>> Announcer: "theCUBE" presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> Greetings from Las Vegas, everyone. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Vellante. We are live at HPE Discover 2022 with about 8,000 folks here at The Sands Expo Convention Center. First HPE Discover in three years, everyone jammed in that keynote room, it was standing in only. Dave and I have a couple of exciting guests we're proud to introduce you to. Please, welcome back to "theCUBE," John Schultz, the EVP and general counsel of HPE. Great to have you back here. And Kay Firth-Butterfield, the head of AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum. Kay, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure. >> Isn't it great to be back in person? >> Fantastic. >> John, we were saying that. >> Fantastic. >> Last time you were on "theCUBE", it was Cube Virtual. Now, here we are back. A lot of news this morning, a lot's going on. The Edge to Cloud Conferences is the theme this year. In today's Edge to Cloud world, so much data being generated at the edge, it's just going to keep proliferating. AI plays a key role in helping to synthesize that, analyze large volumes of data. Can you start by talking about the differences of the two? The synergies, what you see? >> Yeah. Absolutely. And again, it is great to be back with the two of you, and great to be with Kay, who is a leading light in the world of AI, and particularly, AI responsibility. And so, we're going to talk a little bit about that. But really, this synergistic effect between data and AI, is as tight as they come. Really, data is just the raw materials by which we drive actionable insight. And at the end of the day, it's really about insights, and that speed to insight to make the difference. AI is really what is powering our ability to take vast amounts of data. Amounts of data that we'd never conceived of, being able to process before and bring it together into actionable insights. And it's simplest form, right? AI is simply making computers do what humans used to do, but the power of computing, what you heard about frontier on the main stage today, allows us to use technology to solve problems so complex that it would take humans millions of years to do it. So, this relationship between data and AI, it's incredibly tight. You need the right raw materials. You need the right engine, that is the AI, and then you will generate insights that could really change the world. >> So, Kay, there's a data point from the World Economic Forum which really caught my attention. It says the 15.7 billion of GDP growth is going to be a result of AI by 2030, 15.7 billion added. That includes the dilutive effects where we're replacing humans with machines. What is driving this in this incremental growth? >> Well, I think obviously, it's the access to the huge amounts of data that John pointed out. But one of the things that we have to remember about, AI is that actually, AI is pretty dumb unless you give it nice, clean, organized data. And so, it's not just all data, but it's data that has been through a process that enables the AI to gain insights from it. And so, what is it? It's the compute power, the ever increasing compute power. So, in the past, we would never have thought that we could use some of the new things that we're seeing in machine learning, so even deep learning. It's only been about for a small length of time, but it's really with the compute power, with the amount of data, being able to put AI on steroids, for luck of a better analogy. And I think it's also that we are now in business, and society, being able to see some of the benefits that can be generated from AI. Listening to Oakridge talk about the medical science advances that we can create for human beings, that's extraordinary. But we're also seeing that across business. >> That's why I was going to add. As impressive as those economic figures are in terms of what value it could add from a pure financial perspective? It's really the problems that could be solved. If you think about some of the things that happened in the pandemic, and what virtual experience allowed with a phone or with a tablet to check in with a doctor who was going to curate your COVID test, right? When they invented the iPhone, nobody thought that was going to be the use. AI has that same promise, but really on a macro global scale, some of the biggest problems we're trying to solve. So, huge opportunity, but as we're going to talk about a little later, huge risk for it to be misused if it's not guided and aimed in the right direction. >> Absolutely. >> That's okay. Maybe talk about that? >> Well, I was just going to come back about some of the benefits. California has been over the last 10 years trying to reduce emissions. One wildfire, absolutely wiped out all that good work over 10 years. But with AI, we've been developing an application that allows us to say, "Tomorrow, at this location, you will have a wildfire. So, please send your services to that location." That's the power of artificial intelligence to really help with things like climate change. >> Absolutely. >> Is that a probability model that's running somewhere? >> Yeah. Absolutely >> So, I wanted to ask you, but a lot of AI today, is modeling that's done, and the edge, you mentioned the iPhone, with all this power and new processors. AI inferencing at the edge in real time making real time decisions. So, one example is predicting, the other is there's actually something going on in this place. What do you see there? >> Yeah, so, I mean, yes we are using a predictive tool to ingest the data on weather, and all these other factors in order to say, "Please put your services here tomorrow at this time." But maybe you want to talk about the next edge. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think it's not just grabbing the data to do some predictive modeling. It's now creating that end-to-end value chain where the actions are being taken in real time based on the information that's being processed, especially out at the edge. So, you're ending up, not just with predictive modeling, but it's actually transferring into actual action on the ground that's happening... You know, we like to say automagically. So, to the point where you can be making real time changes based on information that continues to make you smarter and smarter. So, it's not just a group of people taking the inputs out of a model and figuring out, okay now what am I going to do with it? The system end-to-end, allows it to happen in a way that drives a time to value that is beyond anything we've seen in the pas- >> In every industry? >> In every industry. >> Absolutely, and that's something we learned during the pandemic, one of the many things. Access to real time data to actually glean those insights that can be acted on, is no longer a nice to have. >> No. >> For companies in any industry they've got to have that now, they've got to use it as their competitive advantage. Where do you see when you're talking with customers, John? Where are they in that capability and leveraging AI on steroids, as I said? >> Yeah. I think it varies. I mean, certainly I think as you look in the medical field, et cetera, I mean, I think they've been very comfortable, and that continues to up. The use cases are so numerous there, that in some ways we've only scratched the surface, I think. But there's a high degree of acceptance, and people see the promise. Manufacturing's another area where automation and relying on some form of what used to be kind of analog intelligence, people are very comfortable with. I would say candidly, I would say the public sector and government is the furthest behind. It may be used for intelligence purposes, and things like that, but in terms of advancing overall, the common good, I think we're trailing behind there. So, that's why things like the partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and some of the other things we're seeing. That's why organizations like the World Economic Forum are so important, because we've got to make sure that this isn't just a private sector piece, It's not just about commercialization, and finding that next cost savings. It really should be about, how do you solve the world's biggest problems and do in a way that's smarter than we've ever been able to do it before? >> It's interesting, you say public sectors is behind because in some respects, they're really advanced, but they're not sharing that because it's secretive. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> That's very fair. >> Yeah. So, Kay, the other interesting stat, was that by 2023 this is like next year, 6.8 trillion will be spent on digital transformation. So, there's this intersection of data. I mean, to me, digital is data. But a lot of it was sort of, we always talk about the acceleration 'cause of the pandemic. If you weren't a digital business you were out of business, and people sort of rushed, I call it the force-march to digital. And now, are people stepping back and saying, "Okay, what can we actually do?" And maybe being more planful? Maybe you could talk about the sort of that roadmap? >> Sure. I think that that's true. And whilst I agree with John, we also see a lot of small... A lot of companies that are really only at proof of value for AI at the moment. So, we need to ensure that everybody, we take everybody, not just the governments, but everybody with us. And one of the things I'm often asked, is if you're a small or medium-sized enterprise, how can you begin to use AI at scale? And I think that's one of the exciting things about building a platform. >> That's right. >> And enabling people to use that. I think that there is also, the fact that we need to take everybody with us on this adventure because AI is so important. And it's not just important in the way it's currently being used. But if we think about these new frontier technologies like Metaverse, for example. What's the Metaverse except an application of AI? But if we don't take everybody on the journey now, then when we are using applications in the Metaverse, or building applications in the Metaverse what happens at that point? >> Think about if only certain groups of people or certain companies had access to wifi, or had access to cellular, or had access to a phone, right? The advantage and the inequality would be manifest, right? We have to think of AI and super computing in the same way, because they are going to be these raw ingredients that are going to drive the future. And if they are not, if there isn't some level of AI equality, I think the potential negative consequences of that, are incredibly high, especially in the developing world. >> Talk about it from a responsibility perspective? Getting everybody on board is challenging from a cultural standpoint, but organizations have to do it as you both articulated. But then every time we talk about AI, we've got to talk about it's used responsibly. Kay, what are your thoughts there? What are you seeing out in the field? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I started working in this in about 2014 when there were maybe a handful of us. What's exciting for me, is that now you hear it on people's lips, much more. But we still got a long way to go. We still got that understanding to happen in companies that although you might, for example, be a drug discovery company, you are probably using AI not just in drug discovery but in a number of backroom operations such as human resources, for example. We know the use of AI and human resources is very problematic. And is about to be legislated against, or at least be set up as a high risk problem use of AI by the E.U. So, across the E.U, we know what happened with GDPR that it became something that lots and lots of countries used, and we expect the AI Act to also become used in that way. So, what you need, is you need not only for companies to understand that they are gradually becoming AI companies, but also that as part of that transformation, it's taking your workers with you. It's helping them understand that AI won't actually take their jobs, it will merely help them with reskilling or working better in what they do. And they think it's also in actually helping the board to understand. We know lots of boards that don't have any clue about AI. And then, the whole of the C-suite and the trickle all down, and understanding that at the end, you've got tools, you've got data, and you've got people, and they all need to be working together to create that functional, responsible AI layer. >> When we think about it, really, when we think about responsible AI, really think about at least three pillars, right? The first off, is that privacy aspect. It's really that data ingestion part, which is respecting the privacy of the individuals, and making sure that you're collecting only the data you should be collecting to feed into your AI mechanism, right? The second, is that inclusivity and equality aspect. We've got to make sure that the actions that are coming out, the insights were generate, driving, really are inclusive. And that goes back to the right data sets. It goes back to the integrity in the algorithm. And then, you need to make sure that your AI is both human and humane. We have to make sure we don't take that human factor out and lose that connection to what really creates our shared humanity. Some of that's transparency, et cetera. I think all of those sound great. We've had some really interesting discussions about in practice, how challenging that's going to be, given the sophistication of this technology. >> When you say transparency, you're talking about the machine made a decision. I have to see how, understand how the machine made a decision. >> Algorithmic transparency. Go ahead. >> Algorithmic transparency. And the United States is actually at the moment considering something which is called the Algorithmic Accountability Act. And so, there is a movement to particularly where somebody's livelihood is affected. Say, for example, whether you get a job, and it was the algorithm that did the pre-selection in the human resources area. So, did you get a job? No, you didn't get that job. Why didn't you get that job? Why did the algorithm- >> A mortgage would be another? >> A mortgage would be another thing. And John was talking about the data, and the way that the algorithms are created. And I think, one great example, is lots of algorithms are currently created by young men under 20. They are not necessarily representative of your target audience for that algorithm. And unless you create some diversity around that group of developers, you're going to create a product that's less than optimal. So, responsible AI, isn't just about being responsible and having a social conscience, and doing things, but in a human-centered way, it's also about your bottom line as well. >> It took us a long time to recognize the kind of the shared interest we have in climate change. And the fact that the things that are happening one part of the world, can't be divorced from the impact across the the globe. When you think about AI, and the ability to create algorithms, and engage in insights, that could happen in one part of the world, and then be transferred out, not withstanding the fact, that most other countries have said, "We wouldn't do it this way, or we would require accountability. You can see the risk." It's what we call the race to the bottom. If you think about some of the things that have happened over the time in the industrial world. Often, businesses flock to those places with the least amount of safeguards that allow them to go the fastest, regardless of the collateral damage. I think we feel that same risk exists today with AI. >> So, much more we could talk about, guys, unfortunately, we are out of time. But it's so amazing to hear where we are with AI, where companies need to be. And it's the tip of the iceberg. You're very exciting. >> Yes. >> Kay and John, thank you so much for joining Dave and me. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> It's a pleasure. >> We want to thank you for watching this segment. Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante for our guests. We are live at HPE Discover '22. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute. (bright upbeat music)

>>long from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in Came along with its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back to the Cube. Lisa Martin at AWS Reinvent in Vegas. Very busy. Sands Expo Center. Pleased to be joined by my co host this afternoon. Justin Warren, founder and chief analyst at Pivot nine. Justin, we're hosting together again. We are. >>It's great to be >>here. It's great to have you that. So. Justin Meyer, please welcome a couple of our cue ball. Um, back to the program. A couple guys from nut up. We have Anthony Lie, the S B, P and G m of the Cloud business unit. Welcome back at the >>very much great to be here >>and color coordinating with Anthony's Jandi Stephenson, Chief Technology officer and GPS Cloud. Welcome back. >>Thank you. Thank you >>very shortly. Dress, guys and very >>thank you. Thank you. It's, uh, the good news Is that their suits anymore. So we're not going to have to wear ties >>comfortable guys net up a w s this event even bigger than last year, which I can't even believe that 65,000 or so thugs. But, Anthony, let's start with you. Talk to us about what's new with the net up AWS partnership a little bit about the evolution of it. >>Yeah. I mean, you know, we started on AWS. Oh, my gosh. Must be almost five or six years ago now and we made a conscious effort to port are operating system to AWS, which was no small task on dhe. It's taken us a few years, but we're really starting to hit our stride Now. We've been very successful, were on boarding customers on an ever increasing rate. We've added more. Service is on. We just continue to love the cloud as a platform for development. We can go so fast, and we can do things in in an environment like aws that, frankly, you just couldn't do on premise, you know, they're they're complexity and EJ ineighty of on premise was always a challenge. The cloud for us is an amazing platform where we can go very, very fast >>and from a customer demand standpoint. Don't talk to me about that, Chief technologist. One of the thing interesting things that that Andy Jassy shared yesterday was that surprised me. 97% of I t spend is still on from So we know that regardless of the M word, multi cloud work customers are living in that multi cloud world. Whether it's by strategy, a lot of it's not. A lot of it's inherited right, but they have to have that choice, right? It's gonna depend on the data, the workload, etcetera. What can you tell us about when you're talking with customers? What what? How are they driving NetApp evolution of its partnership with public provider AWS? >>So actually, I don't know if it's the desired state to be running in a hybrid, mostly cloud fashion, but it's it's It's driven by strategy, and it's usually driven by specific workloads and on the finding the best home for your application or for your workers at any given time. Because it's it's ultimately unrealistic for on premise customers to try to compete with like a machine and keep learning algorithms and the rate of development and rate off basically evolution in the cloud. So you always have to be there to be able to stay competitive, so it's becoming a part of the strategy even though it was probably asked that developers that drove a lot off cloud adoption to begin with. Maybe, maybe not. Not in favor of the c i o r. You have, like a lot of Cloud Cloud sprawling, but there's no longer sprawling it. It's part of the strategy before every company in my way >>heard from any Jesse in the keynote yesterday about the transformation being an important thing. And he also highlighted a lot of enterprise. Nedda has a long history with enterprise, Yes, very solid reputation with enterprise. So it feels to me like this This is an enterprise show. Now that the enterprise has really arrived at with the cloud, what are you seeing from the customers that you've already had for a long time? No, no, no, I'm familiar with it. Trust Net up. We're now exploring the Clouded and doing more than just dipping their toe in the water. What are they actually doing with the cloud and and we'll get up together, you know, >>we see and no one ever growing list of workload. I think when people make decisions in the cloud, they're not making those traditional horizontal decisions anymore. They're making workload by workload by workload decisions and Internet EPPS history and I think, uh, performance on premises, given customers peace of mind now in the cloud, they sort of know that what's been highly reliable, highly scaleable for them on premise, they can now have that same confidence in the cloud. So way started. Like just like Amazon. We started off seeing secondary workloads like D r Back Up Dev ops, but now is seeing big primaries go A s, a p big database workloads, e commerce. Ah, lot of HBC high forming compute. We're doing very well in oil and gas in the pharmaceutical industries where file has been really lacking on the public cloud. I think we leaned in as a company years ago and put put, put a concerted effort to make it there. And I think now the workloads a confident that were there and we can give them the throughput. We give them the performance on the protocols and now we're seeing big, big workloads come over to the public clouds. >>And he did make a big deal about transformation being important. And a lot of that was around the operational model. Let's let's just the pure technology. But what about the operating model? How are you seeing Enterprises Transformer? There's a lot of traditionally just taken a workload, do a bit of lift and shift and put it to the cloud. Where are they now transforming the way they actually operate? Things because of >>cloud? Absolutely. I mean, they have to They have to adopt the new technologies and new ways of doing business. So I mean, I think they are actually celebrating that to answer point. I think this is not a partnership and we're partnering with. We have a very unique story. We're partnering with all of them and have really deep engineering relationship with all of them. And they are now able to go after enterprise type workloads that they haven't been gone. I've been able to go after before, so that's why it's such a strategic strategic relationship that we have with all of them. That sort of brings in in the freedom of choice. You can basically go everywhere anywhere. That, in my opinion, is that true hyper cloud story lot has always been really difficult. But with the data management capabilities of not top, it's really easy to move my greater replicate across on premise toe are hyper scaler off choice. >>I mean, I think you know, if you're in enterprise right now, you know you're a CEO. You're probably scared to death of, like, being uber, you know exactly on. Uh, you know, if you're you know, So speed has now become what we say. The new scale they used to be scaled is your advantage. And now, if you're not fast, you could be killed any day by some of these startups who just build a mobile app. And all of a sudden they've gotten between you and the customer and you've lost. And I think CEOs are now. How fast are we going? How many application developers do we have? And did a scientist do we have? And because of that, that they're seeing Amazon as a platform for speed on. So that's just that paranoia. I think digital transformation is driving everybody to the cloud. >>You're right. If we look at transformation if a business and Andy Jassy and John for your talked about this and that exclusive interview that they did the other day. And Andy, if you're and a legacy enterprise and you're looking at your existing market share segment exactly, and you're not thinking there's somebody else. What assisting on there on the side mirror? Objects in mirror are closer. Not getting ready for that. You're on the wrong. You're going to be on the wrong side of that equation. But if we look at cloud, it has had an impact on traditional story one of naps. Taglines is data driven. If we look at transformation and if we'll even look at the translation of cloud in and of itself, data is at the heart of everything. Yes, and they talk to us about net APS transformation as cloud is something that you're enabling on prime hybrid multi cloud as you talked about. But how is your advantage allowing customers to not only be data driven, but to find value in that data that gives them that differentiation that they need for the guy or a girl that's right behind them. I already did take over. >>Well, I think if you're you know, if you're an enterprise, you know, the one asset you have is data. You have history now >>a liability Now with an asset. >>Can they can they do anything with it. Do they know where it is? Do they know how to use it where it should be, you know, Is it secured? Is it protected all of those things? It's very hard for enterprise to answer those questions. What one end up, I think it's done incredibly well, is by leaning in as much as we did onto AWS way. Give our customers the absolute choice to leave our on premise business and a lot of people, I think years ago thought we were crazy. But because now we've expanded our footprint to allow customers to run anywhere without any fear of lock in, people will start to see us now not as a storage vendor but as a strategic partner, and that that that strategic partnership is really has really come about because of our willingness to let people move the data and manage the data wherever they needed to be. On that something our customers have said, you know, used to be a storage vendor on along with the other storage vendors and now all of a sudden that we're having conversations with you about strategy where the data should be, you know who's using it is. It's secured all of those kinds of conversations we're having with customers. >>You mentioned moving data, and that was something that again came up in the keynote yesterday. And he mentioned that Hey, maybe instead of taking the data to the computer, we should bring the computer's data. That's something that Ned Abbas has long actually talked about. I remember when you used to mention data fabric was something about We want to take your data and then make it available to where the computer is. I'd like you to talk it through that, particularly in light of