>>Good afternoon, friends. My name is Savannah Peterson here in the Cube Studios live from Detroit, Michigan, where we're at Cuban and Cloud Native Foundation, Cloud Native Con all week. Our last interview of the day served me a real treat and one that I wasn't expecting. It turns out that I am in the presence of two caddies. It's a literal episode of Caddy Shack up here on Cube. John Furrier. I don't think the audience knows that you were a caddy. Tell us about your caddy days. >>I used to caddy when I was a kid at the local country club every weekend. This is amazing. Double loops every weekend. Make some bang, two bags on each shoulder. Caddying for the members where you're going. Now I'm >>On show. Just, just really impressive >>Now. Now I'm caddying for the cube where I caddy all this great content out to the audience. >>He's carrying the story of emerging brands and established companies on their cloud journey. I love it. John, well played. I don't wanna waste any more of this really wonderful individual's time, but since we now have a new trend of talking about everyone's Twitter handle here on the cube, this may be my favorite one of the day, if not Q4 so far. Drew, not reply. AKA Drew ne Drew Nielsen, excuse me, there is here with us from Teleport. Drew, thanks so much for being here. >>Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. >>And so you were a caddy on a whole different level. Can you tell us >>About that? Yeah, so I was in university and I got tired after two years and didn't have a car in LA and met a pro golfer at a golf course and took two years off and traveled around caddying for him and tried to get 'em through Q School. >>This is, this is fantastic. So if you're in school and your parents are telling you to continue going to school, know that you can drop out and be a caddy and still be a very successful television personality. Like both of the gentlemen at some point. >>Well, I never said my parents like >>That decision, but we'll keep our day jobs. Yeah, exactly. And one of them is Cloud Native Security. The hottest topic here at the show. Yep. I want to get into it. You guys are doing some really cool things. Are we? We hear Zero Trust, you know, ransomware and we even, I even talked with the CEO of Dockets morning about container security issues. Sure. There's a lot going on. So you guys are in the middle of teleport. You guys have a unique solution. Tell us what you guys got going on. What do you guys do? What's the solution and what's the problem you solve? >>So Teleport is the first and only identity native infrastructure access solution in the market. So breaking that down, what that really means is identity native being the combination of secret list, getting rid of passwords, Pam Vaults, Key Vaults, Yeah. Passwords written down. Basically the number one source of breach. And 50 to 80% of breaches, depending on whose numbers you want to believe are how organizations get hacked. >>But it's not password 1 23 isn't protecting >>Cisco >>Right >>Now. Well, if you think about when you're securing infrastructure and the second component being zero trust, which assumes the network is completely insecure, right? But everything is validated. Resource to resource security is validated, You know, it assumes work from anywhere. It assumes the security comes back to that resource. And we take the combination of those two into identity, native access where we cryptographically ev, validate identity, but more importantly, we make an absolutely frictionless experience. So engineers can access infrastructure from anywhere at any time. >>I'm just flashing on my roommates, checking their little code, changing Bob login, you know, dongle essentially, and how frustrating that always was. I mean, talk about interrupting workflow was something that's obviously necessary, but >>Well, I mean, talk about frustration if I'm an engineer. Yeah, absolutely. You know, back in the day when you had these three tier monolithic applications, it was kind of simple. But now as you've got modern application development environments Yeah, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, whatever marketing term around how you talk about this, expanding sort of disparate infrastructure. Engineers are sitting there going from system to system to machine to database to application. I mean, not even a conversation on Kubernetes yet. Yeah. And it's just, you know, every time you pull an engineer or a developer to go to a vault to pull something out, you're pulling them out for 10 minutes. Now, applications today have hundreds of systems, hundreds of microservices. I mean 30 of these a day and nine minutes, 270 minutes times 60. And they also >>Do the math. Well, there's not only that, there's also the breach from manual error. I forgot to change the password. What is that password? I left it open, I left it on >>Cognitive load. >>I mean, it's the manual piece. But even think about it, TR security has to be transparent and engineers are really smart people. And I've talked to a number of organizations who are like, yeah, we've tried to implement security solutions and they fail. Why? They're too disruptive. They're not transparent. And engineers will work their way around them. They'll write it down, they'll do a workaround, they'll backdoor it something. >>All right. So talk about how it works. But I, I mean, I'm getting the big picture here. I love this. Breaking down the silos, making engineers lives easier, more productive. Clearly the theme, everyone they want, they be gonna need. Whoever does that will win it all. How's it work? I mean, you deploying something, is it code, is it in line? It's, >>It's two binaries that you download and really it starts with the core being the identity native access proxy. Okay. So that proxy, I mean, if you look at like the zero trust principles, it all starts with a proxy. Everything connects into that proxy where all the access is gated, it's validated. And you know, from there we have an authorization engine. So we will be the single source of truth for all access across your entire infrastructure. So we bring machines, engineers, databases, applications, Kubernetes, Linux, Windows, we don't care. And we basically take that into a single architecture and single access platform that essentially secures your entire infrastructure. But more importantly, you can do audit. So for all of the organizations that are dealing with FedRAMP, pci, hipaa, we have a complete audit trail down to a YouTube style playback. >>Oh, interesting. We're we're California and ccpa. >>Oh, gdpr. >>Yeah, exactly. It, it, it's, it's a whole shebang. So I, I love, and John, maybe you've heard this term a lot more than I have, but identity native is relatively new to me as as a term. And I suspect you have a very distinct way of defining identity. How do you guys define identity internally? >>So identity is something that is cryptographically validated. It is something you have. So it's not enough. If you look at, you know, credentials today, everyone's like, Oh, I log into my computer, but that's my identity. No, it's not. Right. Those are attributes. Those are something that is secret for a period of time until you write it down. But I can't change my fingerprint. Right. And now I >>Was just >>Thinking of, well no, perfect case in point with touch ID on your meth there. Yeah. It's like when we deliver that cryptographically validated identity, we use these secure modules in like modern laptops or servers. Yeah. To store that identity so that even if you're sitting in front of your computer, you can't get to it. But more importantly, if somebody were to take that and try to be you and try to log in with your fingerprint, it's >>Not, I'm not gonna lie, I love the apple finger thing, you know, it's like, you know, space recognition, like it's really awesome. >>It save me a lot of time. I mean, even when you go through customs and they do the face scan now it actually knows who you are, which is pretty wild in the last time you wanna provide ones. But it just shifted over like maybe three months ago. Well, >>As long as no one chops your finger off like they do in the James Bond movies. >>I mean, we try and keep it a light and fluffy here on the queue, but you know, do a finger teams, we can talk about that >>Too. >>Gabby, I was thinking more minority report, >>But you >>Knows that's exactly what I, what I think of >>Hit that one outta bounds. So I gotta ask, because you said you're targeting engineers, not IT departments. What's, is that, because I in your mind it is now the engineers or what's the, is always the solution more >>Targeted? Well, if you really look at who's dealing with infrastructure on a day-to-day basis, those are DevOps individuals. Those are infrastructure teams, Those are site reliability engineering. And when it, they're the ones who are not only managing the infrastructure, but they're also dealing with the code on it and everything else. And for us, that is who is our primary customer and that's who's doing >>It. What's the biggest problem that you're solving in this use case? Because you guys are nailing it. What's the problem that your identity native solution solves? >>You know, right out of the backs we remove the number one source of breach. And that is taking passwords, secrets and, and keys off the board. That deals with most of the problem right there. But there are really two problems that organizations face. One is scaling. So as you scale, you get more secrets, you get more keys, you get all these things that is all increasing your attack vector in real time. Oh >>Yeah. Across teams locations. I can't even >>Take your pick. Yeah, it's across clouds, right? Any of it >>On-prem doesn't. >>Yeah. Any of it. We, and we allow you to scale, but do it securely and the security is transparent and your engineers will absolutely love it. What's the most important thing about this product Engineers. Absolutely. >>What are they saying? What are some of those examples? Anecdotally, pull boats out from engineering. >>You're too, we should have invent, we should have invented this ourselves. Or you know, we have run into a lot of customers who have tried to home brew this and they're like, you know, we spend an in nor not of hours on it >>And IT or they got legacy from like Microsoft or other solutions. >>Sure, yeah. Any, but a lot of 'em is just like, I wish I had done it myself. Or you know, this is what security should be. >>It makes so much sense and it gives that the team such a peace of mind. I mean, you never know when a breach is gonna come, especially >>It's peace of mind. But I think for engineers, a lot of times it deals with the security problem. Yeah. Takes it off the table so they can do their jobs. Yeah. With zero friction. Yeah. And you know, it's all about speed. It's all about velocity. You know, go fast, go fast, go fast. And that's what we enable >>Some of the benefits to them is they get to save time, focus more on, on task that they need to work on. >>Exactly. >>And get the >>Job done. And on top of it, they answer the audit and compliance mail every time it comes. >>Yeah. Why are people huge? Honestly, why are people doing this? Because, I mean, identity is just such an hard nut to crack. Everyone's got their silos, Vendors having clouds have 'em. Identity is the most fragmented thing on >>The planet. And it has been fragmented ever since my first RSA conference. >>I know. So will we ever get this do over? Is there a driver? Is there a market force? Is this the