon now. >> I imagine by being able to infuse AI and machine learning, you're able to get insights faster, to be able to either respond faster to those construction customers, for example, or alert them if perhaps something isn't going according to plan. >> Yeah, a lot of it's about schedule, it's about saving money, about saving time. And again, with not as many people traveling to these sites, they really just have to have constant visualization of what's going on day to day. We're detecting things like different types of construction equipment and things that are happening on the site. We're partnering with people that are doing safety analytics and things of that nature. So these are all things that are very important to construction sites. >> What are some of the things as we are rounding out the calendar year 2020, what are some of the things that you're excited about going forward in 2021, that EarthCam is going to be able to get into and to deliver? >> Just more and more people really finally seeing the value. I mean I've been doing this for 20 years and it's just, it's amazing how we're constantly seeing new applications and more people understanding how valuable these visual tools are. That's just a fantastic thing for us because we're really trying to create better lives through visual information. We're really helping people with the things they can do with this imagery. That's what we're all about. And that's really exciting to us in a very challenging environment right now is that people are recognizing the need for this technology and really starting to put it on a lot more projects. >> Well, you can kind of consider it an essential service whether or not it's a construction company that needs to manage and oversee their projects, making sure they're on budget, on schedule, as you said, or maybe even just the essentialness of helping folks from any country in the world connect with a favorite travel location, or (indistinct) to help from an emotional perspective. I think the essentialness of what you guys are delivering is probably even more impactful now, don't you think? >> Absolutely. And again about connecting people when they're at home, and recently we webcast the president's speech from the Flight 93 9/11 observation from the memorial, there was something where only the immediate families were allowed to travel there. We webcast that so people could see that around the world. We've documented, again, some of the biggest construction projects out there, the new Raiders stadium was one of the recent ones, just delivering this kind of flagship content. Wall Street Journal has used some of our content recently to really show the things that have happened during the pandemic in Times Square. We have these cameras around the world. So again, it's really bringing awareness. So letting people virtually travel and share and really remain connected during this challenging time. And again, we're seeing a real increased demand in the traffic in those areas as well. >> I can imagine some of these things that you're doing that you're achieving now are going to become permanent not necessarily artifacts of COVID-19, as you now have the opportunity to reach so many more people and probably the opportunity to help industries that might not have seen the value of this type of video to be able to reach consumers that they probably could never reach before. >> Yeah, I think the whole nature of business and communication and travel and everything is really going to be changed from this point forward. It's really, people are looking at things very, very differently. And again, seeing that the technology really can help with so many different areas that it's just, it's going to be a different kind of landscape out there we feel. And that's really continuing to be seen as on the uptick in our business and how many people are adopting this technology. We're developing a lot more partnerships with other companies, we're expanding into new industries. And again, you know, we're confident that the current platform is going to keep up with us and help us really scale and evolve as these needs are growing. >> It sounds to me like you have the foundation with Dell Technologies, with PowerScale, to be able to facilitate the massive growth that you were saying and the scale in the future, you've got that foundation, you're ready to go. >> Yeah, we've been using the system for five years already. We've already added capacity. We can add capacity on the fly, really haven't hit any limits in what we can do. It's almost infinitely scalable, highly redundant. It gives everyone a real sense of security on our side. And you know, we can just keep innovating, which is what we do, without hitting any technological limits with our partnership. >> Excellent, well, Bill, I'm going to let you get back to innovating for EarthCam. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for your time today. >> Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. >> For Bill Sharp, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's digital coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

(energetic music) >> Live, from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier. We're in Las Vegas and we have somebody from the city of Las Vegas here. We've got two gentlemen joining us. Bill Baver, the VP of NTT. Hey Bill, good to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, appreciate being here. >> And your partner in crime Michael Sherwood, the IT Director Las Vegas. The city of Las Vegas, where we are right now. >> Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Love having you here. >> Thank you for having us. So guys, theCUBE comes to Vegas a lot. There's a ton of shows here. You can fit a ton of people. Last year, Bill, we'll start with you, NTT and Dell Technologies announced this exciting smart cities initiative. Talk to us about, in the last year, first of all why NTT is partnering with Dell Technologies and what you've done. And then of course we're going to dig into Las Vegas as one of those smart secure cities that Michael, I can tell, is just tell dying to tell us about. So, in the last year, what's going on? >> Well, first off when you start digging let me see. I want to see how this really plays here. (laughter) So, I'm ready for that. So, yes last year we announced a partnership between Dell, NTT and Las Vegas. And it's really a three way partnership. And since then, if you ever work with city governments, how far the city of Las Vegas has come has been amazing. So within six months we installed equipment that was supposed to be there. And then started for the last six months running a system there, running it around public safety perspective, and really starting to bring true insights to what they're doing. The Dell part brings equipment on the edge and our core data center. How to go back and forth between the entire Dell family. Dell, EMC, VMware, and then the NTT family that's there. And then really the third leg of the stool is the city of Las Vegas and the insights they've allowed to us to recognize and sort of bring to them. So they can make changes in how the city is looking at and running the environment. >> And why did you decide to start this partnership with the wonderful city of Las Vegas? >> It's really around innovation. So, Michael Sherwood, and the city of Las Vegas have really become a leader in innovation around the country and they're really willing to take chances. And they have an innovation zone that allows them to do projects rather quickly. Not as quick as this sometimes, but rather quickly. Then, we can start to see results and then they can adjust and start to figure out how it's going to roll out and sustain across the city. So, it was their innovation and it was really Michael's legacy of what he's been doing so far and what his willingness to work with partners has been. So that's really a reason to do this as we went forward. >> So, how about the innovation strategy? Because, obviously, Las Vegas, a lot of people come here. Destination, public safety's been critical. Number one. I've seen the evolution of just really smart moves whether it's blocking the sidewalks from anyone driving on them to the use of video and processing video. You need AI for that. So it's probably a melting pot of interest to be on the forefront. >> Why would innovation go anywhere else other than Las Vegas, where we're the innovators of entertainment. We're the innovators of fun. So, why not be the innovators of technology and innovate with great companies like NTT and Dell. I mean you can't get any better. If you want to talk about a cube of perfection that would be it right there. You have innovation around the board surrounded by great companies. Las Vegas is innovative. We have a culture here to use technology to not only make our citizenry safer, but to insight development, to insight economic growth. So innovations not just something that is just limited to technology. It's limited to all facets of society. >> That's great culture too. You don't really have to change the culture if people are already there. What leading edge stuff are you working on now that'd be really cool to talk about? I mean smart cities, obviously, cameras on corners looking at things, so traffic, EIOT devices. What are some of the things? Share with us, open the kimono a little bit. Talk about it. >> So, first off, one thing. We do not say cameras, we say optical sensors because that's more pleasing to the ear. So, as we gather data it'll go, so go ahead. >> All right, thank you Bill. (laughter) So optical. Even I learn something every day in innovation. I mean now we have optical sensors. >> It's all optics. >> It's all optic. Let me just start with, you know public safety's very important. So we're doing some things there with our partnership with Dell and NTT. I like to call it autonomous policing. Where we're really providing real time analysis of a location. So, in the old days or current days of policing, police randomly drive around and do a patrol. That's what we call it. What we're looking at now is using cameras to provide, excuse me, optical sensors, to provide real time situational awareness to those first responders. So as they're responding to an incident, number one, there really is an incident. Because the optical sensor has validated that there is an issue there. And as the officers respond to that, they're actually able to see real time analysis from those optical sensors that's giving them a safety presence. So we're really taking policing, and really putting policing where it needs to be when it needs to be there. That's one category. The other one's mobility. We all want to get from point A to B the most convenient way possible. And what we're doing with the Dell NTT partnership and this optical sensor system, as well as analytics, is really looking at improving traffic flow, but improving traffic flow smartly. And something that's scalable that not just Las Vegas can do but any city could do across the world. Again, Las Vegas, we don't consider ourselves just a national US based innovator. We look at ourselves as world innovators. So really mobility is somewhere that can go anywhere in the world. Same with public safety. >> Talk about the architecture of innovation. How do you guys pull this off? What's the playbook? A lot of people want to be, first of all, cultural change is hard. You guys are there, like I said earlier. What's the playbook? You got to have multi-cloud architecture. You got to start thinking about getting a system set up. Either like some sort of sandbox or I've seen (mumbles) innovation zone. How do you pull it off? What's the playbook? >> I think the playbook goes down to a great team. Without a great team and great partners it doesn't matter what technology you have behind it, it's the team and partnership. That's really what makes this special. You see the bond between myself and Bill. But that goes through all levels of NTT, as far as all levels of Dell. So it's about bringing winning players and winning skill sets together, and then taking great technology and funneling around that. That is a success. Anybody can be an innovator. It's nothing special, though I'm available to help people innovate. But, I think what it really takes is understanding your business. Understanding your performance