like a I and ML, which is on the tip of everybody's tongue. It's It's a bit of I think, it's possibly reaching the peak of the hype cycle at the moment s o what our customers actually doing with their data to actually analyze it? Are they actually seeing real value from machine learning? And I are We still isn't just kicking the tires on that. >>I mean, the biggest problem with deep learning and machine learning is having our accumulating enough on being able to have the data or lessening that gravity by being able to move it then you can take advantage off states maker in AWS, the big Cleary and Google, whatever fits your needs. And then, if you want to store the results back on premise, that's what we enable. With it out of harbor having that free flowing work clothes migration has to count for data. It's not enough to just move your application that that that's the key for machine learning and thought the lakes and others, >>absolutely in terms of speed. Anthony mentioned that that's the new scale. How is flash changing the game >>with perspective, you know, flashes a media type, but it's just, you know, the prices have come down now that you know the price performance couple flashes an obvious thing. Um, and a lot of people are, I think now, making on premise decisions to get rid of spinning disc and replaced with Flash because the R. O. I is so good. Tco the meantime between failures, that's that's so many advantages that percent workloads. It's a better decision, of course. You know, AWS provides a whole bunch of media Onda again. It's just you like a kid in a candy store, you know, as a developer, you look at Amazon. You're like, Oh, my God. Back in the day, we had to make, like, an Oracle decision and everything was Oracle. And now you can just move things around and you can take advantage of all sorts of different utilities. And now you piece together an application very differently. And so you're able to sort of really think I think Dion sees point. People are telling us they have to have a date, a strategy, and then, based on the data strategy, they will then leverage the right storage with the right protocols. They'll then bring that to compute whatever compute is necessary. I think data science is, you know, a little fashion, you know, conscious. Right now, you know, everybody wants to say how many did a scientist they have on their teams? They're looking for needles in haystacks. Someone, they're finding them. Some of them are but not doing it, I think it is. Makes companies very, very nervous. So they're going the results, gonna trying as hard as they can to leverage that technology. >>And you'll see where is that data strategy conversation happening if we think about the four essentials that Andy Johnson talked about yesterday for transformation in one of the first things he said was, it has to be topped at senior level decision. Then it's going to be aggressively pushed down through the organization. Are you seeing this data strategy at the CEO level yet? >>Yeah, we are. But I'm also seeing it much lower. I mean, with the data engineers with the developers, because it's asked, is it is extremely important to be developing on top off production data, specifically if you're doing machine and deep learning. So I think it's both. I think the decision authority has actually moved lower in the company where the developers are the side reliability engineers are actually choosing more technology to use. That fits the product that they are actually creating off course. The strategy happens at the tall, but the influencer and the decision makers, in my opinion, has been moving lower and within the organization. So I'm basically contradicting what yes is a. But to me that is also important. The days off a C t o r C E o. Forcing a specific platform or strategy on to developers. Those days are hopefully gone. >>I think if you're a CEO and you know of any company in any industry you have to be a tech company, you know, it used to be a tech industry, and now every company in the world is now tech. Everyone's building APS. Everyone's using data. Everybody's, you know, trying to figure out machine learning. And so I think what's happening is CEOs are are increasingly becoming technically literate. They have to Exactly. They're dead if they're not. I mean, you know whether your insurance company, your primary platform, is now digital if you're a medical company or primary platform additional. So I think that's a great stat. I saw that about two and 1/2 years ago. The number of software engineering jobs in non tech surpassed the number of jobs in tech, so we used to have our little industry and all the software engineers came to work for tech companies. Now there are more jobs outside the tech segment for engineers, and there are in the text >>well, and you brought up uber a minute ago and I think of a couple of companies examples in my last question for you is real. Rapid is about industries. You look at uber for example, what the fact that the taxi cab companies were transitional. And we're really eager to, you know, AP, if I their organizations, and meet the consumer demand. And then you look at Airbnb and how that's revolutionized hospitality or pellet on how it's revolutionized. Fitness Last question, Jonesy, Let's go for you. Looking at all of the transformation that cloud has enabled and can enable what industry you mentioned when the gas. But is there any industry that you see right now that is just at the tipping point to be ableto blow the door wide open if they transform successfully? >>Well, I mean way are working with a lot off pharma companies and genome sequencing companies that have not actually working with sensitive data on if those companies, I mean, these are people's medical histories and everything, so we're seeing them moving now in close into the cloud so those companies can move to the cloud. Anybody can move to the cloud. You mean these sort of compliancy scaremongering? You cannot move to the cloud because of P. C. I or hip power. Those days are over because aws, Microsoft and Google, that's the first thing they do they have? Ah, stricter compliancy than most on premise Homemade tartar sentence. So I see. I see that industry really moving into the cloud. Now >>who knows what a ws re invent 2020 will look like Gentlemen I wish we had more time, but thank you. Both Young and Anthony were talking with Justin and me today sharing what's new with netapp. What? You guys are enabling customers. D'oh! In multiple. Same old way. We appreciate your time where my car is. Justin Warren, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from AWS or reinvent 19 from Vegas. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. And it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman, we are joined by Lewie Newcomb he is the Vice President, Server Storage and HCI Engineering Dell EMC. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE >> Thank you. >> For the first time ever. >> For the first time, I'm excited. Very excited about it. >> Yes well we're happy to have you. So we're talking VxFlex and we have not talked a lot about VxFlex on the show, I now you had a segment earlier. Tell us about your news today. >> Okay, well the big news for the show this week is we've launched an appliance. So traditionally we do a rack level product with VxFlex. So we've launched an appliance, so basically, think half-rack without networking. And then we did some updates to our software that we can talk about. And we also still, and we've added some more platforms. So we added the 840 PowerEdge server. So all of our products are on PowerEdge servers. And the 840 with 4-socket, we now have a great platform for SAP HANA. >> So Lewie let's take it back a sec, because VxFlex, there are some new products, but a main piece of this, this was a rebranding of some of the other pieces in the CI and HCI family. So maybe those people that have a little history, if you can help put this into context as to which brands are gone and under this umbrella. >> Yeah, so I'll just start with the new brands. VxFlex is the brand, VxFlex Ready Nodes, VxFlex Appliance is the new product, VxFlex Integrated Rack. VxFlex OS and VxFlex Manager. So a lot of parts there. >> Simplicity. >> Okay. (laughs) >> The naming is very simple and it's easier to talk about. I think a big improvement over our previous brands. And then, I'll go into some of the details. So, I talked about the Appliance, think about new consumption model, little bit smaller chunk there. But we also updated the software, the OS, so the VxFlex OS we added compression in this release, it's VxFlex 3.0 is the revision, it's shipping today. We added compression and we changed the data layout so we actually have higher performance and small granularity and snapshots. So some storage features were added. We also have many new certifications. So I mentioned the SAP HANA, we also have Epic, both VDI and the database. We also have SAS Analytics has a great white paper talking about our product and the benefits of our product. And we're really a performant product. If you think about, it's a pure software SAN And we can also do HCI, we can also combine the software SAN with the HCI we call that two-layers, the way we refer to the software SAN. >> Alright, so this week there's a lot of discussion about VxRail, so maybe use that a touch point for people to understand. VxRail, joint integration between VMware and Dell. VMware Hypervisor, give us a little compare and contrast as to some of those pieces. >> Great question, the VxRail as you said, it's our, integrated in an entire VMware stack. And some great announcements, I love ACE, if you seen the ACE announcement. So the Flex though is a product that's out there because not all customers are in a VMware environment. We also support bare metal. >> Or even if they use VMware they're not 100% VMware. >> Not 100%, and many of our customers actually have both. For high performance databases they might pick Flex. For more general purpose VDI and things they might pick the Rail and so customers as we talk to 'em, they different needs and we have different products for those, so we give them that choice. >> Well, let's actually walk us through a little bit about the VxFlex customer and sort of, so this customer what are their needs and why is VxFlex the choice? >> And you've been doing software defined for a long time so I always see it this way, you start out with a customer that's transforming their business, they want to get into software defined, they want to prepare themselves for the future. Well that's where we start, we're software defined. And the next thing we look at is, do they need performance? Do need they need some one millisecond latency across you know, 50 nodes, 1000 nodes, we can do that. We're very high performance, so that's why I mentioned the databases. And the other things is, we just talked about is that choice they may not want to use just vSphere, they might want to use other hypervisors, so we support those hypervisors. And then the real interesting thing is that two-layer, because as you know with HCI we combine the application and the stored services all on one node. So in our product we can actually separate those, so you can scale storage and compute separately. And it's still all in one storage pool. So it's a very flexible product that fits that kind of customer's needs. >> Okay, simplicity is really one of the key words that we've heard in this whole trend there. It's interesting having had discussion from CI all the way through HCI, some of the software that allows me to manage it, really makes invisible some of those choices. You just said, well HCI was, I can have some choices between the computing storage, but usually they did go in blocks together versus scaling them separately. Can you talk a little bit about the management suite and what that means from a customer administrator and the infrastructure team as to how they look at this spectrum of offerings. >> Sure, so we have the VxFlex Manager, I mentioned that in the beginning, so that manager is starting to automate that management orchestration. So from deployment to serviceability to provisioning, we launched several new features in that, in this current release 3.2 release. So it, more granularity round the service of the drives and things like that. We'll continue to evolve that. You mentioned that you're hearing that, every customer I talked to this week, number one thing we talk about is more automation, more ease of use, so as they're going into software defined, they're all asking for the same thing and we're going to support that with the VxFlex Manager. >> Alright, great so talk a little bit about the application, you talk about high performance environment, one of the things we've been looking in this space especially is, what are some of the new areas, things like containerization, Kubernetes, is this platform that the customer builds ready for that environment and how do we span from kind of what I have and where I'm going. >> Yeah, so we just launched our Kubernetes plugin, the CSI plugin, so we have some customers already testing that beta and because we have bare metal, we can also support that in that native environment, So most customers they are still using that in a virtualization environment. But they're preparing for the future, they're looking at different options, so it gives them that flexibility if they want to go bare metal. >> So you're 15 years at Dell and you've really spent your career in storage and we're talking about the big customer... Customer list of what they want, they want ease of use, they want simplicity, they want speed. >> They want performance. >> They want performance, so what are the kinds of things that you're thinking about for the next year's? >> Yeah well next year, we're still building out some of the storage services. So later in the year we'll add some new storage services, like we just added compression, so our launch this week was compression and we'll add more and more storage services more data protection, more replication. We'll continue in that path, and more and more management. The management is going to be a key area focus for us. >> Right, can you take us inside some of those customer conversations, good excitement, 15,000 people here. I'm sure you've talked to a lot of customers, what are some of the key concerns that are raising to them and what's the feedback you're getting? >> A lot of the customers the reason they want automation is they want to manage their full environment, 'cause remember at the rack level we've integrated the switching. So they want a predictable outcome and when they have drift, when they want to do security updates, that's most of our conversations, they want us to do more and more automation around that. Compliance against the product itself and then when a security patch comes in. And by the way I'll mention the two-layer, another great advantage of two-layer, a lot of times, these security patches come in only on the compute side. So we can do a security patch on the compute side without disrupting the storage pool, so it's a big advantage so that's 90% of the conversations we're having. >> Yeah, maybe touch on one of the big concerns, you talk about, I want that cloud operating model. When I'm running in any of the public clouds, I don't have to think about what version I'm running. The old days of, oh I had to manage it to in the VCE days, it was the compatibility matrix and then the RCM documentation, how are we doing towards getting to that simple push button, you know I take care of it, securities patches come I don't have to worry about scrambling I've got that taken care of. >> That's nirvana, that's our north star. We're working on that and we're using the Flex Manager as that platform and more and more we're taking those requirements in the Flex Manager and we'll be rolling it out. Our goal is to have that one click upgrade right? That one button, our goal is to be able to do compliance and quick updates, and it's a journey. And it's the most complex part as you know, you mentioned, some older products, it's the most complex part of the solution, is keeping that compliance and that performance where you need it. >> So how do you manage that? I mean as you said it's a huge challenge that your company's facing and yet also all your clients are facing too. >> Well luckily we have a lot smart people. (laughs) and we have great customers. The nice thing you know, Dell's direct, the interaction we've had with customers this week, I mean they're designing with us, they're telling us what they need. And we're not a large large scale business in relative to a server business and using computing. So we have relationships with almost all of our customers. And we go and show them our roadmaps, we go get feedback from them, they help us define what they need and we follow our customers. >> Well it's really interesting, because we know that Dell's turning 35 very soon and middle age is the time where you start to get a little more set in your ways, a little older, a little creakier, but what you're describing is this real collaborative relationship with your customers and not sort of this my way or the highway kind of thing. >> I feel I work in a startup, we're agile, we're listening to our customers, we're doing the right things. We're not focused all just on our business, we're focused on our customer outcomes. We made a big ship this year on my product line of talking about the databases and the certifications and we're really trying to help our customers through those decisions without them having to make all those decisions themselves. >> Yeah, what about the consumption model, some of the other product lines we're talking to are going to manage their services as well as moving towards that OPEX model. How's that fit into the VxFlex? >> Yeah, we're not there yet, of course we're going to lead with our Dell Technologies portfolio, We have some great products in that portfolio. But we'll get there over time. Today, you saw the announcements on day one with VMware, Dell EMC and the cloud platforms. We'll continue to build infrastructure, we'll continue to stay in our lane, where we do really really well and the customers love us. But We'll eventually get to different consumption models. >> So tell us a little bit about this show for you. This is not your first rodeo here at Dell Technologies World. >> And I hope and you're seeing this, this feel like we're one big company now right? We've been three years in the making. And coming to Dell Tech this year, I feel like we're one. And Michael's key note was, the first customer I talked to, you know, everything Michael said, resonated so well with me and so it really feels that way. And just the vibe back there and in the solution expo, it's just, you know at level 10. >> Well right, so we're passed the Dell EMC integration point, but the big thing we've been talking about this week is, you know those seven logos up on the banner behind you there are acting like one. So VxRail designed together, sold together. Can you talk a little bit about where do some of the other pieces of the portfolio fit into place. >> Pivotal Cloud Foundry right? Almost all of us are parting with Pivotal Cloud Foundry and building that stack and offering that service to our customer, you know Secureworks RSA, we all need security right? We're all working there too. And even now, so I work in the PowerEdge team, you know, storage product, so we're working, we're taking PowerEdge and putting it everywhere. So all of our data protection products, RSA, our storage products, we're working PowerEdge everywhere and leveraging that. And the beauty about that is you saw the VxRail ACE announcement right? That's a platform, that's a analytics platform that now we can build on and designing PowerEdge. We can put requirements into PowerEdge to make that a much richer telemetry box and really start getting some analytics in that solve some problems, predictive analysis and things like that. So yeah, it's been fun, I've been on the tip of the spear of this, you know, coming from the storage side, and I'm starting to see it really really come together this year, here at this show. >> Alright, so want to give you the final word, VxFlex I know people, if they went through the expo hall they could see it, touch it and the like. For those that didn't make it to the show, what do you want the key takeaway for VxFlex? >> So we're pure software defined, we're very high performance, we're ideal for your databases, we're ideal for scale, we can scale up to 1000 nodes or higher. And we have many many customers doing that. We have running in the show this week, a database running at six nodes over a million IOPS, sub one millisecond latency. So... >> A good note to end on, (laughs) powerful. >> Bang yeah. (laughs) >> Lewie thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, appreciate it, it's been fun. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have so much more of day three of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)

live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering Dell technologies world 2019 to you by Dell technologies and its ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world 2019 here in Las Vegas at the sands Expo I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host do minimun we are joined by Steve Nolan he is the lead product manager private cloud at CenturyLink thank you so much for coming and direct from st. Louis Missouri thank you thanks for having me today so let's start by having you tell our viewers a little bit about CenturyLink ok centrelink is a very large carrier international with our recent acquisition of level 3 we have a little over 500,000 fiber optic miles belong to us we're wired into over a hundred thousand buildings globally across approximately 60 countries connected into over 300 data centers so that's kind of our telecom network story I actually work within a division of essentially that handles managed hosting products it's through an acquisition they did a number of years ago called a company called sabes where we now have about 20 years a little over 20 years and managed hosting services to customers in the business and there's been a lot of news this week at Dell technologies world and you your CenturyLink had a big announcement just this morning yes we just released a press release on a two-prong option we've been working on for about six months now it's for a private cloud product that I manage that I released actually a year and a half ago we just added it now Dell options for that product based on the Dell PowerEdge six are 640 server and that of course we did that to be able to expand options and choices for our customers to UM open up the opportunities to those situations where we weren't able to get into before so we're very excited about it so it's it's new it's it's exciting it's of course a great great platform very very amazing technology so Steve that the term private cloud you know is it's almost about 15 years old now but there were many years that we didn't all agree as to what private cloud should be you know I run article recently about hybrid cloud and you know even hybrid cloud was basically like oh I had private cloud and public cloud and a bunch of pieces and I put them together and like well the hybrid multi-cloud stories were hearing this mean many of their shows very different we're trying to get our heart around this so you know I'm familiar with Savas you know I've seen century like many times at vmworld so bring us inside that private cloud it tell us a little bit about you know what you've been seeing in the environment some of those key use cases to what customers are doing and and how this is different than you know the virtualized environments of the past certainly so so what we've been seeing happen in the industry and and it's some and you go back a number of years a few years well to the cloud and you have six people what does cloud me and you get six definitions right but what we've seen is that there's this huge move towards public cloud over the last number years the hyper cloud all-day activity we see plenty of it and there's been challenges associated that you don't find out day one you find out over time certain things that were challenged to work with and in a public cloud type of scenario customers at you know what I still want to hold on to some infrastructure and what we're seeing now also do what private cloud is it is a an infrastructure there's a hum percent dedicated to one client and a story all of that infrastructure belongs to one one one company one entity it is not shared nothing is shared that is true private cloud and so that's what what I manage for our company is our private cloud products we're and we've we have one that's been with us not for about 15 years it's on VMware we're a large VMware shop where a hundred percent VMware today we've been working with VMware for I think a total 15 years a little over 15 years and the various types of products and solutions and platforms we work with them for a year and a half to be able to create our new private cloud product that is a hyper conversion infrastructure software fine networking based on VMware's VMware cloud foundation software suite right so that's where the movements are and and what's happening with this now a we want to go into kind of what's happening in the industry in the world is the way that you built infrastructure historically right as you build your compute your network your storage and your security those are the four minimum columns of which technology you need for a solution and then you connect it all together it's some by four different groups for different subject matter expert groups and and it can be very time-consuming to piece all that together now we roll into this hyper-converged world and you just give me a stack of servers that have some cpu some RAM some disks and I layer on some very well designed and architected software like some VMware Cloud Foundation and I define everything from one interface through software it makes of the ability for enterprise customers to be able to move a much faster or making change to the environment I can spin up a firewall in minutes a several a balancer a router that's very powerful compared to how it was done in the past so Steve one of the years expertise I know CenturyLink has is on the networking side of it's something we've heard Dell talking about their networking and