>>Good afternoon friends, and welcome back to Supercomputing. We're live here at the Cube in Dallas. I'm joined by my co-host, David. My name is Savannah Peterson and our a fabulous guest. I feel like this is almost his show to a degree, given his role at Dell. He is the Vice President of HPC over at Dell. Raja Phan, thank you so much for being on the show with us. How you doing? >>Thank you guys. I'm doing okay. Good to be back in person. This is a great show. It's really filled in nicely today and, and you know, a lot of great stuff happening. >>It's great to be around all of our fellow hardware nerds. The Dell portfolio grew by three products. It it did, I believe. Can you give us a bit of an intro on >>That? Sure. Well, yesterday afternoon and yesterday evening, we had a series of events that announced our new AI portfolio, artificial intelligence portfolio, you know, which will really help scale where I think the world is going in the future with, with the creation of, of all this data and what we can do with it. So yeah, it was an exciting day for us. Yesterday we had a, a session over in a ballroom where we did a product announce and then in the evening had an unveil in our booth here at the SUPERCOMPUTE conference, which was pretty eventful cupcakes, you know, champagne drinks and, and most importantly, Yeah, I know. Good time. Did >>You get the invite? >>No, I, most importantly, some really cool new servers for our customers. >>Well, tell us about them. Yeah, so what's, what's new? What's in the news? >>Well, you know, as you think about artificial intelligence and what customers are, are needing to do and the way artificial intelligence is gonna change how, you know, frankly, the world works. We have now developed and designed new purpose-built hardware, new purpose-built servers for a variety of AI and artificial intelligence needs. We launched our first eight way, you know, Invidia H 100 a a 100 s XM product. Yesterday we launched a four u four way H 100 product yesterday and a two u fully liquid cooled intel data center, Max GPU server yesterday as well. So, you know, a full range of portfolio for a variety of customer needs, depending on their use cases, what they're trying to do, their infrastructure, we're able to now provide, you know, servers to and hardware that help, you know, meet those needs in those use cases. >>So I wanna double click, you just said something interesting, water cooled. >>Yeah. So >>Where does, at what point do you need to move in the direction of water cooling and, you know, I know you mentioned, you know, GPU centric, but, but, but talk about that, that balance between, you know, a density and what you can achieve with the power that's going into the system. Well, you system, >>It all depends on what the customers are trying to accommodate, right? I, I think that there's a dichotomy that's existing now between customers who have already or are planning liquid cooled infrastructures and power distribution to the rack. So you take those two together and if you have the power distribution to the rack, you wanna take advantage of the density to take advantage of the density you need to be able to cool the servers and therefore liquid cooling comes into play. Now you have other customers that either don't have the power to the rack or aren't ready for liquid cooling, and at that point, you know, they're not gonna want to take advantage. They can't take advantage of the density. So there's this dichotomy in products, and that's why we've got our XE 96 40, which is in two U dense liquid cooled, but we also have our XE 86 40, which is a four U air cold, right? Or liquid assisted air cold, right? So depending on where you are on your journey, whether it's power infrastructure, liquid cooling, infrastructure, we've got the right solution for you that, you know, meets your needs. You don't have to take advantage of the density, the expense of liquid cooling, unless you're ready to do that. Otherwise we've got this other option for you. And so that's really what dichotomy is beginning to exist in our customers infrastructures today. >>I was curious about that. So do you see, is there a category or a vertical that is more in the liquid cooling zone because that's a priority in terms of the density or >>Yeah, yeah. I mean, you've got your, your large HTC installations, right? Your large clusters that not only have the power have, you know, the liquid cooling density that they've built in, you've got, you know, federal government installations, you've got financial tech installations, you've got colos that are built for sustainability and density and space that, that can also take advantage of it. Then you've got others that are, you know, more enterprises, more in the mainstream of what they do, where, you know, they're not ready for that. So it just, it just depends on the scale of the customer that we're talking about and what they're trying to do and, and where they're, and where they're doing it. >>So we hear, you know, we hear at Supercomputing conference and HPC is sort of the kind of trailing mini version of supercomputing in a way where maybe you have someone who they don't need 2 million CPU cores, but maybe they need a hundred thousand CPU cores. So it's all a matter of scale. What is, can you identify kind of an HPC sweet spot right now as, as Dell customers are adopting the kinds of things that you just just announced? >>You know, I think >>How big are these clusters at this >>Point? Well, let, let me, let me hit something else first. Yeah, I think people talk about HPC as, as something really specific and what we're seeing now with the, you know, vast amount of data creation, the need for computational analytics, the need for artificial intelligence, the HPC is kind of morphing right into, into, you know, more and more general customer use cases. And so where before you used to think about HPC is research and academics and computational dynamics. Now, you know, there's a significant Venn diagram overlap with just regular artificial intelligence, right? And, and so that is beginning to change the nature of how we think about hpc. You think about the vast data that's being created. You've got data driven HPC where you're running computational analytics on this data that's giving you insights or outcomes or information. It's not just, Hey, I'm running, you know, physics calculations or astronomical how, you know, calculations. It is now expanding in a variety of ways where it's democratizing into, you know, customers who wouldn't actually talk about themselves as HVC customers. And when you meet with them, it's like, well, yeah, but your compute needs are actually looking like HPC customers. So let's talk to you about these products. Let's talk to you about these solutions, whether it's software solutions, hardware solutions, or even purpose-built hardware. Like we're, like we talked about that now becomes the new norm. >>Customer feedback and community engagement is big for you. I know this portfolio of products that was developed based on customer feedback, correct? Yep. >>So everything we do at Dell is customer driven, right? We want to be, we want to drive, you know, customer driven innovation, customer driven value to meet our customer's needs. So yeah, we spent a while, right, researching these products, researching these needs, understanding is this one product? Is it two products? Is it three products? Talking to our partners, right? Driving our own innovation in IP and then where they're going with their roadmaps to be able to deliver kind of a harmonized solution to customers. So yeah, it was a good amount of customer engagement. I know I was on the road quite a bit talking to customers, you know, one of our products was, you know, we almost named after one of our customers, right? I'm like, Hey, this, we've talked about this. This is what you said you wanted. Now he, he was representative of a group of customers and we validated that with other customers and it's also a way of me making sure he buys it. But great, great. Yeah, >>Sharing sales there, >>That was good. But you know, it's heavily customer driven and that's where understanding those use cases and where they fit drove the various products. And, you know, in terms of, in terms of capability, in terms of size, in terms of liquid versus air cooling, in terms of things like number of P C I E lanes, right? What the networking infrastructure was gonna look like. All customer driven, all designed to meet where customers are going in their artificial intelligence journey, in their AI journey. >>It feels really collaborative. I mean, you've got both the intel and the Nvidia GPU on your new product. There's a lot of CoLab between academics and the private sector. What has you most excited today about supercomputing? >>What it's going to enable? If you think about what artificial intelligence is gonna enable, it's gonna enable faster medical research, right? Genomics the next pandemic. Hopefully not anytime soon. We'll be able to diagnose, we'll be able to track it so much faster through artificial intelligence, right? That the data that was created in this last one is gonna be an amazing source of research to, to go address stuff like that in the future and get to the heart of the problem faster. If you think about a manufacturing and, and process improvement, you can now simulate your entire manufacturing process. You don't have to run physical pilots, right? You can simulate it all, get 90% of the way there, which means your, your either factory process will get reinvented factor faster, or a new factory can get up and running faster. Think about retail, how retail products are laid out. >>You can use media analytics to track how customers go through the store, what they're buying. You can lay things out differently. You're not gonna have in the future people going, you know, to test cell phone reception. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me? Now you can simulate where customers are patterns to ensure that the 5G infrastructure is set up, you know, to the maximum advantage. All of that through digital simulation, through digital twins, through media analytics, through natural language processing. Customer experience is gonna be better, communication's gonna be better. All of this stuff with, you know, using this data, training it, and then applying it is probably what excites me the most about super computing and, and really compute in the future. >>So on the hardware front, kind of digging down below the, the covers, you know, the surface a little more, Dell has been well known for democratizing things in it, making them available to, at a variety of levels. Never a one size fits all right? Company, these latest announcements would be fair to say. They represent sort of the tip of the spear in terms of high performance. What about, what about rpc regular performance computing? Where's, where's the overlap? Cause you know, we're in this season where we've got AMD and Intel leapfrogging one another, new bus architectures. The, the, you know, the, the connectivity that's plugged into these things are getting faster and faster and faster. So from a Dell perspective, where does my term rpc regular performance computing and, and HPC begin? Are you seeing people build stuff on kind of general purpose clusters also? >>Well, sure, I mean, you can run a, a good amount of artificial acceleration on, you know, high core count CPUs without acceleration, and you can do it with P C I E accelerators and then, then you can do it with some of the, the, the very specific high performance accelerators like that, the intel, you know, data center, Max GPUs or NVIDIAs a 100 or H 100. So there are these scale up opportunities. I mean, if you think about, >>You know, >>Our mission to democratize compute, not just hpc, but general compute is about making it easier for customers to implement, to get the value out of what they're trying to do. So we focus on that with, you know, reference designs or validated designs that take out a good amount of time that customers would have to do it on their own, right? We can cut by six to 12 months the ability for customers in, in, I'm gonna use an HPC example and then I'll come back to your, your regular performance compute by us doing the work us, you know, setting, you know, determining the configuration, determining the software packages, testing it, tuning it so that by the time it gets to the customer, they get to take advantage of the expertise of Dell Engineers Dell Scale and they are ready to go in a much faster point of view. >>The challenge with AI is, and you talk to customers, is they all know what it can lead to and the benefits of it. Sometimes they just dunno how to start. We are trying to make it easier for customers to start, whether it is using regular RPC or you know, non optimized, non specialized compute, or as you move up the value stack into compute capability, our goal is to make it easier for customers to start to get on their journey and to get to what they're trying to do faster. So where do I see, you know, regular performance compute, you know, it's, it's, you know, they go hand in hand, right? As you think about what customers are trying to do. And I think a lot of customers, like we talked about, don't actually think about what they're trying to do as high performance computing. They don't think of themselves as one of those specialized institutions as their hpc, but they're on this glide path to greater and greater compute needs and greater and greater compute attributes that that merge kind of regular performance computing and high performance computing to where it's hard to really draw the line, especially when you get to data driven HPC data's everywhere >>And so much data. And it sounds like a lot people are very early in this journey. From our conversation with Travis, I mean five AI programs per very large company or less at this point for 75% of customers, that's pretty wild. I mean you're, you're an educational coach, you're teachers, you're innovating on the hardware front, you're doing everything at Dell. Last question for you. You've been at 24 years, >>25 in this coming march. >>What has a company like that done to retain talent like you for more than two and a half decades? >>You know, for me and I, I, and I'd like to say I had an atypical journey, but I don't think I have right there, there has always been opportunity for me, right? You know, I started off as a quality engineer. A couple years later I'm living in Singapore running or you know, running services for Enterprise and apj. I come back couple years in Austin, then I'm in our Bangalore development center helping set that up. Then I come back, then I'm in our Taiwan development center helping with some of the work out there. And then I come back. There has always been the next opportunity before I could even think about am I ready for the next opportunity? Oh. And so for me, why would I leave? Right? Why would I do anything different given that there's always been the next opportunity? The other thing is jobs are what you make of it and Dell embraces that. So if there's something that needs to be done or there was an opportunity, or even in the case of our AI ML portfolio, we saw an opportunity, we reviewed it, we talked about it, and then we went all in. So that innovation, that opportunity, and then most of all the people at Dell, right? I can't ask to work with a better set of set of folks from from the top on down. >>That's fantastic. Yeah. So it's culture. >>It is culture B really, at the end of the day, it is culture. >>That's fantastic. Raja, thank you so much for being here with us. >>Thank you guys, the >>Show. >>Really appreciate it. >>Questions? Yeah, this was such a pleasure. And thank you for tuning into the Cube Live from Dallas here at Supercomputing. My name is Savannah Peterson, and we'll see y'all in just a little bit.

(contemplative upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. Got a great topic on expanding capabilities for urgent computing. Dan Stanzione, he's Executive Director of TACC, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and Rajesh Pohani, VP of PowerEdge, HPC Core Compute at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. >> Thanks, John. >> Thanks, John, good to be here. >> Rajesh, you got a lot of computing in PowerEdge, HPC, Core Computing. I mean, I get a sense that you love compute, so we'll jump right into it. And of course, I got to love TACC, Texas Advanced Computing Center. I can imagine a lot of stuff going on there. Let's start with TACC. What is the Texas Advanced Computing Center? Tell us a little bit about that. >> Yeah, we're part of the University of Texas at Austin here, and we build large-scale supercomputers, data systems, AI systems, to support open science research. And we're mainly funded by the National Science Foundation, so we support research projects in all fields of science, all around the country and around the world. Actually, several thousand projects at the moment. >> But tied to the university, got a lot of gear, got a lot of compute, got a lot of cool stuff going on. What's the coolest thing you got going on right now? >> Well, for me, it's always the next machine, but I think science-wise, it's the machines we have. We just finished deploying Lonestar6, which is our latest supercomputer, in conjunction with Dell. A little over 600 nodes of those PowerEdge servers that Rajesh builds for us. Which makes more than 20,000 that we've had here over the years, of those boxes. But that one just went into production. We're designing new systems for a few years from now, where we'll be even larger. Our Frontera system was top five in the world two years ago, just fell out of the top 10. So we've got to fix that and build the new top-10 system sometime soon. We always have a ton going on in large-scale computing. >> Well, I want to get to the Lonestar6 in a minute, on the next talk track, but... What are some of the areas that you guys are working on that are making an impact? Take us through, and we talked before we came on camera about, obviously, the academic affiliation, but also there's a real societal impact of the work you're doing. What are some of the key areas that the TACC is making an impact? >> So there's really a huge range from new microprocessors, new materials design, photovoltaics, climate modeling, basic science and astrophysics, and quantum mechanics, and things like that. But I think the nearest-term impacts that people see are what we call urgent computing, which is one of the drivers around Lonestar and some other recent expansions that we've done. And that's things like, there's a hurricane coming, exactly where is it going to land? Can we refine the area where there's going to be either high winds or storm surge? Can we assess the damage from digital imagery afterwards? Can we direct first responders in the optimal routes? Similarly for earthquakes, and a lot recently, as you might imagine, around COVID. In 2020, we moved almost a third of our resources to doing COVID work, full-time. >> Rajesh, I want to get your thoughts on this, because Dave Vellante and I have been talking about this on theCUBE recently, a lot. Obviously, people see what cloud's, going on with the cloud technology, but compute and on-premises, private cloud's been growing. If you look at the hyperscale on-premises and the edge, if you include that in, you're seeing a lot more user consumption on-premises, and now, with 5G, you got edge, you