time? >>I think the move to modern applications and to multi-cloud is driving this because as those application stacks get more verticalized, you just, you cannot deal with the productivity >>Here. And of course the next big thing is super cloud and that's coming fast. Savannah, you know, You know that's Rocket. >>John is gonna be the thought leader and keyword leader of the word super cloud. >>Super Cloud is enabling super services as the cloud cast. Brian Gracely pointed out on his Sunday podcast of which if that happens, Super Cloud will enable super apps in a new architectural >>List. Please don't, and it'll be super, just don't. >>Okay. Right. So what are you guys up to next? What's the big hot spot for the company? What are you guys doing? What are you guys, What's the idea guys hiring? You put the plug in. >>You know, right now we are focused on delivering the best identity, native access platform that we can. And we will continue to support our customers that want to use Kubernetes, that want to use any different type of infrastructure. Whether that's Linux, Windows applications or databases. Wherever they are. >>Are, are your customers all of a similar DNA or are you >>No, they're all over the map. They range everything from tech companies to financial services to, you know, fractional property. >>You seem like someone everyone would need. >>Absolutely. >>And I'm not just saying that to be a really clean endorsement from the Cube, but >>If you were doing DevOps Yeah. And any type of forward-leaning shift, left engineering, you need us because we are basically making security as code a reality across your entire infrastructure. >>Love this. What about the team dna? Are you in a scale growth stage right now? What's going on? Absolutely. Sounds I was gonna say, but I feel like you would have >>To be. Yeah, we're doing, we're, we have a very positive outlook and you know, even though the economic time is what it is, we're doing very well meeting. >>How's the location? Where's the location of the headquarters now? With remote work is pretty much virtual. >>Probably. We're based in downtown Oakland, California. >>Woohoo. Bay area representing on this stage right now. >>Nice. Yeah, we have a beautiful office right in downtown Oakland and yeah, it's been great. Awesome. >>Love that. And are you hiring right now? I bet people might be. I feel like some of our cube watchers are here waiting to figure out their next big play. So love to hear that. Absolutely love to hear that. Besides Drew, not reply, if people want to join your team or say hello to you and tell you how brilliant you looked up here, or ask about your caddy days and maybe venture a guest to who that golfer may have been that you were CAD Inc. For, what are the best ways for them to get in touch with you? >>You can find me on LinkedIn. >>Great. Fantastic. John, anything else >>From you? Yeah, I mean, I just think security is paramount. This is just another example of where the innovation has to kind of break through without good identity, everything could cripple. Then you start getting into the silos and you can start getting into, you know, tracking it. You got error user errors, you got, you know, one of the biggest security risks. People just leave systems open, they don't even know it's there. So like, I mean this is just, just identity is the critical linchpin to, to solve for in security to me. And that's totally >>Agree. We even have a lot of customers who use us just to access basic cloud consoles. Yeah. >>So I was actually just gonna drive there a little bit because I think that, I'm curious, it feels like a solution for obviously complex systems and stacks, but given the utility and what sounds like an extreme ease of use, I would imagine people use this for day-to-day stuff within their, >>We have customers who use it to access their AWS consoles. We have customers who use it to access Grafana dashboards. You know, for, since we're sitting here at coupon accessing a Lens Rancher, all of the amazing DevOps tools that are out there. >>Well, I mean true. I mean, you think about all the reasons why people don't adopt this new federated approach or is because the IT guys did it and the world we're moving into, the developers are in charge. And so we're seeing the trend where developers are taking the DevOps and the data and the security teams are now starting to reset the guardrails. What's your >>Reaction to that? Well, you know, I would say that >>Over the top, >>Well I would say that you know, your DevOps teams and your infrastructure teams and your engineers, they are the new king makers. Yeah. Straight up. Full stop. >>You heard it first folks. >>And that's >>A headline right >>There. That is a headline. I mean, they are the new king makers and, but they are being forced to do it as securely as possible. And our job is really to make that as easy and as frictionless as possible. >>Awesome. >>And it sounds like you're absolutely nailing it. Drew, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having today. This has been an absolute pleasure, John, as usual a joy. And thank all of you for tuning in to the Cube Live here at CU Con from Detroit, Michigan. We look forward to catching you for day two tomorrow.

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

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today, having a Cube Conversation, you know, with the COVID situation going on we've had to change our business and go pretty much 100% digital. And as part of that process, we wanted to reach out to our community, and talk to some of the leaders out there, because I think leadership in troubling times is even more amplified in it's importance. So we're excited to be joined today by two leaders in our community. First one being John Chambers, a very familiar face from many, many years at Cisco, who's now the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. John, great to see you. >> Jeff, it's a pleasure to be with you again. >> Absolutely. And joining him is Umesh Sachdev, he's the co-founder and CEO of Uniphore. First time on theCUBE, Umesh, great to meet you. >> Jeff, thank you for having me, it's great to be with you. >> You as well, and I had one of your great people on the other day, talking about CX, and I think CX is the whole solution. Why did Uber beat cabs, do you want to stand on a corner and raise your hand in the rain? Or do you want to know when the guy's going to come pick you up, in just a couple minutes? So anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it. John, one of your things, that you talked about last time we talked, I think it was in October, wow how the world has changed. >> Yes. >> Is about having a playbook, and really, you know, kind of thinking about what you want to do before it's time to actually do it, and having some type of a script, and some type of direction, and some type of structure, as to how you respond to situations. Well there's nothing like a disaster to really fire off, you know, the need to shift gears, and go to kind of into a playbook mode. So I wonder if you could share with the viewers, kind of what is your playbook, you've been through a couple of these bumps. Not necessarily like COVID-19, but you've seen a couple bumps over your career. >> So it's my pleasure Jeff. What I'll do is kind of outline how I believe you use an innovation playbook on everything from acquisitions, to digitizing a company, to dealing with crisis. Let's focus on the playbook for crisis. You are right, and I'm not talking about my age, (John laughing) but this is my sixth financial crisis, and been through the late 1990s with the Asian financial crisis, came out of it even stronger at Cisco. Like everybody else we got knocked down in the 2001 tech bubble, came back from it even stronger. Then in 2008, 2009, Great Recession. We came through that one very, very strong, and we saw that one coming. It's my fourth major health crisis. Some of them turned out to be pretty small. I was in Mexico when the bird pandemic hit, with the President of Mexico, when we thought it was going to be terrible. We literally had to cancel the meetings that evening. That's why Cisco built the PLAR Presence. I was in Brazil for the issue with the Zika virus, that never really developed much, and the Olympics went on there, and I only saw one mosquito during the event. It bit me. But what I'm sharing with you is I've seen this movie again and again. And then, with supply chain, which not many people were talking about yet, supply chain crisis, like we saw in Japan with the Tsunami. What's happening this time is you're seeing all three at one time, and they're occurring even faster. So the playbook is pretty simple in crisis management, and then it would be fun to put Umesh on the spot and say how closely did you follow it? Did you agree with issues, or did you disagree, et cetera, on it. Now I won't mention, Umesh, that you've got a review coming up shortly from your board, so that should not affect your answer at all. But the first playbook is being realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much was market. This one's largely market, but if you had problems before, you got to address them at the same time. The second thing is what are the five to seven things that are material, what you're going to do to lead through this crisis. That's everything from expense management, to cash preservation. It's about how do you interface to your employees, and how do you build on culture. It's about how do you interface to your customers as they change from their top priority being growth and innovation, to a top priority being cost savings, and the ability to really keep their current revenue streams from churning and moving. And it's about literally, how do make your big bets for what you want to look like as you move out of this market. Then it's how do you communicate that to your employees, to your shareholders, to your customers, to your partners. Painting the picture of what you look like as you come out. As basic as that sounds, that's what crisis management is all about. Don't hide, be visible, CEOs should take the role on implementing that playbook. Umesh to you, do you agree? And have fun with it a little bit, I like the give and take. >> I want to see the playbook, do you have it there, just below the camera? (Jeff laughing) >> I have it right here by my side. I will tell you, Jeff, in crisis times and difficult times like these, you count all the things that go right for you, you count your blessings. And one of the blessings that I have, as a CEO, is to have John Chambers as my mentor, by my side, sharing not just the learning that he had through the crisis, but talking through this, with me on a regular basis. I've read John's book more than a few times, I bet more than anybody in the world, I've read it over and over. And that, to me, is preparation going into this mode. One of the things that John has always taught me is when times get difficult, you get calmer than usual. It's one thing that when you're cruising on the freeway and you're asked to put the brakes, but it's quite another when you're in rocket ship, and accelerating, which is what my company situation was in the month of January. We were coming out of a year of 300% growth, we were driving towards another 300% growth, hiring tremendously, at a high pace. Winning customers at a high pace, and then this hit us. And so what I had to do, from a playbook perspective, is, you know, take a deep breath, and just for a couple of days, just slow