measures that you want to hit. What do you want to do? In a football team, they want to score a touchdown. In my job I want to use my resources effectively as I can and create things that are safe, and create a better Las Vegas for everybody. >> Speed is critical. It used to be the old days, months to get projects done. Then it became weeks, now it's days, hours. The shift in the time spectrum has radically changed. >> It's tough. It's tough for government. Government is traditionally not known for it's agility and speed. You know, we're changing some of that here. But we're still struggling in a couple of areas. We have some refinement to do. I think, nationwide, purchasing is hard. We want to be fair and equal to everybody. But, at the same time, we want to get these solutions out in the marketplace because it is helping the city be more effective. So, there's challenges still. But, overall, the future is very bright and the technology and expertise that our partnership has really is making, I mean, in one year I don't think any government in the US has done as much as the city of Las Vegas has with our partnership. >> I would add that Michael's being a little humble on that there's not a lot of, everybody can do innovation. We have an innovation zone that allows him the flexibility to do that. So, that's really important. And then the technology, Michael is right that it is tough. There are times that it didn't work to the schedule. But that goes back to the teamwork of everybody saying our end goal is we want to get this done, and going towards that. >> Talk about the innovation zone. Talk about the innovation zone. Is that a physical zone? is it where you can deploy new towers and test stuff? >> It's downtown Las Vegas. If you're familiar with Fremont Street, it's the big canopy area. So, it's about 80 square blocks around that area that incorporates an entertainment district, a government zone, a medical, where we basically have fiber optics. Different type of technologies and we ask partners to come in and test. But, to follow up a little bit, I'll disagree with my panelist here. You know, every city can do >> That you're not humble? (laughter) >> But every city can do innovations. It's about understanding risk and taking a little gamble and a little chance. We do that everyday in our lives, but yet when we get into out work we seem to forget about risk. >> It's a tech playground, too. You're going to attract great people when you have this kind of flexibility to just deploy. Do bake-offs, test new equipment. >> You got it. Again, so many people know Las Vegas just for what they see while they're here. Which is fun and entertainment. We want everyone to know that Las Vegas also means business. We're here to be discovered. We're here to be used. Not abused, but we're here to be used. (laughter) >> If you're bringing you equipment into you're tech zone does it stay in Vegas? (laughter) >> Everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. >> It can't leave. >> Including the equipment. >> Like hotel California. >> All the equipment. Yes >> Exactly. >> I'd like to have the people remain as well. But no, I mean we're open for business. We're not just a great place to play. We're a great place to develop your products and sell product. >> So talk to us about, not just the innovation zone, but as you mentioned before, this is a challenging thing for governments and municipalities to undertake. It's expensive, right? There's a tremendous amount of people that are coming in and out of Vegas 24 by seven. When you're talking, I presume, Michael, that you're talking with you're talking with your peers in other industries about, this is why we set up an innovation zone. This is why it's so critical. Here's the advancements we've made in terms of safety in the last year. What are some of the industries that you talk to and some of your recommendations for them to take that gamble and to find the resources to make this happen? >> Well it's finding the great partners obviously is one. But two is start small. So many cities want to do, I want to replace all my street lights with smart lights. In Las Vegas that would be over a hundred thousand street lights to replace. A huge project, daunting. But why not start small? Get an understanding of the technology. Understand how it works. And then see what you like and what you don't like. And then you can go ahead and, from a small pilot, then, with the education behind you start branching out and making it bigger. And I think the key to my success is start small gain knowledge, gain success, and then build on that success. Don't try to shoot for that one shot and you're going to be a winner. >> That's great advice. What about some of those key constituents of yours, you mentioned some of the things you're doing with policing and from a government perspective. Who have been some of your key constituents to become champions of what you're doing with NTT and Dell Technologies? >> It's really the people, the people that visit here. I look at everybody as a customer. Whether you live here, play here, you're a customer of Las Vegas. And so we want you to be happy. We want you to be able to get from A to B. It doesn't do us any good if you're stuck in the car because you're not spending any money. And so, I want you excited. I want you having the best time of your life at the best restaurants. I want you having the safest experience here. I want you to return. So my objectives are no different than a private business. Except, I have the whole community. So it's when people in the community say thank you for letting us get to A to B quicker. They never thank me personally, but they're happy about it. I'm not hearing complaints about being stuck in traffic. >> Getting to A, B quicker is a lot of really long stop lights in Vegas. Any optical sensors going to help us with that? >> Taxi lights? >> You've got to come down. This year, we actually, in January we did an autonomous vehicle all the way from Mandalay Bay down to the Golden Nugget. Great technology. It worked. We're getting there. Yes, traffic is still in certain areas an issue. But come down to the innovation district. You want to drive around there it's great. >> We've got to have theCUBE there. We've got to get a tour of this. >> We've got the inside track here. >> In time. >> I know a guy in Vegas. You're out guy >> I'm your guy. (laughter) >> Guys, talk about the key learnings. You can both share some data around the journey the past couple years as technology has shifted. Obviously, apps or renaissances happening, more apps are coming over the top: Saska, cloud, partnerships or people equations happening. What's some key learnings or scar tissue that you guys have learned over the past few years that you could share to folks watching? >> I think one of the first parts is the learning is partnership and your end goal. Because, there are going to be bumps in the road as we go, and there were bumps. Things couldn't get installed as quickly. It didn't work the way we wanted. That's why we started as a proof of concept. But then the other part of the learning is start small and grow. It's not only start small in an area or even a section of the city. It's how does it grow so that you have a sustainable model for the city so they can then pay for it as they go forward. We all want to make sure that it gives us a model forward. So the openness of the NTT and Dell partnerships to allow us to have that time to do it, that was really important for us to figure a model forward. And now we're fitting into the city model a lot better. And it's making it work beyond just the innovation zone. That's where we're taking it now, and that's the key for us all. >> Mike, any learnings? >> Definitely, let me tag on to his openness. Number one is an open platform. Having a platform that's open, that your data's accessible regardless of what changes. Everybody knows technology changes rapidly. So having agility to situations. Today, right now it's mobility for me. It is public safety. But I really look to the future as curb monetization. Where we're monetizing that curb with autonomous vehicles. How do you get there? If you have a closed system that doesn't have the interface, doesn't have the agility, you can't get there. So, the open architecture is something to me that with the learning, I would have never come to that conclusion without the partnership and the learning avenues. But the open architecture is key. >> The most important question I want to ask, Michael, to you is, when the Raiders come to town, that's going to change the game big time. The Oakland Raiders, the black hole. Whole new fan base. >> I'm excited. (laughter) I'm looking for that to be, even though I live on the other side of the stadium so I have to go through there on the weekends. But I'm super excited. I'm not just excited about the game coming. I'm excited about the innovations and the new opportunities for a great city. And we have the Golden Knights you get to have a phenomenal season this year. Give them a shout out, and wait to come. I will bet you in the next year there will be some new sports franchises here. >> And the tech involvement, all kidding aside about the Raiders, it's fun to talk about because they're moving here, that's great. But the tech involved in sports is cutting edge. You've got entertainment, obviously, here inside the venues. And you've got service, managing the team, it's the same IOT problem everyone else has. >> It's in a little mini-city of it's own. It's going to have it's own IOT opportunities there. We're working closely with the stadium authority in that regard. We're sharing our experiences, sharing our partners. But, couldn't be more excited and actually, elated to have them here locally. >> Working closer to get tickets? (laughter) >> How about a suite, I was thinking suite. I'll ask for the suite. >> I'll be with the regular people. (laughter) >> Remember I'm a civil servant of the government here. Very low connections on my lane. >> Last thing, Michael for you, is we talked about the public safety issue. But, in terms of the opportunity for you to let more of the public know. There obviously have been some public incidents here that have been known the world over. It's an important message to get out to everyone. This is a global city. What are some of the opportunities that you have to share what you guys are doing with NTT and Dell Technologies so that the perspective visitors know, I'm coming into a pretty, this is a very AI enabled city that's really looking out for my best interests. >> I'm here on theCUBE. I thought if I was here >> This is it. >> everybody would know about the great things we're doing. >> That's true. >> So, beyond that though. It's part of why we're here today is to share our story and to start outreaching more. We're doing more in the community than we've done before. We're opening a great innovation center downtown. We're calling, it has many name currently now, we're trying to focus on one. But, the concept is basically a technology embassy. Where we're going around the world and sharing our story and letting companies know that they can come here and test their technology, and we can share that with the community. So, really technology is nothing without a great community that supports it. And so, a lot of what I do is sharing that message about what we're doing. We share with our partners, and we come on shows. There's only one show to come on, but this is the show, where I'm sharing what we're doing first. >> He's a quick learner. I think the thing that's been really cool for you guys to share, what NTT Dell and the city of Las Vegas are doing to turn Vegas into this AI enabled city for societal good, but it's also this whole message I think I've heard from you guys in the last 15 minutes is this is all about community, collaboration, people. We thank you both so much for giving us some time this morning on theCUBE. Now you're alumni so you've got to get stickers. And you've got to come back, 'cause this is only going in a better direction. So we're excited to hear in the next year what happens. Doug, Michael, thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Great being here. >> Appreciate it. >> Excellent. For John Furrier I'm Lisa Martin. Can you feel the buzz of Dell Technologies World 2019. Stick around we'll be right back with our next guest. (energetic music)