mentioned first responders, Dan. This is now pointing to a new architectural shift. As the VP of PowerEdge and HPC and Core Compute, you got to look at this and go, "Hmm." If Compute's going to be everywhere, and in locations, you got to have that compute. How does that all work together? And how do you do advanced computing, when you have these urgent needs, as well as real-time in a new architecture? >> Yeah, John, I mean, it's a pretty interesting time when you think about some of the changing dynamics and how customers are utilizing Compute in the compute needs in the industry. Seeing a couple of big trends. One, the distribution of Compute outside of the data center, 5G is really accelerating that, and then you're generating so much data, whether what you do with it, the insights that come out of it, that we're seeing more and more push to AI, ML, inside the data center. Dan mentioned what he's doing at TACC with computational analysis and some of the work that they're doing. So what you're seeing is, now, this push that data in the data center and what you do with it, while data is being created out at the edge. And it's actually this interesting dichotomy that we're beginning to see. Dan mentioned some of the work that they're doing in medical and on COVID research. Even at Dell, we're making cycles available for COVID research using our Zenith cluster, that's located in our HPC and AI Innovation Lab. And we continue to partner with organizations like TACC and others on research activities to continue to learn about the virus, how it mutates, and then how you treat it. So if you think about all the things, and data that's getting created, you're seeing that distribution and it's really leading to some really cool innovations going forward. >> Yeah, I want to get to that COVID research, but first, you mentioned a few words I want to get out there. You mentioned Lonestar6. Okay, so first, what is Lonestar6, then we'll get into the system aspect of it. Take us through what that definition is, what is Lonestar6? >> Well, as Dan mentioned, Lonestar6 is a Dell technology system that we developed with TACC, it's located at the University of Texas at Austin. It consists of more than 800 Dell PowerEdge 6525 servers that are powered with 3rd Generation AMD EPYC processors. And just to give you an example of the scale of this cluster, it could perform roughly three quadrillion operations per second. That's three petaFLOPS, and to match what Lonestar6 can compute in one second, a person would have to do one calculation every second for a hundred million years. So it's quite a good-size system, and quite a powerful one as well. >> Dan, what's the role that the system plays, you've got petaFLOPS, what, three petaFLOPS, you mentioned? That's a lot of FLOPS! So obviously urgent computing, what's cranking through the system there? Take us through, what's it like? >> Sure, well, there there's a mix of workloads on it, and on all our systems. So there's the urgent computing work, right? Fast turnaround, near real-time, whether it's COVID research, or doing... Project now where we bring in MRI data and are doing sort of patient-specific dosing for radiation treatments and chemotherapy, tailored to your tumor, instead of just the sort of general for people your size. That all requires sort of real-time turnaround. There's a lot AI research going on now, we're incorporating AI in traditional science and engineering research. And that uses an awful lot of data, but also consumes a huge amount of cycles in training those models. And then there's all of our traditional, simulation-based workloads and materials and digital twins for aircraft and aircraft design, and more efficient combustion in more efficient photovoltaic materials, or photovoltaic materials without using as much lead, and things like that. And I'm sure I'm missing dozens of other topics, 'cause, like I said, that one really runs every field of science. We've really focused the Lonestar line of systems, and this is obviously the sixth one we built, around our sort of Texas-centric users. It's the UT Austin users, and then with contributions from Texas A&M , and Texas Tech and the University of Texas system, MD Anderson Healthcare Center, the University of North Texas. So users all around the state, and every research problem that you might imagine, those are into. We're just ramping up a project in disaster information systems, that's looking at the probabilities of flooding in coastal Texas and doing... Can we make building code changes to mitigate impact? Do we have to change the standard foundation heights for new construction, to mitigate the increasing storm surges from these sort of slow storms that sit there and rain, like hurricanes didn't used to, but seem to be doing more and more. All those problems will run on Lonestar, and on all the systems to come, yeah. >> It's interesting, you mentioned urgent computing, I love that term because it could be an event, it could be some slow kind of brewing event like that rain example you mentioned. It could also be, obviously, with the healthcare, and you mentioned COVID earlier. These are urgent, societal challenges, and having that available, the processing capability, the compute, the data. You mentioned digital twins. I can imagine all this new goodness coming from that. Compare that, where we were 10 years ago. I mean, just from a mind-blowing standpoint, you have, have come so far, take us through, try to give a context to the level of where we are now, to do this kind of work, and where we were years ago. Can you give us a feel for that? >> Sure, there's a lot of ways to look at that, and how the technology's changed, how we operate around those things, and then sort of what our capabilities are. I think one of the big, first, urgent computing things for us, where we sort of realized we had to adapt to this model of computing was about 15 years ago with the big BP Gulf Oil spill. And suddenly, we were dumping thousands of processors of load to figure out where that oil spill was going to go, and how to do mitigation, and what the potential impacts were, and where you need to put your containment, and things like that. And it was, well, at that point we thought of it as sort of a rare event. There was another one, that I think was the first real urgent computing one, where the space shuttle was in orbit, and they knew something had hit it during takeoff. And we were modeling, along with NASA and a bunch of supercomputers around the world, the heat shield and could they make reentry safely? You have until they come back to get that problem done, you don't have months or years to really investigate that. And so, what we've sort of learned through some of those, the Japanese tsunami was another one, there have been so many over the years, is that one, these sort of disasters are all the time, right? One thing or another, right? If we're not doing hurricanes, we're doing wildfires and drought threat, if it's not COVID. We got good and ready for COVID through SARS and through the swine flu and through HIV work, and things like that. So it's that we can do the computing very fast, but you need to know how to do the work, right? So we've spent a lot of time, not only being able to deliver the computing quickly, but having the data in place, and having the code in place, and having people who know the methods who know how to use big computers, right? That's been a lot of what the COVID Consortium, the White House COVID Consortium, has been about over the last few years. And we're actually trying to modify that nationally into a strategic computing reserve, where we're ready to go after these problems, where we've run drills, right? And if there's a, there's a train that derails, and there's a chemical spill, and it's near a major city, we have the tools and the data in place to do wind modeling, and we have the terrain ready to go. And all those sorts of things that you need to have to be ready. So we've really sort of changed our sort of preparedness and operational model around urgent computing in the last 10 years. Also, just the way we scheduled the system, the ability to sort of segregate between these long-running workflows for things that are really important, like we displaced a lot of cancer research to do COVID research. And cancer's still important, but it's less likely that we're going to make an impact in the next two months, right? So we have to shuffle how we operate things and then just, having all that additional capacity. And I think one of the things that's really changed in the models is our ability to use AI, to sort of adroitly steer our simulations, or prune the space when we're searching parameters for simulations. So we have the operational changes, the system changes, and then things like adding AI on the scientific side, since we have the capacity to do that kind of things now, all feed into our sort of preparedness for this kind of stuff. >> Dan, you got me sold, I want to come work with you. Come on, can I join the team over there? It sounds exciting. >> Come on down! We always need good folks around here, so. (laughs) >> Rajesh, when I- >> Almost 200 now, and we're always growing. >> Rajesh, when I hear the stories about kind of the evolution, kind of where the state of the art is, you almost see the innovation trajectory, right? The growth and the learning, adding machine learning only extends out more capabilities. But also, Dan's kind of pointing out this kind of response, rapid compute engine, that they could actually deploy with learnings, and then software, so is this a model where anyone can call up and get some cycles to, say, power an autonomous vehicle, or, hey, I want to point the machinery and the cycles at something? Is the service, do you guys see this going that direction, or... Because this sounds really, really good. >> Yeah, I mean, one thing that Dan talked about was, it's not just the compute, it's also having the right algorithms, the software, the code, right? The ability to learn. So I think when those are set up, yeah. I mean, the ability to digitally simulate in any number of industries and areas, advances the pace of innovation, reduces the time to market of whatever a customer is trying to do or research, or even vaccines or other healthcare things. If you can reduce that time through the leverage of compute on doing digital simulations, it just makes things better for society or for whatever it is that we're trying to do, in a particular industry. >> I think the idea of instrumenting stuff is here forever, and also simulations, whether it's digital twins, and doing these kinds of real-time models. Isn't really much of a guess, so I think this is a huge, historic moment. But you guys are pushing the envelope here, at University of Texas and at TACC. It's not just research, you guys got real examples. So where do you guys see this going next? I see space, big compute areas that might need some data to be cranked out. You got cybersecurity, you got healthcare, you mentioned oil spill, you got oil and gas, I mean, you got industry, you got climate change. I mean, there's so much to tackle. What's next? >> Absolutely, and I think, the appetite for computing cycles isn't going anywhere, right? And it's only going to, it's going to grow without bound, essentially. And AI, while in some ways it reduces the amount of computing we do, it's also brought this whole new domain of modeling to a bunch of fields that weren't traditionally computational, right? We used to just do engineering, physics, chemistry, were all super computational, but then we got into genome sequencers and imaging and a whole bunch of data, and that made biology computational. And with AI, now we're making things like the behavior of human society and things, computational problems, right? So there's this sort of growing amount of workload that is, in one way or another, computational, and getting bigger and bigger. So that's going to keep on growing. I think the trick is not only going to be growing the computation, but growing the software and the people along with it, because we have amazing capabilities that we can bring to bear. We don't have enough people to hit all of them at once. And so, that's probably going to be the next frontier in growing out both our AI and simulation capability, is the human element of it. >> It's interesting, when you think about society, right? If the things become too predictable, what does a democracy even look like? If you know the election's going to be over two years from now in the United States, or you look at these major, major waves >> Human companies don't know. >> of innovation, you say, "Hmm." So it's democracy, AI, maybe there's an algorithm for checking up on the AI 'cause biases... So, again, there's so many use cases that just come out of this. It's incredible. >> Yeah, and bias in AI is something that we worry about and we work on, and on task forces where we're working on that particular problem, because the AI is going to take... Is based on... Especially when you look at a deep learning model, it's 100% a product of the data you show it, right? So if you show it a biased data set, it's going to have biased results. And it's not anything intrinsic about the computer or the personality, the AI, it's just data mining, right? In essence, right, it's learning from data. And if you show it all images of one particular outcome, it's going to assume that's always the outcome, right? It just has no choice, but to see that. So how we deal with bias, how do we deal with confirmation, right? I mean, in addition, you have to recognize, if you haven't, if it gets data it's never seen before, how do you know it's not wrong, right? So there's about data quality and quality assurance and quality checking around AI. And that's where, especially in scientific research, we use what's starting to be called things like physics-informed or physics-constrained AI, where the neural net that you're using to design an aircraft still has to follow basic physical laws in its output, right? Or if you're doing some materials or astrophysics, you still have to obey conservation of mass, right? So I can't say, well, if you just apply negative mass on this other side and positive mass on this side, everything works out right for stable flight. 'Cause we can't do negative mass, right? So you have to constrain it in the real world. So this notion of how we bring in the laws of physics and constrain your AI to what's possible is also a big part of the sort of AI research going forward. >> You know, Dan, you just, to me just encapsulate the science that's still out there, that's needed. Computer science, social science, material science, kind of all converging right now. >> Yeah, engineering, yeah, >> Engineering, science, >> slipstreams, >> it's all there, >> physics, yeah, mmhmm. >> it's not just code. And, Rajesh, data. You mentioned data, the more data you have, the better the AI. We have a world what's going from silos to open control planes. We have to get to a world. This is a cultural shift we're seeing, what's your thoughts? >> Well, it is, in that, the ability to drive predictive analysis based on the data is going to drive different behaviors, right? Different social behaviors for cultural impacts. But I think the point that Dan made about bias, right, it's only as good as the code that's written and the way that the data is actually brought into the system. So making sure that that is done in a way that generates the right kind of outcome, that allows you to use that in a predictive manner, becomes critically important. If it is biased, you're going to lose credibility in a lot of that analysis that comes out of it. So I think that becomes critically important, but overall, I mean, if you think about the way compute is, it's becoming pervasive. It's not just in selected industries as damage, and it's now applying to everything that you do, right? Whether it is getting you more tailored recommendations for your purchasing, right? You have better options that way. You don't have to sift through a lot of different ideas that, as you scroll online. It's tailoring now to some of your habits and what you're looking for. So that becomes an incredible time-saver for people to be able to get what they want in a way that they want it. And then you look at the way it impacts other industries and development innovation, and it just continues to scale and scale and scale. >> Well, I think the work that you guys are doing together is scratching the surface of the future, which is digital business. It's about data, it's about out all these new things. It's about advanced computing meets the right algorithms for the right purpose. And it's a really amazing operation you guys got over there. Dan, great to hear the stories. It's very provocative, very enticing to just want to jump in and hang out. But I got to do theCUBE day job here, but congratulations on success. Rajesh, great to see you and thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Okay. >> Thanks very much. >> Great conversation around urgent computing, as computing becomes so much more important, bigger problems and opportunities are around the corner. And this is theCUBE, we're documenting it all here. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (contemplative music)