down, and calmly look at the situation. My first few steps were, I reached out to 15 of our top customers, the CEOs, and give them calls, and said let's just talk about what you're seeing, and what we are observing in our business. We get a sense of where they are in their businesses. We had the benefit, my co-founder works out of Singapore, and runs our Asia business. We had the benefit of picking up the sign probably a month before everyone else did it in the U.S. I was with John in Australia, and I was telling John that "John, something unusual is happening, "a couple of our customers in these countries in Asia "are starting to tell us they would do the deal "a quarter later." And it's one thing when one of them says it, it's another when six of them say it together. And John obviously has seen this movie, he could connect the dots early. He told me to prepare, he told the rest of the portfolio companies that are in his investment group to start preparing. We then went to the playbook that John spoke of, being visible. For me, culture and communication take front seat. We have employees in ten different countries, we have offices, and very quickly, even before the governments mandated, we had all of them work, you know, go work from home, and be remote, because employee safety and health was the number one priority. We did our first virtual all-hands meeting on Zoom. We had about 240 people join in from around the world. And my job as CEO, usually our all-hands meeting were different functional leaders, different people in the group talk to the team about their initiatives. This all-hands was almost entirely run by me, addressing the whole company about what's going to be the situation from my lens, what have we learned. Be very factual. At the same time, communicating to the team that because of the fact that we raised our funding the last year, it was a good amount of money, we still have a lot of that in the bank, so we going to be very secure. At the same time, our customers are probably going to need us more than ever. Call centers are in more demand than ever, people can't walk up to a bank branch, they can't go up to a hospital without taking an appointment. So the first thing everyone is doing is trying to reach call centers. There aren't enough people, and anyways the work force that call centers have around the world, are 50% working from home, so the capacity has dropped. So our responsibility almost, is to step up, and have our AI and automation products available to as many call centers as we can. So as we are planning our own business continuity, and making sure every single employee is safe, the message to my team was we also have to be aggressive and making sure we are more out there, and more available, to our customers, that would also mean business growth for us. But first, and foremost is for us to be responsible citizens, and just make it available where it's needed. As we did that, I quickly went back to my leadership team, and again, the learning from John is usually it's more of a consensus driven approach, we go around the table, talk about a topic for a couple of hours, get the consensus, and move out of the room. My leadership meetings, they have become more frequent, we get together once a week, on video call with my executive leaders, and it's largely these days run by me. I broke down the team into five different war rooms, with different objectives. One of them we called it the preservation, we said one leader, supported by others will take the responsibility of making sure every single employee, their families, and our current customers, are addressed, taken care of. So we made somebody lead that group. Another group was made responsible for growth. Business needs to, you know, in a company that's growing at 300%, and we still have the opportunity, because call centers need us more than ever, we wanted to make sure we are responding to growth, and not just hunkering down, and, you know, ignoring the opportunity. So we had a second war room take care of the growth. And a third war room, lead by the head of finance, to look at all the financial scenarios, do the stress tests, and see if we are going to be ready for any eventuality that's going to come. Because, you know, we have a huge amount of people, who work at Uniphore around the world, and we wanted to make sure their well being is taken care of. So from being over communicative, to the team and customers, and being out there personally, to making sure we break down the teams. We have tremendous talent, and we let different people, set of people, run different set of priorities, and report back to me more frequently. And now, as we have settled into this rhythm, Jeff, you know, as we've been in, at least in the Bay area here, we've been shelter in place for about a month now. As we are in the rhythm, we are beginning to do virtual happy hours, every Thursday evening. Right after this call, I get together with my team with a glass of wine, and we get together, we talk every but work, and every employee, it's not divided by functions, or leadership, and we are getting the rhythm back into the organization. So we've gone and adjusted in the crisis, I would say very well. And the business is just humming along, as we had anticipated, going into this crisis. But I would say, if I didn't have John by my side, if I hadn't read his book, the number of times that I have, every plane ride we've done together, every place we've gone together, John has spoken about war stories. About the 2001, about 2008, and until you face the first one of your own, just like I did right now, you don't appreciate when John says leadership is lonely. But having him by our side makes it easier. >> Well I'm sure he's told you the Jack Welch story, right? That you've quoted before, John, where Jack told you that you're not really a good leader, yet, until you've been tested, right. So you go through some tough stuff, it's not that hard to lead on an upward to the right curve, it's when things get a little challenging that the real leadership shines through. >> Completely agree, and Jack said it the best, we were on our way to becoming the most valuable company in the world, he looked me in the eye and said "John, you have a very good company." And I knew he was about to give me a teaching moment, and I said "What does it take to have a great one?" He said a near death experience. And I thought I did that in '97, and some of the other management, and he said, "No, it's when you went through something "like we went through in 2001, "which many of our peers did die in." And we were knocked down really hard. When we came back from it, you get better. But what you see in Umesh is a very humble, young CEO. I have to remember he's only 34 years old, because his maturity is like he's 50, and he's seen it before. As you tell, he's like a sponge on learning, and he doesn't mind challenging. And what what he didn't say, in his humbleness, is they had the best month in March ever. And again, well over 300% versus the same quarter a year ago. So it shows you, if you're in the right spot, i.e. artificial intelligence, i.e. cost savings, i.e. customer relationship with their customers, how you can grow even during the tough times, and perhaps set a bold vision, based upon facts and a execution plan that very few companies will be able to deliver on today. So off to a great start, and you can see why I'm so honored and proud to be his strategic partner, and his coach. >> Well it's interesting, right, the human toll of this crisis is horrible, and there's a lot of people getting sick, and a lot of people are dying, and all the estimations are a lot more are going to die this month, as hopefully we get over the hump of some of these curves. So that aside, you know, we're here talking kind of more about the, kind of, the business of this thing. And it's really interesting kind of what a catalyst COVID has become, in terms of digital transformation. You know, we've been talking about new ways to work for years, and years, and years, and digital transformation, and all these kind of things. You mentioned the Cisco telepresence was out years, and decades ago. I mean I worked in Mitsubishi, we had a phone camera in 1986, I looked it up today, it was ridiculous, didn't work. But now, it's here, right. Now working from home is here. Umesh mentioned, you know, these huge call centers, now everybody's got to go home. Do they have infrastructure to go home? Do they have a place to work at home? Do they have support to go home? Teachers are now being forced, from K-12, and I know it's a hot topic for you, John, to teach from home. Teach on Zoom, with no time to prep, no time to really think it through. It's just like the kids aren't coming back, we got to learn it. You know I think this is such a transformational moment, and to your point, if this goes on for weeks, and weeks, and months, and months, which I think we all are in agreement that it will. I think you said, John, you know, many, many quarters. As people get new habits, and get into this new flow, I don't think they're going to go back back to the old ways. So I think it's a real, you know, kind of forcing function for digital transformation. And it's, you can't, you can't sit on the sidelines, cause your people can't come to the office anymore. >> So you've raised a number of questions, and I'll let Umesh handle the tough part of it. I will answer the easy part, which is I think this is the new normal. And I think it's here now, and the question is are you ready for it. And as you think about what we're really saying is the video sessions will become such an integral part of our daily lives, that we will not go back to having to do 90% of our work physically. Today alone I've done seven major group meetings, on Zoom, and Google Hangouts, and Cisco Webex. I've done six meetings with individuals, or the key CEOs of my portfolio. So that part is here to stay. Now what's going to be fascinating is does that also lead into digitization of our company, or do the companies make the mistake of saying I'm going to use this piece, because it's so obvious, and I get it, in terms of effectiveness, but I'm not going to change the other things in my normal work, in my normal business. This is why, unfortunately, I think you will see, we originally said, Jeff, you remember, 40% maybe as high as 45% of the Fortune 500 wouldn't exist in a decade. And perhaps 70% of the start-ups wouldn't exist in a decade, that are venture capital backed. I now think, unfortunately, you're going to see 20-35% of the start-ups not exist in 2 years, and I think it's going to shock you with the number of Fortune 500 companies that do not make this transition. So where you're leading this, that I completely agree with, is the ability to take this terrible event, with all of the issues, and again thank our healthcare workers for what they've been able to do to help so many people, and deal with the world the way it is. As my parents who are doctors taught me to do, not the way we wish it was. And then get your facts, prepare for the changes, and get ready for the future. The key would be how many companies do this. On the area Umesh has responsibility for, customer experience, I think you're going to see almost all companies focus on that. So it can be an example of perhaps how large companies learn to use the new technology, not just video capability, but AI, assistance for the agents, and then once they get the feel for it, just like we got the feel for these