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. Holloway ALTO, California It is a cute conversation. >> Welcome to the special Keep conversation here in Palo Alto, California. Here, two cubes Studios. I'm John for the host of the Cube. We're talking WiFi six. If you, uh, have use the Internet anywhere outside inside Cos you know why Fiza lifeblood connectivity and hear Expert in WiFi Todd Nightingale, senior vice president general manager at Cisco Muraki. It's been around the block around y fight knows a lot about wireless. Great to see you again. Welcome back. >> Thanks so much. Love the Cube. >> Last time we chatted, we were at definite create, which is advance. Cisco runs around bringing developers cloud native developers into the definite community and programming the infrastructure houses key part of the Cisco. You've been doing a lot of great work. They're making things programmable, switches, wireless, and you got to be big success of Iraqi. But now you're involved in something that I'm super excited about, Which is WiFi. WiFi. Six is upon us. Love the name. It's simple. It's not some acronym letter. Tell us what WiFi six. What is it? What's the new innovation around WiFi six. >> Actually, I've spent practically my whole career in WiFi and we've had just this alphabet soup of WiFi for years, not eleven A and B G and and and A C. And, um, Finally, we're putting that behind us and getting out of the alphabet soup. So there was a new standard called X uh, which is just about to launch around the world. And as a as an industry wide change, we've decided no longer to call that woman dot eight x, but instead WiFi six, which will be hopefully just dramatically easier for people to kind of relate to and understand. And now we have a shortcut. So I'll take it >> on. We want seven eight nights. We innovation run wireless is happening. Seeing a lot of discussion for G five g. Anyone who has a smartphone knows the importance of connectivity. How many bars do you have? How much battery left you So the world has been indoctrinated. Now it's pretty standard that we kind of get this kind, understand the value of having connectivity. What is the innovation on WiFi? Because it's become the critical needed people's lives has been joke. That's that one of the Masters hierarchy of needs. You goto a sporting event, you can see the band with getting choked away. You go to a spotty office. You know the limitations of WiFi. People have experienced that firsthand. What's the new innovations for this next generation? WiFi? >> Yeah. Look, I think wireless has become a basic need. And where that comes from the cellular side and for G. And we hope soon five g or or for comes from the WiFi side. The future. While she's probably looks more and more like outdoor with cellular and five indoor really WiFi and WiFi six and WiFi sixes Justin enormous step forward for that. WiFi technology has far better performance, especially when it comes to ban with client density on blatant See, that could give us just much more immersive experiences, much cleaner video, Much, uh, better, you know, density and performance. It also has a really unique performance optimization, something I think that has a lot of power in the mystery, which is a very sophisticated change to power save power state mode, which means that a wife I will be able to stay to support a whole new generation of Io ti devices operating on batteries for for months or years on this Khun, just open up the door. Tow new IO to use cases we really never thought possible before. >> So the next generation higher band with better power sounds like to market or trends or user trends that we see on the consumption side are immersive experiences. Video people are streaming more than ever now, whether it's in the office or at home or on the go. You have a R N V are more pressure tohave real time, rendering more band with. So this is the band with pressure device pressure on the power. These are the two big ones and I oh, Ty's been enterprise now emerging cloud space. But you know, I ot use cases, but really, it's about the new experiences are really kind of jamming up the highway of Digital highway, if you will. What's going? What's the new things is gonna help that goat better, >> We'LL tell you. We're seeing just a larger and larger percentage of the band with on the Internet and on all networks is as video me. That is the way people want to consume content. ATM, Iraqi We actually launched Ah, whole line of smart cameras just just a couple of years ago, and we see this enormous surge in people deploying cameras and wanting to see real time truly rial time video feeds from around the world. They want to consume content that way, and video is driving just and these immersive experiences, whether it's V. R. It's just driving this enormous need for >> true >> you know, High Band with connectivity. The wireless office in WiFi six the wires office feature. It has to feel like a wired connection. It has to be better than a wired connection. Mohr Band with Lower Late and Seymour efficient. And that's That's the promise of life. I said, >> Just kneel you down on this. I want to get out of the company in the spec sheet in my mind. So why five six has what better than WiFi current version? What's the last version? New version, One of the key bullet points. If you could just go down, stack rank the features that you think are >> important, I think, look, it quadruples the band with scruples. The capacity of these channels that lowers the latent see significantly both of those are important has a technology embedded and called off Oh FDA, which will help us increase the client density per channel, and especially for highly dense deployments that Khun Stadiums. We'LL be able to support MAWR clients on more channels, which is more clients on each channel, which is the key to making those deployments work. Um, and this this power save change for I have T devices for battery powered devices. That's that's really remarkable. And that power save change will affect everyone's mobile phone to I mean, I'm a person who worries about the battery life on my phone almost every day, and I'm hoping WiFi sex will really change that. There's other changes going on in the life I spaces. Well, there's more spectrum opening up. We're starting to see the six gigahertz band being opened up, which will be right, have a unique type of, uh, partially license, regionally licensed model. And by opening up more channels again, we can gain better, better dancer. >> So good density that on the modulation in the multiplex inside that that's for large stadiums. We've all been there offices. What's the impact would like, say, an enterprise who have been, you know, architect ing elaborate wireless networks Because this channel and all the configuration that goes on has been had to be done. What happens there? Is it easier to manage or what's the improvements with WiFi six over in an office space example? >> You know, I think what we'LL see is in high density spaces in conference rooms and our times immediately. See this benefit was higher density. This better performance. Uh, many of the WiFi platforms being built for WiFi six. They have twice as many antennas as the last generations of the high end of life. I five, uh, which was called a Hell of a C that was a four antenna system of what we call four by four radio. The high end of life high sex will be an eight by eight, and what that means is far better response to multi path, meaning these air radios that can see through walls that Khun see around corners. It's remarkable the performance, the thie R F sensitivities device, >> and that solves that people called the Dead Zone areas where, you know, like okay, the bars are down, or why's the why's the video stopping and kind of buffering. >> Exactly. Also solves issues were on interference, so places that of interference. Extra antennas could help see through that as well. And we sometimes call it the line of sight problem. If I could see the AP, it works. But if it's around a wall, I can't lie. Five, six and especially eight by eight antenna. >> Any mission concrete earlier before getting Karen also bounces around a lot of thistle environment where the are wrecked houses around that solves that problem helps that. >> Actually, that's called multi path in the industry. And, yeah, this eight, this eighty antenna ate our chain system really makes a difference >> because that change the form factories, they're still getting faster, smaller, cheaper, kind of thing. Going on boards law, um, or is it same size radios or chipsets? And >> that's a good question. The A. P s, uh, that we're building ATM Iraqi. Uh, they're about the same size, maybe, maybe a little bigger, but we've just built them in a slightly different shape. Um, but I think generally speaking, the technology has hit a point where the size of these devices similar toward the where they were in the last generation our eight by eight, uh, appeal. Maybe about things I >> think, General, if you pulled anyone who's in the WiFi business, whether deploying and rolling out our users, they really don't care what you think it the best performance is also not like, massively, like a tower of his small form factor. It's not going to change much. >> Do you really care? That's everything. There's some people who really care, and the aesthetic of the device really matters. They either wanted to look like physical plant like maybe it should look like it's kind of part of the building, or it should be really aesthetically pleasing and mixing and in your right. Of course, there's some people who really don't care. It's above a ceiling tile or something. All >> right, so let's talk about like the good point about the word matters. Size wise, also kind of footprint. A wind tower and I ot device. This does matter because size is important, whether it's a physical factory floor or somewhere out in the wild. Out in the open, rugged, durable Can it fit in with something? How does y five six save that? Is there any changes there? >> I think we're going to see pretty similar kind of idea will have. In turn, we will see the industry building internal antennas that we call it. Integrate antenna system an external ones for people who want to put custom and tennis solutions. And we'LL see indoor and outdoor e peas and the ruggedized after ones. I don't think that'LL change too much from life by six, but we will see perhaps just higher density deployment because these Raiders, they're so much more power. >> Tell what the impact to the industry isn't going to change the chipsets. How is WiFi? Signal Rollout is R O E EMS who manufactures it? Standards can use at some commentary around the industry coalition around it and impact. >> Yes, a WiFi six will become the new standard wife I will. Over time it will. It will replace not just the consumer at home. Ah, WiFi standard, but also the business and enterprise life I standard what it means is today we're starting to roll out the very first deployments of life I six in enterprise in enterprise B to B use cases on the access point side, and the client devices are just starting to come out. And so we're really right at the beginning of this transition of this curve, and over the next couple of years, we'LL see more and more devices move overto life by six until essentially all devices a couple years are launching on that. >> Iran has been the wireless because you've been in for a long time. They all kind of have this, you know, you know, Comrade of Arms can think is why, if I became so revolutionary that it just grew so fast. But there's been trouble spots has been hard thinking frequency physics, laws of physics, security, security all kind of coming. What's your personal take on where we are now mentioned? Five. G great back haul potential. The network's getting better and faster. Your thoughts just in the industry. Your personal perspective >> give you something I think is really important about life. I is, um, as an industry wife, I sort of developed together as part of a consortium called the WiFi Alliance, and what that means is these air truly standardised protocols and we run interoperability testing with our partners at Cisco. We work closely with the Intel and Samsung, and we run tons and tons of interrupt