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path >>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube. We are here with UI path at forward for I'm Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante and a lovely setting at the Bellagio. We're going to be talking about automation from the CFO's perspective. Our next guest is our jet guard group financial officer at landmark group, or just welcome to the program. >>Thank you so much. Thank >>You. Before we dig into your transformation strategy and how automation is a key to that, help the audience understand a little bit about landmark. >>Absolutely. So landmark is one of the largest, uh, non-food primarily retailer in the middle east and Asia, India, and now increasingly in Southeast Asia. So we've got about 50 brands, uh, more than half of them, which are homegrown our own brands and some franchise brands. So about 2,200 stores, uh, across 20 countries, 55,000 employees. Um, so 30 million square feet of retail space >>They company. When was the company founded, >>Uh, 48 years ago, >>Legacy institution you were mentioning before we went live that you guys have been working with UI path since 2017. So talk to me about that legacy institution, embracing cloud digital transformation and automation as a, from a visionary strategic perspective. >>Yeah. So look, I mean, you know, you get so many technologies that are being thrown at you. So I would say you have packed or robotic process automation was just another one like that. So I wouldn't say it was like part of a grand strategy. You know, it comes as it looks like, Hey, this is cool. You know, in the, in the back office, when somebody showed me first 10 desks with nobody sitting on them, it's kind of spooky. So he said, Hey, this, this looks very interesting. So it started off like that, but then it has just grown because we've stayed with it. So we've amongst things in the early part of your parts customers and, and it's been phenomenal, you know, what, uh, what we're able to do with, uh, with, uh, robotic process automation. Uh, I mean, you know, I've been in this industry with my past employers, like Proctor and gamble and Cadbury, Schweppes, and all, and essentially we used to follow the part of, you know, you eliminate all the non-value add you, then try and automate whatever your ERP system, then all allowed you to automate. >>Then what's left, you consolidate, and then you find the right shore, right. It can be offshore or wherever. So that was the sequence. But I think a lot could not be automated because there are huge gaps in the systems that are being offered and you have a mosaic of systems, every company will have. Right. Um, and then we would end up doing lot more offshore or, you know, other kinds of tactics, but then once RPA showed up on the scene, it's suddenly disrupted everything because now whatever the systems can do, or when you have to move data from one system to the other or make sense out of it, that's where this technology sits. And so that's, so that's very, I, you know, we've now got a pretty large, uh, robotic process automation practice. And, and, you know, we are touching started with finance and now we are pretty much enterprise wide. So all the, >>These technologies are coming together, automation, RPA, cloud AI, they're all sort of converging. And as a retailer, I'm curious as to what your cloud strategy is and how that fits and all, there's always a lot of sensitivity from retailers that don't want to be on Amazon, maybe some do. And they say, Hey, we've, we've we compete in other ways, what's your posture in that? >>So we've also been an early adopter of cloud, both. If I talk within the UI path thing, we were, I think the first ones to put it on the cloud, because we just saw, even before you are part, uh, we saw how people could tamper with it, you know, attended robots, you know, on the desktop one. So we went on the cloud and that was good, uh, way back. But overall, the company also has a very pro you know, Val defined cloud strategy. So we are, you know, pretty much all a large part of our systems are on the cloud with Azure. >>Yeah. So, which makes sense, right. As a retailer, go, go with Azure, plus somebody, Microsoft, you know, X, such a lot of Microsoft expertise out there that you can leverage. And I got to ask you because everybody's freaked out on wall street about power automate, you know, competing with UI path. And I've told people they kind of different parts of the spectrum, but I've talked to a lot of customers this week. So yeah, we use both. We use UI path for end-to-end automation. We use power automate for a lot of our personal productivity stuff. How do you guys, do you use, uh, the power automate? How do you see those two? Yeah, >>No, I think, look, it's inevitable. A lot of technologies will keep evolving. I think Microsoft is a fantastic company. I mean, the way they perfected teams right in time, you know, and pretty, always hit, uh, a year before COVID hit teams was not ready, you know? So I think I know power automate is good. We use it, but not as you know, it's not ready for enterprise wide. So I think more, I'm not an expert in power automate yet. Um, you know, what, it kind of seemed more like when it's linked to the office automation versus linking major enterprise wide or >>Which is really where you're headed. Yeah. Talk about the results that you've seen, the higher you're measuring the return and the whole business case. When you evaluate it as CFO, >>See it being a CFO, I wear two hats. Right. I'm trying to help digital transformation. Although I must say I'm not the only one our company has. Every function is these days talking digital. Right. Because it's almost like table stakes. Yeah. Uh, you, you can't be in business a leader and we are like a leader in all the markets we are, and there's no choice, but to be fully digital. Right. Uh, but being a CFO absolutely. You know, you do look at the hard dollars. Right. Um, and initially when you're pushing any technology to any functional head or your colleague or the CEO or the board, they do want to see the dollars because a lot of softwares talk about the soft benefits. Um, I think they gotta pay for themselves. So I think it's like, yes, if I can get the hard dollars and then I can demonstrate softer benefits, whether it is the quality of work, less errors, better compliance, right. >>Or I think employee, uh, work work-life balance, right. I mean, in, in, uh, we are, uh, in a growing company we've been growing for the last four decades and there's a constant struggle to help colleagues maintain better work life balance. So I think once the basic return is off the table, everyone's talking about the quality of work enabling. And I think now we've, we are proudly talking, you know, that, Hey, we've got a lot of people, um, we've hired them. But what we are using of them is their fingers, their eyes, ears, and that's about it. Can we now get them to use their brain? So it's like, Hey, it's a freebie. You got so many people let's start using the gray matter. And that's, I think what this technology does, it takes away the Gronk and you can then tell them, Hey, analyze the data, look at it, better business outcomes. And I think that's where the real value is. >>That is, so we've heard a lot about time saved hours saved. That's kind of the key, a key metric. And you look at that as hard dollars. How, how do you translate that to the income statement? >>So, so let's put it, uh, you know, I was looking at applied science, applied materials presentation, and they had a 150,000 hours saved. Uh, I just did our math. I mean, so we've so far saved 342,000 hours per annum removed out of the system. Right. But I would say not all I can say, I took them to the bottom line. So probably 70% of that, because the rest is probably gone back to people doing more value added stuff. >>So how does it hit the income statement? Is it hit it as new revenue or cost savings or savings reduction in >>Yeah. Or are you don't hire as many as you needed to? Uh, >>Yes. That's the missing link. Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. Is I was going to need to hire or what 1,100 people hire 10 or whatever it is. Okay. Now I'm sorry. Does that, is that, does that get into a debate? Like, cause I can see a lot of people, if we don't do this, we're going to, you know, and then as a CFO, you might say let's defend that a little bit. >>Seek cost avoidance is always debated. Yep. And that's why I said, as long as you can prove that the hard dollars taken to the bottom line are visible and you can put your finger on them, then people become more comfortable saying, okay, as long as you know, I've got my payback, I've got something I can, you know, make sure that my cost line is not going up because it's very easy to do, you know, kind of say, Hey look, all this soft benefits and now your cost has also gone up. So I think once the, the, the hard dollars that you can bank are out of the way, then you can talk about costs avoided, and then you can talk about the softer benefits. Are there, there is no doubt because you try and what we do is we tell people if they're in a cell, okay, we'll shut, shut it down. >>I say, Hey, wait, well, right then, you know, but so you have four years of data on this, so you can prove it. And by the way, soft dollars are where the real money is. I don't mean to denigrate that, but I get into a lot of discussions with CFO's like, okay, show me the hard dollars first and then the hard, the soft dollars or telephone numbers. Yeah. >>Yeah. I think I look at it as an inverted pyramid. Yeah. Where you start with the cost saved, which is the smaller part of the pyramid. And then you get speed, right. Because speed is actually a big thing, which is very difficult to measure. Right? I mean, I'll give you an example in none of our largest markets, right. In the middle of COVID, they announced all products that are being imported, which is for us about 80,000 of them, um, uh, need to have a whole bunch of compliance forms on the government portal, import certifications. And you got like a month to do all that work. So now you'll get an army of 20, 30 people train them. We did nothing. We built the barns and we were ready ahead of competition. And I think, and, and life continues. Now the supply chain officer will sign on the dotted line for you saying he would have had to hire 30 people. And he, it's not easy to hire suddenly, but we were compliant and, and now that's cost avoided. But I would say a big business benefit because we were the first ones to have all our products compliant with the market requirements. That's a >>Great example. >>I think about some of the IDC data that was, did you see that that was presented this morning, looking at, you know, the positive outlook as, as RPA being a jobs creator over time. Talk to me a little bit about how you've navigated that through the organization and even done upskilling of some of those folks so that they're not losing, but they're gaining. >>I think there is, you know, you have to take all these projections with a pinch of salt, you know, I mean, saying you will, the world will save $150 billion and all, I mean, if you add all the soft dollars. Yes. But in reality, you know, I lose joke about it. If you take all the technology initiatives in a company and you add all the MPVs and that they have submitted, that would be larger than the market cap of the company. >>It's true. All the projects add up to more value. >>I think, I think, you know, we don't get carried away by these major projections, but I think some of it is true. I mean, you know, I kind of talk about the Luddites, right? I mean, when the first, you know, weaving machines game in, in Northern England, near Manchester and these Luddites, they were called, they were going around breaking down these machines because they were supposed to take away jobs. Now reality is a lot of people did lose jobs who could not make the transition, could not retrain themselves. It is inevitable. It will happen. But over time I would say yes, there have been lot more employment. So I think both go hand in hand. Um, but yes, the more one can help retrain people, get them to, you know, say, Hey, you don't need to spend the rest of your life. Copy pasting and just doing data entry. Uh, you can look at the data and make sense out of it. How much >>Of that was a part of your strategic vision years ago? >>I think years ago we knew it, but it was more, let's get these, you know, simple. When you have hundreds of people in a, in a back office, how do I get them to do more work or have slate or meet my, you know, my productivity goals? I would say it starts with that. Okay. Uh, if you start, uh, deep down because I, I am, you know, I believe in technology, I knew it, it would happen that we would eventually go from, let's say, robotic process automation to intelligent process automation. Right. Which is coming for us. It's we are able to see it, you try and sell that as the lead in and people shut down >>Because they're seen by intelligent process automation. W what do you mean? And, and >>So it's look, if I've got, uh, my robots and the tech, the RP infrastructure, which is processing whole bunch of transactions right now, if I'm able to add in some machine learning or AI, or what have you on top of it, and then I can read the patterns I can, for example, you know, we, we now have built on top of all the various security in our payment systems. If you've got a bot, which then does a final check, which goes and checks the history of that particular vendor as to what is the typical payments being done to that. And then it flags, if it's V out and it stops the payment, for example, right? So, or it goes and does a whole bunch of tests. We're building constantly building tools. So that's kind of, you know, a bit more intelligent than just a simple copy paste or, or doing a transaction >>Because why that's their job or because they it's a black box. They don't know how that decision is made. Or >>I think a lot of these have been sold previously similar technologies and things that would be, you know, the next best thing since sliced water and people have lost fit. So you got to show them the money and then take them along the journey. If you go too fast and try and give this whole, you know, people are smart enough and it, it turns them off. >>It's one of the failures of the tech industry is the broken promises. I can, I can rattle many off >>Cultural shift. It is. It is. How did you help facilitate that? See, I mean, we, we took, you know, the bottoms up and top down approach, uh, you know, the top down was, uh, I have my whole leadership team and as a joke, we locked them up in the boardroom and we got them to build bonds a long ago. And we said, let each of you, you know, download your bank statement and send yourself, uh, you know, if you say any transaction above 10,000, whatever, um, send, send an email to yourself. So as simple as that, or download the electricity bill and, and send it to your wife, you know, something like that. And half of them were able to build a bot in that couple of hours. The other half looked at it, and obviously are, you know, many of them are not as tech savvy, but it helped build the kind of it's aha moment three years ago that, wow, you know, I can build a bot. Um, for some people it was like, oh, they taught these metallic 10 bots are going to walk into the room. >>I love it. The bottom who's responsible for governance. >>So we've got a, we've got a team across it and finance. Um, I mean, somehow I have kind of, you know, created the skunkworks team. The S the center of excellence sits with me. Um, uh, but overall it's a combination and they now run governance, uh, you know, 24 7, >>Uh, you know, sorry, I got to get my crypto question. I ask every CFO's, when are you going to put crypto in the balance sheet? I know I'm teasing, but what you see companies doing this? Has it ever come up in conversation? Is it sort of tongue in cheek joke? Or what do you make of the crypto? >>Yeah, I think personally I'm a big believer, uh, but not for, uh, for a company. I think the, the benefit case of a company, we are not that, you know, we have enough other face too, you know? Um, uh, I think, uh, it's a bit further out for a company to start taking balance sheet position because that's then a speculation, right? Because, so I'm a believer in the benefit of the blockchain technology. We actually did a blockchain experiment a couple of years ago, moving goods, uh, from China to Dubai and also making the payments through a blockchain to, um, so we see huge benefits. We are working with our bankers on certain other initiatives, but I think on the balance sheet sounds like speculation and use of capital. So yeah, if it brings efficiency, if it brings transparency, which is what blockchains do, uh, I think absolutely it's, it is here to stay >>Last question. And then the last 30 seconds, or so for your peers in any industry who are it was, we saw some of the stats yesterday, the amount of percentage of processes that are automateable that aren't automated. What's your advice, recommendations to peers about pulling automation into their digital transformation strategy? >>I think, um, digital transformation can be hugely aided and accelerated if you first put RPLs, because that is the layer, which goes between the humans and whatever technology is out there or whatever you keep buying. So I think because they will be in every area, new technologies coming up, it's better to put RPA first because you can then get more benefit from whatever other technologies you're bolting on. So I would say it's a predecessor to your broader digital transformation, rather than just a part of it. >>Got it. A predecessor, or just thank you for joining Dave and me on the program today, talking about what you're, how you're transforming landmark. Good luck in your presentation this afternoon. I'm sure a lot of folks will get some great takeaways from your talk. >>Thank you so much. It's been >>Great. Our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas UI path forward for it. We'll be right back after a break.

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World. Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Dell Technology World. We've been covering Dell Tech World since it started really. It used to just be Dell World and there was EMC World after the merger and this is the all virtual version but we're excited to be here and we've got a great panel coming up. I think you're going to enjoy it. Our first guest is Rajesh Janey. He is the Senior Vice President of Global Alliances for APJ for Dell Technologies. Rajesh, where are you coming in from today? >> I'm speaking to you from Gurgaon, India. >> Awesome. It's the power of the virtual, right? It's not all bad that we don't have to get on planes all the time. >> Absolutely. >> And joining him is Utpal Bakshi. He is the Vice President and Global Vertical Head High Tech for Wipro. Utpal, good to see you. >> Nice to see you. >> And where are you calling us in from? >> I'm from Dallas, Texas. Actually suburb outside of Dallas called South Lake. >> Oh, excellent. Great to see you and again didn't have to get on a plane to do this so not all bad. And also joining us is Satish Yadavalli. He is the Vice President and Global Practice Head, Cloud and Infrastructure Services for Wipro. Satish, where are you joining us from? >> Hi, I'm joining from Bangalore, India. >> Excellent. Welcome. So gentlemen let's just jump into it. Wipro's a huge services firm, does a lot of work with Dell so I wonder Rajesh if you can talk really about the importance of partnerships and the importance of having somebody like Wipro within the Dell ecosystem. >> Absolutely. Thank you for having us on with Wipro. Wipro and we have had a partnership which is over two decades old and we have a multifaceted 360 degree kind of relationship with Wipro. Wipro is a platinum partner and what's more while we bring a lot of technology and products and the depth of product which are relevant to customer's transformation scenarios today, coupled with Wipro's consulting and services and design abilities this becomes an unbeatable power house so to say whereby we can work closely with a customer to help them transform and live in what we are calling the next normal. >> Yeah that's great. Utpal to you there's a lot of interesting trends going on. We've had cloud and big data been going on for a lot but really the talk in social media is what's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CIO or COVID and we all know what the answer is. So we've got a lot of new stuff in terms of digital transformation, working from anywhere, workforce transformation. Wonder if you can speak a little bit about how COVID has accelerated some of the priorities that your customers are trying to get done. >> Yeah. I think that's a great point. Wipro has been transforming over the last several years. We were a strong, large scale system integration partner, large IT organization but over the last several years we pivoted hard into the digital transformation world moving into the design side, leading the design, moving to cloud and helping our clients help make that journey and all of that got accelerated with the whole COVID situation. The work from home became all pervasive and the whole virtualization of the workforce really pivoted with some of our key transformational ideas around live workspace and the virtual desk which we've been working very closely with Dell have taken shape. So that has been a big part of our ongoing strategy. Doing the modernization off the network has also accelerated the customer networks and