meetings, change their rhythm entirely. It was a dinner in New York, virtually, when we stopped, six weeks ago, traveling, that was supposed to be a bunch of board meetings, customer meetings, that was easy. But we were supposed to have a dinner with Shake Shack's CEO, and we were supposed to have him come out and show how he does cool innovation. We had a bunch of enterprise companies, and a bunch of media, and subject matter expertise, we ended up canceling it, and then we said why not do it virtually? And to your point, we did it in 24 different locations. Half the people, remember six weeks ago, had never even used Zoom. We had milk shakes, and hamburgers, and french fries delivered to their home. And it was one of the best two hour meetings I've seen. The future is this now. It's going to change dramatically, and Umesh, I think, is going to be at the front edge of how enterprise companies understand how their relationship with their customers is going to completely transform, using AI, conversational AI capability, speech recognition, et cetera. >> Yeah, I mean, Umesh, we haven't even really got into Uniphore, or what you guys are all about. But, you know, you're supporting call centers, you're using natural language technology, both on the inbound and all that, give us the overview, but you're playing on so many kind of innovation spaces, you know, the main interaction now with customers, and a brand, is either through the mobile phone, or through a call center, right. And that's becoming more, and increasingly, digitized. The ability to have a voice interaction, with a machine. Fascinating, and really, I think, revolutionary, and kind of taking, you know, getting us away from these stupid qwerty keyboards, which are supposed to slow us down on purpose. It's still the funniest thing ever, that we're still using these qwerty keyboards. So I wonder if you can share with us a little bit about, you know, kind of your vision of natural language, and how that changes the interaction with people, and machines. I think your TED Talk was really powerful, and I couldn't help but think of, you know, kind of mobile versus land lines, in terms of transformation. Transforming telecommunications in rural, and hard to serve areas, and then actually then adding the AI piece, to not only make it better for the front end person, but actually make it for the person servicing the account. >> Absolutely Jeff, so Uniphore, the company that I founded in 2008. We were talking about it's such a coincidence that I founded the company in 2008, the year of the Great Recession, and here we are again, talking in midst of the impact that we all have because of COVID. Uniphore does artificial intelligence and automation products, for the customer service industry. Call centers, as we know it, have fundamentally, for the last 20, 30 years, not have had a major technology disruption. We've seen a couple of ways of business model disruption, where call centers, you know, started to become offshore, in locations in Asia, India, and Mexico. Where our calls started to get routed around the world internationally, but fundamentally, the core technology in call centers, up until very recently, hadn't seen a major shift. With artificial intelligence, with natural language processings, speech recognition, available in over 100 languages. And, you know, in the last year or so, automation, and RPA, sort of adding to that mix, there's a whole new opportunity to re-think what customer service will mean to us, more in the future. As I think about the next five to seven years, with 5G happening, with 15 billion connected devices, you know, my five year old daughter, she the first thing she does when she enters the house from a playground, she goes to talk to her friend called Alexa. She speaks to Alexa. So, you know, these next generation of users, and technology users will grow up with AI, and voice, and NLP, all around us. And so their expectation of customer service and customer experience is going to be quantum times higher than some of us have, from our brands. I mean, today when a microwave or a TV doesn't work in our homes, our instinct could be to either go to the website of the brand, and try to do a chat with the agent, or do an 800 number phone call, and get them to visit the house to fix the TV. With, like I said with 5G, with TV, and microwave, and refrigerator becoming intelligent devices, you know, I could totally see my daughter telling the microwave "Why aren't you working?" And, you know, that question might still get routed to a remote contact center. Now the whole concept of contact center, the word has center in it, which means, in the past, we used to have these physical, massive locations, where people used to come in and put on their headsets to receive calls. Like John said, more than ever, we will see these centers become dispersed, and virtual. The channels with which these queries will come in would no more be just a phone, it would be the microwave, the car, the fridge. And the receivers of these calls would be anywhere in the world, sitting in their home, or sitting on a holiday in the Himalayas, and answering these situations to us. You know, I was reading, just for everyone to realize how drastic this shift has been, for the customer service industry. There are over 14 million workers, who work in contact centers around the world. Like I said, the word center means something here. All of them, right now, are working remote. This industry was never designed to work remote. Enterprises who fundamentally didn't plan for this. To your point Jeff, who thought digitization or automation, was a project they could have picked next year, or they were sitting on the fence, will now know more have a choice to make this adjustment. There's a report by a top analyst firm that said by 2023, up to 30% of customer service representatives would be remote. Well guess what, we just way blew past that number right away. And most of the CEOs that I talked to recently tell me that now that this shift has happened, about 40% of their workers will probably never return back to the office. They will always remain a permanent virtual workforce. Now when the workforce is remote, you need all the tools and technology, and AI, that A, if on any given day, 7-10% of your workforce calls in sick, you need bots, like the Amazon's Alexa, taking over a full conversation. Uniphore has a product called Akira, which does that in call centers. Most often, when these call center workers are talking, we have the experience of being put on hold, because call center workers have to type in something on their keyboard, and take notes. Well guess what, today AI and automation can assist them in doing that, making the call shorter, allowing the call center workers to take a lot more calls in the same time frame. And I don't know your experience, but, you know, a couple of weekends ago, the modem in my house wasn't working. I had a seven hour wait time to my service provider. Seven hour. I started calling at 8:30, it was somewhere around 3-4:00, finally, after call backs, wait, call back, wait, that it finally got resolved. It was just a small thing, I just couldn't get to the representative. So the enterprises are truly struggling, technology can help. They weren't designed to go remote, think about it, some of the unique challenges that I've heard now, from my customers, is that how do I know that my call center representative, who I've trained over years to be so nice, and empathetic, when they take a pee break, or a bio break, they don't get their 10 year old son to attend a call. How do I know that? Because now I can no more physically check in on them. How do I know that if I'm a bank, there's compliance? There's nothing being said that isn't being, is, you know, supposed to be said, because in a center, in an office, a supervisor can listen in. When everyone's remote, you can't do that. So AI, automation, monitoring, supporting, aiding human beings to take calls much better, and drive automation, as well as AI take over parts of a complete call, by the way of being a bot like Alexa, are sort of the things that Uniphore does, and I just feel that this is a permanent shift that we are seeing. While it's happening because of a terrible reason, the virus, that's affecting human beings, but the shift in business and behavior, is going to be permanent in this industry. >> Yeah, I think so, you know it's funny, I had Marten Mickos on, or excuse me, yeah, Marten Mickos, as part of this series. And I asked him, he's been doing distributed companies since he was doing MySQL, before Sun bought them. And he's, he was funny, it's like actually easier to fake it in an office, than when you're at home, because at home all you have to show is your deliverables. You can't look busy, you can't be going to meetings, you can't be doing things at your computer. All you have to show is your output. He said it's actually much more efficient, and it drives people, you know, to manage to the output, manage to what you want. But I want to shift gears a little bit, before we let you go, and really talk a little bit about the role of government. And John, I know you've been very involved with the Indian government, and the French government, trying to help them, in their kind of entrepreneurial pursuits, and Uniphore, I think, was founded in India, right, before you moved over here. You know we've got this huge stimulus package coming from the U.S. government, to try to help, as people, you know, can't pay their mortgage, a lot of people aren't so fortunate to be in digital businesses. It's two trillion dollars, so as kind of a thought experiment, I'm like well how much is two trillion dollars? And I did the cash balance of the FAANG companies. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet, just looking at Yahoo Finance, the latest one that was there. It's 333 billion, compared to two trillion. Even when you add Microsoft's 133 billion on top, it's still shy, it's still shy of 500 billion. You know, and really, the federal government is really the only people in a position to make kind of sweeping, these types of investments. But should we be scared? Should we be worried about, you know, kind of this big shift in control? And should, do you think these companies with these big balance sheets, as you said John, priorities change a little bit. Should it be, keep that money to pay the people, so that they can stay employed and pay their mortgage, and go buy groceries, and maybe get take out from their favorite restaurant, versus, you know, kind of what we've seen in the past, where there's a lot more, you know, stock buy backs, and kind of other uses of these cash. As you said, if it's a crisis, and you got to cut to survive, you got to do that. But clearly some of these other companies are not in that position. >> So you, let me break it into two pieces, Jeff, if I may. The first is for the first time in my lifetime I have seen the federal government and federal agencies move very rapidly. And if you would have told me government could move with the speed we've seen over the last three months, I would have said probably not. The fed was ahead of both the initial interest rate cuts, and the fed was ahead in terms of the slowing down, i.e. your 2 trillion discussion, by central banks here, and around the world. But right behind it was the Treasury, which put on 4 trillion on top of that. And only governments can move in this way, but the coordination with government and businesses, and the