how that's expanding the HCI market today and as well as if you talk about that hybrid or multi cloud environment networking is a critical component things like an ST when put into so can you help you know where does that those those pieces fit into your environment where we see that that going and is these are it's a common theme and that we've been talking through a little over a year now and this this topic of milliseconds matter is the edge and so that's where it's really evolving to and that's what we're working towards as well so so one of the things we're doing with our products is moving in our products out to them the data centers many more data centers what we've done in the past and then taking that a step further we go to edge computing because of our telecom expertise and experience and our thousands of points of presence we can put those systems into a pop if you would we can put those systems of course on customer Prem getting the response times down to just a few milliseconds which is critical to business's response times delivery companies or various comers where that that's important to the middle of stiffens milliseconds matters because it saves them money because they're very able to be more responsive to their customers that's exactly what I want to drill into a little bit you say milliseconds matter which is which is absolutely true and you're talking about how customers feel this need to move so much faster and we know about the breakneck speed of technological change can you give us a real business impact I mean as you said this this really is game-changing for so many companies can you just give us an example of a customer you're working with and how this really the ROI on the stuff yeah okay so we're working with some shipping companies who of course they've got the little responders when they delivered the package they have hundreds maybe as many as a few thousand locations they want to be able to put that data right neck in those locations so that the response on that package gets that information faster they they get closure on that they are able to bill faster they're able to move on to the next item faster provide the information to their customers faster those are the real live examples that we're seeing with the Middlesex and spanner type of scenario we actually did a demo of this at vmworld last year we just give an example where and we did a test of going across the internet and then going across a dedicated circuit and we painted us one page one screen and it took a second going across the internet and it took a half a second to go across the dedicated circuit and so it's like will you take that one page and it's the thousands of pages that one of your employees goes through in a day and then multiply it by your thousands of ploys that's not where we're adding up to cost savings more efficiencies of your employees when they can get that information faster all right so one of the important areas here is that is the management piece so we can understand your partnering deeply with VMware is it primarily the V realized suite for from management tooling anything what's what's special about the CenturyLink offering so relative to my product offering is in the private cloud we actually have because here's the situation customers don't just have one cloud we all know the true story is it's it's not about public or private it's about both it's not about one cloud or one other cloud is about many and so we actually through an acquisition we had done we created a product called cloud application manager it's a multi cloud management product that is designed today to support from one interface I can have a W us as your Google my private cloud product we call the centrally private cloud on VMware cloud foundation our public cloud product all from one interface I can manage my workloads I can monitor the oasis we will manage a monitor those OS as an application for the customer Larrin will be call our managed services anywhere a methodology - for customers that want that management to provide that for them right so it's it's really about it being able to take all those different environments in that hybrid IT solution the vast majority of enterprise folks either have one or are stuck with right and be able to trim it down to singular interfaces to be able to support them how closely are you working with customers on the actual implementation onboarding of these new technologies and making sure that employees are also really onboard with these things so well first of all when we work through solutions with our customers we don't just say here pick this from a menu and so we sit down and design for them so so we're very specific in how we've designed our products to where we actually allow over a thousand configuration options so we want that you have to right-size the infrastructure that's what you start that's the foundation your right size that infrastructure for your work environment for what it is that you're trying to accomplish and you allow flexibility to be able to grow it and so we have flexibility to be able to have RAM or storage to those systems or add more systems give the flexibility to grow as you need to grow whatever but it is you want to push it's growing on you fine so so that's where we start with this in that design aspect of this and that's how we solution all of our mana Hosting sub products great well Steve you started this conversation at cube Ricky you're ending a cube alum so thanks so much for coming on the show well thank you for having us having me all right appreciate it I'm Rebecca Nightforce - minimun we will have much more of the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world coming up in just a little bit

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering del technology's world 2019 to you by del technologies and its ecosystem partners welcome back to the cubes live coverage of del technologies world here at the sands Expo in the Venetian in Las Vegas I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host stu minimun we have two guests this segment we have Everest us main saw he is the general manager IBM cloud private ecosystem and Brendan Kincaid vice-president strategic partners cloud and cognitive software both at IBM thanks so much for coming on the show thank you very much for having us so the word on the street it is a multi cloud world it is it is the debate over public and private cloud it's over we know it's both and when we know it's multi cloud so can you talk a little bit about how this partnership is making it easier for customers sure so first we have a very strong multifaceted partnership with the Delft Technologies family of companies so for instance our partnership with VMware dates back some 10 years IBM was the first major cloud provider to bring the full VMware sddc stack to clients we're also the world's largest operator of VMware workloads so for us we have great experience working with VMware and the Dell technologies family of companies on-premises as well as in the cloud so Dells a major infrastructure partner and supplier to us we also have created a new offer that we're showing here at the show and it is around what we're doing with IBM cloud private on Dell technologies VX rail in addition and IBM we partner with them for so long and in so many ways that we've seen great results we've seen consistent year-over-year growth with particularly with our VM for our partnership and we've established a connection as well between Delta protection solutions and IBM cloud with data domain being able to tear out to IBM cloud object storage so the relationship between IBM and Dell technologies allows our joint customers to really capitalize on what they're doing on premises on the public cloud and truly as a hybrid cloud all right so ever it's just wonder if you could help you know bring us into that IBM cloud private solution a bit you know I had long history looking at you know the IBM VMware you know IBM was one of the you know big companies that helped to bring virtualization I remember wonderful commercials used to be like I'm in the datacenter where did everything go it's like oh we virtualized it and it just you know had a big rack of you know IBM blade servers so I've been crowded cloud private something I'm familiar with I'm not sure how much of the world knows that piece of the IBM cloud story so maybe you just bring this up up to date as to where that is and I tell you myself a little surprised it's like oh you know a few years ago talking about like you know Dell hardware it's part of that solution what would have surprised a lot of people this is not IBM of a few years back oh absolutely thank you Stu so the IBM cloud private it really is a jewel in the crown of our overall hybrid cloud strategy so we talked about hybrid being pretty much everything now because every single client will have some infrastructure and some solutions and apps that even live in the private cloud they live in the datacenter they live in multiple public clouds that all need to be integrated and what IBM cloud private does is it provides a layer build around containers and kubernetes to enable clients to begin the journey to begin the modernization of their apps it's designed to the multimodal so because it's truly hybrid we want to meet clients where they are so if clients are running on Z for example it runs on it obviously runs on VX and the IBM tell Dell as well so I love you you're hitting about a buzzwords for me you know containerization kubernetes will have the cube I'll be at Q con Barcelona in just a few weeks I've talked to lots of IBM executives we know the commitment IBM in that space I'd love to talk a little bit about the application space there because hybrid applications and modern you know pieces there is still you know interesting to see where that is compared to say district virtualized environments that they might have had in the past yes so the value of having your applications sort of run as micro services in containers is that you can create small pieces of the app and you can get you can get to value much more quickly so the old days are the road apps you write one big monolithic application that did a lot of different things sometimes you have to shut down your data center in order to do upgrades but micro services running containers you can write ones in a small container you can then deploy that container across a variety of different both public and private clouds without having to rewrite that so it's basically it enables you to be able to write once and run anywhere and that really helps drive innovation can you give us some specific use cases I mean we I know that there is no cookie cutter solution every organizations needs are different but can you talk about how some companies even without naming names are using these products so we have companies that use this in reservation systems in order to deal with which changes with rebooking we have some clients have done that and in fact the best way to think about this is the results that we get from studies so recently we had a study done by ovum recently looking at clients that use both our IBM cloud private as well as a multi cloud manager multi card managers interesting product because it enables you to be able to see manage workload across a variety of different clouds both private and public as long as those clouds are built and open which is central to the way that we work and they found that there was a 75% productivity benefit from deploying cloud related apps from deploying IBM cloud private and multi cloud manager so Brendan in the keynote this morning pack elster the CEO of VMware said that their STD size sea stack is you know the you know infrastructure piece that's going to live in the multi cloud world talk about how that fits into you know your solution and you know what are what IBM seeing broadly about that well IBM strategy is really around five basic tenets it is hybrid hybrid multi-cloud open secure and managed so for us that's what we see from clients our research shows us that in the enterprise most over 94% of the customers are using multiple public clouds yet only 20% of the workloads have moved there today so the real opportunity is around the other 80% of business applications that need to be able to move to the cloud but they need to do so with security and the ability to manage across both on-premises private clouds and multiple public clouds so what causes that change that discrepancy I mean what would you say are the reasons for that is that is that sort of entrenched attitudes within the workforce I think that that process is largely manual today and it has major implications around security you know there's also a lack of consistent cloud management and automation services to make that easier for clients to deploy so how do you help customers deal with this I mean we know that there's certain people process and technology technology in a lot of ways this is the easy part so how do you bring customers along in that journey and make sure that everyone is on board one of the ways in which we do this is actually using the IBM garage where you bring all the key stakeholders together and it's a it's a process that begins with bringing the stakeholders together identifying a Minimum Viable Product that you can go implement something that's small enough that you can do with lower risks because the key is not to buy too much that you can chew but big enough that it's impactful because this is not something that you throw away then you code that solution and you run this solution you deploy it and then you manage it and then you do a retrospective to see how that worked and then you go through the same process again to pick your MVP - that way you can help clients in their journey by basically beginning where they are picking the most needy of solutions and then getting them on that journey and they're seeing results - which then reinforces the process and they can see results - and in fact if there's a forest report that came out recently looking at a subset of IBM cloud private customers that showed a 40 percent improvement in in the productivity of your developers including a return of a payback of 11 months and in return of more than 200% much of that driven client said by the ways in which IBM has configured the kubernetes and containers into a stable low-risk easy to consume and cost-effective offering so for any one of the things we've really seen at this show is delve technologies and VMware field and channel are really rallying together on them when it comes to go to market on the cloud solutions IBM is no slouch when it comes to services and go to market there so so how do all these pieces fit together so very highly complementary in fact so if we look at the work we've done with VMware on IBM cloud we have over 1,700 customers meteoric year-over-year growth we we have been able to deploy probably more enterprise workloads on VMware cloud than any other provider to date and I think that we really see that this all fits together IBM out of strength and services IBM services are you know one of the leading system integrators in the world we have capabilities from managing on-premises to the public cloud and our sweet spot is really working in the hybrid cloud and dealing with these complex workloads that enterprise customers have right these are the easy apps have already been put on the cloud it's it's the more difficult complex ones that still remain on-premises and the challenges around moving those and and taking advantage of a true hybrid environment that present an opportunity for clients to improve their business capabilities as well as for IBM Dell VMware cetera so for the customers who are watching at home and are tantalized by what they're hearing here what is the best way for them to get engaged and get more information about this partnership and the solutions that we've been talking about today I think the the the best thing is to get started where you are right and if you are Dell customer then of course the solution that runs on their EMC VX rail is a hyper-converged hybrid cloud platform which means you know you basically got your compute you've got your storage you got your networking all in one and one of the issues often is where the get started and customers get start sort of wondering about choices you've got something here that's effectively can think of it as a private cloud in a box will IBM cloud private on top of it you can basically get started and get started trying to write your very first up modernizing your existing app or writing new cloud natives on that platform I happen to see a big IBM booth when you first walk into the expo hall I'm curious are people surprised to see IBM here do they comprehend it what are some of the conversations you're having you know I don't think so I think last year we were Dell technologies system integrator partner of the year we were VMware's cloud partner of the year and this year just recently at partner Leadership Summit VMware announced us as their integrate public cloud partner of the year so that is really integrate public cloud is about what we do integrating on-premises with the public cloud so I don't think there should be any surprise where we're strategic partners with the Dell technologies family of companies there's a lot of synergy and complimentary offerings and we've got some powerful solutions that are differentiated and really bring value to clients well everest is Brendan thank you so much for coming on the cube it's been a great conversation thank you very much thank you very much I'm Rebecca Knight force 2 minimun we will have so much more coming up of the cubes live coverage from Dell technologies world stay tuned

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering del technology's world 2019 on to you by del technologies and its ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to day two of the cubes live coverage of del technologies world here in Las Vegas at the sands Expo I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host stu minimun we have two guests for this segment we have Kunal Rove Allah he is the SVP software engineering Dell EMC and yet edie your your Dominion SVP product development Dell EMC thank you both so much for coming on the queue thank you thank you thank you so as we know customers are dealing with a tsunami of and apps this is what from Michael Dell from his words it is it is it is exceedingly complex there is so much to manage can you just lay the foundation and just tell our viewers what you're hearing from customers and the specific challenges they're facing I think customers have been pretty specific with us and they've been very consistent about it their business is being disrupted by digital transformation data is exploding and it's hard to manage and then on top of it they're they're working as hard as they can to cope with that growth best they can but that's often causing them unintended consequences in making things either less efficient or harder to manage in their data centers and in their operation so our job is and that and that those factors are making it difficult for them to realize that your benefit of all the data that they have so our job is to help them unlock all of that potential that's sort in their data alright so Kunal data protection got some good call outs in the keynote new brandings power protect can you walk us through you know what's new what to rebrand and you know what we should be taking away absolutely still so it's been an exciting morning already as you heard we've announced Dell EMC pulpit that software and Dell UMC power protect X 400 it is our new next-generation data management software platform and the new next-generation multi-dimensional data management appliance and with power protect we believe that it will help midsize and large enterprise organizations transform from what is traditionally been a traditional form of data protection - more of a data management space and their management solutions so that's what happens with power protect protect comes as you have heard in different form factors you can deploy it as a software or it can come as an appliance but it gives you the ability to set up policies and manage the data where you can create the backups you can create the restores and restore the data that you need at the same time have other use cases to help with data management problems that customers are running into today so as we know that the landscape is really changing there are new threats there are new requirements that companies need to abide by what are the sort of can you walk us through some of the specs of this and exactly what it does yeah absolutely so it is it is a based on a modern architecture it is software-defined and we see that a lot of the transformation that we're seeing in the industry is driving towards software-defined we do see that there is a need for data protection to reside closest to where the data is or where the application owners are so if you think of customers that have thought about data protection in the past is sometimes as an afterthought they've run into challenges when they've had incidents or they've lost data if you think about how do you best protect some of this data if you give the powers to the customers that are closest to the data or the data owners there's a good chance of success with data protection strategies so having self service driven architectures as well as capabilities to help with centralized IT management are key parts of what we do with power protect and then if you think about just the explosion of data that we've seen and the usage and the widespread usage of cloud it is cloud enabled multiple ways of using power protect in the cloud storing to the cloud clout hearing to the cloud so there are a lot of things that we can do with multi cloud environments that customers have as well as having simplicity of management so these are some of the key pillars that come together as you think about power protect software as well as the appliances yeah so I'm wondering if you can just bring us in a little bit cuz I look at the challenges out there we know one of the one of the biggest things in IT is nothing ever dies you know I've got old environments out there that I need to be able to manage that data protection layer is something that it you know it can sometimes be you have to be able to do it over time because it needs to work with so many different environment so I've got everything from you know boy my mainframe and you know my make legacy applications to the latest cloud native wonderful multi cloud things like you know we saw Microsoft up on stage talking about can you give us you know what you're hearing from customers what are they finally you know moving forward and how do you manage that breadth of you know data that you need to be able to deal with the diversity both of their workloads that are being protected in the environments and the distributed data centers that they have in the operational towns they have is tremendous that's why we have a portfolio products so we have a portfolio both in the software side as well as the appliance side that deal with the different challenges that they have whether it's on the edge with our virtual edition in in larger data centers with things like data domain and some of our data suite product a to protection suite products as well as in this modern data protection space and the new products that we're introducing today so we need they customers need diversity and how we protect their data and then they need different options for for how and where that they they do that anything specifically you know that you know is different now than it would have been five years ago when it talked about diversity of environments or media that they're working on we talked about tape earlier and one of the challenging things is we keep you know building new products that don't have some of these features because we think that's not where the markets going but even on our entry data domain appliance we just added tape capability to it because that's what customers feedback is they said even in the smallest case we still have a need for that in our in our environment all right so so 2019 is not the year that tape finally dies obviously there's not new tape probably being deployed but customers still have tape in their environment and they need a way to protect but also be able to access and leverage the data that's in their tapes we had a customer we're talking about big data and then they said you know the biggest data is on our tapes but it's locked up so we need a way to have accessibility for that data and bring it into our business and our transformation unlocking the data no matter where it resides whether it's on the tape whether it's on disk whether it's in the cloud no matter how far it is from where the applications are and being able to provide a solution that helps unlock the data bring it to where it is required and be but to use it again is acting a key part of what we're trying to solve I know that so many people are eager to memorialize tape but I what I'm trying to what I'm trying to think about is how are you talking with customers about these these things because there are there is sort of an unease with we've had data over here and we're not ready to migrate it over it this way and how are you sort of holding your customers hand and when walking them through these decisions I mean it's there's no cookie cutter answer because it is different for every organization so how do you help a customer think through these very big challenges I think one of the key parts of this is having conversations with the customers to think about what their objectives are what their standard objectives are for their environments now in certain cases we've seen customers that have governance or compliance requirements because of the industries that they play in one customer for example is talking about backups being required for 50 years so there are customers that have long term retention needs or situations where they want to have backups or data stored for different purposes as you think about what these s loz are and as you talk about the top two customers about what problems they want to solve defining what the solution is and how that solution helps them meet their SLA or meet their business objectives is a good way that customers understand what we can present and how we can help them and I think one thing I'd add is we