really testing. So the day this equipment ships it is operating at old, ultra high quality and interrupt. Inter operates with all types of devices made by all types of different vendors. Many other standards don't have that type of strong consortium, that kind of strong ecosystem of partners and that that that's a really powerful for why find? I think that's why it has become such a strong standard. >> You know, I know you're really humble Todd's, but I'LL give the plugs haven't fallen Cisco for many, many decades, So I've been following you. Guys have done a lot of wireless early days, you know. Misfires. Stop start acquisitions, airspace one of the notable acquisition, the WiFi space. Think a bunch of memo based acquisitions also have come in. You could have a lot of experience almost twenty years, plus experienced fifteen that I can point to direct wireless experience that Cisco you guys also care about. You're involved. You're part of the Alliance group ecosystem. What's the vibe internally at Cisco and why? Because it's packets or packets and we went with the air. They movement through cables. It's the same kind of philosophy right >> packets are packets, but it's how you care for your packets that really matters. That's why Cisco is different. >> No, I, uh I >> think the Cisco teams are all super excited. I'm of course, part of the Iraqi acquisition and our team is is just like I know we're pumped. WiFi six is going to be the new standard of WiFi across all of Cisco across all of our regions were starting to roll out education about it and getting ready for a big WiFi six product launch in the coming weeks. And >> what pumps you most? My wife, I six just is that attack? Is that the program ability? What if some of the key things that get you excited? >> I just think we will put the era of wiring desks behind us, and that is an enormous step forward. The life I six enables truly, ah, wireless work space and what we call the true digital work space. And we just won't be wiring offices anymore. After the life I six roll out and that is that's exciting. Wireless has arrived. >> I mean, I want one of my friends built this big house, and he was so meticulous. He's a nerd. He wired fiber to every port, every room. And I'm like, I don't think you need that anymore. He's out. I just going to have the highest band with. So now again, to the tear point that kind of becomes obsolete as long as you've got an access point to some back Hall with its Comcast or two networks. Three. >> Realistically, actually, the wireless devices for the enterprise, especially wireless capacity, is driving switch capacity. At this point, Um, we're building M gig switches to connect our access points primarily, and the purpose of the performance on that on that WiFi access points. Really, What's driving the wired performance on DH? That's, I think, just a telltale sign that this is a wireless digital work spaces. >> So I totally agree with that thing. It's a great vision. Nothing. It's pretty plausible. What would be your advice to your friend if I was your CEO, buddy? And I said, Hey, Todd, how should I be thinking about our protecting my network for the next ten years? OK, bye. Bye bye. The wireless thing I got What should I be thinking about? How shall be architect ing the big holistic plan. >> Yeah, I think right now we're really talking about building for the future. Most CEOs air thinking about rolling something out today or of the next twelve months, and they wantto be using that. Now we're deployment for five years, seven years. And in order to do that, you really need to look. The two technologies really need to look at our WiFi six and EM gig in the access layer, and you have to find a solution that provides a holistic, secure access. And don't think about any of your network deployment without bringing security into that thought process and decide how you're going to secure these sites. Because the band with goes up as the capacity goes up. All of our security concerns, of course. Just increase with that. And we have to be meticulous about that. My number one piece of advice to CEOs is planned for the future of life by six and m gig and plan plan for security. Because even if it's not top of mind >> today, in >> six months and twelve months and eighteen months, it will. >> The reality for them is the surface area is just now the world Todd Nightingale here breaking it down. WiFi six. Next generation Wireless Ethernet wireless connectivity. We all know WiFi wireless six going next generation secu bringing you all the coverage in tech here inside a studio. John Fergus. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio this morning for a CUBE Conversation talking about content marketing, attention economy, a lot of really interesting topics that should be top of mind for marketers, that we're in very interesting times on the B2C side and even more, I think, on the B2B side. So we're excited to have Randy Wootton, he's the CEO of Percolate. Randy, great to see you. >> Thanks very much for having me. A real pleasure to be here. >> Absolutely, so for those who aren't familiar, give us kind of the quick and dirty on Percolate. >> Percolate has been around for about seven years. It started as a social media marketing platform. So helping people, helping brands, build their brands on the social landscape, and integrating campaigns to deploy across the different social channels. Over the last couple of years, it's been moving more into the space called content marketing, which is really an interesting new area that marketers are coming to terms with. How do you put together content and orchestrate it across all the different channels. >> And it's interesting, a lot of vocabulary on the website around experiences and content not a lot about products. So how should marketers think and how does experience and content ultimately map back to the products and services you're trying to sell. >> Well, I do think that's a great point. And the distinction between modern brands, who are trying to create relationships with their consumers, rather than pushing products, especially if you're B2B, or technology pushing speeds and feeds. Instead, you are trying to figure out what is going to enable you to create a brand that consumers pull through versus getting pushed at. And so I think the idea around content marketing is that in some ways advertising isn't working anymore. People aren't paying attention to display ads, they're not clicking, they aren't processing the information. But, they are still buying. So the idea for marketers is, how do you get the appropriate content at the right time, to the right person, in their purchase journey. >> Right, and there's so many different examples of people doing new things. There's more conversations kind of, of the persona of the company, of the purpose, purpose driven things, really trying to appeal to their younger employees as well as a younger customer. You have just crazy off the wall things, which never fail to entertain. Like Geico, who seems to break every rule of advertising by having a different theme every time you see a Geico ad. So people are trying humor, they're trying theater, they're trying a lot of things to get through because the tough thing today is getting people's attention. >> I think so, and they talk a lot about the attention economy. That we live in a world of exponential fragmentation. All the information that we are processing across all these different devices. And a brand trying to break through, there's a couple of challenges, one is you have to create a really authentic voice, one that resonates with who you are and how you show up. And then, I think the second point is you recognize that you are co-building the brand with the consumers. It's no longer you build the Super Bowl ad and transmit it on T.V., and people experience your brand. You have this whole unfolding experience in real time. You've seen some of the airlines, for example, that have struggled with the social media downside of brand building. And so how do control, not control, but engage with consumers in a way that feels very authentic and it continues to build a relationship with your consumers. >> Yeah, it's interesting, a lot of things have changed. The other thing that has changed now is that you can have a direct relationship with that consumer whether you want it or not, via social media touches, maybe you were before, that was hidden through your distribution, or you didn't have that, that direct connect. So, you know, being able to respond to this kind of micro-segmentation, it's one thing to talk about micro-segmentation on the marketing side, it's a whole different thing with that one individual, with the relatively loud voice, is screaming "Hey, I need help." >> That's right, and I think there are a couple of things on that point. One is, I've been in technology for 20 years. I've been at Microsoft, I was at Salesforce, I was at AdReady, Avenue A, and Quantive. And now, Rocket Fuel before I came to Percolate. And I've always been wrestling with two dimensions of the digital marketing challenge. One is around consumer identity, and really understanding who the consumer is, and where they've been and what they've done. The second piece is around the context. That is, where they are in the moment, and which device they're on. And so, those are two dimensions of the triangle. The third is the content, or in advertising it's the creative. And that's always been the constraint. You never have enough creative to be able to really deliver on the promise of personalization, of getting the right message to the right person at the right time. And that now is the blockade. That now is the bottleneck, and that now is what brands are really trying to come to terms with. Is how do we create enough content so that you can create a compelling experience for each person, and then if there's someone who is engaging in a very loud voice, how do you know, and how do you engage to sort of address that, but not loose connections with all your other consumers. >> Right, it's interesting, you bring up something, in some of the research, in micro-moments. And in the old days, I controlled all of the information, you had to come for me for the information, and it was a very different world. And now, as you said, the information is out there, there's too much information. Who's my trusted conduit for the information. So by the time they actually get to me, or I'm going to try to leverage these micro-moments, it's not about, necessarily direct information exchange. What are some of these kind of micro-moments, and how are they game changers? >> Well, I think the fact that we can make decisions in near real time. And when I was at Rocket Fuel, we were making decisions in less than 20 milliseconds, processing something like 200 billion bid transactions a day, and so I just think people are not yet aware of the amount, the volume and the velocity of data that is being processed each and every day. And, to make decisions about specific moments. So the two moments I give as examples are: One, I'm sitting at home watching the Oakland Raiders with my two boys, I'm back on the couch and we're watching the game, and Disney makes an advertisement. I'm probably open to a Disney advertisement with my boys next to me, who are probably getting an advertisement at the same time by Disney. I'm a very different person in that moment, or that micro-moment than when I'm commuting in from Oakland to San Francisco on BART, reading the New York Times. I'm not open to a Disney ad at that moment, because I'm concentrating on work, I'm concentrating on the commute. And I think the thing that brands are coming to terms with is, how much am I willing to pay to engage with me sitting on the couch versus me sitting on BART. And that is where the real value comes from, is understanding which moments are the valuable ones. >> So there's so much we can learn from Ad Tech. And I don't think Ad Tech gets enough kind of credit for operating these really large, really hyper speed, really sophisticated marketplaces that are serving up I don't even know how many billions of transactions per unit time. A lot of activity going on. So, you've been in that world for a while. As you've seen them shift from kind of people driving, and buyers driving to more automation, what are some