citizens, has been remarkable. And the citizens being willing to shelter in place. To your question about India, Prime Minister Modi spent the last five years digitizing his country. And he put in place the most bandwidth of any country in the world, and literally did transformation of the currency to a virtual currency, so that people could get paid online, et cetera, within it. He then looked at start-ups and job creation, and he positioned this when an opportunity or problem came along, to be able to perhaps navigate through it in a way that other countries might struggle. I would argue President Macron in France is doing a remarkable job with his innovation economy, but also saying how do you preserve jobs. So you suddenly see government doing something that no business can do, with the scale, and the speed, and a equal approach. But at the same time, may of these companies, and being very candid, that some people might have associated with tech for good, or with tech for challenges, have been unbelievably generous in giving both from the CEOs pockets perspective, and number two and three founders perspective, as well as a company giving to the CDC, and giving to people to help create jobs. So I actually like this opportunity for tech to regain its image of being good for everybody in the world, and leadership within the world. And I think it's a unique opportunity. For my start-ups, I've been so proud, Jeff. I didn't have to tell them to go do the right thing with their employees, I didn't have to tell them that you got to treat people, human lives first, the economy second, but we can do both in parallel. And you saw companies like Sprinklr suddenly say how can I help the World Health Organization anticipate through social media, where the next spread of the virus is going to be? A company, like Bloom Energy, with what KR did there, rebuilding all of the ventilators that were broken here in California, of which about 40% were, out of the stock that they got, because it had been in storage for so long, and doing it for all of California in their manufacturing plant, at cost. A company like Aspire Foods, a cricket company down in Texas, who does 3D capabilities, taking part of their production in 3D, and saying how many thousand masks can I generate, per week, using 3D printers. You watch what Umesh has done, and how he literally is changing peoples lives, and making that experience, instead of being a negative from working at home, perhaps to a positive, and increasing the customer loyalty in the process, as opposed to when you got a seven hour wait time on a line. Not only are you probably not going to order anything else from that company, you're probably going to change it. So what is fascinating to me is I believe companies owe an obligation to be successful, to their employees, and to their shareholders, but also to give back to society. And it's one of the things I'm most proud about the portfolio companies that I'm a part of, and why I'm so proud of what Umesh is doing, in both a economically successful environment, but really giving back and making a difference. >> Yeah, I mean, there's again, there's all the doctor stuff, and the medical stuff, which I'm not qualified to really talk about. Thankfully we have good professionals that have the data, and the knowledge, and know what to do, and got out ahead of the social distancing, et cetera, but on the backside, it really looks like a big data problem in so many ways, right. And now we have massive amounts of compute at places like Amazon, and Google, and we have all types of machine learning and AI to figure out, you know, there's kind of resource allocation, whether that be hospital beds, or ventilators, or doctors, or nurses, and trying to figure out how to sort that all out. But then all of the, you know, genome work, and you know, kind of all that big heavy lifting data crunching, you know, CPU consuming work, that hopefully is accelerating the vaccine. Because I don't know how we get all the way out of this until, it just seems like kind of race to the vaccine, or massive testing, so we know that it's not going to spike up. So it seems like there is a real opportunity, it's not necessarily Kaiser building ships, or Ford building planes, but there is a role for tech to play in trying to combat this thing, and bring it under control. Umesh, I wonder if you could just kind of contrast being from India, and now being in the States for a couple years. Anything kind of jump out to you, in terms of the differences in what you're hearing back home, in the way this has been handled? >> You know, it's been very interesting, Jeff, I'm sure everyone is concerned that India, for many reasons, so far hasn't become a big hot spot yet. And, you know, we can hope and pray that that remains to be the case. There are many things that the government back home has done, I think India took lessons from what they saw in Europe, and the U.S, and China. They went into a countrywide lockdown pretty early, you know, pretty much when they were lower than a two hundred positive tested cases, the country went into lockdown. And remember this is a 1.5 billion people all together going into lockdown. What I've seen in the U.S. is that, you know, California thankfully reacted fast. We've all been sheltered in place, there's cabin fever for all of us, but you know, I'm sure at the end of the day, we're going to be thankful for the steps that are taken. Both by the administration at the state level, at the federal level, and the medical doctors, who are doing everything they can. But India, on the other hand, has taken the more aggressive stance, in terms of doing a country lockdown. We just last evening went live at a University in the city of Chennai, where Uniphore was born. The government came out with the request, much like the U.S., where they're government departments were getting a surge of traffic about information about COVID, the hospitals that are serving, what beds are available, where is the testing? We stood up a voice bot with AI, in less than a week, in three languages. Which even before the government started to advertise, we started to get thousands of calls. And this is AI answering these questions for the citizens, in doing so. So it goes back to your point of there's a real opportunity of using all the technology that the world has today, to be put to good use. And at the same time, it's really partnering meaningfully with government, in India, in Singapore, in Vietnam, and here in the U.S., to make sure that happens on, you know, John's coaching and nudging, I became a part of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which is truly a premier trade and commerce body between U.S. and India. And I, today, co-chaired the start-up program with, you know, the top start-ups between U.S. and India, being part of that program. And I think we got, again, tremendously fortunate, and lucky with the timeline. We started working on this start-up program between U.S. and India, and getting the start-ups together, two quarters ago, and as this new regulation with the government support, and the news about the two trillion dollar packages coming out, and the support for small businesses, we could quickly get some of the questions answered for the start-ups. Had we not created this body, which had the ability to poll the Treasury Department, and say here are questions, can start-ups do A, B, and C? What do you have by way of regulation? And I think as a response to one of our letters, on Monday the Treasury put out an FAQ on their website, which makes it super clear for start-ups and small businesses, to figure out whether they qualify or they don't qualify. So I think there's ton that both from a individual company, and the technology that each one of us have, but also as a community, how do we, all of us, meaningfully get together, as a community, and just drive benefit, both for our people, for the economy, and for our countries. Wherever we have the businesses, like I said in the U.S., or in India, or parts of Asia. >> Yeah, it's interesting. So, this is a great conversation, I could talk to you guys all night long, but I probably would hear about it later, so we'll wrap it, but I just want to kind of close on the following thought, which is really, as you've talked about before John, and as Umesh as you're now living, you know, when we go through these disruptions, things do get changed, and as you said a lot of people, and companies don't get through it. On the other hand many companies are birthed from it, right, people that are kind of on the new trend, and are in a good position to take advantage, and it's not that you're laughing over the people that didn't make it, but it does stir up the pot, and it sounds like, Umesh, you're in a really good position to take advantage of this new kind of virtual world, this new digital transformation, that's just now waiting anymore. I love your stat, they were going to move X% out of the call center over some period of time, and then it's basically snap your fingers, everybody out, without much planning. So just give you the final word, you know, kind of advice for people, as they're looking forward, and Umesh, we'll get you on another time, because I want to go deep diving in natural language, I think that's just a fascinating topic in the way that people are going to interact with machines and get rid of the stupid qwerty keyboard. But let me get kind of your last thoughts as we wrap this segment. Umesh we'll let you go first. >> Umesh, you want to go first? >> I'll go first. My last thoughts are first for the entrepreneurs, everyone who's sort of going through this together. I think in difficult times is when real heroes are born. I read a quote that when it's a sunny day, you can't overtake too many cars, but when it's raining you have a real opportunity. And the other one that I read was when fishermen can't go out fishing, because of the high tide, they come back, and mend their nets, and be ready for the time that they can go out. So I think there's no easy way to say, this is a difficult time for the economy, health wise, I hope that, you know, we can contain the damage that's being done through the virus, but some of us have the opportunity to really take our products and technology out there, more than usual. Uniphore, particularly, has a unique opportunity, the contact center industry just cannot keep up with the traffic that it's seeing. Around the world, across US, across Asia, across India, and the need for AI and automation would never be pronounced more than it is today. As much as it's a great business opportunity, it's more of a responsibility, as I see it. There can be scale up as fast as the demand is coming, and really come out of this with a much stronger business model. John has always told me in final words you always paint the picture of what you want to be, a year or two out. And I see Uniphore being a much stronger AI plus automation company, in the customer service space, really transforming the face of call centers, and customer service. Which have been forced to rethink their core business value in the last few weeks. And, you know, every fence sitter who would think that digitalization and automation was an option that they could think of in the future years, would be forced to make those decisions now. And I'm just making sure that my team, and my company, and I, am ready to gear to that great responsibility and opportunity that's ahead of us. >> John, give you the final word. >> Say Jeff, I