can also approach it from a portfolio perspective so when we talk about solving their problems we don't need to talk about it just as data protection but as a portfolio so we can bring in VX rail discussion and power edge and different storage options and we can build them a solution that is encompassing all the different things that will really solve their problem yeah let's get underneath the covers here for a second you brought up some of the platform pieces what's the update on the appliance piece you know as that fits into the power project family yeah so we have an appliance instantiation that both is a hybrid so a combination of spending media and flash as well as in all flash appliance we needed and that was kind of one key tenant as having the performance options available at different cost points another option another requirement was scale out so we needed we have customers that need starting at a half to buy it or even a petabyte but we also have customers that want to start 6,400 TBS and and that's what our appliances allows not only to scale in place so they can buy one and then they can grow it in place or they can actually add nodes and scale out as another way to deal with the data the data explosion so I think the appliance is offering both this penomet and earlier software to find it is scale out and it has cloud you know coverage in that it's object aware it's loud aware and I think with the software platform that we build that integrates seamlessly with the appliance we have the ability to drive automation that helps with customers deployments as the environments continue to change one thing that's consistent with every customer that we speak to is that environments aren't stagnant they keep evolving they keep changing and it's not just an expansion of the environments but there are different types of workloads that come in there are different types of deployment models that they have and with the automation that we built-in it's easy for customers to use the automated policies to help with the data protection that we provide so let's talk about the data for a second you know one of the objectives I love you talking about how much data they have on tape they want to unlock that how much are you having conversation with the customer about the value of data and how important that is to their business and where you know your solution set really helps to be able to business unlock that value sure so I think it is very clear to us in all of our conversations that I think data is becoming the new currency I think data is the center of all of the decisions that are getting made within organizations identifying what the critical data is what the critical applications are where the data is important for continuous operations of a business in a lot of cases data is continuously required for all businesses now but what are some of the data what is some of the data that helps with the decision making that is required for businesses succeed is important so once there has been an identification of what this data is what the classification is for the data having different strategies to protect that data to help restore from that data backups is a critical part of what we have worked with customers yes not all data is created equal and then different different workloads DIF data needs a different strategy to make sure that it's weather well-protected it's resilient and accessible anything in the modern work workloads that are impacting you think kind of the a IML you know IOT type environment where there's a lot of data and when you talk about not data it's a very created equal it's like okay sometimes there's a lot of data but you know I don't necessarily want to spend as much on some of these classes data I want to be able to use them how does that fit into the discussion so as we think about how we built the architecture we build an architecture where there are services that help with collecting more data and more information that can help with decision making within the product if you think about different forms of modern data that is available whether it be containers whether it be applications that are residing on Prem more seamlessly transition to the cloud bringing the right amount of data back having analysis on that data and have been protected is critical so I think those are key key components of how we solve the data protection problem yeah that that and having patented industry-leading efficiency and data reduction technology - it's gonna cost money wherever you save the data but if we can optimize and reduce that provide a great total cost of ownership that's that's key for these customers is because a lot of a lot of it seems easy upfront but then long term those costs can escalate whether it's on Prem or in cloud and we have to make sure that they they maintain a good TCO and I think to add to that also the application owners understand their data better than anyone else does giving the power to the application owners on when they need to protect the data what they need to do with the data when they need to restore from that data is a critical part of driving success for the customers while we do that it is important that the central IT teams are able to enforce the compliance and governance across the entire environment as well whether it be existing workloads new workloads new applications but we want to provide the central IT team the ability to have that SLO driven compliance framework and that's what the platform presents as well I want to ask you to sort of look into the future a little bit and we're talking a lot about as you said there are companies organizations their data needs are not stagnant they are always changing that is really the one true constant of this technological world that we live in what do you think we're going to be talking about in 2020 and 20 20 25 when we heard from the keynote there's going to be enough data to fill the Empire State Building 13 times our change is just staggering in and of itself I mean what are some of the the things that organizations need to be thinking about to make sure that they are preparing for the future I think we talked a little bit about AI in ml I think integrating more and more of those technologies into the product so that they're they're making decisions and they're being smart without the user intervention and they're even understand the quality of service quality of data and making those decisions we integrated ml into the new appliance product to help one of the biggest challenges our customers face is managing the capacity and maintaining good d-do performance and we integrated ml in order to decide where to put that data both for capacity and performance I think we're gonna further see the integration of that technology on our end as well as the customers end all right so bring us on home power protected new branding new products I hear the power name I'm sure Jeff Clark's happy when we talk about you know getting alignment across the portfolio I've talked a lot of the other power groups this week you know what's your customers you know take away as to why this is different yet you know the comfort of the history and experience that EMC and Ella brought in this space for many years so it for all of us it's a very exciting announcement it is our new modern data management platform that we've launched with power protect you get the ease of the simplicity of deployment you get the full integrated start if you have the appliance deployment form factor if you have the flexibility with the software deployment that you need you have the ability to protect and do all of your data management use cases or drive the deer management use cases for critical workloads and I think that's the that's the key problem the customers are trying to solve it's also the platform that's built with our trusted architectures and it's built on on what we've we've done very well with the trusted architectures we built so I think with that power protect gives you from that customers will be able to use and will be able to expand the businesses in the future as well I think well said I think we saw in the demos today of the many of the storage products and data protection products you see a very consistent UX across those products and we want we want as can all was saying bringing the trusted technologies that we've had but bring them in a modern usable way and if you know a little bit about using a power edge or VX rail or an e CS product as soon as you get this new power protect product actually we've been bringing that technology to some of our other products it'll feel familiar and it'll be easy to use so that's a great note to end on Edie canal thank you so much for coming on with you thank you thank you we will have so much more coming up on day two of the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world in just a little bit I'm Rebecca Knight force to minimun

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World Here at the Sands Expo at the Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host Stew Minutemen. We have Sean Kinney joining the program. He is a senior director primary storage marketing at Delhi emcee Thank you so much. Thrilled to redirect from Boston, >> the home of the universe, >> it's indeed well, we would say so so and so lots of news coming out this morning yesterday. Talk about some of the mean. If you want to start with talking about the storage platform, the mid range storage market in general sort of lay the foundation What you're seeing, what you're hearing, and then how the new the new products fit in with what with what customers air needing. We'LL >> break that a couple pieces. I believe that the mid range of the storage market is the most competitive. They're the most players. There are different architectures and implementations, and it's the biggest part of the market. About fifty eight percent or so so that attracts a lot of investments in competition. So what we announced today, it was the deli emcee Unity X t Siri's and that built on all the momentous on the success we had with Unity, which we actually announce basically the same conference three years ago. So we've sold forty thousand systems Good nowhere market leader, and the first part is the external storage market. It's declined, continues to be exaggerated. One of the Ellis firms predicted it wasn't gonna grow it all last year. Well, crew sixteen percent actually grew three billion dollars. It's with unity. Its original design points like the sort of Day one engineering principles were really around a couple of things. One was a true, unified architecture being told to do. Block storage, file storage and VM. Where've evils that was built in, not bolted on like no gateways, no extra window licensing, no limitations on file system size. The second was around operational simplicity and making it easy for a customer to install easier for custom manage. He was a customer of use remotely manage, and then we took that forward by adding all inclusive software, making it easy to own like not him to worry about software contracts. So all of that goodness is rolling forward in the engineering challenge that we took on with E x t wass. You know, a lot of mid range systems switch of those that have an active, passive architectural design. It's hard to do everything at once. Process, application data run, data reduction, run data services like snapshots of replications, all without significantly impacting performance. And a lot of cases, our competitors and other platforms have to make compromises. They say. Okay, if you want performance turned this function off. What was that challenge that our engineers took on? And that's what we came up with. No compromise for midrange storage. That's unity. Extinct. >> Yeah, Shawn, it's it's really interesting you could I could probably do a history lesson on some of the space thing back to, you know, early days when you know we were first to DMC. It was like, Oh, the data general product line. You know, getting merged in very competitive landscape is, as you said, most companies had multiple solutions, you know, unity in the name of it was to talk about Dell and AMC coming together, but what I want you coming on is there was often, you know, okay, somebody came out with, like, a new a new idea, and they sold that as a product. And then it got baked into a feature, and we saw that happened again and again and again. And the storage market, what are some of those key drivers is toe. You know what customers look for? How you differentiate yourself. Are we past that? You know, product feature churn way in the platform phase. Now, you know, we always say it would be great if software was just independent of some of these. But there's a reason why we still have storage raise. Despite the fact that, you know, it's been, you know, it's been nibbled at by some of the other, you know, cloud and hyper converge. You know, talk applications. >> Yeah. Uh, let's say that a couple ways in that, especially in the mid range. Our customers expect the system to do everything you know. It has to do everything Well, it doesn't get to be specialized for a lot of our customers. It is thie infrastructure. It is that data capital, which is the lifeblood of their business. So the first thing is it has to do everything. The second thing I would say is that because it has to do everything and one feature isn't really gonna break through anymore. The architecture's the intelligence, the reliability, the resiliency that takes years of hardening. Okay, the new competitors has to start a ground zero all over again. So I would say that that's part of the second thing I would say is, it's about the experience inside the box from the feature function and outside the box. How do we get a better experience? And for us, that starts with Cloud I. Q. It's a storage, monitoring and analytics platform that you can really you have infrastructure insight in the palm of your hand. You're not tied to a terminal, and if you want to be, of course you can. But you can now remotely monitor your entire storage environment. Unity, Power Max SC Extreme Io. Today we announce connect trick support for sandwiches in VM support. So we're going broader and deeper, you know, as well as making its water. So it's hard to have one feature breakthrough when you need the first ten to even get in the game. >> Well, as you said, for for these customers, this infrastructure has to do it all. And and so how do you manage expectations? And how do you How do you work with your customers? Maybe who have unrealistic expectations about what it can do. >> Our customers are the best. I mean, everybody says it, but because they push us and they push the product and they want to see how far it can go and they want to test it. So I love them. I love because they push us to be better. They push us to think in new ways. Uh, but yeah, there are different architectures. Have differences. Thumbs Power Max is an enterprise. High end, resilient architecture. It's never going to hit a ten thousand dollar price point like the architecture wasn't designed. And so for our customers that wants all these high end features like an end to end envy me implementation. Well, that's actually why we have power, Max. So you don't want to build another Power Macs with unity. So while the new unit e x t, it is envy Emmy ready and that'LL give us a performance boost We're balancing the benefits of envy. Emmy with the economics, the price point that come with it. >> All right, So, Sean, talk about Get front from the user standpoint, you know, we've We've talked about simplicity for a long time. I remember used to be contest. It's like All right, well, you know, bring in the kids and has he how fast they can go through the wizard Or, you know, he had a hyper converts infrastructure. It should just be a button you press and I mean had clouded. Just kind of does it. When we look at the mid range, you know, where are we in that? You know, management. You talked about Cloud like you, you know, how do we measure and how to customers look at you know how invisible their infrastructure is? >> I think every I don't think any marketing person worth his salt would say, My product is hard to use. It's easy to use the word simplicity, but I think it's we're evolving. And again, it's that outside the box experience now, the element manager Unisphere for um, for unity is very easy to use with tons of tests and research. But it's going beyond that is how do we plug into the VM? Where tools. How do we plug? How do we support containers? How do we support playbooks with Ansel? Forget it. It's moving the storage. Management's out of storage. Still remember, twenty years ago, we helped create the concept of a storage admin. You know, things that coming full circle. And except for the biggest companies, you know that it's becoming of'em where admin that wants to manage the whole environment. >> Okay, I wonder if you could walk us up the stack a little bit. You know, when you talk about these environments at the keynote this morning, we're talking about a lot of new application. You're talking about a I and M l. What's the applications, Stace? That's the sweet spot for unity. And, you know, you know, you mentioned kind of container ization in there, you know, Cloud native. How much does that tie into the mid range today? >> Yeah, I think it goes back to that. All of the above. Its some database, some file sharing, some management and movement of work loads to the cloud. Whether be cloud tearing. What? Running disaster recovery As a service where you know you need the replication You just don't want to pay for and manage and owned that second sight in the cloud. We'Ll do that as a service. So I, uh I think it's again. It goes back to that being able to do everything and with the rise of the Internet of things with the rise of new workloads, new workload types, they're just more uses for data and data continues to be the light flooding of business. But it you need the foundation. You need the performance. And with X t now twice as fast as the previous generation, you need the data reduction with compression. Indeed, implication with extra that's now up to five to one. You need the overall system efficiency so the system doesn't have a ton of overhead, and you need multiple paths to the cloud For those customers that already ofwork loads in the cloud. No, they're going to go there in the next twelve months or know that they have to at least think about it and so that we future proof them across all boys. So you need those sort of foundational aspects and we believe we're basically best in class across all of them. But then you get more >> advanced. I want to get your thoughts on where this market is going. As you said that analysts that the news of its demise has been greatly exaggerated, analysts are just not getting it right. I mean, they said it wasn't gonna grow a gross. Sixty grew sixteen percent. Why are they getting it wrong? Are there and also do? What do you see as sort of the growth trajectory of this market? I'm not >> sure they're getting it wrong. And they may be underestimating the new use cases and the new ways customers using data What I think we should probably do a better job of as an industry is realize that there is a lot of space for both best of breed infrastructure and converged infrastructure and things like Piper converge. It's not an or conversation, it's an and conversation, and no one thinks that I love working about Del Technologies is we have the aunt, you know, for us, it's not one or the other, and that's all we could sell. We have the aunt, and that allows us to really better serve our customers because over eighty percent of our customers have both. >> So, Sean, you mentioned working for Del Technologies. There are a couple people that have been at this show for a while there. Like boy, they didn't spend a lot of time in the keynotes talking about storage. Bring us in a little bit. And inside there, you know, still a deli emcee. You got still a storage company. >> Still, you've seen the name isn't there very much. So you know that we wouldn't be spending all this time and R and D and you've heard about the investments we've made in our stores sales organization and our partner organization. You don't do those investments. If you're not committed to storage it, you know, way struggled for a while. We're losing share for awhile, but that ship has turned for the last four quarters. We've grown market share in revenue, but we're pretty good trajectory. I like our chances. >> I want to ask you about something else that was brought up in the keynote. And that is this idea of a very changing workforce. The workforce is now has five generations in it. Uh, it is a much younger workforce in a in a work first that wants to work in different ways. Collaborate in different ways. Uh, how are you personally dealing with that with your team, Maybe a dispersed team. How are you managing new forms of creativity and collaboration and innovation in the workforce? And then how are you helping your customers think about these challenges? >> You know, I, uh, maybe I can't write for the Harvard Business Review. For me personally, this is my approach that is one guy's opinion for me. It's about people like you want to manage the project, not the people I expected. I trust my staff, and they range from twenty two to sixty two to be adults in to get the job done and whether they do it in the office or at home, whether they do it Tuesday at two o'Clock or Tuesday at nine o'Clock. If it's due Wednesday, I'm gonna trust them to get it done. So it's, uh, there's a little of professionals. It does require sometimes more empathy and some understanding of flexibility. But I participate in that change to I don't want to miss my kid's game, and I wanna make sure I bring my daughter to the dentist, So I, uh, I think it's for the best, because we're blurring the lines of on and off. I could see again. I don't write for our business, really a time in the next few years where vacation time is no longer tracked. I don't think that far away >> a lot of companies don't even have it at all. I mean, it's >> just you >> get your work done, do what you need to do. >> So I love it because then we come back to being more of it. It's even more about, um, a meritocracy and performance and delivery and execution. So, uh, I think it's only the better and more productive employees, happier employees. It's actually reinforcing cycle. What I found, >> and that's good for business. That's a bottom line. >> Employees. You good >> for Harvard Business Review. >> So, Sean, last thing I wanted to get is for people that didn't make it to show. Give them a beginning of flavor about what's happening from a mid range to orange around the environment here and tell us, how much time have you been spending at the Fenway and, you know, pro Basketball Hall of Fame sex mons you know, in the Expo Hall there because I know what a big sports got. You >> are not enough is the first question, quite simply, the best mid range storage just got better now the market leader, when all the advantages, we have immunity. We just rolled them forward to a new, more efficient, better performing platform. So it's, ah, our customers are gonna love over bringing forward, and I think it's our sales. Guys will find it much easier to sell. So we're, uh, we're thrilled with today's announcements. Were thrilled with where the marketplaces were thrilled with our market position and best is yet to come. >> Well, we were thrilled to have you on the cute. So thank you so much for coming on. >> It's always a pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stew Minutemen. We will have much more of the cubes Live coverage from Del Technologies World coming up in just a little bit

>> Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019, brought to you by Dell Technologies, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 from Las Vegas at the Sands Expo Center. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier, this is day one of two sets of coverage for three days for theCUBE. There are at least 15,000 people here, we just came from a great keynote, Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger, Jeff Clarks, Sati Netella was here. John and I are pleased to welcome back to theCUBE one of our guests, we've got Doug Schmitt, president of Dell Technologies Services. Doug, welcome back. >> Well, thank you for having me. >> And you've brought a partner in crime, we have Alex Barretto, Senior Vice President of Dell Technologies Services, Strategic Planning, and Technology. Alex, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> So guys, I always love the keynotes. Michael always has- Michael and team always have great energy. Lot of cool announcements, all talking about digital transformation. But Doug, let's start with you, let's talk about the transformation of Dell Technologies Services. Give us an overview of your organization, and what you're doing for Dell Technologies Services. >> Yeah, well thank you for having us back. I know we were here last year talking a little bit about Dell Technologies, and wow, what an opening keynote this morning. And following up on that; look, service is key component, obviously. Helping our customers through their transformation. Our number one priority, it's really simple. It's literally about, for, and helping the customers. Whether it be specifically kind of, three areas: to sport, deployment, and their manning services. And helping them not only keep their data centers to the edge, running correctly. Making sure to help them through their transformations that they're going through, that we talked a lot about this morning. And then, what we do is we support our customers really with 60,000 people globally, about half of those are Dell Badge, the others, we leverage partners in various countries for. Look, it's about getting up every day and making sure everything runs correctly for them. And that's our job. >> Alex, talk about the strategy for services. Because one of the highlights in the keynote was Bank of America talking about how they got where they are today, and they go forward. It's not the same, things are changing, you guys have to change. What's changing in sevices? What's the strategy? Because it's a whole new ballgame. >> Yeah, great question. In fact, technology is- we have to ask ourselves of our own transformation. In fact, Doug and I spend quite a bit of time talking about a technology world map. Really, if you open the aperture of 'What is technology?', it's everything from data science, to our bots, to our software engineers, into the AI, engineers are developing both in-house as well as partnering with others. That is really the essence of what we're doing in services, and you see customers like Bank of America really adopting that. Because it's helpful in the value that customers get out of our technology. >> And the data was also important, they mentioned data. How are you guys using data in services? I'm sure you must be data-driven. I mean, the mandate up from high, Michael's like, "It's a data-driven world, it's clear as day." >> Absolutely, data is essential. In fact, if you look at the amount of data that's out there, and the growth of the data, it's just phenomenal. But the way I actually like to talk about data is the insights we get from data, right? Data is interesting, but the value that you get from data comes from the insights. So, we actually spent a lot of time developing models, and that's why we use a lot of data scientists, a lot of software engineers. Again, to develop models to generate value from the data. That value is what customers are looking for, and what we're focused on. >> In terms of value, one of the things that was also talked about this morning in the keynote is people and the workforce being massively distributed for any kind of business. 81% of the average worker, is outside of the traditional office, with over half of these people, I'm one of them, working in at least three different places every week. You've got customers that are highly distributed, as is your workforce. What can you talk to us, Alex, about the unified workspace announced on stage this morning? >> Fantastic new offering that we have, obviously you heard from Jeff onstage talking about that. And if you look at that, there are a couple elements that are interesting to me. First, you see all the pieces of Dell Technologies coming together to create greater value for the customer, and if you look at the value that's generated there, to your point, wherever you are as a customer, you're able to access your specific information, whatever the device. And so, if you think about your whole experience, device independent, as well as from a software standpoint, we can offer all in one. >> How, how is-- Sorry Doug, how is service integral to this, you know? >> Well that's-- yeah. What that's really about is so, you have workspace one, coming from VM, great offer and product. And then you have our services, which would be pro-deploy, are pro-support and in some cases, even the manning services, coming together with that to provide a wrapper around that. So, customers have that end-to-end experience with unified workspace, getting those four great service offerings together. Which really then brings it all together for the customer. So they have to do very little, quite frankly, to make that happen. >> One of the comments from Sati Netella was the whole new renaissance of IT needs infrastructure. You see the VX rail being bundled into data centers and service, the demo of the VM-ware cloud, where the just deploy a data center to the edge. I mean, this is just completely game-changing. How is that changing how you guys do the services? Because you guys, it was self-healing. There was a lot of stuff in the dashboard-- no one was deployed, it was all being done with software. How is this changing your mix of business, personnel, economics? >> Great question. You know, we talk about how we're helping customers transform Dell Technologies, well look, services is going through its own transformation as well. And I think that's what you're bringing up. And really, there's four pivots around that transformation we see inside of services that we have to do to stay up and make sure that we're cutting-edge for our customers. The first is around technology, Alex talked a little bit about that. But really, what that's about is the telemetry to help our customers. Data insights, it's not just the data. The second is around our systems that we're putting in place to leverage all that telemetry. You know, we're basically building a whole new CRM, bringing everything together. Our field capabilities, in terms of systems we're building out as well. So a massive transformation on the infrastructure inside just running this to support really. It's a $150 million install base. >> Can you share just stats or data on what's the most popular services you're deploying? And which ones are trending? Like, which ones are kind of, people kicking the tires on? Obviously, you've got the grooves swing on some of your key products. What's the hottest, services/products that you have? >> Well look, our Pro Support Plus is a very hot product for us, it literally provides end-to-end support for our customers, provides what we call a technical account manager, or service account manager with it. It gives you the insights then to really go help you. So it's not then about break/fix anymore. What it's about is proactive, predictive service, and then actually using that to go to the customer and say, "Hey, you know what? "Here's what we're seeing, here's how you can improve "your environment, not only prevent issues from happening, "but what are we doing to actually improve, "and carry that environment forward." And our customers love that. >> Any up and coming, trending products, services you see? Obviously, I can see yeah, there's probably going to be some new services there, but what are going to be the hot new techniques? >> I think seeing the same spot in ProManage which you'll see us carry forward here, and carrying it into the managing service is how do we continue to provide more of that end-to-end? Really, what you're seeing is a convergence of deployment, support, and managing service all really coming together. Our customers are really looking for more and more of that one-stop shop, but one offer across the board. So that's what we're seeing. >> But just to add to that, if you our ProSupport Suite, we have SupportAssist, which is our technology behind ProSupport. And the insights that we're generating; we have 55 million devices connected now. So you look at the connectivity, and the value customers are getting out of that, it's amazing. 20 Terabytes of data per day generated out of those devices. It's a lot of information coming in, customers see the value, they connect more, and again, back to your loop that you're talking about the data. >> Well, the security visibility too, just looking at the data, with all those devices now with Windows, and all the new multiple vendors. I mean, you've got all that data. >> That's right. But I think it's the insights, you know, we keep talking about that. Those insights are really helping us leverage that for the customer so they can see in front of them, and I think what we always say internally is "Look, customers aren't looking for a rear-view mirror. "They're looking through the windshield." The more we can use that insight, to help them see when and where they need to get through for their own transformation, is what it's all about. >> And talk to us about how both of you-- Doug, we'll start with you, how have customers been sort of symbiotic to the digital transformation of services in terms of knowing, "We've got to get predictive"? How are they helping you to evolve what you're delivering so that ultimately, services is part of this technology differentiation and product front that Dell Technologies has? >> Yeah, well, you know the history of Dell Technologies is really the core of our foundation. Culturally, for all 140,000 of us, is listening to the customer. And I think that culture has allowed us to adapt and stay close to not only what the customers are telling us, using the insights we're getting back, but knowing where the customers want to head. And it truly is a one-on-one listening to the customers, listening to where their issues are at, then using this technology and their solutions to solve their problems they're bringing up. But I got to tell you, there's not a big hammer that just- one answer for that. Literally, it's how are we helping consumers? How are we helping small, medium, business? Large? All of them have a variation of what's the same, and all of them have a variation of difference as well. >> Alex, how about strategy for a minute, the strategic landscape, how has Dell Technologies Services changed with the vendor landscape? Now you've got multiple vendors, it turns into multiple clouds, multiple clouds with open source software. You've got all kinds of new things emerging. How do you stay on top of it, what's the strategy, what's the long game look like for you guys? >> If I were to summarize in a nutshell, it's software. We're investing quite a bit in software, whether that is within our predictive capabilites, but as well as in deployment services, and Doug alluded to ProManage. So software is a pivotal, key component. So this is how we are approaching from a services standpoint. Whether you talk support, deploy, or manage services, the umbrella around that is really our capability to do the software component. So that's where we are placing our bets, we think that's where the future is. Whether it's SupportAssist, or our ProManager offering. It's all the backbone based on software development. >> And where is, we talked a lot about digital transformation and services, but the people, the people being essential to, we need the technology to do our jobs in any industry. What about skill, upleveling skills? It's great to have all the technology, but we need to have people to be trained, certified, professionals to be able to maximize the value of the services. Doug, go ahead and start, and then Alex, maybe from a strategic perspective, where is that people, cultural part of the services? >> Well, look it's huge. I don't think it's just for services, I hear our customers talk about it as well. And as Alex just mentioned, that software is driving more and more of it. You know, we use a lot of different acronyms and titles to kind of describe it, Digital Transformation, AI, BI. I mean there's all of this, but it is is all summarized in Digital Transformation. And the impact it has on our team members is vast. So look, open communication, yes, it is changing the way we do business, and quite frankly the world's doing business, the simple tasks are getting more and more automated through these insights, and they're going away. Making it easier for our customers means you're not getting as many break/fix calls, you're not getting these transactions. But what we're doing at the same time is we're upscaling the team, telling them where we need to be in the future, helping them with those skillsets, reset. The interesting thing is our team members are seeing the value of it, their jobs actually become more enriched because you're doing higher value things for our customers. But there is a transformation going on and-- >> And Doug, there's cultural changes as well, as we think about how we measure the business, some of the metrics that we look at, legacy metrics versus new metrics, they are different now. How we think about people development is different. So, I think it's a great question, 'cause the actual talent transformation, it's huge. There's short-term impact, and long-term impact. And if you don't plan that right, obviously you can't execute a strategy. >> How should your customers start rethinking about how they're leveraging the services? Because with unified workspace, data center as a service, and now multi-cloud, architecture is really important. Where the data sits, using real-time data you mentioned in software and data, so as they think about now, looking at not resetting, but taking services for their advantage. 'Cause they look at services, they want to be in the right position. It seems like architectures are more important now. Multi-cloud architecture. So, more technical people involved, the roles are changing. What should customers, how should they expect to be thinking about that? >> It's another great question. Well look, I'll let Alex follow up with his thoughts on this one. But I think this is really about us, the customers have to look as a true partnership. What we're really there trying to help them with every single day, is we talk about keeping the solutions in the system running to what they need, what they wanted. But we can also help by helping their staff free up time through the services we have, so they can stay focused on their transformation and provide the value that their teams and customers are looking for. That's really how we see that. So in other words, go into them and say, "Hey look, "we can take some of these tasks off, whether it be the deployment, unified workspace we talked about, you know, that was announced today. These are all about not only providing better technology for their team members and their customers, but then leveraging their time then to go spend it on their transformation. That's really it, quite frankly, simply put. >> Yeah, I would say it depends. Customers want to do a variety of things, so it depends on their business outcomes. So, at the end of the day, I would say, as you look at Dell Technologies, we have all the Lego blocks. You tell us what you're trying to achieve from a business standpoint, and we have the Lego blocks to make it happen. I think we're in a unique position to be able to deliver that valuable proposition to customers. So it's not a one size fits all. >> More data, more workloads, I've heard the term workload mentioned so many times in all my CUBE interviews, we all talk about workloads, but now with IOT and Edge, you're going to see a proliferation of more workloads, some small, some massive, and managing that workload is a huge challenge for organizations. This comes up as the number one issue. How does services play into that, how do you guys make that easier, and I love the operating model of simplicity, but when you guys take that realization into services, what do you guys bake out of that? What comes out of that? >> Yeah, I would say two things. First, the reason that workloads exists is that it's important for the business. So it's got to be up at times, it's got to be 100 percent. It's got to be up and running. We make sure that that happens. Second, if you look at the workloads, they're actually running critical pieces of the business. So we actually assure that we are providing additional value, beyond actually just running infrastructure, actually keeping value and how you should optimize that infrastructure so you can do more with less. >> Can you give, is there an example of a customer? John mentioned B of A was highlighted this morning, Draper was as well, I think some of the Trailblazer Winners were right before we started. A customer that comes to mind that really demonstrates the value that they're getting from Dell Technologies' suite of services? >> Well, look, I think there's a lot of those. But going back to maybe, we talked about the customers today in the keynote speeches that were happening. But look, there's a lot of small and medium businesses that are one, trying to stay with and ahead of technology. Lots of cases actually farther ahead in their transformation. I think I know of one that I recently had a conversation with, a doctor's office had four or five offices in a town here in the US. And they're staying ahead of that. They want us to "Look, we want to buy things that have "easy deployment, easy install/run. We also need you "to come in and help us tell us how to access "and leverage the technology we have better." Running it easier, staying ahead of that digital transformation, and providing really, their virtual CIO, with a technical account manager pulling all that together. You know, all from the storage, their server, their client products coming together; they don't view it as-- the customer's not coming to us and talking to us about individual products. It's not the discussion. What they're saying is "We need to purchase this, "we know we need this solution, we need to have you guys "come and pull it all together, we're looking "for our people to take care of the patients, "get the information that needs to the government, "and get paid, that's it. "And we need you to help us pull all that together." And we're doing that. >> Doug, my final question for you. Michael Dell always talks about this, within the hallway conversations, or on theCUBE. He says, "The best way to create valuable teams is to attract and retain the best talent." How are you guys attracting and retaining the talent, because the workforces are changing, the technology's changing. What are some of the hard problems? Because people love to solve hard problems. What's the pitch for people out there watching, that might want to work in the services group? What's the environment like? How do you attract great people? What kind of problems do they work on? Give a little taste. >> Well, first of all, you know, you have to love and want to take care of our customers, that's really exciting to me, and I know to the other 60,000 team members. That's why we get up for every day. There's an energy that comes from that. I mean, you're getting up and helping our customers whether they're hospitals, small, medium businesses, or consumers. Really being productive in their lives, whatever it may be. So there's an energy that comes from that, I think a lot of people enjoy doing that. It can't be more exciting than that, right? Second of all, career. Just so many aspects to this. You think about digital future technology, we have everything from being able to go out in the field and help our customers to remote, there's just so many different opportunities. And then we also have our employee resource group. So even participating beyond just work, we have the ability to join all of our different resources groups, whether it be Pride, or Veterans, or whatever they may be. People like and see value to just coming into work, but being able to take their passions that they have on the outside and bring it in as well. >> Real citizenship opportunities to bring and contribute back. >> Exactly right, giving back to our communities. very strong, very strong. You know I get an immense amount of pride in the things that I want to contribute to outside of work, and seeing and getting empowered by Dell to do those things. And then constant learning, constant, constant learning. >> I would also hint at a bit of competitive imagination. (Laughing) If you heard any barking during our interviews, speaking of things to do outside of work, we're next to Michael's Angel Paws, which is near and dear to Michael Dell's heart. That's the service dogs that are actually here for all of us to get our dog fixes on. So Doug, Alex, thank you so much for explaining to us the momentum, the excitement behind the digital transformation of Dell Technologies Services. >> Thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Live at Dell Technologies World 2019. This is day one of two sets of CUBE coverage. Stick around, our next guest will join us shortly.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018 brought to you by Amazon web services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> Good to have you here on theCUBE, as we continue our coverage at AWS re:Invent. We're at day three here in Las Vegas in the Sands Expo Hall D, and we got about a half hour. Come by and say hi to us if you would. I'm here with Rebecca Knight, John Walls, and two gentleman here to join us. One from GitLab, Brendan Jung, who is the vice president of alliances. Brendan, good to see you sir. >> Thank you for having us. >> And Alex Hale, platform engineering at Beacon Platform. >> Hello, Alex, how are you doing? >> Not bad, I'm surviving the whole experience. >> It's a test! >> Well, let's talk about the whole experience (mumbles) What have you picked up this week? >> I've picked up that AWS is going very much into this sort of enterprise space. We saw that theme last year, and I think this year it's even more so that they're really catering towards how enterprise and then big organizations are getting in. And I think that's been a big. You can see it in how they're doing their storage strategies, how they're doing their network strategies, and how they're just really targeting towards security, and compliance, and governance. And I think that's a big theme that's from last year to this year, and I think it's going to continue on. >> Yeah, they've been waving a big flag for sure telling the enterprise it's safe to come onboard the public cloud's open for ya. >> Yes. >> Oh yeah for sure. >> Brendan, if you would, you were telling a story that you worked at Google for quite some time. >> I was, yes. >> Worked on some fairly high profile projects >> there, and you've been >> Yes. at GitLab for five months now. Instant transition for ya? >> Five months, yes. >> What was behind that? >> So a couple of it is, I mean when we get down to it sometimes you're either a builder or a runner just in the way you're oriented. And I'm a builder, so the biggest thing was love building that from the ground up with Google. Amazing team they did amazing job. We got to do a lot of really fun things. Was looking for something kind of new, and I'd worked with GitLab since I ran the partner organization for a lot of the partners at Google. I had worked with them for a number of years and it's rare when you work regularly with the company that you get surprised. So the kind of the point that I was like, "Oh, I really need to look into this more deeply," is I've done detailed work with GitLab for years. And I was in a meeting with Sid, our CEO. And he kind of, "Hey, you know what we're up to." And I'm like, "Oh, of course I know what we're up to." Right, cuz that's you always answer that. I mean you don't answer the question, "No, I have no idea what you're up to." We met four weeks ago, of course I know what you're up to. And he's really humble. But simply like oh hey, you want to see me insert. Hey, this is what we're working on. Slides across the floors to report, and he's like, oh, in the CI space, under three years we went from no product to the very best of the business. Beat out Microsoft, and CloudBees, and all these. And I was like wait, I didn't know you were in the CI space. I shouldn't say this publicly, >> Alright it's alright. >> but I went like I didn't know that. >> It's okay. You got the job. >> No, I'm safe, but the ability that's just the speed that the company moves. Everyone says it, but when you can go that fast with that kind of quality, I was like I got to dig deeper. And so we just kind of went down that path, and it's been quite an adventure. >> Good. >> Obviously, Microsoft buying GitHub has made for a whole lot of discussions in a whole lot of different ways for us. And competition's good, so it's been a lot of fun. >> Well, we definitely want to talk about the GitLab and Beacon Platform partnership, but I want to first ask you, Alex. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the Beacon Platform. >> So Beacon Platform is a company that came out of the financial services from the large banks; the Goldman Sachs, the J.P. Morgans, the Bank of Americas. And in those places, internally they have to have this quite open source like culture where there is people contributing in the same codebase, there's a lifecycle of how things are done, and it's rapid moving. And people don't associate them with large banks, but there is these products out there. In fact, some of the Goldman Sachs partners refer to those as the golden source, so they secret source. And if large banks can do it, why can't someone else. So we've taken those experiences that people have done for years to build these communities, best practices, and prescriptions, and turn it into a product. So we've taken the same model of here is a set of financial tooling, and infrastructure, and toolboxes to make financial applications. And we've brought it to the smaller bunch; so your insurance companies, even your large banks, Komodo used firms, insurance people. They can take our platform, and then bring their own analytics, and then build financial applications that they want on top of it and whilst doing so be ensured that they're compliant with security. We've done the governance for you. We've done the security for you. All you have to do is put your good ideas to use and make applications. >> So give us some examples of the business problems that this platform solves. >> So typically in the financial space, the people that have the great ideas are pawns, and they're by nature mathematicians. They're not developers. They're not UX people. They're not UI designers. They're certainly not security people. And yet they are are the people that are driving the core business and the value. And so the question is how do we make them be productive? How do we make sure that their lives are easier? Which means that you give them an idea. You give them a lifecycle for software that they can start saying, "Ooh, I've got an idea. I'll hack it up." And when it's hacked, they can publish it. It comes out the other end, and all the reporting is underneath there. Their security is there. The compliance is there. All the authentication is there. And that idea is now being actualized in the matter of days, weeks rather than months and years. And that means that our customers can take these ideas that they've been working on or just conceiving and turn it into reality in a very short amount of time. And then be comfortable that whole platform itself remains secure, compliant, and all the same thing that Amazon is actually counting to us. >> You know it seems like if your focus, your core competence, was or is financial services. I mean you're starting at a very high level of demand client, right? >> Yes. >> And appropriately so, and so there are a lot of lessons that migrate to other businesses that I assume are quite attractive to them, >> Yes. >> because if you mention your client, BOA, if they've got comfort, I have comfort. Right, because how much of that do you see that the experiences that you've developed or that you have put them through translate in a very positive way to other sectors? >> We've found out some of our customers are starting off in the cloud, and they're making their cloud journey. They're financial companies that want to take the journey to the cloud, but don't really know how to. And so we as a company which has already running on the cloud, as a company we don't actually own a physical single server. We're all on the cloud, all in. And they, our customers, come to us to say, "How are you in the cloud? What do you do? "You have the experience. You've worked at these places. "How does that all work?" And so we give them a sort of in the same way that out platform does. Prescriptive advice on how things are going to be done. And our customers come along with us on the journey. And so we take the customers on their cloud journey whereas our customers are taking us on their needs, and bringing their needs, and what they need to us to say, "I want to build an application like this. "What more do I need to do? What do I have to do?" And so it's a very collaborative relationship doing our customers to say, "I can help you in the cloud space. "You can help us in the financial ideas space, "and together we can actually make applications." Whatever we build ourselves, becomes we can resell it to others whilst the customers intellectual property can stay with them. It's a really interesting collaboration of. >> Symbiotic in many respects, right? >> Yes. >> You're leaning on them. And what about the relationship between the two of you again in terms of. >> Sure yeah, so as much as Beacon is very financial services focused, we're a DevOps tool and end DevOps tool for anyone, right. So in many ways what Beacon is doing is taking what GitLab's done about builing that whole tool chain, 'cause there's really a tool chain crisis out there. If you start looking at what needs to be set up for a developer, they want to live in their IDE, do their development, and publish as he said. But you start looking at what that needs to be set up after that, you're talking often times on a company 12, 15 other steps to go through. And that was kind of our aha was there's an opportunity to treat that as one full application as a DevOps tool set across the entire board. Started down that journey really like three years ago, and that's kind of I think we kind of match up. The similar story; they wrap all the important financial data, all the other things that matter to a bank, right. And they're got to whole bunch of extra tooling, extra data, extra services. But at the core of it, they also leveraged GitLab both as a tool to develop their own product and also to offer it as a tool possibly to their own customers, right. So their other customers need to develop. They need a DevOps toolset, so we work back and forth a whole lot on this. They move so fast. It's been amazing, and so every time we sit down we're like wait, what if we did, okay cool let's iterate. And we can turn that around. We ship every month to our customers. You can run it anywhere you want. The majority of our customers, they love the fact that they can run anywhere. Which in fact while Beacon does runs on Amazon, their customer bases have to run on (mumbles), right? And while we're seeing that hybrid become more and more common which is great, that's the truth that's been there forever. That's the world that we've lived, they live everyday and have lived for a long time, and so it's kind of fun to come here and see that be like yes, oh yeah that does exist, and we're kind of like yeah that's existed for a long time. >> Everybody caught up. >> Right yeah, we're there and there's always going to be reasons for that on both directions. And so we work really well together on that side, and they push us hard. Right, so we're actually right on stage. We're sitting there in just this morning, he's like hey, you finally (mumbles). You know I've got all these merge requests that he wants in our product. (mumbles) opens, it's open. Everyone in the world, anyone that watches this, go put a merge request on GitLab. We're going to track it. You're going to know where it lands. You're going to know when it gets delivered. So and if you want to write the code, you can write it and it's in. So it's been actually a ton of fun. >> And have at it, right? >> Yes. >> Well if the relationship's working good to see. >> Yes. >> And you're five months in, and I'm sure the one year anniversary's right around the corner for you. I'll try to be able to wait. >> Be here before you'll know it right? >> Hell yeah. >> (mumbles) thanks for joining us. Good to have you here on theCUBE, and look forward to hearing about this continuous success down the road I'm sure. >> Thank you >> Thank you so much. >> (mumbles) having us. >> Thank you both. Back with more here on theCUBE. You're watching this live at AWS re:Invent Las Vegas. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas. Good afternoon to you. No matter where you're watching, here in the US, we know it is afternoon. As we wind up our coverage for day three at AWS re:invent here on the Cube. One of seven venues we're in right now that's hosting various satellite events. Right now we're in the Sands Expo. Rebecca Knight, John Walls, with Russ Currie. The vice president of Enterprise Strategy at NetScout. Russ, good to see you sir. >> Nice to see you again. >> I've got to be careful. I've got two Bostonian's of sorts here. >> Sorry, sorry. >> So if I don't get something on the accent, you just let me know (laughs) >> We'll talk amongst ourselves. >> Sorry if your sports inferiority complex is.. We're the champions, whatever >> Russ, if you would, first off, your take about what you're seeing here. Because, here we are, day three. As you know, you've been to a lot of shows. Day three, kind of, usually hits a different gear, right? >> Right >> Slows down a little bit. There's still a lot of excitement here. There's still a lot of people around. This show has a little different vibe to it. >> It really does. It's interesting because it becomes a little bit more serious, I think. At this point, in day three for this show, it's now, people are really kind of, they've been exposed to an awful lot in the last three days. And they're really saying, "Okay, now I really want to understand the nuts and bolts of it", and they're spending a little bit more time sitting and learning, understanding what you have to offer them in terms of your solution sense. So it's been an awful lot of fun. Also we did a couple of speaking engagements, so it's really good getting the folks that went and saw our guys speak and seeing them come into the booth and say, 'I want to talk more about that'. >> Well, I want to talk more about that, so you have a new marketing campaign, but first for the viewers who are not familiar with NetScout, you're a Fortune 500 company, but tell us a little more about who you are and what you do. >> Right, so what we do is we provide visibility into the communications between servers and clients and basically see all of the traffic that traverses the network and whether the network is in a public cloud, private cloud, or an on-prem environment, and by looking at that traffic we're able to understand the performance of the services that are being delivered and ensure the security performance of those servers. But right in that perspective we give IT the tools they need to get quicker to the mean time to knowledge, identifying where a problem might be or where a risk may exist and being able to solve those tough problems. >> So it's been a year since you've been on the Cube, I know the esteemed John Walls interviewed you. >> We go way back, yes. >> What's new this year? What sort of advancements, progressions have you implemented? >> So last year when we came in was really our first entry into the public cloud environment and our first entry into AWS, since then we've got a lot of really good traction, a lot of embracing of our technology, we partnered more closely with AWS and got ourselves onto the marketplace. We also enhanced our partnership with VMware and now a part of their NetX integration so we have high levels of integration into both of those platforms, which of course is strong to this entire audience. We've introduced new features and functionality into our product to be able to provide greater visibility, even going deeper into understanding the way the applications are functioning and also added some more security profiling into our products and being able to identify threats as they come into the enterprise network and also as they go out ,so, it's been interesting, it's been a lot of fun. >> You talk about the hybrid cloud and obviously we're hearing that here, this week right, so AWS is obviously slightly shifting its perspective a bit, you know, in terms of on-prem and dealing with the public cloud as well, mind that merger. Your clients, is their any arm twisting that you still have to do or are people buying into it a little more wholeheartedly now in terms of the public cloud and that you've addressed these security concerns? >> I think actually we've become an enabler in often times for our customers, to move to the cloud with competence, where they were a little bit concerned that as they move into the cloud, what kind of investment in tools are they going to have to make? What are they going to potentially lose as they put their workloads into the cloud ? Do they lose a degree of visibility and control? And what we've been able to do is ensure that they have that same experience no matter where they deploy. We were talking earlier about one of our customers that's in the travel and entertainment business and they have been using our gear on cruise ships and in their on-prem data center, but expanded themselves into AWS to extend their capabilities and provide a better user experience for those on ship and now what they really have was the ability to have visibility from ship to shore to cloud and have that perspective and have the confidence that they're delivering a high quality experience to their customers. >> Ship to shore to cloud, not every company can say that. >> Exactly. >> But speaking of motto's, you have a new marketing campaign, visibility without borders. What does that mean? What are you trying to evoke their with your customers? >> What we we're really trying to look at there is the ability to provide visibility no matter where you're deployed. If you have a deployment in a public cloud environment like AWS, you want to have that same level of visibility in your on-prem environment, you want to have it no matter where you have a workload, wherever you have an instance that you want to manage. You want to be able to have that same perspective, one of the things we talk about a little bit, is the idea that, providing a single pane of glass into the service insurance experience and I think that often times, when people try to get to that single pane of glass, they end up with more of a single glass of pain. (laughing) You know, they're trying to aggregate so much stuff that it really doesn't come together too well. >> Right. >> But because we focus in on the data source itself then it just provides that continuity regardless of where they deploy. >> Alright and the importance of visibility, obviously when you're talking about end to end right now, whether you're on-prem or whether you're in the public cloud you're not particular, right? >> Right. >> As a user, I just want to see my operation from start to finish and I don't care where it is. >> Exactly, providing that end to end perspective and being able to understand how I'm delivering services, what the customer experiences, no matter where I deploy and especially when we look at taking advantage of some of the elastic compute capabilities and the like that exists in the cloud, you want to ensure that you're actually getting what you paid for as well, you want to have those controls in place, knowing that what you're delivering is meaningful and impacting the business in a positive way as opposed to, potentially, in a negative way, and spending too much for something that doesn't improve anything in terms of the customer experience. >> Right. >> So the customers, when they want to talk about return on investment, what excites them most? What kind of things are you showing them that is delighting them? >> Often times it's really about mean time to knowledge, we spend a lot of time pointing fingers at each other when we're trying to solve a problem instead of pointing our fingers at the problem. And that's really what we try to focus in on, really getting down into the real details of why something is not performing properly, not, what might be performing improperly. So being able to really get down to that detail and get the right people working on the right problems, I often talk about it in terms of getting the right information, to the right person at the right time, to do the right thing. And if you're able to do that, you're going to provide a better user experience to your customers. >> You mention that a lot of your personnel, a lot of your folks here have been speaking, talking to various groups, I always find that interesting right, because, it's usually the Q&A. >> Yes. >> That when things pop off. So, if you had to generalize about the kind of feedback you're getting from those sessions in terms of the questions, the concerns, the challenges, what are you hearing from folks out there? >> It's kind of funny, one of the things that we get a lot of times is, "You really can do this?" you know, "Is this real what you're showing us?", it's like, yes, this is actual traffic we're showing you exactly what we're seeing. >> Yeah. >> And then they are often pretty amazed at our ability to bring this all into something that visualizes these complex applications that they're delivering across multiple different environments and they have that ah-ah moment where they go, "Oh gosh I really need this, you know, this is really that end to end view that I've been looking for for so long, but I really can't get what I use, a bunch of disparate tools, to try and bring that together" >> So that means, what you just described, is really the definition of innovation, which is providing customers with things that they want, that they didn't even know they wanted. How do you stay innovative? I mean here we are at AWS, Amazon, one of the most innovative companies on the planet and in the history of industry. >> Absolutely. >> How does a company, you're based in Westford, Massachusetts, how do you stay on the cutting edge? >> We spend an enormous amount of time working with our customers and listening to them in terms of where they're going, what their plans are, what new technologies might they be implementing, what are their major initiatives, we regularly reach out and we have constant contact with them to get that feedback and make sure that we're developing solutions that are meaningful to them, it's really about, not what feature can I deliver but what can I provide as value, that's going to make their lives better. Because, as an IT person, it's a tough job right? You're usually the person that people look at and say "Why isn't this working?". >> Right. >> And not being able to have an answer to that, is not a good position to be in. (laughter) Right, so what we're really trying to do is provide them with that answer and give them that ability to be able to answer the tough questions and solve those tough problems. >> Talking about finger pointing, it happens right? >> It does, you know. So what we're really all about is making sure that they're able to get the problem solved as quickly as possible. One of the interesting things I've been hearing from our customers too is that they're looking to this concept of a versatilist, rather than having just a straight forward specialist coming in and work on problems, having people that are a little bit broader in terms of their capabilities and looking at things not only from the perspective, say I'm a network guy, I'm going to look at the network and the app guys going to look at the app. >> Right. >> You got to cross pollinate a little bit and provide that ability to see both sides of that problem, so that's starting to happen. >> Certainly presents a challenge for your workforce right? All of a sudden, you've got to be a little smarter and where a lot of different hats. >> Exactly. >> Versatilist, I like that. You heard it here first. >> Yeah. >> Well, Russ, if you're going to go and ship the shorter cloud, you let us know? OK? >> OK. (laughing) >> Because we want to take that journey with you, alright? >> Love to. >> Thanks for being with us again, good to see you. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure. >> You bet, safe trip home. Back with more here from AWS re:Invent, you are watching us live on the Cube.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to our continuing coverage here on theCUBE of AWS re:Invent, we're on day three of three days of wall to wall coverage that we've brought you here from the Sands Expo along with David Vellante, I'm John Walls. Glad you're with us here, we're joined by David Flynn from Hammerspace, and David, good afternoon to you. >> Good afternoon. >> Been quite a year for you, right? >> Yeah. >> This has been something else. Set us up a little bit about where you've been, the journey you're on right now with Hammerspace and maybe for folks at home who aren't familiar, a little bit about what you do. >> So Hammerspace is all about data agility. We believe that data should be like the air you breathe, where you need it, when you need it, without having to think about it. Today, data's managed by copying it between the sundry different types of storage. And that's 'cause we're managing data through the storage system itself. What we want is for data to simply be there, when you need it. So it's all about data agility. >> I need to know more. So let's talk about some of your past endeavors. Fusion-io we watched you grow that company from just an idea. You solved the block storage problem, you solved the performance problems, amazing what you guys did with that company. My understanding is you're focused on file. >> That's right. >> Which is a much larger-- >> Unstructured data in general file and object. >> So a much larger proportion of the data that's out there. >> Yes. >> What's the problem that you guys are going after? >> Well at Fusion-io and this was pre-flash, now flash everybody takes it for granted. When we started it didn't really exist in the data center. And if you're using SAN, most likely it's for performance. And there's a better way to get performance with flash down in the server. Very successful with that. Now the problem is, people want the ease of managablility of having a global name space of file and object name space. And that's what we're tackling now because file is not native in the Cloud. It's kind of an afterthought. And all of these different forms of storage represents silos into which you copy data, from on-prem into cloud, between the different types of storage, from one site to another. This is what we're addressing with virtualizing the data, putting powerful metadata in control of how that data's realized across multiple data centers across the different types of storage, so that you see it as a single piece of data regardless of where it lives. >> Okay so file's not a first class citizen. You're making copies, moving data all over the place. You got copy creep going on. >> It's like cutting off Hydra's head. When you manage data by copying it you're just making more of it and that's because the metadata's down with the data. Every time you make a copy, it's a new piece of data that needs to be managed. >> So talk more about the metadata structure, architecture, what you guys are envisioning? >> Fundamentally, the technology is a separate metadata control plane that is powerful enough to present data as both file and object. And takes that powerful metadata, and puts it in control of where the data is realized, both in terms of what data center it's in, as well as what type of storage it's on, allowing you to tap into the full dynamic range of the performance of server-attached flash, of course Fusion-io, very near and dear to my heart, getting tens of millions of I-ops and tens of gigabytes per second, you can't do that across the network. You have to have the data be very agile, and be able to be promoted into the server. And then be able to manage it all the way to global scale between whole different data centers. So that's the magic of being able to cover the full dynamic range performance to capacity, scale and distance, and have it be that same piece of data that's simply instantiated, where you need it, when you need it, based on the power of the metadata. >> So when you talk about object, you talk about a simplified means of interacting, it's a get-put paradigm right? >> That's right. >> So that's something that you're checking up? >> That's right, ultimately you need to also have random read and write semantics and very high performance, and today, the standard model is you put your data in object storage and then you have your application rewritten to pull it down, store it on some local storage, to work with it and then put it back. And that's great for very large-scale applications, where you can invest the effort to rewrite them. But what about the world where they want the convenience of, the data is simply there, in something that you can mount as a file system or access as object, and it can be at the highest performance of random IO against local flash, all the way to cold in the Cloud where it's cheap. >> I get it so it's like great for Shutterfly 'cause they've got the resources to rewrite the application but for everybody else. >> That's right, and that's why the web scalers pioneered the notion of object storage and we helped them with the local block to get very, very high performance. So that bifurcated world, because the spectrum got stretched so wide that a single size fits all no longer works. So you have to kind of take object on the capacity, distance and scale side, and block, local on the performance side. But what I realized early on, all the way back to Fusion-io is that it is possible to have a shared namespace, both file system and object, that can span that whole spectrum. But to do that you have to provide really powerful metadata as a separate service that has the competency to actually manage the realization of the data across the infrastructure. >> You know David you talk about data agility, so that's what we're all about right? We're all about being agile. Just conceptually today, a lot more data than you've ever had to deal with before. In a lot more places. >> It's a veritable forest. >> With a lot more demands, so just fundamentally, how do you secure that agility. How can you provide that kind of reliability and agility, in that environment, like the challenge for you. >> Oh yeah. Well the challenge really goes back to the fact that the network storage protocols haven't had innovation for like 20 years because of the world of NAS being so dominant by a few players, well one. There really hasn't been a lot of innovation. Y'know NFSv3 three has been around for decades. NFSv4 didn't really happen. It was slower and worse off. At the heart of the storage networking protocols for presenting a file system, it hadn't even been enhanced to be able to communicate across hostile networks. So how are you going to use that at the kind of scale and distance of cloud, right? So what I did, after leaving Fusion-io, was I went and teamed up with the world's top experts. We're talking here about Trent Micklebus, the Linux Kernel author and maintainer of the storage networking stack. And we have spent the last five plus years fixing the fundamental plumbing that makes it possible to bring the shared file semantic into something that becomes cloud native. And that really is two things. One is about the ability to scale, both performance, capacity, in the metadata and in the data. And you couldn't do that before because NAS systems fundamentally have the metadata and data together. Splitting the two allows you to scale them both. So scale is one. Also the ability to secure it over large distances and networks, the ability to operate in an eventually consistent, to work across multiple datacenters. NAS had never made the multi-datacenter leap. Or the securing it across other networks, it just hadn't got there. But that is actually secondary compared to the fact that the world of NAS is very focused on the infrastructure guys and the storage admin. And what you have to do is elevate the discussion to be about the data user and empower them with powerful metadata to do self service. And as a service so that they can completely automate all of the concerns about the infrastructure. 'Cause if there's anything that's cloud, it's being able to delegate and hand off the infrastructure concerns, and you simply can't do that when you're focused at it from a storage administration and data janitorial kind of model. >> So I want to pause for a second and just talk to our audience and just stress how important it is to pay attention to this man. So there's no such thing as a sure thing in business. But there is one sure thing that is if David Flynn's involved you're going to disrupt something so you disrupted Scuzzy, the horrible storage stack. So when you hear things today like NVME and CAPPY and Atomic Rights and storage class memory, you got it all started. Fusion-io. >> That's right. >> And that was your vision that really got that started up. When I used to talk to people about that they would say I'm crazy, and you educated myself and Floyer and now you see it coming to fruition today. So you're taking aim at decades old infrastructure and protocols called NAS, and trying to do the same thing at Cloud scale, which is obviously something you know a lot about. >> That's right. I mean if you think about it. The spectrum of data, goes from performance on the one hand to ease of manageability, distance and scale, cost capacity versus cost performance. And that's inherent to our physical universe because it takes time to propagate information to a distance and to get ease of manageability to encode things very, very tight to get capacity efficiency, takes time, which works against performance. And as technology advances the spectrum only gets wider, and that's why we're stuck to the point of having to bifurcate it, that performance is locally attached flash. And that's what I pioneered with flash in the server in NVME. I told everybody, EMC, SAN, it sucks. If you want performance put flash in the server. Now we're saying if you want ease of use and manageability there's a better way to do that than NAS, and even object storage. It's to separate the metadata as a distinct control plane that is put in charge of managing data through very rich and powerful metadata, and that puts the data owner in control of their data. Not just across different types of storage in the performance capacity spectrum, but also across on-prem and in the Cloud, and across multi-cloud. 