of the lessons learned, and what should learn more from a B2B side from this automated marketplace. >> Well, a couple of things, one is the machines are not our enemies, they are there to enable or enhance our capabilities. Though I do think it's going to require people to re-think work, specifically at agencies, in terms of, you don't need people to do media mixed modeling on the front end in Excel files, instead, you need capacity on the back end after the data has come out, and to really understand the insights. So there is some re-training or re-skilling that's needed. But, the machines make us smarter. It's not artificial intelligence, it's augmented intelligence. I think for B2B in particular what you're finding is, all the research shows that B2B purchasers spend something like 70 or 80% of their time in making the purchase decision before they even engage with the sales rep. And as a B2B company ourselves, we know how expensive our field reps are. And so to make sure that they are engaging with people at the right time, understanding the information that they would have had, before our sales cycle starts, super important. And I think that goes back to the content orchestration, or content marketing revolution that we are seeing now. And, you know, I that there is, when you think about it, most marketers today, use PowerPoint and Excel to have their marketing calendar and run their campaigns. And we're the only function left where you don't have an automated system, like a sales force for marketers, or a service now for marketers. Where a chief of marketing or a SVP of marketing, has, on their phone the tool of record, they system of record that they want to be able to oversee the campaigns. >> Right, although on the other hand, you're using super sophisticated A/B testing across multiple, multiple data sets, rather than doing that purchase price, right. You can test for colors, and fonts, and locations. And it's so different than trying to figure out the answer, make the investment, blast the answer, than this kind of DevOps way, test, test, test, test, test, adjust, test, test, test, test, adjust. >> You're absolutely right, and that's what, at Rocket Fuel, and any real AI powered system, they're using artificial intelligence as the higher order, underneath that you have different categories, like neural networks, deep learning and machine learning. We were using a logistic regression analysis. And we were running algorithms 27 models a day, every single day, that would test multiple features. So it wasn't just A/B testing, it was multi variant analysis happening in real time. Again, the volume and velocity of data is beyond human comprehension, and you need the machine learning to help you make sense of all that data. Otherwise, you just get overwhelmed, and you drown in the data. >> Right, so I want to talk a little bit about PNG. >> I know they're close and dear to your heart. In the old days, but more recently, I just want to bring up, they obviously wield a ton of power in the advertising spin campaign. And they recently tried to bring a little bit more discipline and said, hey we want tighter controls, tighter reporting, more independent third party reporting. There's this interesting thing going now where before, you know, you went for a big in, 'causethen you timed it by some conversion rating you had customers at the end. But now people it seems like, are so focused on the in kind of forgetting necessarily about the conversion because you can drive promoted campaigns in the social media, that now there's the specter of hmm, are we really getting, where we're getting. So again, the PNG, and the consumer side, are really leading kind of this next revolution of audit control and really closer monitoring to what's happening in these automated ad marketplaces. >> Well, I think what you're finding is, there's digital transformation happening across all functions, all industries. And, I think that in the media space in particular, you're also having an agency business model transformation. And what they used to provide for brands has to change as you move forward. PNG has really been driving that. PNG because of how much money they spend on media, has the biggest stick in the fight, and they've brought a lot of accountability. Mark Pritchard, in particular, has laid down these gauntlets the last couple of years, in terms of saying, I want more accountability, more visibility. Part of the challenge with the digital ecosystem is the propensity for fraud and lack of transparency, 'cause things are moving so quickly. So, the fact, that on one side the machines are working really well for ya, on the other side it's hard to audit it. But PNG is really bringing that level of discipline there. I think the thing that PNG is also doing really well, is they're really starting to re-think about how CPG brands can create relationships with their consumers and customers, much like we were talking about before. Primarily, before, CPG brands would work through distributors and retailers, and not really have a relationship with the end consumer. But now as they've started to build up their first party profiles, through clubs and loyalty programs, they're starting to better understand, the soccer mom. But it's not just the soccer mom, it's the soccer mom in Oakland at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, as she goes to Starbucks, when she's picked up her kids from school. All of those are features that better help PNG understand who that person is, in that context, and what's the appropriate engagement to create a compelling experience. That's really hard to do at the individual level. And when you think about the myriad of brands, that PNG has, they have to coordinate their stories and conversations across all of those brands, to drive market share. >> Yeah, it's a really interesting transformation, as we were talking earlier, I used to joke always, that we should have the underground railroad, from Cincinnati to Silicone Valley to get good product managers, right. 'Cause back in the day you still were doing PRD's and MRD's and those companies have been data driven for a long time and work with massive shares and small shifts in market percentages. But, as you said, they now, they're having to transform still data driven, but it's a completely different set of data, and much more direct set of data from the people that actually consume our products. >> And it's been a long journey, I remember when I was at Microsoft, gosh this would have been back in 2004 or 2005, we were working with PNG and they brought their brands to Microsoft. And we did digital immersions for them, to help them understand how they could engage consumers across the entire Microsoft network, and that would include X-Box, Hotmail at the time, MSN, and the brands were just coming to terms with what their digital strategy was and how they would work with Portal versus how they would work with other digital touchpoints. And I think that has just continued to evolve, with the rise of Facebook, with the rise of Twitter, and how do brands maintain relationships in that context, is something that every brand manager of today is having to do. My father, I think we were chatting a little earlier, started his career in 1968 as a brand manager for PNG. And, I remember him telling the stories about how the disciplined approach to brand building, and the structure and the framework hasn't changed, the execution has, over the last 50 years. >> So, just to bring it full circle before we close out, there's always a segment of marketing that's driven to just get me leads, right, give me leads, I need barcode scans at the conference et cetera. And then there's always been kind of the category of kind of thought leadership. Which isn't necessarily tied directly back to some campaign, but we want to be upfront, and show that we're a leading brand. Content marketing is kind of in-between, so, how much content marketing lead towards kind of thought leadership, how much lead kind of towards, actually lead conversions that I can track, and how much of it is something completely different. >> That's a great question, I think this is where people are trying to come to terms, what is content, long form, short form video. I think of content as being applied across all three dimensions of marketing. One is thought leadership, number two is demand gen, and number three is actualization or enablement in a B2B for your sales folks. And how do you have the right set of content along each of those dimensions. And I don't think they're necessarily, I fundamentally think the marketing funnel is broken. It's not you jump in at the top, and you go all the way to the bottom and you buy. You have this sort of webbed touch of experiences. So the idea is, going back to our earlier conversation, is, who is that consumer, what do you know about him, what is the context, and what's the appropriate form of content for them, where they are in their own buyer journey. So, a UGC video on YouTube may be okay for one consumer in a specific moment, but a short form video may be better for someone else, and a white paper may be better. And I think that people don't necessarily go down the funnel and purchase because they click on a search ad, they instead may be looking at a white paper at the end of the purchase, and so the big challenge, is the attribution of value, and that's one of the things that we're looking at Percolate. Is almost around thinking about it as content insight. Which content is working for whom. 'Cause right now you don't know, and I think the really interesting thing is you have a lot of people producing a lot of content. And, they don't know if it's working. And I think when we talk to marketers, that we hear their teams are producing content, and they want to know, they don't want to create content that doesn't work. They just want a better understanding of what's working, and that's the last challenge in the digital marketing transformation to solve. >> And how do you measure it? >> How do you measure, how do you define it? And categorize it, so that's one of the challenges, we were chatting a little bit before, about what you guys are doing at CUBE, and your clipper technology and how you're able to dis-aggregate videos, to these component pieces, or what in an AI world, you'd call features, that then can be loaded as unstructured data, and you can apply AI against it and really come up with interesting insights. So I think there's, as much as I say, the transformation of the internet has been huge, AI is going to transform our world more than we even can conceive of today. And I think content eventually will be impacted materially by AI. >> I still can't help but think of the original marketing quote, I've wasted half of my marketing budget, I'm just not sure which half. But, really it's not so much the waste as we have to continue to find better ways to measure the impact of all these kind of disparate non-traditional funnel things. >> I think you're right, I think it was Wanamaker who said that. I think your point is spot on, it's something we've always wrestled with, and as you move more into the branding media, they struggle more with the accountability. That's one of the reasons why direct response in the internet has been such a great mechanism, is because it's data based, you can show results. The challenge there is the attribution. But I think as we get into video, and you can get to digital video assets, and you can break it down into its component pieces, and all the different dimensions, all of that's fair game for better understanding what's working. >> Randy, really enjoyed the conversation, and thanks for taking a minute out of your busy day. >> My pleasure, always enjoy it. >> Alright, he's Randy, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto Studios, thanks for watching. (digital music)