don't know if you can still hear me, we went blank there, maybe for me to follow up. >> We gotcha. >> Shimon Peres taught me a lot about life, and dealing with life the way it is, not the way you wish it was. So did my parents, but he also taught me it always looks darkest just before the tide switches, and you move on to victory. I think the challenges in front of us are huge, I think our nation knows how to deal with that, I do believe the government has moved largely pretty effectively, to give us the impetus to move, and then if we continue to flatten the curve on the issues with the pandemic, if we get some therapeutic drugs that dramatically reduce the risk of death, for people that get the challenges the worst, and over time a vaccine, I think you look to the future, America will rebound, it will be rebounding around start-ups, new job creation, using technology in every business. So not only is there a light at the tunnel, at the end of the tunnel, I think we will emerge from this a stronger nation, a stronger start-up community. But it depends on how well we work together as a group, and I just want to say to Umesh, it's an honor to be your coach, and I learn from you as much as I give back. Jeff, as always, you do a great job. Thank you for your time today. >> Thank you both, and I look forward to our next catch up. Stay safe, wash your hands, and thanks for spending some time with us. >> And I just want to say I hope and pray that all of us can get together in Palo Alto real quick, and in person, and doing fist bumps, not shake hands or probably a namaste. Thank you, it's an honor. >> Thank you very much. All right, that was John and Umesh, you're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto Studios, thanks for tuning in, stay safe, wash your hands, keep away from people that you're not that familiar with, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! Covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back, live here on theCube, as we continue our coverage here of Red Hat Summit, along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls. It's great to have you here, in one of America's great cities! We're in Boston, Massachusetts, for day one of the three-day conference. And we're now joined with Denise Dumas, who is with Red Hat, and working on the RHEL 8 release that just became, I guess, available today, right? >> Today! >> Huge news! >> Yes! >> I have to first of compliment you on rocking these Red Hat red earrings. And then I look down below you've got the Red Hat sneakers on too, so you are company-branded >> Absolutely. >> up and down, literally, from head-to-toe. >> I'm very proud of the earrings, because some of the support guys made them up on their 3D printer back at the office. >> John: How cool is that? >> I love it. >> Now we had Stefanie Chiras on a little bit earlier, and we were talking about RHEL 8 and all that came with that, and we talked about the deeper dive we're gonna take with you a little bit later on, now we're at that moment. Just first off, in general, how do you feel when something like this finally gets out of the beta stage, gets moved into a much more active space, and now it's available to the marketplace? >> It's like fresh air, right? >> Thrilled. >> Oh, thrilled. Well, you know, and in a way, it's almost an anti-climax, because we're working on 8.1 already, and we're talking about RHEL 9, but this is just such an opportunity to take a moment, especially for so many of the RHEL engineering and QE team who are wandering around the summit, and for us all to just kind of say, (sighs) it's out. It's out, let's see if they like it, I hope they do. But you know, we've been working with so many of the customers and partners through the High Touch Beta Program, 40,000 downloads of the beta, and it has been tremendous feedback. We've been really pleased to see how many people are willing to pick it up and experiment with it, and tell us what they like and what they don't like. >> So Denise, it's always great to hear the customers, but take a second and celebrate that internal work, 'cause so much code, so many engineers, years worth of planning and coding that go into this, so give us a little but of a look behind the curtain, if you would. >> Well, you know so much community as well, right, because, like everything else that Red Hat does, it's totally Open Source. So, many communities feed into Fedora, and Fedora feeds into RHEL, so we took Fedora 28, and pulled it in, and then did a lot more work on it, to try to move it into, this year, we've done the distro differently. There's a core kernel, the noodles, you know, and then there are the application streams. So we've done a lot of work to separate out the two types of package that make up RHEL, so that we can spin the application streams faster. That's where things like developer tools, and language runtimes, databases, the things that are more aimed at developers, where a ten-year life cycle is not a natural for those, right, and yet the core of RHEL, the kernel, you rely on that, we're gonna support it for ten years, but you need your application streams to keep the developers happy. So we tried to make the admin side happy, and the developer side happy. >> All right so, as Vice President of Software Engineering, your team had, certainly, its focuses along this way. >> Denise: Oh, yeah. And dealing with, I guess, the complexities that you were, was there maybe a point in the process where you had an uh-oh moment, or, I'm just curious, because it's not always smooth sailing, right, you run into speed bumps, and some times there're barriers, they're not just bumps, but in terms of what you were trying to enable, and what your vision was to get there, talk about that journey from the engineering side of the equation, and maybe the hiccups you had to deal with along the way. >> So, RHEL 8 has been interesting because in the course of putting the product together, the RHEL organization went through our own digital transformation. So just like our customers have been moving to become more agile, the RHEL engineering team, and our partners in QE, and our partners in support, have worked together to deliver the operating system in a much more agile way. I mean, did you ever think you would hear agile and operating system in the same breath, right, it's like, wow. So that has been an interesting process, and a real set of challenges, because it's meant that people have had to change work habits that have served them well for many, many years. It's a different world. So we've been very fortunate to take people through a lot of changes, they've been very flexible. But there have been some times when it's just been too much too fast, like (gasps), And so it's like, everybody take a deep breath, okay, will do. You know, a couple of weeks, we'll consolidate. It's been a really interesting process. Clearly the kernel, so we've got the 4.18 kernel, and the kernel comes in and we have to understand what the kernel configuration is gonna be. And that can be a lengthy process, because it means you have to understand, when you pull a kernel out of the upstream some of the features are pretty solid, some are maybe less solid. We have to make an educated call about what's ready to go and what's not. So figuring out the kernel configuration can take a while. We do that with our friends in the performance team. And so every inch of the way, we build it, we see how the performance looks, maybe we do some tweaking, change that lock, everything we do goes back upstream, to make the upstream kernel better. So that, as well, has been an interesting process, because there's a lot of change. We're really proud of the performance in RHEL 8, we think that it's a significant improvement in many different areas. We've got the Shack and Larry Show tomorrow, we'll talk all the way through performance, but that's been a big differentiator, I think. >> All right so, Denise, security, absolutely is at top of mind always? >> Denise: Always. >> Some updates in RHEL 8, maybe if you walk us through security and some of the policy changes. >> Yeah, we bake security in, right, we have a secure supply chain, and, talk about difficult things for RHEL 8, right, every package that comes in, we totally refresh everything from upstream. But when they come in, we have to inspect all the crypto, we have to run them through security scans, vulnerability scanners, we've got three different vulnerability scanners that we're using, we run them through penetration testing, so there's a huge amount of work that comes just to inherit all that from the upstream. But in addition to that, we put a lot of work into making sure that, well, our crypto has to be FIP certified, right, which means you've got to meet standards. We also have work that's gone in to make sure that you can enable a security policy consistently across the system, so that no application that you load on can violate your security policy. We've got nftables in there, new firewalling, network-bound disk encryption, that actually, it kind of ties in with a lot of the system management work that we've done. So a thing that I think differentiates RHEL 8 is we put a lot of focus on making it easy to use on day one, and easy to manage day two. It's always been interesting, you know, our customers have been very very technical. They understand how to build their golden images, they understand how to fine-tweak everything. But it's becoming harder and harder to find that level of Linux expertise. I'll vouch for that. And also, once you have those guys, you don't want to waste their time on things that could be automated. And so we've done a lot of work with the management tooling, to make sure that the daily tasks are much easier, that we're integrated better with satellite, we've got Ansible system roles, so if you use Ansible system roles we wanted to make it easy, we wanted to make the operating system easy to configure. So the same work that we do for RHEL 8 itself also goes into Red Hat Enterprise Linux core OS, which will be shipping with OpenShift. So it's a subset of the package set, same kernel. But there it's a very, very focused workload that they're gonna run. So we've been able to do a really opinionated build for RHEL core OS. But for RHEL 8 itself, it's got to be much more general purpose, we've focused on some of our traditional workloads, things like SAP, SAP HANA, SQL Server, so we've done a lot to make sure that those deploy really easily, we've got tuning profiles that help you make sure you've got your system set up to get the right kind of performance. But at the same time, there are lots of other applications out there and we have to do a really good general-purpose operating system. We can be opinionated to some extent, but we have to support much, much wider range. >> Yeah, I mean, Denise, I think back, it's been five years since the last major release. >> Yeah. >> And in the last five years, you know, Red Hat lived a lot of places, but, oh, the diversity of location in today's multi cloud world, with containerization and everything happening there, and from an application standpoint, the machine learning and new modern apps, there's such breadth and depth, seems like in order of magnitude more effort must be needed to support the ecosystem today than it was five years ago. >> Well, it's interesting that you say ecosystem, because you don't play in those places without a tight network of partnerships. So we have lots, of course, hardware partnerships, that's the thing that you