'Cause the Cloud after all is just another big storage silo. And given the inertia of data, they've got you by the balls when they've got all the data there. (laughing) I'm sorry, I know I'm at AWS I should be careful what I say. >> Well this is live. >> Yeah, okay so they can't censor us, right. So just like the storage vendors of yesteryear, would charge you an arm and a leg when their arrays were out of service, to get out of your service, because they knew that if you were trying to extend the service life of that, that that's because it was really hard for you to get the data off of it because you had to suffer application downtime and all of that. In the same fashion, when you have your data in the Cloud, the egress costs are so expensive. And so this is all about putting the data owner in control of the data by giving them a rich powerful metadata platform to do that. >> You always want to have strategies that give you flexibility, exit strategies if things don't work out, so that's fascinating. I know we got to wrap, but give us the low-down on the company, the funding, what can you share with us. Go-to-market, et cetera. >> So it's a tightly held company. I was very successful financially. So from that point of view we're... >> Self-funded. >> Self-funded, funded from angels. I made some friends with Fusion-io right? So from that point of view yeah, it's the highest power team you can get. I mean these are great guys, the Linux Kernel maintainer on the storage networking stack. This was a heavy lift because you have to fix the fundamental plumbing in the way storage networking works so that you can, it's like a directories service for data, and then all the management service. This has been a while in the making, but it's that foundational engineering. >> You love heavy lifts. >> I love hard problems. >> I feel like I mis-introduced you, I should have said the great disruptor is what I should have said. >> Well, we'll see. I think disrupting the performance side was a pure play and very easy. Disrupting the ease of use side of the data spectrum, that's the fun one that's actually so transformative because it touches the people that use the data. >> Well best of luck. It was really, I'm excited for ya. >> Thanks for joining us David. Appreciate the time. David Flynn joined up from Hammerspace, and back with more on theCUBE at AWS re:Invent. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2018, brought to you buy Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. And welcome back here at AWS re:Invent. We are live in Las Vegas, day three of our coverage right here on the Cube, and we continue our discussion now with Justin Warren and John Walls, with Matt Yanchyshyn, who is the director of solutions architecture at AWS. >> That's right. >> Good morning. Good to see you, sir. >> Thanks for having me. >> And Nick Cayou, vice president of the global ecosystem at Pivotal. And, good to see you this morning, Nick. >> Good morning, thanks for having me. >> All right, first off let's just get your take on what's happening here. We were talking a little but before we got started about here we are, day three, well day four if you count the partner conferences, but last day of the show, and there's still a lot of excitement in the air. >> All the energy out here. >> The show floor's still packed. What have you guys seen this week that's kind of stood out in your mind, Matt? >> Well, I mean people stick around for the third day because Werner Vogels is like a hero for so many people here and so, you know, a lot of buzz is to see his keynote this morning. You know, one thing I've been really excited about is all the announcements around machine learning this week. There's just been an incredible amount of innovation, and people are really excited about the DeepRacer and the DeepRacer league announced this morning, so that, you know, the momentum we're seeing and the excitement around machine learning is really cool to see. >> And from your perspective, Nick? >> I'm joining the marathon towards the middle. I came in last night. Matt and I had dinner. But I think the most impactful announcement I saw coming out of AWS was probably the Outposts announcement, sort of the commitment to hybrid, which, and I know Matt played a big role in kind of pioneering that and so that's super exciting, and I just can't believe how many people have stuck around. I mean, we're on the last day of this thing, and it's like, you know, people are staying after the party. They won't leave the house. >> Yeah, exactly right. Well, at four O'clock they're going to have important things that we're going to think about. DeepRacer, by the way, we've had a couple of guests on. That was a really cool idea about taking literally a small, toy truck, if you will, but programming it and doing some, not reflective learning, but reinforced learning with it, and then actually taking it into practice and putting these cars on tracks and having a yearlong competition. So we'll kind of see next year, how that works out. >> Yeah. >> AWS and Pivotal, all right. So what are the two of aligned with now? What brings the two of you here, and the two companies together? >> Yeah, well, I mean, I think first of all, as companies we have a lot in common, certainly how we think about customers. We're both really sort of customer-obsessed companies. But, you know what I see a lot, I work with partners all day long, and we want to make it easy for both our customers and our partners to embrace modern DevOps, like all these enterprises are going through DevOps transformation, and any tools and partnerships we can create to make that journey easier is really a priority for me and my team. >> Okay, and then from the Pivotal side of the fence? >> Yeah, I would say largely it's our customers. You know, a large portion of our clients have chosen to run Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which is sort of our flagship platform, as a service on AWS. Going back to, you know, tune of 2014 was the first public IaaS we supported after Vsphere, so, you know, I think our customers are pushing us to work together, and I think we've met that challenge. You know, one of the things we're here to talk about from a Pivotal perspective is all the work we've done with Amazon to expose Amazon services to our platform through this technology called a service broker, that you know, over the past six months, Amazon engineers and Pivotal engineers have worked kind of assiduously to deliver to market, and now it's getting in the hands of customers. You know, after this session we're going to go speak with about 50 customers in a private room about how they're deploying Cloud Foundry on AWS and utilizing the service broker to be more productive and drive more innovation of services into their developer community. >> So what are some of the services customers are attracted to? What are they pushing you to put into this service broker? What do they want to do with that? Maybe you could give us a bit of a flavor of that? >> So we came out initially a couple months ago with 18 services that we support, so things like S3, RDS, some of the Hadoop offerings. You know, I think we're going to see the basics, the S3s, probably consumed first, but we're working. We're actually putting some ideas together to see how we can build kind of reference architectures and paradigms to let our customers know how to take advantage of these services like machine learning or some of the Hadoop offerings, etc. >> Yeah, I mean, we started out with some of the IoT integrations already for the service brokers, but I agree. We're starting with the core services, the databases, DynamoDB, RDS, S3, etc. And we're starting to layer in more services over time. >> Well you've got to start with the basics so that you can then build upon that. >> Exactly. >> Which is what Amazon has a long history of doing. You know, you started with EC2 and then you grew beyond S3 and now we have services like SageMaker and things that drive the car with DeepRacer, so it would be nice if we could actually do training models using Pivotal Cloud Foundry. >> Well actually, nothing's stopping us from using PCF. One of the things I love about it is with Cloud Foundry you can use the Service Brokers. It makes it easier for you to adopt AWS services, but nothing's stopping you from using any AWS service, and it's one of actually the great parts of the partnership, so you're not limited to what we have service brokers for. >> Yeah. So, enterprises have been going on this cloud journey for some time, and Amazon's been around for a long time. AWS has had these services for a while, Pivotal as well. Where are we seeing customers? Where's the momentum for customers, where they're transforming their businesses, and we're hearing a lot about hybrid cloud here at the show. Where are enterprises putting their workloads? What are they looking at putting workloads into hybrid as compared to putting things over into public cloud or using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for? >> I guess I'll take it from my angle first. So, you know, approximately 70% of our customers are still running their workloads on prem, right? That doesn't mean to say that they're not expanding those applications out to Amazon, for example, and I think the key trend we're seen is, you know, cloud is becoming more of an operating model, and what we focus on is teaching our clients how to build and rebuilt software. The big sort of surface area below the iceberg for us right now is all of the enterprise applications, legacy monoliths that need to be kind of decomposed and moved into a cloud operating model, modernized through things like data services that we can expose through our platform to something like AWS. And, you know, it's starting to shift. We were talking earlier about the Outpost and how I think the goal is to kind of meet customers where they are together, if that's the best way to put it. >> Yeah. >> Both Amazon and Pivotal. >> Yeah, I mean with the size of customers we're working with, like Comcast and Liberty Mutual and US Air Force, it's not like a single jump into the cloud. It's a migration, a lot of different workloads, a lot of different divisions of these companies. So it's sort of a continuum, and so different companies are at different stages of their migration and adoption of the cloud all over different parts of the business, so I think the hybrid story is really meeting that need. You have some divisions that are going to jump right into server lists and IoT, and then you have other parts of the company that maybe, you know, have a mainframe that they're still tied to, so there's always going to be some of these dependencies, and so I think hybrid story allows us to sort of address all different parts of the companies we work with. >> So what are the factors then? If I'm looking at, you know, a hybrid cloud solution, how do you help people decide what to put where? Because, you know, you got it on prem, it becomes, you know, a heave, right? To move some things over, and so, could be easier to I guess, take the lightest lift and go from there, but that's not necessarily the best route to go, so how do you help people with that kind of decision? >> Yeah, I mean, we believe in the fullness of time that customers will eventually move everything to the cloud but, you know, in the meantime, like I said, it's going to be a multiyear journey for a lot of these big customers. So like if you take, you know, a Liberty Mutual or a Comcast, these are very large companies, and we work with them to find teams and workloads within, and that comes down to people a lot of the time. You know, different teams may be at a different point of sort of agility in terms of DevOps, and if they're able to adapt their software. If their software runs on x86 infrastructure and if they're already using CICD for example and if they're used to containers, then they're going to be good candidates. So I always look to the people and then the products and then decide what they're going to migrate in that order. >> Yeah, and I would say that, you know, there's a lot of big enterprises that are looking to shut down data centers and they've already made a decision to fundamentally move infrastructure to AWS for example, right? And a lot of times we'll be brought in after the fact if you will, to deliver that developer experience on top of an already made, fundamentally an outsourcing decision, so all the reasons, you know, cost, complexity, flexible finances, consumption-based pricing, a lot of that kind of substrate decision has already been made, and we're generally coming in and saying, okay, now let's look at the application architecture. Are there things like latency and/or regulatory requirements that would require you to keep this on prem versus moving completely to the public cloud? Are there services? So, you know, could you move off of legacy middleware for example, on prem, and take advantage of, you know, refactoring and moving applications into the public cloud to improve your cost structure there? There's a myriad of issues. I think we would generally agree. A lot of times we get guidance from our customers in their respective market segment as to what's most important to them. >> So looking ahead trying to sketch out the vision of what we're going to see in the future, what do you think that customers are going to be asking for you, next year, two years out? >> Well, I think we've had a great reception for a lot of the templates and the automation that we've co-engineered. You know, Nick was talking about a lot of the co-engineering. So we have something called the AWS Quick Starts that allow you to deploy Pivotal Cloud Foundry really quickly, and so we've had really good reception from customers. >> Yep. >> Like, things that we can make it easier for them to deploy Pivotal and just sort of explore using AWS. We're going to double down on those efforts. More service brokers, more Quick Starts, more Automation more self-service for customers to they can get started with pivotal, you know, quickly. >> Yeah, and I'd add we're also, we support a product we launched about three quarters ago, Pivotal Container Service, on AWS, and so I think we'll see by virtue of the partnership with VMware, a lot more customer demand to run PKS, you know, on AWS, on Outposts, on VM cloud for AWS, and all the variants of the VMware and Amazon partnership as well. >> Yeah, like you said, meeting customers where they are. >> That's right, yeah. >> Well you're about to meet Cisco >> (laughs) that's right. >> So, good luck with that, and I'm sure you're going to get a very positive earful, which is always a good thing and continue that great work with them. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> Back with more AWS re:Invent. We're live here in Las Vegas at the Sands expo, and you're watching theCUBE.

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent, 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Well, good morning. Welcome back, or good afternoon for that matter, if you're watching out on the East Coast. Good to have you have here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here in Las Vegas. We're at the Sands Expo, Hall D to be exact, one of seven sites that are hosting the AWS re:Invent John Wallace here with Justin Warren. We're now joined by Ankur Shah, who is the vice president of Products, a public cloud security, Palo Alto Networks, and, Ankur, good to see you this morning. >> Yeah, happy to be here. >> Thank you for being with us. And Richard Wise, who is the cloud security engineer, or a cloud security engineer at Robert Half. Good morning to you, Richard. >> Good morning. >> Well, first off, let's tell us about Robert Half. So, you're a recruiting firm in a partnership with Palo Alto, but fill in a few more blanks for folks at home who might not know exactly what you do. >> Sure, we're a staffing and recruiting firm. We have offices worldwide. We have roughly 15,000 full-time employees. We also have many, many temporary employees, and, of course, we do recruiting. Many people I've met here at the conference, in fact, got their first job or one job in the past through Robert Half. And we also-- >> That's makes you a really popular guy-- >> Yes. when the show closes. >> And we also have Protiviti, our prestigious consulting arm. >> Okay, so now, about your partnership. How did you find Palo Alto, or how did Palo Alto find you? And talk about maybe that relationship, how it's developed and where it stands today. What are they doing for you? >> Sure, well, we found Palo Alto about two years ago. We're about seven years into our cloud journey, but it became very clear at a point in time that we needed to get a better handle on how we were managing and securing it. We were doing all the right things but we didn't have the visibility we needed, so we brought in Evident to do that. Also, compliance is very important to us, and the tools allowed us to ensure that we were conforming to all of the compliance standards that we needed to. >> So, maybe Ankur, you can get us in here. Explain how did this partnership get started? >> Yeah, so Robert Half is kind of prototypical customer for us at Palo Alto Networks. Customers moving to cloud. AWS is obviously one of the biggest clouds, so all our customers are migrating, a lot of their, you know, shutting down their data centers, and moving the work loads and applications to the cloud, but as they move to the cloud, they want to make sure that they have the visibility and the security controls to make sure that they are not in the news. So, that's how the partnership started. A lot of customers, just like Robert Half, starts with kind of, you know, I'd like to get a visibility into what's happening in my cloud environment, detect advance data breeches, like cryptojacking, stolen access keys, things of that nature, so that's how we kind of started this partnership. We've been kind of helping them kind of move more and more applications and more and more workloads in their AWS environments, and it's been a really amazing partnership. We've gotten some amazing feedback from them that has helped mature the product over the years. >> What's one of the more surprising things that you've noticed as part of this journey. What's something that you didn't realize that this was going to be a benefit to this partnership, and then, once you actually had Palo Alto come in there, it's like, oh wow, this is amazing. >> Well, there were a couple of things. First off, their RQL, the RedLock Query Language, is very powerful and flexible, and let's us take our compliance and security to the next level, but was really impressed when we first started talking to RedLock and Palo Alto, even before we had purchased the product, we saw some opportunities for product improvements, suggested them, and before we purchased it, within a couple of weeks, they were there. >> Wow. >> Yeah. >> That's pretty fast of all those cycles. I mean, that's what we're here for is rapid innovation. They're trying to change things at the speed of cloud. So, how do you do that safely and securely? Maybe you can tell us how does Palo Alto help do this rapid innovation but still keep everything really secure. >> Yeah, so our DNAs, obviously, network security is where the company started. Over a year now, the company has doubled down on public cloud security, and a lot of emphasis on, sort of, securing customers' cloud environment, helping a lot of customers migrate their applications into the cloud, and from a security standpoint, we look at it from different angles. One is kind of the basic configuration management aspects, making sure that customers don't leave open s3 buckets, permissive security groups, things of that nature. Above and beyond that, we also perform network analytics, so things like triple jacking, data exploration attempts. The platform is able to detect those kinds of advanced threats. Privileged activity monitoring, and anomaly detection is another thing we do, and last but not the least, host monitoring and host security aspects. That's something we do really, really well in the cloud as well, so when you combine all of that stuff, gives customers 360 visibility, as well as security for all things in the cloud. >> I'm sorry. Richard, how hard is your job these days? (laughing) And I mean that with all due respect. We've talked a lot about complexity. We've talked a lot about speed. We've talked a lot about versatility, and high demand, and all these things. Corner office is making demands on you, right? I mean, how tough is it to be in your shoes? >> If it was easy, it wouldn't be fun. I've been working in cloud about as long as Robert Half has, about seven years, and moving into the security role, it's been an incredibly interesting challenge. Yes, it's hard. I do stay up at night on occasion worrying about, did I check this, did I check that? I'm fortunate that our management has a really good understanding of the importance of security and of cloud, and I've gotten a lot of support in my role there so, in that respect, it hasn't been too hard. >> And where is it that security, in terms of a deployment? So, you think about function, right, right? >> Yeah. >> What are we going to get done here? But is it a close second, is it a tie? Because, especially in your business, I mean, you have a lot of personal information with which you're working that you've got to protect. >> Absolutely, so, people trust us with their data. We have personal information for many, many people, and we take very seriously our responsibility to manage and protect that. One of the things that we've done with Palo Alto's tools is ensuring that we're compliant with all of the various standards like ISO 27001, and compliance is kind of like brushing your teeth, right. Everybody needs to do it, and somebody doesn't want to be friends with somebody who doesn't brush their teeth. So, we ensure that we brush our teeth using tools like Palo Alto's. We can demonstrate to people that we're brushing our teeth. >> Right. >> With the innovation of RedLock now, we're able to take that to the next level, so we're not only brushing our teeth now, but we're also grooming our hair. >> You're technologically flossing as well, I'm sure. >> We are, we are. >> So, Ankur, I think that makes you the dentist of cloud security. (laughing) >> So, you've got people brushing their teeth, they're flossing. What comes next? What should they be looking at? Should they be going beyond just hygiene factors, and is there something they can do that's more than just brushing their teeth? >> Yeah, so I touched upon some of those areas. So, I think it all starts with the basic hygiene that we've talked about it, right. So, you got to do it. That's the, kind of, the fundamental, but the next-gen attacks are not going to be very simple, right, because the cloud fundamentally increases the attack factor, right, so the malicious actor, they're smarter, right. So, like I mentioned, things like cryptojacking, stolen access keys, a lot of the next-gen breeches are going to happen in the cloud, so customers have to constantly understand the kind of AWS services that they're adopting, understand the security implications, make sure they have the security guard rails, and like I mentioned, that once they understand that, look at it more holistically, both from, sort of, the basic hygiene perspective, as well as from network security, user activity, as well host monitoring perspective. Once they cover all of that stuff, you know, hopefully they'll have good teeth forever. (laughing) >> Strong cloud teeth. I don't think that's a phrase I wouldn't have thought I'd say until today. >> You know, we hear a lot about the cat and mouse game in security, right? You're trying to stay one step ahead of bad actors who are spending a lot of time, and a lot of resources, and a lot of energy to stay a step ahead of you. So, in today's world, how do you really win that battle? How do you predict where the next wrong turn is going to come, if you will, or where that invasion's going to try to occur, and prevent that, or are you in a prophylactic state all the time where it's about seeing where that action's going, and then trying to stop it once you've learned of it? See what I mean? It's a conundrum that I think you find yourself in. >> You know, I think 90% of the problems that happen where bad actors get hold of your sensitive data is because of common, silly mistakes. So, making sure that there is a user training across the board, not just security teams. Now, DevOps teams have to be part of the equation as well. They need to be trained, and coached, and understanding the security implications of their day-to-day operations. Once you train the users, you'll find that a lot of these problems will go away because most of these actors are using simple techniques to get into the customer's cloud environment because those mistakes are being made. So, start with the user training. Obviously, you need third party tooling and technologies like Palo Alto Networks to make sure you have that security guard rails all the time. Beyond that, you know, you just have to hire a lot of smart people like Richard just to insure that you're ahead of the game, thinking two steps in advance, yeah. >> It's about locking the door. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, and I want to touch on a couple of the things that Ankur said. He talked about building security into DevOps. So, there's this concept we call shifting left where you're trying to build security more upfront into the development and deployment process before you even get into the wild, and that's something Palo Alto is helping us with. The other thing is, we cannot hire enough people to keep up with the pace at which we're scaling our cloud environments, so we need tooling and automation like RedLock in order to ensure that we can get visibility and control on this vast set of resources with just a small number of people. >> Yeah. >> So necessity driving invention in that case, right? >> Yes. >> You need it. Well, gentlemen, thanks for the time. We appreciate the conversation. I feel like I need to go brush or floss. (laughing) >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Very self-conscious all of a sudden, but thank you both. >> Thanks for having us. >> Brilliant discussion. Back with more from AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE here in Las Vegas. (energetic electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back once again here, to Hall D in the Sands Expo. We're at AWS re:Invent for the third day of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE, of this fantastic show. Justin Warren, John Walls. We're now joined by Prashanth Chandrasekar, who is the SVP and GM of managed public cloud at Rackspace. Prashanth, good to see you this morning. >> Absolutely, thank you for having me. >> You bet, and Ajay Patel who is the SVP and GM of cloud provider services at VMware. Good morning, to you as well >> Glad to be here, good morning. >> Alright, first off, let's just talk about Rackspace, a little bit, if we can Prashanth. You're kind of going through this metamorphosis, right? This transformation of sorts. So kind of get us up to speed a little bit about your journey, about where you've been and where you're going. >> Yeah absolutely, I'd love to. I think Rackspace has been been on a phenomenal journey over the past 20 years. This is our 20th year anniversary as a company. So obviously we've been know historically for our managed hosting DNA and we came from that, a long time ago. But over the years, we very much are very, very focused on customers, just like Amazon is and VMware is and we really thought about, how do we make sure that we're at where our customers want to go. And so we evolved effectively to support the leading technologies in either the public cloud space, like an Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google, Alibaba or in the private cloud space with VMware and even our own OpenStack Private Cloud deployments, along with our traditional managed hosting business. So over the years, and also with a very, very phenomenal new owner in Apollo, we've been transforming as a company that's truly a next generation IT services company, looking to take enterprises into the future, at their pace by the way, meeting them where they are and really making sure that we bring to bare, really, best of read services, cloud services, to really kind of manage their transition into the cloud and to make the most of that investment. >> Yeah, use that carrot approach, right? Not the-- >> That's right, that's right. >> Bring them along gently which many people need. Alright, so each of you has your expertise. I'm talking about the companies here. But now this partnership, this synergy that you have, it's kind of like peanut butter and chocolate in a way, right? Great combination! Everybody's going to love it! Talk about that partnership and how it's come together and how that's playing out right now. >> Yeah-- >> So from a philosophy perspective, we're both goal aligned, right? We're starting to see this world being a multi-cloud world and more importantly, it's all about the customer on their journey. They're going to have existing assets, existing data centers, for a long time. They're going to need support in terms of the legacy applications but also they replatform, rehost, and modernize the application. And they need a strategic partner, so Rackspace sees the same way. Starting to provide that set of choice and help the customer on their journey, at their own pace, enabled by a common technology platform. And so us as a company, we've also transformed ourself from we're going to be a vSphere-only company, to starting to embrace public clouds. Whether it's VMware cloud on AWS or our recent CloudHealth acquisition, which allows us to start managing native public cloud. So in this journey, we're seeing ourself as peanut butter and chocolate, as you said, working together, hand-in-hand for the benefit of our customers. >> Yeah, I really love that analogy and thank you for it, because in some ways, VMware and Rackspace, are very much, our philosophies are exactly the same in terms of where the customer journey is, but we approach the problem with two different angles. One, we come from it from a technology-services angle, 'cause we're a service company at heart, right? We're fanatical experience and we're known for that, and VMware is obviously a phenomenal, technology platform company. But we both believe in a multi-cloud and a hyper-cloud world where we see that, hey, the journey to the cloud is a very, very, long-standing one. We're in the early innings of this, where customer workloads are actually moving and this is, you can talk about the projections, you're literally probably over a trillion dollars spent over the next decade or so that's going to move >> in the cloud, exactly. >> with this very form factor, so it's a really exciting time and we're really, really aligned with our partners with VMware and of course AWS and the other public cloud partners. >> Yeah so, you mentioned that we are at the beginning. This is just the start of how things are working, So with customers who are looking at this transformation journey and trying to make this decision about, what do I keep onsite, what do I transform, what do I re-platform, what do I just completely replace with something new and let the old one die. How do you help customers make those decisions? >> Yes, absolutely, so this is the heart of what Rackspace is doing for our customers today, right? We are very much a company that's basically taking a very unbiased approach upfront. We're taking about literally, thinking about the planning stage and assessing their workloads, going through an application assessment and doing all the work that's required to understand, you know what, which workloads need to go on each of the public clouds? Which one runs well on Amazon? Which ones actually should be better leveraged on a VMware on AWS sort of scenario and so on, right? So there's a very deep assessment that's done upfront and then we go through the process of architecting and deploying, based on best practices that we've gained from, by the way, thousands of these customers that we've actually moved and then actually managing and operating in these environments, which we've been talking about at Rackspace, that's our DNA, and optimizing those environments, for cost and the greatest and latest of features that any of these providers provide. So that's the journey and the way we do that is, using a true next-generation cloud services set of capabilities which we announced a couple weeks ago in a press release and that includes something with a notion of service blocks, as we call at Rackspace, service blocks where you're literally able to mix and match all the things that I just mentioned along the journey, dependent on where the customer is on their journey. So we could say, let's focus just on architecting, deploying and migrating apps and that's it. That's what the enterprise wants, because they want to enable an internal, focused motion to manage these, and they want to skill up their internal people to do that. Or you might encounter a company that actually wants us to actually manage the whole thing, and that's fine too. And then maybe, by the way, nine months into their experience that they realize that or later down the line, they want us to help 'em with cost optimization or Kubernetes expertise to actually move into the container world. So that whole curve and the transitioning through that process, is our job to make sure, meet the customer where they are and make sure we deliver value very specifically at that point in time, for them, and not be, not put customers into some long-term, monolithic sort of contract. So really being agile around us. >> You know it's funny, it's very interesting, because as you see the complexity has only gone up. It hasn't gone down. That's when you talk about cloud benefits, the amount of services being launched, the complexity of all the different technologies. Rackspace is uniquely set up, they're going to have their VMware expertise and the AWS certified partners, that we can start to bring the value together. So we're excited about kind of mixing and matching and kind of this modular set of services and capability, that you can bring to bare for the customers. So I think, it actually puts us in a unique position in some ways, right? To be that trusted partner as we move on this journey. >> And to put some numbers around that, very specifically, that Ajay said, we have over a thousand, no, eleven hundred Amazon certified certifications at Rackspace. We have probably a very similar number of VMware, right? Over a thousand VMware people that actually service customers and that's all-- >> With Enterprise DNN Enterprise support, right? >> That's correct, that's right, and then ultimately we know that combination of expertise is very material in that scale for our customers to be able to leverage. >> So Ajay, you've got a long history with the Enterprise customers. The people have been using VMware for a long, long, time. What are you seeing from your existing customer base? What kind of technologies are they interested in? What are they moving to? Where is the momentum? >> So, clearly the excitement hype is around containers, Kubernetes, serverless, et cetera. But their bread and butter workloads, are existing applications. They're looking to optimize their data center costs, some trying to eliminate data centers, they're looking to lift and shift entire landscapes of application, move them to cloud. They're looking for expertise, building a center of excellence. Start up a prominent operation model or on a multi-cloud world So they're now starting to hit, what I call, real-world problems, where the experiments are working, they need to now create operational model around it and it's starting to go back to the trusted partners, VMware is a platform provider, Rackspace is a trusted managed services provider. Whether it's up front and design or to help operate. So we're starting to see this maturities coming in place and cost is not really the driver. They're starting to find that public out cost is actually an issue. So cost management too. If you just walk around the shop floor, it's all about cost management, security, visibility. These are all signs of a maturing market. >> And because of that, and you talk about a maturing market, if I'm just now making my entry, alright? I've decided, hey we're running our company, it's time to jump into the public cloud. Is there benefit to us being maybe a bit-- >> A bit more lore? >> more reticent yeah, than others, because there've been other growing pains, you've already kind of, you've found where the wrinkles were and so we will benefit by those past experiences? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> So I'm giving you a chance, I mean talk to somebody who hasn't made that commitment yet, and they're thinking I'm so far behind >> Yes. >> But they're not. >> Yeah, I mean I think this is a spot-on point, right? So when we work with enterprises, what we're really seeing is that, let's say a company has got 10 divisions within the company and you know, generally speaking, you've got maybe a couple divisions that have gone ahead of the pack. They've already done it, because they actually went with the cloud curve. They're leading the world internally. They're being the internal sponsors and the champions for the movement and you've got some laggards along the way as well. So Rackspace, our job is to really bring true up, if you will, the level of capability with the groups that are actually lagging. And also, not to do it in an artificial way, but actually do it on their terms, to say, you know what, you may not be ready for, a containerized world tomorrow. Maybe you actually start leveraging basic, easy to, and that's the way to get started. Which is fewer and fewer number of companies that are not there already, but the ability for you to move along and use advanced services, that's our job, to keep moving them and encouraging them to do it, bu enabling them through our tooling that we built and leveraging through partners like VMware or even on the top of each of the public clouds that we built, proprietary tooling, or through the expertise that we bring up to bat. So that's the combination. >> It's never to late to get started, so for customers who might've just decided that, actually I've decided, yes, it's time to go to cloud, I'm ready. How do they begin? How should they start on this journey? How would they start to engage with you? >> Yeah, I think for us, it's a what we've noticed, is that it's very important to just make sure that you take a success-based and phase-based approach. And so, starting with a place in the organization, where it actually makes a difference, there's a differentiated set of applications that are going to make a difference for the customer that they're trying to serve. Or it could be, listen, they have actually a problem where they have 27 DC's, as a customer that I was talking to yesterday that is about to join us, they're trying to consolidate down to six data centers over the next two years. So how do you go about that problem of doing DC consolidation and how do you figure out which workloads go on which platform, et cetera. So starting with some very specific problems, could be as big as a DC problem, or it could be as specific as, let's go work on this very specific differentiated critical application on the cloud et cetera, and that really creates a mushrooming effect, 'cause you notice the difference it makes in terms of developer productivity, your agility, your ability to deploy coded production multiple times and that just drives, you know, it gains the attention of, what we've seen is, that finally gets the attention of the CIO in the company and then the CIO is like, listen I better get control of this, because in some situations we have hundreds and thousands of Amazon accounts within these organizations, that they ultimately now want governance and visibility, and so that's when it starts creating a more holistic, enterprise-wide strategy around cloud and adoption and one of the various form factors they should use, to actually to keep moving on. So really it's mushrooming with a center of excellence and a sponsor or a line of business that's really starting and that's really where we've seen success. >> You know one other thing I'll add to that is, the guys who are fast followers now, are getting the benefit of hindsight of other partners, as you just said. And couple things I'm starting to see in the market. They're starting to make some strategic bets. They're picking a strategic technology partner from a technology platform perspective. They're looking for a strategic service provider partner, a managed service partner. And they're starting to look at them as trusted partners. The conversations are moving away from being transactional, to more success oriented. Now even Andy talk about that. It's really about outcomes and in this journey, I think you're starting to find the right partners, building the core competency within your organization and finding those sustaining technology platform choices that guide you through this hybrid world. That's what the world went with, the battlefield now is all about hybrid. It's no longer about private or public. Everyone's just, even Amazon finally recognized, the world is a hybrid with their outpost announcement, right? And starting to look at how do I work in this hybrid world and what's the right operating model. So it's a really interesting time to kind of make, say look, the world is going to be public and private, how do I operate in this? >> Cloud all the things >> Makes sense. I do want to say, before we say goodbye, that when Prashanth was talking about laggards, he was really looking at us (all laughing) an awful lot, but I don't know, I don't know what to make of that, but we won't take it too personally >> Might be the beard maybe. >> Thanks for being with us. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you for having us, >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you gentlemen. Back with more from AWS re:Invent. We're live in Las Vegas and you're watching the Cube. (relaxing music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their Ecosystem partners. >> Oh welcome back, to theCUBE. Continuing coverage here from AWS re:Invent, as we start to wind down our coverage here on the second day. We'll be here tomorrow as well, live on theCUBE, bringing you interviews from Hall D at the Sands Expo. Along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls, and we're joined by Jonathan Ballon, who's the Vice President of the internet of things at Intel. Jonathan, thank you for being with us today. Good to see you, >> Thanks for having me guys. >> All right, interesting announcement today, and last year it was all about DeepLens. This year it's about DeepRacer. Tell us about that. >> What we're really trying to do is make AI accessible to developers and democratize various AI tools. Last year it was about computer vision. The DeepLens camera was a way for developers to very inexpensively get a hold of a camera, the first camera that was a deep-learning enabled, cloud connected camera, so that they could start experimenting and see what they could do with that type of device. This year we took the camera and we put it in a car, and we thought what could they do if we add mobility to the equation, and specifically, wanted to introduce a relatively obscure form of AI called reinforcement learning. Historically this has been an area of AI that hasn't really been accessible to most developers, because they haven't had the compute resources at their disposal, or the scale to do it. And so now, what we've done is we've built a car, and a set of tools that help the car run. >> And it's a little miniature car, right? I mean it's a scale. >> It's 1/118th scale, it's an RC car. It's four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering. It's got GPS, it's got two batteries. One that runs the car itself, one that runs the compute platform and the camera. It's got expansion capabilities. We've got plans for next year of how we can turbo-charge the car. >> I love it. >> Right now it's baby steps, so to speak, and basically giving the developer the chance to write a reinforcement learning model, an algorithm that helps them to determine what is the optimum way that this car can move around a track, but you're not telling the car what the optimum way is, you're letting the car figure it out on their own. And that's really the key to reinforcement learning is you don't need a large dataset to begin with, it's pre-trained. You're actually letting, in this case, a device figure it out for themselves, and this becomes very powerful as a tool, when you think about it being applied to various industries, or various use-cases, where we don't know the answer today, but we can allow vast amounts of computing resources to run a reinforcement model over and over, perhaps millions of times, until they find the optimum solution. >> So how do you, I mean that's a lot of input right? That's a lot, that's a crazy number of variables. So, how do you do that? So, how do you, like in this case, provide a car with all the multiple variables that will come into play. How fast it goes, and which direction it goes, and all that, and on different axes and all those things, to make these own determinations, and how will that then translate to a real specific case in the workplace? >> Well, I mean the obvious parallel is of course autonomous driving. AWS had Formula One on stage today during Andy Jassy's keynote, that's also an Intel customer, and what Formula One does is they have the fastest cars in the world, and they have over 120 sensors on that car that are bringing in over a million pieces of data per second. Being able to process that vast amount of data that quickly, which includes a variety of data, like it's not just, it's also audio data, it's visual data, and being able to use that to inform decisions in close to real time, requires very powerful compute resources, and those resources exist both in the cloud as well as close to the source of the data itself at the edge, in the physical environment. >> So, tell us a bit about the software that's involved here, 'cause people think of Intel, you know that some people don't know about the software heritage that Intel has. It's not just about, the Intel inside isn't just the hardware chips that's there, there's a lot of software that goes into this. So, what's the Intel angle here on the software that powers this kind of distributed learning. >> Absolutely, software is a very important part of any AI architecture, and for us we've a tremendous amount of investment. It's almost perhaps, equal investment in software as we do in hardware. In the case of what we announced today with DeepRacer and AWS, there's some toolkits that allow developers to better harness the compute resources on the car itself. Two things specifically, one is we have a tool called, RL Coach or Reinforcement Learning Coach, that is integrated into SageMaker, AWS' machine learning toolkit, that allows them to access better performance in the cloud of that data that's coming into the, off their model and into their cloud. And then we also have a toolkit called OpenVINO. It's not about drinking wine. >> Oh darn. >> Alright. >> Open means it's an opensource contribution that we made to the industry. Vino, V-I-N-O is Visual Inference and Neural Network Optimization, and this is a powerful tool, because so much of AI is about harnessing compute resources efficiently, and as more and more of the data that we bring into our compute environments is actually taking place in the physical world, it's really important to be able to do that in a cost-effective and power-efficient way. OpenVINO allows developers to actually isolate individual cores or an integrated GPU on a CPU without knowing anything about hardware architecture, and it allows them then to apply different applications, or different algorithms, or inference workloads very efficiently onto that compute architecture, but it's abstracted away from any knowledge of that. So, it's really designed for an application developer, who maybe is working with a data scientist that's built a neural network in a framework like TensorFlow, or Onyx, or Pytorch, any tool that they're already comfortable with, abstract away from the silicon and optimize their model onto this hardware platform, so it performs at orders of magnitude better performance then what you would get from a more traditional GPU approach. >> Yeah, and that kind of decision making about understanding chip architectures to be able to optimize how that works, that's some deep magic really. The amount of understanding that you would need to have to do that as a human is enormous, but as a developer, I don't know anything about chip architectures, so it sounds like the, and it's a thing that we've been hearing over the last couple of days, is these tools allow developers to have essentially superpowers, so you become an augmented intelligence yourself. Rather than just giving everything to an artificial intelligence, these tools actually augment the human intelligence and allow you to do things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. >> And that's I think the key to getting mass market adoption of some of these AI implementations. So, for the last four or five years since ImageNet solved the image recognition problem, and now we have greater accuracy from computer models then we do from our own human eyes, really AI was limited to academia, or large IT tech companies, or proof-of-concepts. It didn't really scale into these production environments, but what we've seen over the couple of years is really a democratization of AI by companies like AWS and Intel that are making tools available to developers, so they don't need to know how to code in Python to optimize a compute module, or they don't need to, in many cases, understand the fundamental underlying architectures. They can focus on whatever business problem they're tryin' to solve, or whatever AI use-case it is that they're working on. >> I know you talked about DeepLens last year, and now we've got DeepRacer this year, and you've got the contest going on throughout this coming year with DeepRacer, and we're going to have a big race at the AWS re:Invent 2019. So what's next? I mean, or what are you thinking about conceptually to, I guess build on what you've already started there? >> Well, I can't reveal what next years, >> Well that I understand >> Project will be. >> But generally speaking. >> But what I can tell you, what I can tell you is what's available today in these DeepRacer cars is a level playing field. Everyone's getting the same car and they have essentially the same tool sets, but I've got a couple of pro-tips for your viewers if they want to win some of these AWS Summits that are going to be around the world in 2019. Two pro-tips, one is they can leverage the OpenVINO toolkit to get much higher inference performance from what's already on that car. So, I encourage them to work with OpenVINO. It's integrated into SageMaker, so that they have easy access to it if they're an AWS developer, but also we're going to allow an expansion of, almost an accelerator of the car itself, by being able to plug in an Intel Neural Compute Stick. We just released the second version of this stick. It's a USB form factor. It's got a Movidius Myriad X Vision processing unit inside. This years version is eight times more powerful than last years version, and when they plug it into the car, all of that inference workload, all of those images, and information that's coming off those sensors will be put onto the VPU, allowing all the CPU, and GPU resources to be used for other activities. It's going to allow that car to go at turbo speed. >> To really cook. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> Alright, so now you know, you have no excuse, right? I mean Jonathan has shared the secret sauce, although I still think when you said OpenVINO you got Justin really excited. >> It is vino time. >> It is five o'clock actually. >> Alright, thank you for being with us. >> Thanks for having me guys. >> And good luck with DeepRacer for the coming year. >> Thank you. >> It looks like a really, really fun project. We're back with more, here at AWS re:Invent on theCUBE, live in Las Vegas. (rhythmic digital music)