(hopeful futuristic music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are really excited to have this cube conversation here in the Palo Alto studio with a real close friend of theCUBE, and repeat alumni, Leslie Berlin. I want to get her official title; she's the historian for the Silicon Valley archive at Stanford. Last time we talked to Leslie, she had just come out with a book about Robert Noyce, and the man behind the microchip. If you haven't seen that, go check it out. But now she's got a new book, it's called "Troublemakers," which is a really appropriate title. And it's really about kind of the next phase of Silicon Valley growth, and it's hitting bookstores. I'm sure you can buy it wherever you can buy any other book, and we're excited to have you on Leslie, great to see you again. >> So good to see you Jeff. >> Absolutely, so the last book you wrote was really just about Noyce, and obviously, Intel, very specific in, you know, the silicon in Silicon Valley obviously. >> Right yeah. >> This is a much, kind of broader history with again just great characters. I mean, it's a tech history book, but it's really a character novel; I love it. >> Well thanks, yeah; I mean, I really wanted to find people. They had to meet a few criteria. They had to be interesting, they had to be important, they had to be, in my book, a little unknown; and most important, they had to be super-duper interesting. >> Jeff Frick: Yeah. >> And what I love about this generation is I look at Noyce's generation of innovators, who sort of working in the... Are getting their start in the 60s. And they really kind of set the tone for the valley in a lot of ways, but the valley at that point was still just all about chips. And then you have this new generation show up in the 70s, and they come up with the personal computer, they come up with video games. They sort of launch the venture capital industry in the way we know it now. Biotech, the internet gets started via the ARPANET, and they kind of set the tone for where we are today around the world in this modern, sort of tech infused, life that we live. >> Right, right, and it's interesting to me, because there's so many things that kind of define what Silicon Valley is. And of course, people are trying to replicate it all over the place, all over the world. But really, a lot of those kind of attributes were started by this class of entrepreneurs. Like just venture capital, the whole concept of having kind of a high risk, high return, small carve out from an institution, to put in a tech venture with basically a PowerPoint and some faith was a brand new concept back in the day. >> Leslie Berlin: Yeah, and no PowerPoint even. >> Well that's right, no PowerPoint, which is probably a good thing. >> You're right, because we're talking about the 1970s. I mean, what's so, really was very surprising to me about this book, and really important for understanding early venture capital, is that now a lot of venture capitalists are professional investors. But these venture capitalists pretty much to a man, and they were all men at that point, they were all operating guys, all of them. They worked at Fairchild, they worked at Intel, they worked at HP; and that was really part of the value that they brought to these propositions was they had money, yes, but they also had done this before. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> And that was really, really important. >> Right, another concept that kind of comes out, and I think we've seen it time and time again is kind of this partnership of kind of the crazy super enthusiastic visionary that maybe is hard to work with and drives everybody nuts, and then always kind of has the other person, again, generally a guy in this time still a lot, who's kind of the doer. And it was really the Bushnell-Alcorn story around Atari that really brought that home where you had this guy way out front of the curve but you have to have the person behind who's actually building the vision in real material. >> Yeah, I mean I think something that's really important to understand, and this is something that I was really trying to bring out in the book, is that we usually only have room in our stories for one person in the spotlight when innovation is a team sport. And so, the kind of relationship that you're talking about with Nolan Bushnell, who started Atari, and Al Alcorn who was the first engineer there, it's a great example of that. And Nolan is exactly this very out there person, big curly hair, talkative, outgoing guy. After Atari he starts Chuck E. Cheese, which kind of tells you everything you need to know about someone who's dreaming up Chuck E. Cheese, super creative, super out there, super fun oriented. And you have working with him, Al Alcorn, who's a very straight laced for the time, by which I mean, he tried LSD but only once. (cumulative laughing) Engineer, and I think that what's important to understand is how much they needed each other, because the stories are so often only about the exuberant out front guy. To understand that those are just dreams, they are not reality without these other people. And how important, I mean, Al Alcorn told me look, "I couldn't have done this without Nolan, "kind of constantly pushing me." >> Right, right. >> And then in the Apple example, you actually see a third really important person, which to me was possibly the most exciting part of everything I discovered, which was the importance of the guy named Mike Markkula. Because in Jobs you had the visionary, and in Woz you had the engineer, but the two of them together, they had an idea, they had a great product, the Apple II, but they didn't have a company. And when Mike Markkula shows up at the garage, you know, Steve Jobs is 21 years old. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> He has had 17 months of business experience in his life, and it's all his attack for Atari, actually. And so how that company became a business is due to Mike Markkula, this very quiet guy, very, very ambitious guy. He talked them up from a thousand stock options at Intel to 20,000 stock options at Intel when he got there, just before the IPO, which is how he could then turn around and help finance >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> The birth of Apple. And he pulled into Apple all of the chip people that he had worked with, and that is really what turned Apple into a company. So you had the visionary, you had the tech guy, you also needed a business person. >> But it's funny though because in that story of his visit to the garage he's specifically taken by the engineering elegance of the board >> Leslie Berlin: Right. >> That Woz put together, which I thought was really neat. So yeah, he's a successful business man. Yes he was bringing a lot of kind of business acumen value to the opportunity, but what struck him, and he specifically talks about what chips he used, how he planned for the power supply. Just very elegant engineering stuff that touched him, and he could recognize that they were so far ahead of the curve. And I think that's such another interesting point is that things that we so take for granted like mice, and UI, and UX. I mean the Atari example, for them to even think of actually building it that would operate with a television was just, I mean you might as well go to Venus, forget Mars, I mean that was such a crazy idea. >> Yeah, I mean I think Al ran to Walgreens or something like that and just sort of picked out the closest t.v. to figure out how he could build what turned out to be Pong, the first super successful video game. And I mean, if you look also at another story I tell is about Xerox Park; and specifically about a guy named Bob Taylor, who, I know I keep saying, "Oh this might be my favorite part." But Bob Taylor is another incredible story. This is the guy who convinced DARPA to start, it was then called ARPA, to start the ARPANET, which became the internet in a lot of ways. And then he goes on and he starts the computer sciences lab at Xerox Park. And that is the lab that Steve Jobs comes to in 1979, and for the first time sees a GUI, sees a mouse, sees Windows. And this is... The history behind that, and these people all working together, these very sophisticated Ph.D. engineers were all working together under the guidance of Bob Taylor, a Texan with a drawl and a Master's Degree in Psychology. So what it takes to lead, I think, is a really interesting question that gets raised in this book. >> So another great personality, Sandra Kurtzig. >> Yeah. >> I had to look to see if she's still alive. She's still alive. >> Leslie Berlin: Yeah. >> I'd love to get her in some time, we'll have to arrange for that next time, but her story is pretty fascinating, because she's a woman, and we still have big women issues in the tech industry, and this is years ago, but she was aggressive, she was a fantastic sales person, and she could code. And what was really interesting is she started her own software company. The whole concept of software kind of separated from hardware was completely alien. She couldn't even convince the HP guys to let her have access to a machine to write basically an NRP system that would add a ton of value to these big, expensive machines that they were selling. >> Yeah, you know what's interesting, she was able to get access to the machine. And HP, this is not a well known part of HP's history, is how important it was in helping launch little bitty companies in the valley. It was a wonderful sort of... Benefited all these small companies. But she had to go and read to them the definition of what an OEM was to make an argument that I am adding value to your machines by putting software on it. And software was such an unknown concept. A, people who heard she was selling software thought she was selling lingerie. And B, Larry Ellison tells a hilarious story of going to talk to venture capitalists about... When he's trying to start Oracle, he had co-founders, which I'm not sure everybody knows. And he and his co-founders were going to try to start Oracle, and these venture capitalists would, he said, not only throw him out of the office for such a crazy idea, but their secretaries would double check that he hadn't stolen the copy of Business Week off the table because what kind of nut job are we talking to here? >> Software. >> Yeah, where as now, I mean when you think about it, this is software valley. >> Right, right, it's software, even, world. There's so many great stories, again, "Troublemakers" just go out and get it wherever you buy a book. The whole recombinant DNA story and the birth of Genentech, A, is interesting, but I think the more kind of unique twist was the guy at Stanford, who really took it upon himself to take the commercialization of academic, generated, basic research to a whole 'nother level that had never been done. I guess it was like a sleepy little something in Manhattan they would send some paper to, but this guy took it to a whole 'nother level. >> Oh yeah, I mean before Niels showed up, Niels Reimers, he I believe that Stanford had made something like $3,000 off of the IP from its professors and students in the previous decades, and Niels said "There had to be a better way to do this." And he's the person who decided, we ought to be able to patent recombinant DNA. And one of the stories that's very, very interesting is what a cultural shift that required, whereas engineers had always thought in terms of, "How can this be practical?" For biologists this was seen as really an unpleasant thing to be doing, don't think about that we're about basic research. So in addition to having to convince all sorts of government agencies and the University of California system, which co-patented this, to make it possible, just almost on a paperwork level... >> Right. >> He had to convince the scientists themselves. And it was not a foregone conclusion, and a lot of people think that what kept the two named co-inventors of recombinant DNA, Stan Cohen and Herb Boyer, from winning the Nobel Prize is that they were seen as having benefited from the work of others, but having claimed all the credit, which is not, A, isn't fair, and B, both of those men had worried about that from the very beginning and kept saying, "We need to make sure that this includes everyone." >> Right. >> But that's not just the origins of the biotech industry in the valley, the entire landscape of how universities get their ideas to the public was transformed, and that whole story, there are these ideas that used to be in university labs, used to be locked up in the DOD, like you know, the ARPANET. And this is the time when those ideas start making their way out in a significant way. >> But it's this elegant dance, because it's basic research, and they want it to benefit all, but then you commercialize it, right? And then it's benefiting the few. But if you don't commercialize it and it doesn't get out, you really don't benefit very many. So they really had to walk this fine line to kind of serve both masters. >> Absolutely, and I mean it was even more complicated than that, because researchers didn't have to pay for it, it was... The thing that's amazing to me is that we look back at these people and say, "Oh these are trailblazers." And when I talked to them, because something that was really exciting about this book was that I got to talk to every one of the primary characters, you talk to them, and they say, "I was just putting one foot in front of the other." It's only when you sort of look behind them years later that you see, "Oh my God, they forged a completely new trail." But here it was just, "No I need to get to here, "and now I need to get to here." And that's what helped them get through. That's why I start the book with the quote from Raiders of the Lost Ark where Sallah asks Indy, you know basically, how are you going to stop, "Stop that car." And he says, "How are you going to do it Indy?" And Indy says, "I don't know "I'm making it up as I go along." And that really could almost be a theme in a lot of cases here that they knew where they needed to get to, and they just had to make it up to get there. >> Yeah, and there's a whole 'nother tranche on the Genentech story; they couldn't get all of the financing, so they actually used outsourcing, you know, so that whole kind of approach to business, which was really new and innovative. But we're running out of time, and I wanted to follow up on the last comment that you made. As a historian, you know, you are so fortunate or smart to pick your field that you can talk to the individual. So, I think you said, you've been doing interviews for five or six years for this book, it's 100 pages of notes in the back, don't miss the notes. >> But also don't think the book's too long. >> No, it's a good book, it's an easy read. But as you reflect on these individuals and these personalities, so there's obviously the stories you spent a lot of time writing about, but I'm wondering if there's some things that you see over and over again that just impress you. Is there a pattern, or is it just, as you said, just people working hard, putting one step in front of the other, and taking those risks that in hindsight are so big? >> I would say, I would point to a few things. I'd point to audacity; there really is a certain kind of adventurousness, at an almost unimaginable level, and persistence. I would also point to a third feature at that time that I think was really important, which was for a purpose that was creative. You know, I mean there was the notion, I think the metaphor of pioneering is much more what they were doing then what we would necessarily... Today we would call it disruption, and I think there's a difference there. And their vision was creative, I think of them as rebels with a cause. >> Right, right; is disruption the right... Is disruption, is that the right way that we should be thinking about it today or are just kind of backfilling the disruption after the fact that it happens do you think? >> I don't know, I mean I've given this a lot of thought, because I actually think, well, you know, the valley at this point, two-thirds of the people who are working in the tech industry in the valley were born outside of this country right now, actually 76 percent of the women. >> Jeff Frick: 76 percent? Wow. >> 76 percent of the women, I think it's age 25 to 44 working in tech were born outside of the United States. Okay, so the pioneering metaphor, that's just not the right metaphor anymore. The disruptive metaphor has a lot of the same concepts, but it has, it sounds to me more like blowing things up, and doesn't really thing so far as to, "Okay, what comes next?" >> Jeff Frick: Right, right. >> And I think we have to be sure that we continue to do that. >> Right, well because clearly, I mean, the Facebooks are the classic example where, you know, when he built that thing at Harvard, it was not to build a new platform that was going to have the power to disrupt global elections. You're trying to get dates, right? I mean, it was pretty simple. >> Right. >> Simple concept and yet, as you said, by putting one foot in front of the other as things roll out, he gets smart people, they see opportunities and take advantage of it, it becomes a much different thing, as has Google, as has Amazon. >> That's the way it goes, that's exactly... I mean, and you look back at the chip industry. These guys just didn't want to work for a boss they didn't like, and they wanted to build a transistor. And 20 years later a huge portion of the U.S. economy rests on the decisions they're making and the choices. And so I think this has been a continuous story in Silicon Valley. People start with a cool, small idea and it just grows so fast among them and around them with other people contributing, some people they wish didn't contribute, okay then what comes next? >> Jeff Frick: Right, right. >> That's what we figure out now. >> All right, audacity, creativity and persistence. Did I get it? >> And a goal. >> And a goal, and a goal. Pong, I mean was a great goal. (cumulative laughing) All right, so Leslie, thanks for taking a few minutes. Congratulations on the book; go out, get the book, you will not be disappointed. And of course, the Bob Noyce book is awesome as well, so... >> Thanks. >> Thanks for taking a few minutes and congratulations. >> Thank you so much Jeff. >> All right this is Leslie Berlin, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. See you next time, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. (electronic music) >> Welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. Coverage of HPE Discover 2017. That's Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE. My co-host for the next three days, Dave Vellante, Chief analyst at Wikibon and co-founder with me of theCUBE. Our next guest is Partha Narasimhan, who's the CTO of Aruba, now part of HP for multiple years. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me here. >> So chief technology officer of Aruba, we get to go under the hood a little bit, but it's really important the we kind of have that context because the wireless is beyond just wifi. I mean, wifi is joked on the internet as the lower level of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I mean, it's the biggest complaint people have. 'Where's the wifi? Is it secure?' So wifi obviously in wireless, certainly brings that digital life. Now you take wireless in an enterprise environment, unlimited possibilities with Internet of Things, campus, intelligent edge was the key part of this theme. Welcome to theCUBE and thanks for joining us. >> Narasimhan: Thank you. >> So your thoughts on the intelligent edge, what is Aruba's real innovation happening now? Where's the fruit coming off the trees, beyond just the access to wireless, because we all know is like, freedom. >> Right, and so think of it. People tend to think of wireless as just okay, getting rid of the cables. And yes, it does that, but it does a lot more than getting rid of the cables. And if you think about what it allows you to do, wireless enables mobility, right? So as people walk around and stay connected to all the things that they need connectivity to, we allow that to happen. But wireless enabling mobility also means that we have now the ability to observe things in the physical world that people reside in, right? Kinds of things that they interact with, whether it's in the workplace as part of their work, or whether it's as a customer when you enter a retail store, or when you enter a stadium or a venue for an event. How do we now gather our understanding of context from purely from a digital domain? Combine that with what we are learning about context, the other side of context from the physical domain. Blend that together, one, to either create new experiences for enthusers. Or to enhance existing ones that they're already used to, how can we make it work better? Right, and we have these used cases in- >> Is it true enabling technology and these new scenarios are new? I want to get into the used case, but I first want to get the hard news out of the way. You guys have some announcements here at HPE Discover that are notable. One is an extension to the course, which is 8400 line, real focus on the intelligent edge. And the other one is really comprehensive asset tracking. Assets could be anything, it could be people, it could be machines, devices and whatnot. This really kind of highlights the things that are possible. Obviously asset tracking is entering a change, and it's also big data, it's Internet of Things. Talk about this intelligent edge, talk about the switches and the asset tracking. What is the notable things about those two announcements? >> So let's start with the 8400, right it's a big core of new classes, Abdication switch. We don't have many of those built over the years in the industry, right? There have been very small number of instances of switches like this built in here. But the big difference with the 8400 is it's actually the first one that was completely built in an era that is defined increasingly by mobility in IoT, right? Think of mobility. With mobility, topology is never a constant. Right, I can never assume that the network topology is set and it never changes. Or changes can be controlled in some perspectives. So if you start with the given that topology is not a constant, how do we now create a switch that enables network administrators to deploy networks without having to worry about, you know, old methods of configuring and monitoring the switches, right? So, this was built ground up with the notion that it has to support today's use cases, not overlay today's use cases onto, you know a switch that might have worked many years ago. So programmability was important, modernality was important. It is built on a basic premise that you know, the entire state of the network, the switch, is stored in a database that is accessible through modern interfaces. It allows you to take that switch, plug it into existing workflows that are more modern than to try and force feed these modern workflows be constrained by technologies that were invented fifteen, twenty years ago. So that is the one that's important, right? And in addition to all of the connectivity options, the speeds and feeds that we have to go build, it's extremely interesting and there are advances and innovation on that side. The one that excites me the most is the software layer in the switch, right, that allows for the programmability, it allows for visibility, right, I'm able to get access to all of the state of the switch, and any trouble, problems that I see, I can quickly get to the bottom of, and go back and fix it. But more importantly, the biggest innovation that I think we have, is this thing that we call the Network Analytics Engine. This is what gives you the extensibility property for the switch. Where your ability to go extend the capabilities of the switch in the field, right? Not have to for our engineers to tell what features, but people in the field, either customers or our own field engineers, can extend the capabilities of the switch to go do things that we didn't think of, but exist in the field. >> So before we get to asset tracking, I love the way this press release was worded. You kind of hit on it, John. 