think about when you think about the operating system, but we also have lots of partnerships with the software vendors. We've done a lot of work this year with Nvidia, we've supported their one and two systems, right, and we've done a lot to make sure that the workloads are happy. But, increasingly, as ISVs move to containerize their applications, when you containerize you need a user space that you bring along with you, you need your libraries, you need your container runtime. So we've taken a lot of the RHEL user space content, and put it into something that we're calling the Universal Base Image. So, you can rely on that layer of RHEL content when you build your container, put your application into a container. You can rely on that, you can get a stream of updates associated with that, so you can maintain your security, and when you deploy it on top of RHEL, we're with OpenShift, we can actually support it well for you. >> Walk me through the migration process, a little bit, if I'm running 7, and I'm shifting over, and I'm gonna make the move, how does that work? >> Denise: Carefully (laughs). >> Yeah sure, right. (laughs) 'Cause I've got my own concerns, right, I've got-- >> Of course! >> Sure, I've got to think, daily operation, or moment-to-moment operation, I can't afford to have downtime, I've got to make sure it's done in a secure way, I've got to make sure that files aren't corrupted, and things aren't lost, and, so that in itself is a, teeth-gnashing moment I would think, a bit, how do you make that easier for me? >> Yeah, well, especially when you've got 10,000 servers that you need to manage, and you want to start migrating them. You absolutely have to come to tomorrow morning's demo, we're gonna do, it's live! >> It's always tricky, right, live is always, yeah. >> Yeah, but migration, so we've put a lot of effort into migration. We're looking at, it's no good if the applications can't come along, why would you migrate the operating system, you wanna migrate the application. So we've got tooling that examines your environment, and tries to automate as much of it as we can. It looks at your existing environment, it looks at what you're gonna move through, it'll ask a few questions, it's totally driven by plug-in equivalents, we call them actors, and they understand the various, like one understands how to do network configuration, one understands how to replicate your disk configuration. It's integrated with automated backup and rollback, which is a thing that people have wanted for a long time so that we've got a much tighter level of safety there. We won't be able to migrate everything, I'm sure, but, as time goes along we add more and more and more into that utility as we learn more about what matters to customers. >> So, tomorrow morning, live demo. >> Denise: Live demo! >> Get a good night's sleep tonight! >> Denise: Put on your crash helmets! >> Fingers crossed. But thanks for joining us here and talking about the RHEL 8, about the rollout, and we wish you well with that, off to a great start for sure. >> Thank you so much, >> Thank you Denise. >> the RHEL teams are amazing, I love my guys. >> Great, thanks for being with us. >> Denise: Thank you so much. >> We'll continue here at the Red Hat Summit. You're watching theCUBE, live from Boston. (upbeat music)

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

>> Speaker: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's TheCube. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a special Cube conversation here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program Bobby Allen, who's the chief technology officer and chief evangelist at CloudGenera. Bobby thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, thanks for having us. >> Alright so Bobby we had a great conversation with your CEO Brian Kelly talking about CloudGenera, helping customers if, in my own words I'll say, there's this great mess of the cloud and service providers and data centers and things are changing all the time. And here's a great tool to help people understand this. Now, I've had people asking me for years, it's like "Hey, I've got my app, "or I'm building a new app, where do I do this?" And I've always said well, there are certain things that are really easy. If it's going to be up for a really short period of time, and it's something there, it's like you're not going to spend the time to rack and stack and build and do this. hey, Cloud was great for that. And on the other end of the spectrum now, the public clouds might disagree, but if I have something that's just like it's going to be cooking along and it's not changing and it's there, the rent versus buy analogy once again goes towards kind of doing it in a hosted or my own data center. But there's a whole lot of stuff in the middle, That is, well, it depends. There's there's this uncertainty in the world and that's where you live, so bring us in a little bit as to some of the thinking as to how CloudGenera helps and where let's get into it. >> That's a great question Stu. So, we feel like the market is actually changed, in the sense that information is coming faster and faster, there's more and more information that people are inundated and honestly overwhelmed by. And so when people ask us for more information, we typically tell them you don't need more information in our opinion, you really want to move from information to clarity to insight, "What should I actually do?" And so to go back to the real estate analogy you talked about, I think people think of cloud as a house. Cloud is at least a neighborhood if not a state, and you need to figure out where should I live within that state or that neighborhood. So, let's take AWS for example. AWS is a vendor that has many, many, many services, but also different flavors of how you can run things. So before people would look at CloudGenera as a company that can compare different execution venues. Do I want to run this in Amazon or Azure or Google? Still we increasingly get people that want to understand which flavor of Amazon should I do? Do I do the multi-tenant, do I do the dedicated, do I do the VMware cloud on AWS? And those are all valid choices for us. And so for us, we don't really care where a customer wants to evaluate. Let's define what you need and map that to the relevant or interesting options in the marketplace, and then take the guesswork out of it so you have some data-driven decision making. >> Yeah, I love that because I have been covering Amazon for many years, and boy I go to the show and it was like "Alright, I thought I got my arms around Aurora and now there's the serverless based Aurora, and there's 17 different database options inside of Amazon so, oh boy," and then, right. Let's not even talk about all the compute instances. I think it's more complicated to pick a compute instance in the public cloud than it is if I was going to put something in my own rack these days. >> Bobby: Yes, yes it is. >> So, but that being said I want to for a second before we talk about the public cloud, talk to your viewpoint, how are you helping customers in kind of the service provider to data center world. And because that's a complicated and very I have to say fragmented space. >> It is. >> How does CloudGenera help there? >> So CloudGenera deals with the consumers, so ones who actually want to benefit from the technology themselves, but also from the service provider side. So if you're Joe's Cloud Shack, or regional cloud provider or Vmware service provider, anyone who is offering technology services, you may want to know number one, how do you compare with the large hyperscale providers, and then number two, how can you showcase your valued proposition next to those. So maybe Amazon and Azure and Google are on the top of peoples' minds, but how do your services compare to those? So in our platform you can actually show a Joe's Cloud Shack next to an Amazon next to something like a Synergy or SimpliVity. So options inside and outside the data center that you thought about and then ones that you didn't can all be kind of presented in a fair way, so you take the guesswork out of how they compare to each other. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the big raging debates we've had out there is, "Oh I wish I had a cloud concierge." And it's like well, it's not a utility, and therefore, I could stand up something in my data center or I could put a Paz in my environment or there's so many layers in the stack and so much nuance that it's the paradox of choice I think that most people have. So, maybe walk us through a customer. When do they tend to come to you, what are some of those patterns, and what are the things that really help get accelerated when they use a platform like yours? >> So, some of the things that people think about are they have workloads that they want to move maybe they want to exit a data center, or what really happens commonly is there's a new leader in town. New CIO comes in, "We're going to have a cloud-first strategy." And we're not opposed to that. The biggest principle for us is do you understand why you're doing, and whether this is the right time, the when? Because if you don't do the right thing at the right time for the right reason there's a hole in your strategy. And so what we look at is, okay what is it that you're trying to move or change or transform, What are the things that are interesting to you or strategic, and then let's look at putting those things together. Now when you define what you need, you shouldn't define what you need in terms of where you're going, right. I don't decide my venue based on the airline I want to get on, I decide I need to be in Vegas for this conference at this time, and then I see the airline that can get me there on time for the best price, hopefully. And we take that same approach when it comes to helping customers. Let's talk about what you need in a vendor agnostic way that's divorced from the options in the market. Because your needs are not impacted by Amazon or Azure or HPE or Dell. And so then, after we define your expectations and your requirements let's map those to the things that you're curious about, or that your leadership says are strategic, and then let's make sure that we understand what we call the concept of logical equivalence. The spirit of your requirement may be called x in one provider and y in a different one, are they really the same as a tomato to-mah-to, or are they really two different types of, excuse me, services or entities altogether? So let's, let's evaluate then, how well your needs are met by these different vendors. Is it just a semantics issue or are these really two different things? Yes, they're both different types of block storage but the requirements are different. The latency is different, the redundancy is different, the pricing is certainly different. How close are these things to meeting the spirit of what you asked for? And the other parts too that I'll just offer that we see a lot is people are concerned overly about cost. How much does it cost? And we feel like the problem is not a problem of cost, it's a problem of value. People go to look for cost calculators but really what they need are value calculators, right? I take a Porsche and an F-150. An F-150 is a bigger vehicle but the Porsche is more expensive for a reason. There's a different experience than just space. And so the reality is people don't mind paying more if they know what they're paying for. Transparency is really the key. >> On that cost piece though, how