infrastructure was not necessarily set up for enabling these hybrid work environment. A lot of our clients are coming back and saying they want to modernize and actually accelerate. So that has all changed with COVID. Some of it is very positive actually for the business. >> Right. >> From an SI perspective. >> Satish, you've got cloud and infrastructure in your title. Public cloud really changed the game when Amazon kind of came on the scene and now we're seeing this evolution and change over time between a public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud and cloud on cloud. I wonder if you could speak to and then even have an AWS inside of other people's clouds. They're trying to get it out there. The evolution of cloud both as a technology but really more as a way of thinking in terms of rapid deployment of new functionality to support the business and what you're seeing with your customers today. >> So let me share a perspective, right? Enterprises today are looking at options to extract greater value from hybrid cloud investment. It's a brownfield environment today where customers have their existing data centers but the hyperscalers have really come into play now and right cloud is the strategy which most of our customers embrace to address the market demands which are primarily focused on business outcomes today. As Wipro we have invested in developing a holistic extensible platform led approach called Wipro BoundaryLess Enterprise to drive business outcomes to customers. So the BLE construct is all about providing a ready to use plug-and-play platforms making IT easily consumable from multiple stakeholder personas be it admins, be it line of businesses, developers and partners. So basically we have built a holistic solution and our BLE solutions has majorly five building blocks. The first building block would be the BoundaryLess Data Center. The second is the BoundaryLess Container Platform. The third is the BoundaryLess Data Protection Platform. The fourth is the BoundaryLess Cloud Exchange where we get together all the internet connections and define the software defined network part to give access to the workloads across hybrid environments and the BoundaryLess Integration Platform which we call it as BLIP. Basically this is what we have put together to deliver an outcome to the customers powered by BLE. >> So BLE again, you call it the BoundaryLess Enterprise. What's the most important components of BLE? What are the things that most people are missing to actually implement the strategy? >> So if I actually build on you, right? The five building blocks let me elaborate in detail. The first is on the BoundaryLess Data Center. This enables our clients to deliver an infrastructure as a service across data centers and public clouds and enables customers to seamlessly move workloads from Edge to Cloud and manage them in a consistent and efficient model. That's the first building block of our BLE. The second important building block is container, right? We all know today container orchestration is key across hybrid cloud and with micro services and architectures becoming more prominent we see huge search for managing various Kubernetes enrollments with our clients. So our BLCP platform leverages solutions like VMware Tanzu, which is again a Dell company to enable clients manage the multicloud Kubernetes enrollments through a single pane of glass and provide seamless migration and movement of workloads across cloud environments. That's going to be the key in the future with microservices being dominant and every enterprise embracing microservices architectures this becomes very important building block in our overall solution. The third important stuff is BoundaryLess Data Protection. Now that data is all cross in hybrid cloud environment and application actually consume this data it is important to protect the data which is intellectual property and very critical to every business. So with the BLDP platform we ensure that we deliver availability, solidarity, security and reliability of cloud adoption increasingly and rapidly across multicloud platforms. So our solution leverages the DTC of Dell and other existing Dell storages and data production solutions to offer seamless and right cost models which will be very critical for any cloud transformation and schedules as we move forward. The fourth point which I was talking about is BLCE. This is basically a cloud exchange where in a hybrid cloud environment you need to establish connectivities across PaaS and SaaS platforms as well as on-premise networks to provide seamless access to data and the workloads which are in multicloud scenarios. So that's about BLCE. With respect to BLIP it is an integration platform. Today we are in a software defined world and when I talk about providing a single pane of glass solution it is important for us to have an integration platform where I can bring all EPIs together and do northbound and southbound integrations with the architectures of clients and the cloud providers to spin off workloads, to commission, decommission and provide a seamless consumption experience to clients across multiple hyperscalers and on-premise infrastructure. >> Thank you for that summary. I think you hit on all the big trends. I want to go back to you Rajesh 'cause you said that this is a really unique time. You've been in the business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of other transformations and you've seen a lot of big trends. Why is this one different? What makes where we are today such a unique point in time in this IT industry journey? >> Excellent. I think I would say we are in a period of what is called an enforced innovation. While most of the time transformation in IT has been very, very sequential or continuous I think we are seeing an order of shift in the transformation and this whole situation is forcing everyone to accelerate the pace of innovation and transformation. There are two key priorities for every organization in this time. One, build resilient operations and second employee safety. These two parameters have forced the organization to look at their businesses differently, look at their IT infrastructure differently and created a sort of opportunity you can say which is ripe for Wipro's BoundaryLess Enterprise because there are no boundaries. People are working from home. They're no longer in an office confined or boundary. So that's smart. Coming back we are seeing an accelerated innovation. That means our partnership to deliver customer transformation at scale becomes all the more important. Bringing all the good technologies of Dell on one side and combining it Wipro's size, scale and services help us lead in the marketplace for customer transformation. And what's more, we are adding our Dell financial services solutions as Dell Tech on demand to enable all this to be consumed as a service and with flexible payment options which Wipro helps us translate it to customer offerings. >> That's great. Utpal, I want to go to you and get your perspective on how customers, in terms of this boundaryless, how things have changed since March 15th which at least here in the US, I don't know if in India it was on the same date when everything basically got shut down. So it was this light switch moment. Everybody worked from home, no planning, no thought like ready, set, go to now we're six, seven, eight months into this thing and clearly we're it's a marathon not a sprint and even if we go back to some semblance of what was the old normal the new normal is going to be different and everyone is not going to go back to work full time like they did before. So how, from a customer perspective, from a technology implementation perspective and from an initiative and getting this stuff done how has that changed pre-COVID then oh my goodness, it's the light switch moment and now it's, hey, we're in this for the long term. >> Yeah. I think Rajesh did hit upon that a little bit. This is truly that moment where it was a forced innovation. Some of it was happening anyways and it was bound to happen but I think the COVID kind of accelerated all of it. What has impacted is it all started with, okay, how do we enable work from home? And that is when the whole BoundaryLess infrastructure, the virtual desk solutions and all of that started getting impact. I think after that most companies have realized that this is not a short term fix. It is a longterm it's going to be here for staying so they wanted to have a longterm fix so they wanted to come in with innovation but at the same time from a business perspective they've had impact in business so they wanted very creative business models for them to get set with the technology innovation quicker but they didn't want to do it in a traditional way of paying it all upfront and moving it to that. So that is where the creativity in terms of joint innovation which we did with Dell, in flexible payment options, bringing in some kind of an asset lease model and things like that have gained traction. A lot more conversations are around we want to transform help us find a way to make the transformation sooner with maybe less investment upfront and find a way to fund this from the future savings we'll get so that we can be ready for the future without necessarily impacting the bottom line today. All of that has changed, I would say in summary, has accelerated the adoption and the rate of change but it has also led to all of us thinking some creative business models and new approaches to doing business. >> Right, right. Satish back to you. What are the big conflicts that always exist? There's innovation versus security, right? And enabling innovation and giving people more power, more tools, more data to do things at the same time now your tax surface has increased you don't necessarily have everybody locked down on their home infrastructure and they were forced into this. When people are talking about digital transformation, how do they continue to drive forward and how are you helping them on innovation and enabling innovation at the same time as you talked about keeping the data protected and really thinking about business resiliency and continuity in this to increase the tax surface not only because of mobile, but now with the working from home thing? It's increased exponentially. >> Yeah. So I would just take an example of how Wipro handled this pandemic when it hit us and what solutions we get. So let me just give you a perspective. As we all know the current pandemic has disrupted many industries and we were no exception. Basically COVID has brought to the forefront many crucial factors in terms of business continuity process, the quality of employee experience and the automation connected with the employees. So while we enable our employees to connect, collaborate, and communicate with ease from anywhere from any device in a secure way with a consistent user experience powered by Wipro LiVE Workspace platform which actually takes care of delivering a seamless onboarding of user via the Wipro LiVE Workspace platform and consume all the services the way they used to traditionally consume when they were working from office? So this is something which is the power of Wipro LiVe Workspace platform we have implemented to deliver a seamless employee experience access to the workspaces. That's one but also there are some learnings. When we implemented the solutions on the flip side as businesses we must also acknowledge and be cognizant of the fact that employees are trying hard to juggle between frequent interruptions at home and notifications from various applications we receive both on corporate and personal devices. Basically in a nut shell it is difficult to have the culture of corporate to be working from home. Basically that's another big learning. While all of us are adjusting to this new normal we are in constant touch with our employees and trying to improve the overall employee connect and experience. From a solution perspective let me just give you what we actually did. We have close to 175,000 employees across the globe. Suddenly started working from home post lockdown. What does this mean? The traffic pattern suddenly changed the directions which were traditionally moving on a East to West direction started moving North to South. Basically this means a 100% of the workforce in a corporate started coming from the internet to access the corporate infrastructure and then gain access to the customer network. So basically we had to quickly swing in with our solutions and got our engineering teams to re engineer and tweet the infrastructure and security architecture to this new normal. By leveraging our Wipro BLE and video architectures which is powered by Dell VxRail, NSX we were able to spin off and build capacity on on-prem as well as on cloud in less than 24 hours post one got approvals from the client. Lastly we also deployed a back to work IoT solution which helped our employees to get back to work safely. Basically the solution offers various security parameters. Apart from traditional COVID updates it also helps in scanning the employees' temperatures, employee movement within the office premises, bundled with video analytics and enables secure touch less access to the ODCs for employees who are coming back to work. So we are putting all these solutions together and we pretty much seamlessly were able to navigate from the pandemic situation and get our business back to operations in a matter of days. >> 175,000 People. It's really interesting to think about how that network traffic completely changed from inside the firewalls to everything coming from the outside. It's a lot of people to get working from home right away so congratulations on that. As we come to a close Rajesh, I want to come back to you and talk about again, partnership in the age of this rapid acceleration of technology adoption, new technology move. We talked about the work from home. We've talked about cloud. We haven't talked very much about there's this other big thing that's coming down the pike which is 5G and IoT and kind of this entirely new scale of communication that's machine to machine, not person to person and now these connected devices. The amount of traffic continues to go up into the right at an accelerating rate. Tell us a little bit about the meaningfulness of having a partnership like Wipro that you guys can build solutions around new cutting edge technologies and have that real close connection with the customer or with all the supporting services. >> We'd love to. And maybe first I'll give you a perspective on how our employee base started working from home. Some other statistics that they wanted to show maybe add on towards what Satish said. We transitioned 120,000 employees. Twice the normal to work from home within two weeks and every day we are running something like 20,000 meetings and 16 million zoom minutes per day. That's the kind of traffic IT has seen. >> 16 million zoom minutes per day? >> Zoom minutes per day. >> Wow. >> That's the kind of traffic and our VPN traffic user load just tripled. At software or IT we call Dell digital. It was just a smooth and seamless experience. Now coming back, you said rightly. While we have partnered so far to deliver to the solution which are here today and the customers needs which are here today, what are we going to do for the future needs especially ie 5G IoT? We believe as a corporation that Edge is going to be the next wave of innovation. And next way our customers will benefit. Therefore connectivity to Edge via 5G becomes critical. IoT devices and managing the traffic and contain it there itself rather than flowing it back to data center becomes critical. As an example Wipro and Dell technologies are using our hyper converge solutions along with VMware telco and software for a European telco to provide automation and AI to deliver rapid results for the customer. So these are just early parts of it. We are partnering with Wipro to build solutions around 5G as well as telecom related innovation that'll come into the picture. IoT Satish spoke about a simple example of employee attendance. Imagine this is a need which will only accelerate from every organization, multiply it with the automation and AI that needs to be built into machines and feeding all the data back to drive some intelligence and refine the processes, refine the business outcomes. So I think we are working together on many such things and what's important is in all this, when the universe just explodes to devices and millions of devices, security becomes a paramount feature and we are working with Wipro to build what is called an embedded security into each of the solutions that we are designing. Security cannot be an afterthought or a bolt on it's becoming an integral part of the overall solution as we move towards the Edge. >> Yeah, right. And I think as Satish talked about all the distractions and notifications there're a lot of great opportunities for applied AI too to help people know what to do next. It's hard to be context switching all the time, not only on your work, but also the spouses working from home, the kids are doing homeschooling. It's not an optimal environment at all. Gentlemen thank you for your time. Congratulations on your partnership and hope you have a fantastic Dell Tech World. Sorry we can't be in person but this is not too bad. >> Thank you. >> Jeff >> Thank you >> Thank you Utpal, thank you Satish for your partnership. >> All right. Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Alright. Stay with us for continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. I'm Jeff Frick. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover virtual experience brought to you by HP. >>Welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. This is the virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, and I'm joined by a couple of guys who were gonna talk through one of HPC ease. Longest partnerships. We've got shells. No Ryan and the Senior director Ecosystem Sales or North America at HP And Dr Rajesh, It's really a Boston. The global head of sales and solutions for the TCS. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. >>Yeah, Thank you. >>So, first question for you is I mentioned HP and TCS have been partners for over 30 years. Talk to our audience about the partnership and how it has evolved to where it is today. >>Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. Firstly, you know, I'm pretty excited to be part of this Cube interview with garages. You know, I know him personally for over five years through various interactions globally and this new role for North America. This is our strategy and global system integrator partner. And this is a longstanding partnership between HP and this years has grown multi falls over the last 30 years. Ah, we you know, pretty much enjoyed every single I would say transactions or the business engagements, what we've had so far. And we liberate each other for our internal I T requirements and also to drive joint, go to market initiatives across the world. That's making this a truly 3 60 degree partnership. There is a lot of heritage, a mutual trust and respect between both organizations at all levels and the complimentary offerings. You know what you will hear a lot more in the next couple of questions. Uh, we bring to the table together are very unique and very differentiating to the clients which are >>excellent. Dr. Rajesh, walk us through some of those joint offerings that TCS cloud in h e or delivering. >>Yeah, so far. So far. Thanks. I just want to thank the HP team for giving me the opportunity to up to a larger audience. Andi, This new normal. This is the first time I'm doing an interview like this. Thanks for that experience. Actually, as Jules mentioned, this relationship goes a long way. I am talking about the larger PCs were a long relationship, Andi, specifically on the easiest load we started this journey in a very, very practical way. Five years back it was it was started in a very, very small trial and error basis. We started this relationship RPC explode. But at this point in time after So yes, we have taken this into ah, new norm, actually. So I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the examples We have a very major retailer in Germany, which we work so that it was a $1,000,000 deals. Our busiest on GHB. Yes, you wanna unique offering to the customer s AP and a space on that is really growing a lot. And that's the one offering I would like to tell the audience that really has picked up and spent on the relationship in the German region. Right now we are trying to take that up, offering across on other other regions also, so that is one of the key offerings that we are doing it. The other offerings are multiple offerings we are doing. But again, I want to highlight the storage as a service offering. Great. It's everybody in the industry today, Andi, we are experimenting that in the initial stages in Australia we started in Australia a small offering. And now we are expanding it in the US geography in a big way. And this year we are going to make that as a unique offering. And we're going to offer they're all over cloud customers as a storage as a service offering. Also multiple other offering, Lisa. But I just thought that I like this tool which are making our business. We're making a lot of business together with these two offerings >>is the, uh, s AP opportunity that you mentioned is that the Hana as a service that TCS is delivered? >>That's correct. So it's ah, it's a service. But the uniqueness of that particular offering is we jointly created the architecture so that the customer can use that, like a database as a service model. Right? So it was It was not available that time in the industry so easily like what we offered at that point in time to do enough years back. We offer that particular said we spoke a summer and interestingly, that particular offering the customer was using s AP themselves as a service initially, and they migrated their to us actually from Maybe that's a reason they bought HP and TCS. There is like a summer on this API and a platform. So that's the That's the interesting story under, >>if we didn't do that just a little bit further, I wanted the audience to understand the impact that this partnership has H p E and TCS delivering Hana as a service or your customers. What are the benefits there than what the customer, as you said was doing previously? >>Yeah, yeah, I think I just want to highlight the three or four points that make that this offering very unique, and that helps the customer number one is associated with model. So the customer has got the complete flexibility off going up and down like a true cloud model, right? And so it is a really a unique proposition at that point in time, where the customer not a story about using less for some time and then using more sometimes so it's kind of a complete, flexible model that we offered at the time. Number two is, it's a complete customization is possible. It is not like a fixed architecture. The architecture is so flexible so that the customer business needs can be met through the architectural changes. So it's not like normally people think that lotus highly standardized architecture, right? So that has gone out, and we were given a flexible architecture for the customer. That is the number two number three, obviously the cost end of the day. There's a business case which we need to make it work right for the customer. So obviously, with the PCs and HP coming together, we were able to do the costarred, want age with a customer that is the third advantage of that. The last, but not the least, is the quality of service it is it is all about. I always used to tell my partners that selling is easy. Delivering it is what it's important it is, which will make the customer to stick with you, right? The were given and delivery quality experience who our customer s so that I think that makes a very unique proposition from a technology perspective from a pricing. But but from an architecture and also from the delivery perspective. So those are the few few things I just thought that I violated. >>Excellent. So a couple of words that you mentioned popped into my mind as really even more well, have a different meeting as we're in summer 2020 flexibility and unique offering chills back to you from a go to market perspective. How is that relationship with HP? And he says, changing in the Koven era. >>Yeah, it's pretty interesting, and I would like to call it an example off. You know, what we see is is that you themselves during the corporate times, you know, it also came in the in the pets close to 90% of the workforce. We're 100% productive. Uh, and, uh, they have a plan to go 75% of the employees, you know, go being remote by 2025. Right? So that's the journey they're taking on. And another thing that you notice there's a lot of the, you know, During the corporate times, many of the customers were looking for solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure. So they wanted their employees to be productive, bi directional and in the other area of focus was like a TCP, you know, how do I kind of make sure on the applications are available to you? The customers and also do their internal organizations. So we've seen a lot off. I would say engagement with that is I could picture team and also the solution team toe address This requirements off the market joint >>when we look at certain things that now might even be more important with this new normal, if you will, that the fact that most companies are still in phase one of this work, everyone works from home trying to get to a phase to that might see some some maybe by function groups coming back to the office and then getting to this third. Maybe it's the new nirvana of some hybrid workforce, where there's gonna be some that come back permanently, and some that Don't and Tony Unirea chose, I saw was quoted last month as saying he thinks that 50% of the workforce will only 50% will come back. So in this new not only hybrid I T environment in which your customers love it now, this new pending hybrid workforce environment how are you addressing some of the concerns together with respect to the network connectivity security, >>I will just take the cost anything. It's a very, very interesting at least when we all ended up in this pandemic in March. We really very, very nervous, actually, because everyone has to operate remotely on we are. We are dealing with the customer data. It's ah, it's very, very important that we have a secure environment to access the information and at the same time maintain the integrity of the data and also the quality off the plate. Those other two primary objective for us. We don't want to compromise on quality. We don't want to compromise on security from a cloud perspective. So the solution we have put in really, I just give you one example there was on the airline Ah, UK based the airline industry airline company which they need that workforce overnight. They want everybody to go remote because you know you cape on. They just put up condition that nobody can work from the office overnight and then terror ports as toe work from home purchases, implement the solution for them on our clothes overnight and make that 1000 employees store from home the next day morning. All of them started working with full quality of services and also with a full security aspect of it, has been taken care ornate on the solution. We are deployed. Very interesting case study on The important thing we have done is use the technology to the port. Use all kinds of technology to make sure that the employees that work from home we took care of the network connectivity. We took our eye off the security aspects off the data from security aspects. We've implemented all the security functions from really APIs. But people, Children stop perspective. Andi, make the workforce enable that. But now you are talking about millions off millions of workers going to work from home. Right? Because it is one example for one company we have done that now the easiest themselves has got more than 400 1000 employees. And we are talking about millions off our pores, going to work from home on going forward. So that is I'm seeing this as a big opportunity. It's not that everybody has are just this at this point in time, I'm seeing this as an opportunity where on the cloud easiest cloud kind off. The solution is going to help them to achieve this. And this is a great opportunity for not only for PCs, but also for HP because the solution we're putting together with the HP is more on the digital or course how we can enable the people to work from home, not compromising on as I mentioned from a security you're in from millions perspective. So I'm seeing this as an opportunity for both the organization, and it's a long way to go is we need to work on this. It's not. We don't have a magic want to make the millions off workers to work from home, but it is going to have all soon and probably in the next step. Yeah, so we may achieve this, impair people off. The workforce is going to go remotely on this list. So that's that. And my take on this >>is so the impact that HP and TCS Herb being able to make for customers who have had to massively transform their entire workforce overnight, as he said, to work from home to talk about some of the new maybe new solutions or new business opportunities that HPC is partnering with TCS shells, we'll start with you in this new era, >>Yeah, so if you look at it, I just taking it again on extension off of the projects. What he just mentioned about the percentage of employees going remote Lisa across industries today. I would say less than 20% of the employees are actually working remote or they have the ability. But the organizations have the ability to support the employees going, and if you have to take it to 50% so you can look at the kind of opportunity we have both as HP and as PCs. So we bring in a lot of best in breed infrastructure from for enabling the employee workforce to know where it is. I would say capacity off workloads and it's all workload specific. And what business does this or when people Pretty easy as we kind of bundle that creating a reference architecture or a giant architect picture addressing the customers by industry word. So because one what suits for one vertical may not be really suiting well for a different world, right? For example, if you take a banking sector are playing, a workstation solution would look very different from somebody's doing remote work in retail, so we kind of continuously engage with the PCs, and that's where both of us have joint lab as well, where our technologies and pieces technologies come together, working on joint solutions and assisting the market in terms of the opportunity lights. And we offer this as part of A C is our digital workplace offerings. >>Are your conversations Dr Additional go to you or your conversations when you're jointly selling, changing in terms of who your audience is? Is this now a C level conversation? Since these leaders and we've heard leaders of Google and Facebook already last month saying Work from home extended still 2021. Is this now at the C suite level, where you guys are helping them really understand how to completely change and digitize their entire way of doing business? >>Absolutely. I think it's a great question, and it's actually the opportunity goes beyond the work from home solution. As you rightly I want to know that it is. It is all about digitization. It is all about digitizing their whole business process. It is not anymore infrastructure. Our application solution. It is more about really finding that business process be defending. The way the business is going to operate in future is the discussion we are having so a lot of these discussions are happening at a very, very high level and with the business team also directly so earlier, you used to interact with the technology partners off our organization. But now we are interacting directly with the head of business are the C level except of the company. And that is the reason the exact reason is Ah, you. If you want your ports to be productive remotely, you can't just offer them on network on. You can't offer them just a solution to work from home. But you need to really find your whole business process you need. You need to digitize your infrastructure. You need to digitize your application. You need to rethink your whole process off. You're operating on it, so that's what I'm seeing. It's not only an opportunity for our players like a business cloud, but it is the opportunity for a bigger opportunity for PCs. And it should be not only in terms off on infrastructure in our cloud business, it goes beyond that. So that is that is the kind of an opportunity we're seeing, especially in the in the sectors of healthcare you're seeing major reforms are happening in the healthcare industry as we speak, and obviously manufacturing is going to go through a lot of changes. Also from that. And retail obviously has gone through a lot of changes already in terms of online, uh, stuff, but know that also going to go through changes in this new era? Yes, >>I have to ask you shelled, talking about redefining? That's a word that we've seen so many years in a row at tech conferences, right, this technology redefining this business or that industry. And now, of course, we're being redefined by an invisible virus. But how? How is the sales process being redefined? Is it a lot more accelerated because businesses have to put together new plans to continue operations? >>Yeah, again, a great question. Is this how you have? You know, I would say it's divided by industry body. It's not a uniform thing by, as not British was saying, every industry has got its own, its own set of challenges and its own set of opportunities, and some of them are really actually doing well even in times like and some of them have seen, Really. I mean, like, travel our transportation or you know some of those industries are, and even hospitality that's kind of affected big time. So our view of you know, the entire sales engagement of the processes we're spending more time on there. We really need to focus and which can help improve the businesses. Right? So the conversation's ready from How do I take the cost out in terms of how can I make a little more investment to get greater returns from the business? So it's like it's completely, I would say, an interesting pain and engaging compositions and decisions are happening. So we, if you look at us from an automatic perspective, the Internet to the sales team is armed with various virtual tools like we know you zoom views Skype using SMS teens. So all the tools available to make sure that we're able to connect with all our partners and customers on do enable joint business together. >>I just want oh, I add to it, Lisa, 111 point. I want bad, Really interesting change I'm seeing on the sales is normally we respond to it. I asked from a customer that is a sales happens. I want this many days. Do it and then what you can do with a solution that is a normal sales process. What I have seen that has changed completely. Yes, we go and tell the customer, Is this what you need Actually, to make you yourself your business? Better? This is the new offerings I'm having good. And this offering is going to help you to solve the problem what you are having today. So we are engaging a different level off sales conversation today with our customers. We know the problem of the customer because we are working with them for many years and we know exactly what they're going through. And we also know what new offerings we are having in this. So we are engaging the discussion with the customer doing that. This is my new offering. This is going to help you to solve this problem. But that is a different angle of sales we have seen nowadays they spend on it. >>The last question shells to you. We started our interview today talking about the HP TCS relationship. You talked about how it's evolved. Last question. You talked to me about H B's strategy. How does it match TCS Alfa Cloud offering. >>Yeah, so again, a great question, Lisa, if you look at our strategy, is to accelerate the enterprises with it. Centric and cloud enable solutions which are workload up, optimized and delivered everything as a service. And whatever you heard from Dr Rogers through this entire conversation was about how do we give as a service model you gave an example of honor. You gave an example off, you know, going how optimizing workloads for video and getting employees to be able to be productive remotely and all of that kind of extremely resonate well with, you know, what we see is confined to price. Cloud offering is bringing to the table for the customer and the underlying platform. You know, we kind of elaborate extensively and closely with the easiest architecture. Seem to have the HP portfolio off. You know, the compute and storage portfolio integrated as part of their offering, and we go together to market, you know, and addressing and kind of an ask service model. 1,000,000,000. >>Excellent. Well, shells Dr. Rajesh, pleasure talking with you both today about what UCS and H e are doing together and some of the ways that you're really helping businesses move forward in these uncertain times, we appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you for represents. Thanks. Thank >>you. Dr Rajesh. >>My guest. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover virtual experience brought to you by HP. >>Welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. This is the virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, and I'm joined by a couple of guys who were gonna talk through one of HPC ease. Longest partnerships. We've got shells. No Ryan and the senior director Ecosystem sales for North America at HP and Dr Rajesh Boston, the global head of sales and solutions for the TCS. Wow. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you. >>So, first question for you, as I mentioned, HP and TCS have been partners for over 30 years. Talk to our audience about the partnership and how it has evolved to where it is today. >>Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. Firstly, you know, I'm pretty excited to be part of this Cube interview with garages. I know. I know him personally for over five years through various interactions globally and this new role for North America. This is our strategy and global system integrator partner. And this is a longstanding partnership between HP and this years has grown multi falls over the last 30 years. We you know, pretty much enjoyed every single I would say transactions or the business engagements, what we've had so far. And we liberate each other for our internal I T requirements and also to drive joint, go to market initiatives across the world. That's making this a truly a 3 60 degree partnership. There is a lot of heritage, a mutual trust and respect between both organizations at all levels and the complimentary offerings. You know what you will hear a lot more in the next couple of questions we bring to the table together are very unique and very differentiating to the clients, which are >>excellent. Dr. Rajesh walk us through some of those joint offerings that TCS cloud in h e or delivering. >>Yeah, so far so far. Thanks. I just want to thank the HP team for giving me the opportunity to off to a larger audience. Andi, This new normal. This is the first time I'm doing an interview like this. Thanks for that experience. Actually, as James mentioned, this relationship goes a long way. I am talking about the larger PCs were a long relationship. Andi, specifically on the easiest flowed. We started this journey in a very, very practical way. Five years back it was it was started in a very, very small trial and error basis. We started this relationship RPC explode. But at this point in time after So yes, we have taken this into, ah, new norm, actually. So I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the examples We have a very major retailer in Germany, which we work so that it was a multi $1,000,000 deals, our busiest on GHB. He has been a unique offering to the customer s AP, and a space on that is really growing a lot. And that's the one offering I would like to tell the audience that really has picked up and spent on the relationship in the German region. Right now we are trying to take that up, offering across on other other regions also, so that is one of the key offerings that we are doing it. The other offerings are multiple offerings we are doing, but again, I want to highlight the storage as a service offering. Great. It's everybody in the industry today, Andi, we are experimenting that in the initial stages in Australia, we started in Australia a small offering. And now we are expanding it in the US geography in a big way. And this year we are going to make that as a unique offering. And we're going to offer they're all over cloud customers as a storage as a service offering. Also, multiple other offering. Lisa. But I just thought that I like this tool which are making our business. We're making a lot of business together with these two offerings >>is the, uh, s AP opportunity that you mentioned is that the Hana as a service that TCS is delivered? >>That's correct. So it's ah, it's a service. But the uniqueness of that particular offering is be jointly created the architecture so that the customer can use that, like a database as a service model. Right? So it was It was not available that time in the industry so easily like what we offered at that point in time to do enough years back. We offer that particular said we spoke a summer and interestingly, that particular offering the customer was using s AP themselves as a service initially, and they migrated their to us actually from Maybe that's a reason they bought HP and PCs. That is like a summer on this API and a platform. So that's the That's the interesting story under, >>if we didn't do that just a little bit further, I wanted the audience to understand the impact that this partnership has H p E and TCS delivering Hana as a service for your customers. What are the benefits there than what the customer, as you said was doing previously? >>Yeah, yeah, I think I just want to relay the three or four points that make that this offering very unique, and that helps the customer number one is associated with model. So the customer has got the complete flexibility off going up and down like a true cloud model, right? And so it is a really a unique proposition at that point in time, where the customer not a story about using less for some time and then using more sometimes. So it's kind of a complete, flexible model that we offered at the time. Number two is, it's a complete customization is possible. It is not like a fixed architecture. The architecture is so flexible so that the customer business needs can be met through the architectural changes. So it's not like normally people think that lotus highly standardized architecture, right? So that has gone out, and we were given a flexible architecture for the customer. That is the number two number three, obviously the cost end of the day. There's a business case which we need to make it work right for the customer. So obviously, with the PCs and HP coming together, we were able to do the costarred, want age with a customer that is the third advantage of that. The last, but not the least, is the quality of service it is it is all about. I always used to tell my partners that selling is easy. Delivering it is what it's important it is, which will make the customer to stick with you, right? The were given and delivery quality experience who our customer s so that I think that makes a very unique proposition from a technology perspective from a pricing, but from an architecture and also from the delivery perspective. So those are the few few things I just thought that I violated. >>Excellent. So a couple of words that you mentioned popped into my mind as really even more well have a different meeting as we're in summer 2020 flexibility and unique. Offering chills back to you from a go to market perspective. How is that relationship with HP? And he says, changing in the Koven era. >>Yeah, it's pretty interesting, and I would like to call it an example off. You know, what we see is is that you themselves during the corporate times, you know, it also came in the pets close to 90% of the workforce. We're 100% productive. Uh, and, uh, they have a plan to go 75% of the employees, you know, but go being remote by 2025. So that's the journey they're taking on. And another thing that you notice there's a lot of the, you know, During the corporate times, many of the customers were looking for solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure. So they wanted their employees to be productive, bi directional and in the other area of focus was like a TCP, you know, how do I kind of make sure on the applications are available to you, the customers and also do their internal organizations? So we've seen a lot off. I would say engagement with that is I could picture team and also the solution team toe address This requirements off the market jointly >>when we look at certain things that now might even be more important with this new normal, if you will, that the fact that most companies are still in phase one of this work, everyone works from home trying to get to a face to that might see some some maybe by function groups coming back to the office and then getting to this third. Maybe it's the new nirvana of some hybrid workforce, where there's gonna be some that come back permanently, and some that Don't and Tony Unirea chose, I saw was quoted last month as saying, I think that 50% of the workforce will only 50% will come back. So in this new not only hybrid I T environment in which your customers love, but now this new pending hybrid workforce environment, how are you addressing some of the concerns together with respect to the network connectivity security, >>I I'll just take the cost anything. It's a very, very interesting at least when we all ended up in this pandemic in March. We really very, very nervous, actually, because everyone has to operate remotely on we are. We are dealing with the customer data. It's ah, it's very, very important that we have a secure environment to access the information and at the same time maintain the integrity of the data and also the quality off the plate. Those other two primary objective for us. We don't want to compromise on quality. We don't want to compromise on security from a cloud perspective. So the solution we have put in really I just give you one example there was on the airline Ah, UK basically are living in the spirit of the company which they need that workforce overnight. They want everybody to go remote because you know you cape on. They just put up a condition that nobody can work from the office overnight on the entire or ports as toe work from home, PTC is implemented the solution for them on our clothes overnight and make that 1000 employees store from home the next day morning all of them started working with the full quality of services and also with a full security aspect of it has been taken care or made on the solution. We are deployed. Very interesting case study on The important thing we have done is use the technology to the poor. Use all kinds of technology to make sure that the employees that work from home we took care of the network connectivity. We took our eye off the security aspects off the data from security aspects. We've implemented all the security functions from a media perspective. Actually stop perspective, Andi. Make the workforce enable that. But now you are talking about millions off millions of workers going to work from home. Right, Because it is one example for one company we have done that note easiest themselves has got more than 400 1000 employees, and we are talking about millions off work force going to work from home on going forward. So that is, I'm seeing this as a big opportunity. It's not that everybody has are just this. At this point in time, I'm seeing this as an opportunity where on the cloud easiest cloud kind off. The solution is going to help them to achieve this, and this is a great opportunity for not only for PCs but also for HP because the solution we're putting together with the HP is more on the digital or course how we can enable the people to work from home, not compromising on as I mentioned from a security you're in from millions perspective. So I'm seeing this as an opportunity for both the organization, and it's a long way to go is we need to work on this. It's not. We don't have a magic want to make the millions off workers to work from home, but it is going to have all soon and probably in the next step. Yeah, so we may achieve this. Impair people's off. The workforce is going to go remotely on this list. So that's that. And my take on this >>is so the impact that HP and TCS herb being able to make for customers who have had to massively transform their entire workforce overnight, as he said, to work from home to talk about some of the new maybe new solutions or new business opportunities that HPC is partnering with TCS shells, we'll start with you in this new era, >>Yeah, so if you look at it, I just taking it again on extension, offered up by just what you just mentioned about the percentage of employees going Lisa across industries today. I would say less than 20% of the employees are actually working remote or they have the ability. But the organizations have the ability to support the employees going, and if you have to take it to 50% so you can look at the kind of opportunity we have both as HP and as PCs. So we bring in a lot of best in breed infrastructure from for enabling the employee workforce to know where it is. I would say capacity off workloads and it's all workload specific. And what business does is over when people pretty easy as we kind of bundle that creating a reference architecture or a giant architect architecture addressing the customers by industry body. So because one what suits for one vertical may not be really suiting well for a different world, right? For example, if you take a banking sector, our traded workstation solution would look very different from somebody's doing remote in a retail. So we kind of continuously engage with the PCs, and that's where both of us have joint lab as well, where our technologies and pieces technologies come together, working on joint solutions and assisting the market in terms of the opportunity lights. And we offer this as part of A C is our digital workplace offerings. >>Are your conversations Dr Additional go to you or your conversations when you're jointly selling, changing in terms of who your audience is? Is this now a C level conversation? Since these leaders and we've heard leaders of Google and Facebook already last month saying Work from home extended still 2021. Is this now at the C suite level, where you guys are helping them really understand how to completely change and digitize their entire way of doing business? >>Absolutely. I think it's a great question, and it's actually the opportunity goes beyond the work from home solution. As you rightly I want to know that it is. It is all about digitization. It is all about digitizing their whole business process. It is not anymore infrastructure. Our application solution. It is more about really finding that business process be defending. The way the business is going to operate in future is the discussion we are having so a lot of these discussions are happening at a very, very high level on with the business team. Also directly, so earlier you used to interact with the technology partners off our organization. But now we are interacting directly with the head of business are the C level except of the company. And that is the reason the exact reason is Ah, you. If you want your ports to be productive remotely, you can't just offer them on network on. You can't offer them just a solution to work from home, But you need to really find your whole business process you need. You need to digitize your infrastructure. You need to digitize your application. You need to rethink your whole process off. You're operating on it, so that's what I'm seeing. It's not only an opportunity for our players like PCs cloud, but it is the opportunity for a bigger opportunity for PCs and be not only in terms off on infrastructure in our cloud business, it goes beyond that. So that is that is the kind of an opportunity we're seeing, especially in the in the sectors of healthcare you're seeing major reforms are happening in the healthcare industry as we speak on, obviously, manufacturing is going to go through a lot of changes. Also from that. And retail obviously has gone through a lot of changes already in terms of online, uh, stuff, but know that also going to goto changes in this new era? Yes, >>I have to ask you shelled talking about redefining? That's a word that we've seen so many years in a row at tech conferences, right, this technology redefining this business or that industry. And now, of course, we're being redefined by an invisible virus. But how is how is the sales process being redefined? Is it a lot more accelerated because businesses have to put together new plans to continue operations? >>Yeah, again, a great question. Is this how you have? You know, I would say it's divided by industry body. It's not a uniform thing. By, as the British was saying, every industry has got its own, its own set of challenges and its own set of opportunities, and some of them are really actually doing well even in times like and some of them have seen, Really. I mean, like, travel our transportation or, you know, some of those industries are and even hospitality that's kind of affected big time. So our view of you know, the entire sales engagement of the processes we're spending more time on there. We really need to focus and which can help improve the businesses. Right? So the conversation's ready from How do I take the cost out in terms of how can I make a little more investment to get greater returns from the business? So it's like it's a completely I would say, an interesting pain and engaging compositions and decisions are happening. So we, if you look at us from an automatic perspective, the sales team is armed with various virtual tools, like We know you zoom views Skype using SMS teens. So all the tools available to make sure that we're able to connect with all our partners and customers on do enable joint business together. >>I just want oh, I add to it, Lisa, 111 point. I want to ride Really interesting change I'm seeing on the sales is normally we respond to ask from a customer that is a sales happens. I want this many days do it and then what you can do with a solution That is the normal sales process. What I have seen that has changed completely. Yes, we go and tell the customer, Is this what you need Actually, to make you yourself your business? Better? This is the new offerings I'm having good. And this offering is going to help you to solve the problem what you are having today. So we are engaging a different level off sales conversation today with our customers. We know the problem of the customer because we are working with them for many years and we know exactly what they're going through. And we also know what new offerings we are having in this. So we are engaging the discussion with the customer doing that. This is my new offering. This is going to help you to solve this problem. But that is a different angle of sales we have seen nowadays in this. A friend of it, >>the last question shells to you. We started our interview today talking about the HP TCS relationship. You talked about how it's evolved. Last question. You talked to me about H B's strategy. How does it match TCS Alfa Cloud offering? >>Yeah, so again, a great question, Lisa, if you look at our strategy is to accelerate the enterprises with it. Centric and cloud enable solutions which are workload optimized and delivered everything as a service. And whatever you heard from Dr Rogers through this entire conversation was about how do we give as a service model you gave an example of Hana? You give an example off, you know, going optimizing workloads for VD I and getting employees to be able to be productive remotely and all of that kind of extremely resonate well with you know, what pieces are defined to. Price cloud offering is bringing to the table for the customer and the underlying platform. You know, we can have yeah, extensively and closely with the easiest architecture being tohave the HP portfolio off. You know, the compute and storage portfolio integrated as part of their offering, and we go together to market, you know, addressing and kind of an ask service model. 1,000,000,000. >>Excellent. Well, shells Dr Rajesh, pleasure talking with you both today about what UCS and H e are doing together in some of the ways that you're really helping businesses move forward in these uncertain times, we appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you. For instance. Thanks. >>Thank you. Dr Rajesh. >>My guest. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Google Cloud Next 2018, brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. (techy music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here. We're in San Francisco for Google Cloud's major conference, Next 2018. I'm John Furrier, here for three days. Wall to wall coverage on day one. We've got two great guests from SignalFX, Karthik Rau, founder and CEO, and Rajesh Raman, who's the chief architect. Signal's a hot startup in the area. Way ahead of its time, but now as the world gets more advanced, the solution is front and center as the value proposition if cloud moves into the mainstream, devops going to a world at large scale. Not just networking, monitoring, applications, you've got service meshes booming, great topic. Karthik, great to see you, Rajesh, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> John, great to be on. >> So, first of all let's just get it out of the way, you guys have some fresh funding in May, so just quickly give an update on the company. You guys raised-- >> Yeah >> A series... >> A series D. >> Series D, give us, but how much? >> Yeah, so we raised $45 million from General Catalyst leading the round back in May, been building a ton of momentum as a company, close to a couple hundred people today. We're using a lot of that to expand internationally. We've got a team in Europe now, just opened up a team in Australia. So, things have been going great. >> Congratulations, we've had chats before, always been impressed. You guys have a great stable of awesome engineers and talent in the company doing some great work, but it begs the question, I always like to get into the what ifs. What if I could have large scale application development environments with programmable infrastructure, how does that change things? So, Karthik, what's... How as that what if changes, now that is what's happening you're starting to see the cloud at scale for the common masses of enterprises, where old ways of doing things are kind of moving away. It's like horse and buggy versus having a car for the first time-- >> Yeah. >> Jobs are changing, but the value doesn't necessarily change. You still go from point A to point B, you still got an engine, people who care about fixing cars, so people just want to drive the cloud, some people want to get under the hood, whole new architecture. >> Yeah. >> What's the what if of if I could have all these resources, what's the challenges and what do you guys solve. >> Well, I think there are a couple of challenges in this new environment. One is the number of components are just orders of magnitude more than they used to be in a cloud environment, right? We went from having physical machines that live for three years in a data center, divide it up into VMs 10 years ago, now divided up into containers for every process. Not only that, but these containers get spun up and spun down every few minutes or every few hours, and so it's just the number of components in the churn is just massive. So, that in and of itself requires a far more analytics-based approach to understand patterns rather than what's happening on an individual component. The second thing that's changed is the operating model's fundamentally different, because now you're building and running web services, and when you're running web services the people who build the software are the ones who technically are responsible for operating it. And so, you know, you have more updates, you've got more people involved, you've got lots of different components that all need to interact with one another, and so having a communication framework across all of these disparate teams become really, really, really critical. So, those are the two fundamental changes as you move from, you know, for operating these modern, massively distributed-- >> Yes. >> Applications. >> And I'll just add just some observation data that we've seeing in theCUBE is those same folks building aren't necessarily operators, so they want to be in and out fast, right? (laughs) >> They don't want to be running and operating all the time, they want to push some code. Melody Meckfessel here at Google ran a survey with developers and said, you know, "What makes you happy," and it was two things that bothered developers: technical debt and speed for deployments, commits, and the commit number was around minutes. If you can't get something done in minutes then they're onto something else, so the mind share attention of developers and technicos. So, this is a challenge at scale when you have technical debt, which we've seen companies come out of the woodwork, "Oh, yeah, "I'm going to automate something, "I'm going to throw some compute at it with the cloud "with the best monitoring package on the planet "and look how great it is," but all they did was just code some instrumentation and that's it. >> Mm-hmm. >> They weren't dealing with a lot of moving parts. Now as more things come in this is a challenge that a lot of companies face. You guys kind of solved this problem... >> Yeah, absolutely, so maybe Rajesh was a part of the team at Facebook that built the Facebook monitoring system, and that's actually what gave us a lot of the vision to start SignalFX five-and-a-half years ago, so maybe-- >> Tell about the protection, the vision-- >> Yeah. >> And what you guys are doing. >> Yeah, so CICD, you know, it kind of, like, underlies a lot of this vision of, like, moving fast. You mentioned that people wanted, like, you know, push their code in a few minutes... The thing that makes that possible is for you to have observability into what's happening while that push happens, because it's one thing to push very fast, it's another thing to recognize that you might have pushed something bad and to be able to revert it very quickly, too. And so, you'd only need, like, you know, good observability into all the things that matter that characterize the health of your system to be able to quickly recognize patterns, to be able to quickly recognize anomalies, and to be able to maybe push forward or even roll back very quickly. So, I think, like, observability is like a very key aspect of this entire CICD story. >> That's great, and that's great to know that you were over at Facebook because obviously Facebook built, at scale from the ground up, a lot of opensource. Obviously they contributed a lot to opensource, but it's interesting, as they matured and you start to see their philosophy change. It used to be move fast, break stuff. >> Yeah. >> To move fast, be reliable. >> Yeah. >> This is now the norm that's the table stakes in cloud. You have to move fast, you got to push code, but you got to maintain an operational integrity. This is, like, not like an option. This is, like, standard. >> Absolutely. >> How do you guys help solve that problem? >> So, I think there are a few different aspects to it. So, the first is to, you know, people need to ensure that they have observability into their application, so this is ensuring that you have the right kind of instrumentation in place. Thankfully this is kind of becoming commoditized right now and getting metrics from your system. The second part, and the more key part, is then being able to process this data in a real time way. You know, have high resolution, very low latency, and then to be able to do real time streaming analytics on this data. In highly elastic environments when things come and go very quickly, the identity of any individual, like, component is less important than the aggregate system behavior, and so you really need the analytics capability to kind of, like, go across this data, do various kinds of aggregations, compare it against past data, do predictive analytics, that sort of thing. So, analytics becomes the very key concept of, you know, how you operate these environments. >> It sounds so easy. >> Yeah, well one thing I'll add to that, so you know, to your point a lot of big companies sometimes are scared by this. You know, "How do we," you know... "We can't move quickly and break things," and everything that they've designed is around having process and structure to check and make sure everything is clean before they push changes out, and now we're in this world where, you know, an intern or a developer can push directly on a production, how do you manage that? The key thing in this modern world when you're trying to release software quickly, Rajesh hit on this earlier, you need the magic undo button. >> Yeah. >> That is the key to this entire process. You need to design your software, you need to design your process, and you need to design your tools so that if you introduce something bad you catch it immediately and you can roll it back. So, lots of devops practices are oriented around this, right? The idea of a canary release, I'm going to roll out an update to one percent of my systems and users, test it out, observe all the metrics, make sure everything is clean before I roll it out to everyone else, and the ability to roll back quickly is also important. But in order to do all of this you need the visibility, you need the metrics, and you need to be able to do analytics on it quickly to identify the patterns as they emerge. >> That's a great point and I'd love to just double down on that and get your thoughts because some of the Google Cloud people who are operating at this scale, I put them on this whole service-centric architecture, because they're services. We're talking about services, managing sets of services, having analytics, observation space, the reverting back and the undo button, the magic button do-over, whatever you want to call it, but the interesting thing is clean. Having a clean service whether it's an API, message queue, or an event, this stuff's happening all over the place in the new services world. How do you guys help there, is that where you guys get involved? Do you see up in that layer, how far up are you guys looking at some of the instrumentation and the insights? >> Yeah, you want to take that? >> Yeah, sure, so you know, the one thing that we really like about SignalFX and we were very keen on when we built the platform is that we are very agnostic about metrics. We're happy to accept metrics from anywhere, we'll take instrumentation-- >> (chuckles) You don't discriminate against metrics. >> We'll take instrumentation from cloud environment, we'll take, you know, metrics from opensource systems and premier applications, so you know, some of these systems are already kind of built in to get metrics from. You know, we talk to the Kafkas and Cassandras of the world, for example. We can also talk to GCP and AWS and grab metrics from their system. I think the interesting question is like when people really are taking the devops philosophy of, like, so how do you instrument your own application, what questions do you want to ask from your environment that answer the critical questions that you kind of have, and so you know, that's the one, that's the next step in the hierarchy of needs is for people to ask the right kinds of questions, and you know, instrument their applications properly. But like having done that, we can go up and down the stack in terms of, like, insight into whether all the way from your cloud environment through opensource systems, all the way up-- >> So, you guys'll take data from anyone, just stream it in-- >> Yeah. >> Normal mechanisms there, what's the value added, where's the secret sauce on SignalFX? >> So, I think value, it's all about analytics. We are all about analytics, so we are able to look at patterns of the data, we can go up and down the stack and correlate across different layers of software, look at interactions across components in your microservice, for example. You know, one really interesting thing that's happening, as you might be aware, like the whole service mesh aspect of it, which lets us, gives us insight into interactions between components-- >> Yeah. >> In a microservices architecture, so you know, we are able to get all that data and give you insight into how your whole system is working. >> So, you guys, you can see in the microservices layer? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> That's powerful. >> And the key point is monitoring really has become an analytics problem, that's what we keep saying, right, because what's happening on an individual component is no longer as interesting as what's happening across the entire service, so you have to aggregate the information and look at the trend across the entire service, but the second thing that's really important is you need to be able to do it quickly, and this is where our streaming real time system really mattes. And people might ask, "Why does it "matter to do something real time." Like, "Seconds versus minutes, can a human actually "process something in seconds versus minutes?" Perhaps not, but everyone's moving towards automation, right? >> Yeah. >> So, if you want to move to a system where you have a closed loop, you have automation, and guess what, all of these modern systems, all the stuff that Google's talking here is all about automation. >> Yeah. >> And in that world seconds versus minutes, it means a tremendous amount of difference, right, where if you can find signals that will tell you there's an emerging problem within seconds and then you can revert a bad code push or you can auto-scale a cluster or you can, you know, change your load balancing algorithms all within seconds, that is what enables you to deliver, you know, 4.9s, 5.9s type of availability. >> And the consequences of not having that is outages-- >> Yeah, outages. >> Performance. >> Performance degradations, unhappy customers. I mean the cost to a brand now of having any kind of a performance issue is enormous, right? People are on Twitter before your team knows about it. (chuckles) >> Actually, you guys have a lot of the things you're solving, what is the core problem that you solve, what's the value proposition if you narrow it down that's high order bit for SignalFX? What's the corporate problem you solve? >> Well, we're solving the monitoring and observation problem for people operating cloud applications, so what happens is when you use SignalFX you have the confidence to move quickly, right? It gives you the safety net to be able to deploy changes on a daily basis, to have the shared context across a distributed team, so if you've got hundreds of two pizza box teams working together we give you that framework, the communication framework and the proactive intelligence to find issues as they emerge and proactively address them. And bottom line what that means is you can move as quickly as a Google or a Facebook or a Netflix even if you're a traditional Fortune 500 company that's regulated, and you know, you think you may not be able to do it but you really can. >> You give them the turbo charge, basically, for the analytics. All right, here's a question for you, what are the core guiding principles for the company? You guys obviously have a lot going on so you've got a core tech team, I mentioned it earlier. >> Mm-hmm. >> What are some of the guiding principles as you guys hire, build product, talk to customers, what's the key DNA of SignalFX? >> Yeah, I would say we are a very impact-driven company, so I'm, you know, very, very proud of all the people that we have on the team. We've got a lot of entrepreneurs who are focused on solving big problems, solving problems that customers may not necessarily know they need at the time, but as the market evolves we're there to solve it for them. So, we're a very customer-centric company. We have fantastic, we invest aggressively in technology, so it's not just about wrapping a pretty UI around, you know, Bolton Tech. We have real differentiated technology that solves real problems for people, and you know, I think we've in general just tried to skate to where the puck is and understand where the market's headed as a company. >> What are some of the customer feedback that you're getting? For folks that don't know SignalFX, what are some of the things that you're hearing from customers, why are you winning, what are some of the examples, can you share some color commentary? >> Yeah, I'll give one example, a Fortune 500 company that has been very aggressively investing in cloud the past, you know, four or five years, built an entire digital team, and their entire initiative is, like a lot of people in the Fortune 500 now, is to have a direct-to-consumer type of a relationship, and one of the things that they struggled with early was how do they move quickly, support product launches that might have massive load, and have the visibility to know that they can do that and catch issues as they emerge, and they didn't have a solution that could give that visibility to them until they leveraged SignalFX. And so now, if you talk to people there they'll say that they've essentially gone from defense every time they did one of these product launches to being on offense and really understanding what it takes to successfully launch a product and they're doing way more of these, so-- >> Moving the needle on time to market. >> Moving their business forward, you know, and digital transformation just by-- >> Yeah. >> Having SignalFX as a core enabler. >> It's the cloud version of putting out fires, so to speak, when you do product launches, right? >> Yeah. >> I got to ask you guys a question. You guys are both industry veterans, obviously Facebook has a storied history. We know all the great things that happen on the infrastructure side. Karthik, you've been in VM where you've seen the movie before where VM, where it made the market, changed IT for the better, still talk about the VMwares now. Now as we see cloud taking that next transformational push, describe the wave we're on right now, because it's kind of an interesting time in tech history where the talent that's coming in is pretty amazing. The young guns coming in with opensource the way it's flourishing is pretty phenomenal. Some of the smartest computer science and/or engineering talent is really solving what was old school B2B problems that really no one really wanted to solve. I mean, it was people were buying IT. Now you're talking about building operating systems, so the computer science kind of mojo in the enterprise has upped a bit. >> Mm-hmm. >> What's this wave about, how would you describe the wave of this time in history of the tech industry? >> Do you want to... (laughs) I'll add my take but why don't you go first. >> I think the thing that I find striking is just like, you know, when people used to talk about big data, you know, a few years ago, and now that is like, that's just normal. >> Yeah. >> And like, the amount of compute and the amount of storage that people are able to, you know, bring to command at-- >> Yeah. >> On any problem, it's just incredible, and that's just going to, I think, like continue to grow, right? That's going to be an amazing thing to watch. I think, you know, what this means... It also has interesting implications for, you know, companies like SignalFX who are trying to be in the monitoring space because the mojo used to be you had to have all this complicated software to do the instrumentation. Well, the instrumentations part is easy, but now all the value that's going to come about monitoring is in what you do with all that data, how you analyze it and look for, like, you know, so the whole AI ops and all that is going to be the key of the whole monitoring problem going forward, you know, five, 10 years from now, but we already see that analytics is such a key aspect of the whole thing, so... >> Yeah, I'm very, I think we're at the beginning, still at the beginning of a massive 30 to 40 year cycle, and this hasn't happened since the PC revolution in the 1970s, right, so the smartphone comes out 2007, massively opens up the market for software-based services to several billion people who are connected all the time now, drives a massive refresh of the backend infrastructure, drives the adoption of opensource, and so we're at this magical point now where the market for software-based services is just exploding, and every enterprise, you know, is becoming a software company, and you know, I think the volume of data that we're accumulating is just growing exponentially and what you can do with AI at this point, it's just... We're just beginning to see the benefit of it, so I think this is a really, really exciting time and I think we're just at the beginning. Most of the enterprises, and even the tech companies, are just beginning to capitalize on what is in store for us in the industry. >> I find it to be intoxicating, fun, and just great people coming in. To your point about the beginning of a 40 year run, also the nature of software development is being modernized at an extremely accelerated pace, so as people in the enterprise start re-imagining how they do software, because if they're a software company they've never had product managers. I mean, so the notion of what is a product, how do you launch a product, is all kind of first generation problems and opportunities, so I think to me it's really the enablement... And this is really what I think people are looking for is who can take the burden off my shoulders, help me move faster, more gas, less brake. >> Mm-hmm. >> Go faster, drive value, and then ultimately compete, because competitive advantage with technology... What does that mean to you guys, because how do you react to that because what you essentially are doing is creating instrumentation for enabling companies to create new value faster with technology and software, in some cases at a level that they've never seen before. What do you, how do you react to that? >> Well, I think that's exactly what we do, right, I mean, every company, I think most companies realized that they had to invest in software and focus on all these new opportunities at the early part of this decade. First thing they had to do was figure out who's going to build all this software, so most of them had to go hire engineers or build digital teams. They had to decide where are they going to run, the cloud wars of, you know, the early part of this decade. Do we build a private cloud, do we use a public cloud, I think both of those things have happened and people are now comfortable with those decisions. The third leg, which is squarely in the space that we're in, which is how do you operationalize this new model, and I think people are working through that now. As they get through that in the next few years, the companies like SignalFX helping every company, operationalize it very quickly, I think that's when the true promise of this new digital era will be realized where you'll start to see all of these fantastic applications, mobile apps, web service apps, direct-to-consumer streamlined supply chains. We're just beginning to see the benefit of that, and we'll see when that happens then the volume of data that they're collecting will increase exponentially and then the promise of machine learning and AI will take an altogether nother step. >> You got to know how to automate it before you can automate it, basically. What's next, final question for you guys, what's going on with SignalFX, what are you guys going to conquer, what's the next major milestones for you guys, what are you looking to do? >> Yeah, well we're continuing to focus on driving value for our customers, so we're expanding our geographic presence, so we're doing a lot of international expansion at this point. We're hiring a lot of engineers, so if anyone is interested in a development job, reach out to us. >> What kind of engineers are you looking to hire? >> Rajesh, you want to take that, sorry. (chuckles) What kind of engineers... >> What kind of engineers you looking to hire? >> Everything. (chuckles) >> I mean, all kinds of engineers, especially distributed systems engineers, front end engineers, full stack engineers, like real tech, all the good engineers we can get. >> (chuckles) Awesome. >> A lot of product development, there's a lot of interesting things happening in this space, and so we're, you know, continuing to invest very aggressively. >> Large scale distributed systems. >> Yep. >> You've got decentralized right around the corner, so you've got a lot of stuff happening. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Great job to have you coming on, thanks for coming on, Karthik. >> Great, great to be on. >> Rajesh, thank you so much. >> My pleasure. >> SignalFX here in the cloud of Google here at Next, it's theCUBE, theCUBE cloud, CUBE data, we're bringing it all to you. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. More coverage, stay with us, we'll be back after this short break. (techy music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2018 brought to you by IBM. >> We're back at IBM Think 2018. This is theCUBE the leader and live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my cohost Peter Burst. Day two of our wall to wall coverage of IBM's inaugural Think conference. Rajesh Nambiar is here, he's the general manager of global business services for application services within IBM. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me here. >> So how's this event going for you? You're in from Singapore. We were saying you must love the fact that IBM's consolidated a lot of it's major events in one place. You get a lot done in a week. >> Absolutely, I think this is four or five days that we're going to be here. Phenomenal amount of energy, I mean when you go around you can see that. I think as you said, combining some of the events it's made it even more interesting for us. I'll be meeting more people, more clients, more productive session for sure. >> So let's talk about what you do with application services and then we really want to get in to one of the themes that Jenny hit on today which is incumbent disruptors and competing from the core of your proprietary data. So let's get in to it. Start with your organization and what you guys do. >> Absolutely, so as you mentioned and I do the application services for GBS in IBM. Within application services I think we focus on application development and management which is a large area for us and as you know that IBM has been managing applications for many, many large clients over the period of time and it's a very large portfolio for IBM. What we see truly is enterprises as you saw and they are going to have enormous amount of issues with the new age companies if you may, all of the new companies which are sort of coming out. You can call them bond digital or bond in cloud or uberization of the organizations, whatever. So you'd find that the enterprises are going to have significant issues maintaining the company advantage over a period of time. And one of the ways they could sort of regain the leadership or company advantage would be by ensuring that they are digitally reinventing themselves. The problem is, I think as Forbes said recently in an article around saying that, about 80 percent of the digital transformation projects really fail with multiple reasons as to why they fail. I want to argue saying that one of the, and you heard from Jenny this morning, that you know you have the business architecture and the technology architecture. If we focus on the technology for second, you would find that many of these new incumbents that you mentioned will, they try to compete purely on the digital side of the equation. They will have a harder chance or they might not even get where they want to go. And we want to argue saying that if they kind of pay attention to the core they have, and I want to sort of define what this core and digital is going to be, so think of it this way, I mean core is what, if any company has been around for awhile, then they would of had a significant amount of core systems, systems of records if you want to call it where they have the business process embedded into that. They have the customer data embedded into that. Now what's happening on the other side, of course everybody wants to get there, the whole digital dimension, on the digital side of the equation you do have systems of engagement, where you truly understand and engage, I want to say customers but then again also have employees of your organization. So you're going to engage them in the last mile if you may. What touches the customer, touches your employees, that's what we call systems of engagement in the digital. Now, organizations tend to see these two as two different things and if you do not build your digital eco system, leveraging what you have in core, I believe that the chances of you failing in your digital transformation are very, very high. Why is that? Because I believe the intersection of these two worlds if you may, the core and the digital, is not that easy for people to leverage and I believe that we as a company, we help our clients sort of leverage that intersection if you may. >> Okay so, where do you start? Is it application modernization? Is it allowing them to develop applications that are more sort of more native as you say? When you talk to customers where do you see the starting point? >> Okay so, when you look at these two fundamentally there are synergies between these two worlds and they are discouraged. Synergies are natural why? Because as I mentioned before, in the core or in the systems of records you'll find business processes getting embedded, customers data getting embedded. And then on the other side of the digital system, you always have the user experience which is what we all want to try. I mean the user experience is all about everything. I was talking to a bank recently (foreign name). So they said, we built this phenomenally wonderful user friendly mobile app for our customers and what happened was the app was fantastic and it was great user experience and everything was fine, he just add for every transaction it took like a minute for the balance to show up on the mobile app. That's not what he wanted because why is that? Because your focusing on the digital only. The fact that it just go to your core systems, get the customer data and bring it back to the watch app or the mobile app or whatever, that wasn't the plan that I weighed and hence my point being that if you look at the synergies which is great, there are a lot of discordance because the way that all systems are being built is very different. Maybe you're using a waterfall. The new systems are getting built in a different way. If you leverage the synergies, manage the discordant in a nicer way. A great example would be, so do you have micro services coming out of your core systems to enable your digital systems. You have the right API's getting built from the core systems to enable your digital systems. If you're able to manage this intersection well, then I think you have a play and that's how I believe that we should. So again to your point, do you modernize? I believe you do the three things to get the synergy right. One would be you are to optimize your core systems for efficiency because more and more the systems get older and older. You're going to have challenges in maintaining them, more expensive to maintain them, so you optimize those systems for efficiency. Then you modernize them to build in or enable new capability. So second, as I said modernize, what you really do, you're making sure that it is easier for the digital systems to get to you, to understand what you're doing, to get the customer data, so that is a modernized space. The third is that you have to innovate sort of co create if you may and make sure that you're able to build those newer systems, digital systems using the core and enabling the core for growth. So if you had an organization, if you want growth, you're not going to get it if you don't do these three things in my opinion. >> So Rajesh, many years ago I did a research project for a client and we looked very closely at the consequences of increasing the functionality and automation in systems of engagement and how that drove work back in the core and we found that every success of generation of enhancement on the systems of engagement, drove the number of transactions back at the core sevenfold. Are you seeing relationships like that? Is there rules of thumbs that people should use now as their systems of engagement get even more powerful, more human friendly? What is the new kind of expectation these days? >> So the issue is definitely what you said. I mean for every about seven or eight times is what you want to drive the, for every single transaction which is rising out systems of engagement. However, one of the way to make it more efficient when the systems of records, which is the core systems if you may, is by using the modern, stuff we'll be talking about, if you have designed your core systems and enabled micro services in the right way, maybe instead of having seven or eight transactions, you could be able to do that in two or three. Similarly >> Peter: Unstage them. >> Unstage them, yeah in a certain way so that you're not getting into the performance issue which I talked about in this banking example as you know, you don't want to build a wonderful digital app but having that to go through a significant performance issue over the period of time. So that is one of the things. The other important element of what he just now said is also the talent piece of it. We underestimate, I think, as we said, one of the reasons why many of these engagements fail is also because people don't think talent is a big deal in a lot of this. Because when you really see, if you're a big company, been around for awhile, you have a very strong core, and your people in the IT organization are going to be wired somewhat to the processes which are going to be sort of the ordeal if you may. And how do you move to this new world of digital? So there is a fundamental difference from the talent point of view. Two things, as an organization you're moving from process centric to user centric. Now you want to build something for your customer, for your employee. When you do that the talent base, of course their minds have changed, but also a simple example, we always hire people for skills. Maybe still, some companies still do, for skills. But I believe that's a passe because you know what do you now need is a tenacity for learnability or tenacity for a life long learning for the people whom you're hiring. Not necessarily a skill that you value today because what happens in today's world, after six months that skill is no longer valuable for you. So what do you do with them? But if you have a tenacity for life long learning, the ability for you to pick up new skills and then transform yourself will be so high that you're not stuck with people who are all skills for a long period of time. >> I was talking to a senior, a guy who owns development and he said one of the biggest impacts of open source over the last few years was that it brought the notion of responsibility, recognition, reputation, and change the way that the evolvers talk about collaboration with each other, not just in the open source world but overall. I think collaboration and new collaboration agile also has to be part of the equation. What do you think? >> Well without a question. In fact, I was about to say, collaboration's very, very key because again, when you move from process interviews as intrigue, you also find, traditionally organizations are very role based, so everybody had a role. I'm a developer, I'm a tester, I'm a architect. But in the new world, this is going to be changing into maybe parts of people who are sort of working on a garage metal. Everybody does everything. You have a smaller group of people who are able to evaluate something very, very quick and in an agile fashion as opposed to the traditional way of saying, I'm sort of role based, I have an organization and that's how they operate. So I think there's significant difference and again, I would probably say to leverage the talent for the newer market. Again there are about two or three things that one could potentially do. One would clearly be this learnability. Skills are no longer what is valued, it's the learnability. The ability for you to sort of quickly move from one to another would be valued. Second would be diversity of skills. Today we hire more people with user experience, with psychology major. You would of never thought of this 10 years ago. We never hired anybody from art school but we do that today because of... >> I was really happy. My son's a music major. >> My son is a psychology major, I was just telling you in the University of Colorado. So they get hired probably as well as already the STEM students are going to be, so that's good. (laughing) And the last one is of course, I have this notion called digital label . I don't know if you've heard this before. And Jenny talked about it today. So you're going to have man and machine, when you do that, automation is a great influencer in all of this. I think there are going to be the digital label and the human label are going to co exist. So we're calling it hybrid label. So any task that you're going to do, we will have people which is sort of high capability now, leveraging watts, which is a digital label. So that's another important thing in the talent market. >> And the laborer increasingly requires sort of multi tool skills not only domain expertise but also digital skills. >> Rajesh: Absolutely >> At least being able to understand how the leverage, the machine intelligence. I want to ask you, and I know Peter you got to go soon. But this trend with IOT, Blockchain, we saw the IV and Maersk example today where they're attacking inefficiencies where there's a third party trust involved and it's creating a trustless system. Do you see a trend toward sort of putting token economics embedded inside of applications, things like Blockchain, increasingly going into core applications? Is that a trend you're seeing yet? >> Yes, yes, I think not as much as we would like to see but I think it's beginning to sort of level up in a period of time. I think Blockchain is still, as I said, there's a more in the experimentation phase, and there are a few companies who have leveraged fully. Great example is as you saw this morning with what we're doing with the APMM Maersk, the fact that we're able to do the distribution systems within shipping. And any radio finding that there's going to be a significant amount of paperwork or transactional arrangements that are being done outside of the normal systems. I think Blockchain would be a great way to solve this issue. >> I want to tease your session a little bit. You're going talk, you got a CIO panel, what is that? >> Well the talk is actually going to be I think unlocking the value of the core system. So there's going to be something similar to what we talked about. We've got great session with three CIO's who are going to be on the panel. We're going to have the Carhartt CIO John Hill is going to be on the panel, and they've done a lot of good work in terms of truly making sure that they understood that if they don't level the core they can't really get to the digital. >> Was that CarHartt? >> Carhartt, yes. >> The only brand I wear. >> Really? (laughing) >> They'll be interesting, then KLM with (mumbling) with their history of the core that they've had for several years and how they're really moving into the new digital era and then being sort of a customer friendly airline if you may, so he's going to talk about some of that. And then we also have the TPX which is the communications organization which they've done gone through about 12 acquisitions over the last 12 years, so one a year pretty much. How are they integrating all of those companies and how are they really putting them together into sort of one system. >> Peter: And when is that session? >> That session's on Thursday morning at 11:30, I hope you guys are there to watch that. I'm worried because it's the last day. >> It's a getaway day but listen, a good day to go down and check it out because that notion of what incumbents should be doing and competing from the core is very, very important idea. So Rajesh thanks for coming on theCUBE and explaining that. Best of luck to you tomorrow and great to see you. >> Thank you so much, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is CUBE, you're watching live from IBM Think 2018. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)