'Setting it apart from other core aggregation switches in the market, the 8400's most unique innovation is the Aruba OSCX, a modern software foundation that is a departure from today's static, inflexible operating systems.' I'm not sure exactly who you're talking about there, but nonetheless, so when you talk about this network analytics engine, Are you suggesting that makers of static inflexible operating system designs would have to bolt something like that on? And it would just not be as effective? Or would it not be possible? >> Well you have to go deeper into the operating system, and do major surgery for that to happen. And that is very hard to do. So if you already built it for a certain static use case, and you're trying to now introduce support on certain things in there, you will always be limited by what lies underneath, compared to if you look at the operating system Aruba OSCX, it was built from the ground up with the modalality and extensibility in mind including the programmability for configuring the switches. This is not something that you can bolt on later and go fix it, because you have to go very deep into the operating system, and there's a lot of major surgery work that is for a switch of this magnitude and size, the effort is as good as starting from scratch, throwing everything away and starting from scratch and building it new. That is very hard to do. >> And tell us about the asset tracking. Let's not, I didn't want to lose that either. >> Well the asset tracking, before we get that point. Operating systems are generally about connecting things, subsystems. You mentioned the wireless as an unpredictable. Which is true, I agree with that. Now Internet of Things is even more unpredictable, and the rate of devices connecting: a watch on someone's wrist, a wearable, a phone. We saw the new Apple announcements yesterday, we covered that on SiliconANGLE.com, again more and more consumer devices, and yet, industrial equipment. This is important, I mean, it's not just machinery, it's like, it could be the air conditioning, it could be anything. Thoughts on this asset tracking concept? >> Narasimhan: I'll start the IoT's side, and how it applies to the network, and get to the asset tracking. Let me start with an example. One of our university customers, in adding to the story, right, they said one day the facilities people called and said hey, we just went out and swapped out about 400 door locks in a residence hall with wifi enabled door locks, and then they turn on the 400 of them and they don't work, and the network people are saying sure it doesn't work, we're not surprised, because the network's not built to have arbitrary things come in and start working. But if you look at it from the people that are deploying this equipment, they just think hey, it's wifi, it should just connect and work, right? Versus people running the network have certain ways in which they have configured the network either for quality of service, or security, that, you have to understand. But the network admins are also in a state where they just say that battle is probably lost. People are going to add things to my environment and my job is to go make sure that I gracefully accept them in and fit the into a profile. In the security profile that I already have. So this is why the programmability is key, right? As door locks come in, chances are those door locks don't need to communicate with everything on the network. Maybe only to a very specific server that pushes policy on which keys should open a particular door, and which one's shouldn't, but if you look at network's specifically designed with a certain notion of trust, saying okay, I have a security perimeter. Whether it's a physical perimeter that allows me entry into the building, or a digital perimeter that, you know, I have a dmz in a firewall, but once you're on the inside, you're in a safe zone. That safe zone is being challenged by IoT, right? Because these devices are not capable to begin with. Think of an electronic door lock, and compare it with many other servers, and the compute capabilities and the servers on the showfloor, versus what is available in the door lock. By itself, it's starting out at a very huge disadvantage on that front. But more importantly, the compute capabilities of a door lock are frozen in time. And they tend to stay on the door for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. Versus the compute capabilities that are available to an attacker keeps pace with technology. So over time, the ability for the door lock to protect itself diminishes, right? And this is not just true of door locks, it's true of any of these IoT type of things that are getting added to the systems. So our goal is as we gracefully accept them and get them connected to the network and provide the network guys with the tools to kind of segment them into appropriate boundaries, we also have a need to go monitor their activity all the time. Because they become juicy targets for hackers. To get into and from there, propagate out to the rest of the network. So how do we know they're not getting attacked? Their vulnerability is not getting exploited, and the only way to do this is to continuously monitor them. But more importantly, to use a machine learning approach. A behavioral approach, rather than a signature based detection. So if I baseline behaviors of a certain IoT device, whether it's a door lock or a security camera, or any number of those, and whenever I see deviations from that baseline behavior, I want to alert somebody. Because, while it is an anomaly, and not all anomalies are malicious, but it could be potentially. And you need somebody to look at it, so how do we quickly detect that, okay, there's a deviation and is it malicious, and how do we react to it, and how do we shut it down? >> Now talk about the asset tracking announcement, because that's relevant to this show. What's the status, the news? What's the notable thing about the Aruba asset tracking? >> So the asset tracking is interesting on two counts: one is, when you want to track an asset, you need to attach a tag to it, that kind of puts out some notion of identity that I can attach to that asset. But there's also the infrastructure side of it, you need an infrastructure that picks up on these signals, and can locate the asset, and can figure out where all it's been, and who's kind of used it, and how it's getting used. So while we look at asset tags as one improvement, the infrastructure is also another improvement. Aruba we started down the bluetooth low energy as one of the elements for our location based services strategy, look at Meridian team as a central gravity for all location based services. We started out with beacons, and using the beacons as an indication of location, and then providing contextual information and semantic information about that location. But over time we've also recognized that in addition to beacons, we've integrated bluetooth into our access point. So any wireless LAN infrastructure that's based off of the Aruba solution that is getting deployed today is already ready for one half of the asset tracking solution, so the other half is the tags that we're introducing that can be attached to high value assets, and then together these two combine with a back end solution that not only provides you with where the assets are and where they've been, but also uses APIs to integrate with other asset tracking larger solutions that you might have. >> Furrier: So you're feeding data into a bigger picture on the edge? Alright, so let's talk about the fun stuff now. So we can get under the hood there. Getting a little technical, which is great. There's some real sexy deployments out that you guys have been involved in. One is, we've talked about, the folks watching theCUBE know, Levi Stadium in San Francisco, for the San Francisco 49ers is highly instrumented venue next is the provider, great service provider. You guys are the provider there. But it's interesting, this other use case. So talk about how the use cases are driving the value, and how people who are discovering these new value creation opportunities, how do they get there and give us some examples. >> So Levi Stadium, okay. We tend to talk about it a lot, but it also is because we learnt a lot of things as part of being, you know, we were fortunate to be part of that exercise. We learnt a lot of things, so one key learning was the people that built the stadium were very clear from the beginning, their competition was not another sporting venue, right? It's not the Oakland Raiders fans that they wanted to attract over into the stadium. They were very clear their competition was a TV in your living room. How do I convince a fan to not watch the game on the TV in their living room but instead to come into the stadium and watch it? So they said here's a list of experiences that I want to create for the fan that you can only have in the stadium, and that is compelling enough to get a fan into the stadium to watch the game. So once you define those, then it becomes a lot easier. The rest of it underlying here is all technology, and we know how to piece it together. So this was one of the first instances where we saw the whole infrastructure build out being driven top down, right? You define your experiences and then you work your way down on what kind of pieces of technology we need to go in there. Otherwise the networking industry was largely driven by hey, here's the connectivity infrastructure, and we'll figure what hooks are available, and then we'll figure out what you can do with it. >> Furrier: You constrain, naturally, with that. >> Correct, but if you start from the top, lot's of things become easier, right, what we need can be customized to go address the problem, specific problems if we want to go in there. And this is not something new. As you look at, yes it was true for the stadium, but retail stores have a similar problem, right, how do I convince a user to not buy a particular item online, and instead come into the store to do it? And Apple's done a pretty good job of it, the whole store is not a place where you go pick items off of the shelf, put it in your cart, and check it out. It is a place where you go and interact with the item. >> Experience! >> Experience, again. >> What other verticals are hot right now, obviously retail makes sense, sports makes sense, what other verticals- >> Narasimhan: Hospitality is another one where you want to create an experience that customers associate with a brand. If I can somehow make the whole process of you checking into a hotel room, and being in the hotel room and then checking out, if that whole experience can be made significantly better, then I'm going to associate it with that brand. And the next time I'm looking for a hotel- >> So it's an opportunity for brands to extend their brand value, digitally. >> Narasimhan: Correct. It is by creating a better experience in the physical world, you tie it to your brand, and customers associate it with it. And then you go into the workplace. Again, employees and how do I help improve their productivity with what kind of experiences? More and more workplaces are shifting to more open environments, all wireless workplace, because, you know, even if I had wires, there's nothing that I can plug into. I have three devices with me in my bag. Nothing with an Ethernet port in it. And we recently moved into a new facility in Santa Clarita. in January of this year, and the one thing you'll notice is that there are no wires running to where people sit. So when you go into an all wireless workplace, you convince users that it's viable, right, and the way to convince users it's viable is that the network is always there when they need it, when they need to do something on it. But the facilities people are also excited by the possibility, because it gives them a lot of flexibility in how they want to reconfigure space. >> Furrier: It's the future of work and the future of play kind of converging with analog and digital kind of coming together with experiences at the center, and wireless is the fabric for it all. >> Correct, and wireless is what enables mobility but more importantly location is the other fabric that interconnects the two worlds. If I can sense location on the digital side, location is an attribute of the physical world. That's what bridges the two together. >> Context, interest, location. These are all new variables, a whole new way of doing things. In fact, the modern mobility we suggest on SiliconANGLE, Wikibon and theCUBE is this is going to be the future of work, the future of play, all around modern mobility. >> Narasimhan: Correct. >> Partha, thanks so much for sharing your insights. The CTO here of Aruba Wireless, doing some amazing things, enabling new possibilities here in a new simplified, sounds complex to me, but it sounds like you simplifying, as the new message from HP. Thanks for sharing your insights. Of course, we're bringing that modern day to you here on theCUBE live in Las Vegas, our exclusive coverage for three days. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, we'll be right back with more after this short break. (electronic music)