much of the total equation do you look at? So I think about, my data center there's everything like the power, space, and all those pieces, if I go to a service provider, if it's my stuff, if I still have to manage it, versus some of the operational expenses. How much of kind of the, I hate to say total cost, but how much of that spread do you look at? >> We try to be pretty comprehensive, Stu. So, if you go to a public provider for example you're not paying for power but you're paying for a certainly hourly charge typically on an (mumbling) basis that accommodates a lot of the things that I'll say are platform or hypervisor and below. Now where I think a lot of the other people that are in this space maybe fall short, and our opinion is that they don't look at things above the hypervisor. If I move a workload to an AWS, they may have some great services I can take advantage of. The labor and the licensing and the other considerations that we consider to be carryover costs are things that I still need to accommodate. If I put a workload in Amazon, someone still needs to patch the OS, maybe manage the database, maybe audit security. Those are things that have labor and licensing and software considerations that we try to look at. So we try to be as comprehensive as possible, but we also look at SLA, we also look at security, so you may need to bring another manage services or consulting or software packages to fill those other gaps, so we try to be as holistic and comprehensive as possible. >> What other kind of patterns and data do you bring for CloudGenera? So thinking things either from a vertical standpoint or kind of size of company. I just think there's been certain movements in virtualization and containers and the like where there's been kind of that data and how do I understand what's going to make sense for me, so. Does CloudGenera get into any of that? >> We do get into some of that. So we try again not to force anything down someone's throat. We try to look at where you are, but also understand that there are some patterns. So for example, when we talk about different industry verticals it's very aligned to security and compliance for example. So we know that there are certain providers that are interesting but not ready for primetime because they don't have HIPAA, high tech, high trust, things that are typically relevant for the healthcare industry, so we're very quickly able to say this is something that may not be right for you just yet. Or if you have certain regional concerns, maybe you're looking at GDPR in Europe, you're looking at IRAP in Australia, we can, again, typically guide them to, this provider has some very interesting services but they don't have the security or the SLA that you need. So we try to do that to kind of whittle it down. The other thing that we're seeing though, Stu, is that honestly, many enterprises are biting off more than they can chew. They try to do too much at once, and so some of the things that we talked about, even off camera, is I would ask the question "Does the industry have a POT problem? "Are we trying to do too much at once?" And when I say POT I'm using that to represent the acronym of, to me, three pieces that we need to break this down to. Number one is parity, number two is optimization, and then number three is transformation. Many enterprises in our opinion are trying to eat an elephant with a spoon. They have no idea how to get there and they really don't understand what is too much in terms of the cost, and so when they're evaluating how much they can handle, how much change is too much, in terms of people, process, and technology, the thing to us is, what does parity look like? And that may mean a lift and shift in some cases, it may not, but you at least have to define what success looks like if you take what you're doing in your data center and move that somewhere else. But then, the middle ground is optimization. How do I take the spirit of what I'm doing, move it to that venue and then kind of clean it up or optimize it a little bit, and then once I'm there and I can evaluate the unintended consequences of change, what are the things that I didn't think about? The impacts to my people, the retraining, the other software package I need to put in place for monitoring and management, and so forth. Once I have a handle on that, then I can finally move from optimization to transformation, but that's not, that's not glamorous. That's not interesting. People don't want to talk about that. They want to go whole hog and change everything all at once and we get into trouble doing that. >> Bobby you've given me flashbacks. I worked in the storage industry for a decade, and migrations, you still kind of wake up in the middle of the night, screaming a little bit because it's always challenging, there's always all of those things to work through. You think you've gone through all of your checklists and then, oh wait, something didn't work. Database migrations, big discussion going on there. From Wikibon David Floyer has just been like, it's so many horror stories. People get there but it's, if you don't have to, maybe you don't want to, but there's so many reasons why you want to, so, I guess I want to highlight, we're not telling people not to change, and moving faster and getting on board, some modernization's a good thing, everywhere. You've got a virtualization environment, there's lots you can do today that we couldn't do two or four years ago. So, how do we get over this POT problem then? >> I think part of it is, so again going back to the moving analogy, if I'm going to move, Stu, it would be foolish for me to move without getting an estimate. And there are times when an estimate should be able to come in my house and tell me "It's actually better for you to sell that piano "than to try to move it, 'cause it's not worth it." I would want someone, if I were CIO in an enterprise today, to tell me, "Don't waste your time focusing on this, "this is really where you need to focus your time "because this is going to be the Pareto principle "that saves you the time and the money." The reality is bringing someone who's benefited from the land mines and the pitfalls, so in our opinion, bringing whether that's an SI, consultancy, a data service company like CloudGenera that's benefited from a lot of the things we've seen in the industry, don't hit things on your own that other people have stumbled on, right? Benefit from others' mistakes to allow you to take a look at the whole thing. So the challenge that I think we're having, Stu, is that we're proficient in talking about these things, there aren't enough use cases in terms of mature of cloud transformations to really look back at anecdotal data this comprehensive. We're still figuring a lot of this stuff out, and I know people don't want to hear that, but that's my opinion. >> So, Bobby, is there some place when I'm filling out these forms that I put in here's the skill set my team has, and a little alarm goes off and says, "Hey, time to do some retraining, some reskilling, "maybe bringing on some new people "to handle some of these new areas." How do you handle that side of it? >> I think part of it is honestly, and this may sound a little trite, I think people that are willing to raise their hand and say that we need some help or that "We don't have this all figured out," or that "There are some things that we need to bring in "a little bit of help to help us get that estimate "before we look to move everything," that's really the skill set you want to have. People that are not saying, "I'm the (mumbles) "juggernaut of everything cloud," because those people don't exist yet in my opinion. There are people that have pockets of expertise in things that they have really deep knowledge about, but we need to mix that with, I think, a healthy appreciation for the fact that there's still a lot of things that we're learning about together. The other part of that, Stu, is it's a community and it's a network. You may know storage migrations, I may know database migrations, let's put our heads together about how we can work together as an enterprise and make sure that we minimize impact to the users, because at the end of the day, that's really the challenge, is not to do a cool project, it's to deliver value to the business, and that's what I think we're loosing sight of with all this cool technology sometimes. >> Alright, so Bobby you've got over a thousand people using the tool. What are some of the big areas that people are like, "Oh wow, this is the stuff that's saving me "either lots of time, lots of money, saving my business, "and heck if I'm running the show, keeps my job"? >> I think storage is a big one. So people are oftentimes unaware that there are so many different ways that you can run storage in a given provider. So Amazon for example has four to six different ways you can just run block storage in their particular multi-tenant cloud, and people aren't aware of that. So there's a case that we did for a major bank. We showed them that a terabyte of storage in Amazon can run from 300 dollars up to 26 thousand dollars depending on the level or performance that you want to hit. Egress is another one, so what does the network behavior look like in those applications? Because people often will estimate the resources but not the traffic. What are the estimates to have a level of parity around security. So I don't have HIPAA compliance or SOP compliance in this particular provider. What is it going to take me to get to that level of parity that I need to have, because if I save money, Stu, but I have to spend all that on my lawyer because my data got accessed, then I've still got a problem, I've just kind of moved that down the road. So lots of things out there that I believe we're hiding in plain sight. Again, information is out there that we just don't have the filters to find. What I would say is a lot of people think that cloud is a commodity, we're not there yet. There're providers to this day, I can't give any names to protect the innocent, but the same service is literally triple in one provider what it costs in another one for almost exactly the same service. And there're examples like that that have been out there for years, we just can't see them. >> So, Bobby, last question, if somebody wanted to get started with CloudGenera, is there like a trial version, or how would somebody get involved? >> Yeah, so a couple things that are really interesting. So there's a try now button on our website that lets you kind of answer a few questions and actually get a sample mini-assessment, download a sample report, and actually see the type of analysis that we provide, number one. Number two, CloudGenera is a software company but also a services company. If you want to purchase the software, great, and we actually have trials that we can set up for you to do that. We also do what we call proofs of value. If you want to engage our team to come in and do five to ten applications to see how those might look with our analysis, and then they go at scale and look at your whole CMDB. We want to make sure we're meeting the needs of the business and not trying to boil the ocean if they're not ready for that yet. >> Bobby Allen, CTO and chief evangelist to CloudGenerate, thanks so much for joining me. So much happening in the cloud world. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of our coverage, as well as wikibon.com for all the research. Thanks for watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman.