>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe, 2021 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE'S coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2021 Virtual, I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've got two great guests here, always great to talk to the KubeCon co-chairs and we have Stephen Augustus Head of Open Source at Cisco and also the KubeCon co-chair great to have you back. And Jasmine James Manager and Engineering Effectives at Twitter, the KubeCon co-chair, she's new on the job so we're not going to grill her too hard but she's excited to share her perspective, Jasmine, Stephen great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> So obviously the co-chairs you guys see everything upfront Jasmine, you're going to learn that this is a really kind of key fun position because you've got to multiple hats you got to wear, you got to put a great program together, you got to entertain and surprise and delight the attendees and also can get the right trends, pick everything right and then keep that harmonious vibe going at CNCF and KubeCon is hard so it's a hard job. So I got to ask you out of the gate, what are the top trends that you guys have selected and are pushing forward this year that we're seeing evolve and unfold here at KubeCon? >> For sure yeah. So I'm excited to see, and I would say that some of the top trends for Cloud Native right now are just changes in the ecosystem, how we think about different use cases for Cloud Native technology. So you'll see lot's of talk about new architectures being introduced into Cloud Native technologies or things like WebAssembly. WebAssembly Wasm used cases and really starting to and again, I think I mentioned this every time, but like what are the customer used cases actually really thinking about how all of these building blocks connect and create a cohesive story. So I think a lot of it is enduring and will always be a part. My favorite thing to see is pretty much always maintainer and user stories, but yeah, but architecture is Wasm and security. Security is a huge focus and it's nice to see it comes to the forefront as we talked about having these like the security day, as well as all of the talk arounds, supply chain security, it has been a really, really, really big event (laughs) I'll say. >> Yeah. Well, great shot from last year we have been we're virtual again, but we're back in, the real world is coming back in the fall, so we hopefully in North America we'll be in person. Jasmine, you're new to the job. Tell us a little about you introduce yourself to the community and tell more about who you are and why you're so excited to be the co-chair with Stephen. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Jasmine James, I've been in the industry for the past five or six years previous at Delta Airlines, now at Twitter, as a part of my job at Delta we did a huge drive on adopting Kubernetes. So a lot of those experiences, I was very, very blessed to be a part of in making the adoption and really the cultural shift, easy for developers during my time there. I'm really excited to experience like Cloud Native from the co-chair perspective because historically I've been like on the consumer side going to talk, taking all those best practices, stealing everything I could into bring it back into my job. So make everyone's life easier. So it's really, really great to see all of the fantastic ideas that are being presented, all of the growth and maturity within the Cloud Native world. Similar to Stephen, I'm super excited to hear about the security stuff, especially as it relates to making it easy for developers to shift left on security versus it being such an afterthought and making it something that you don't really have to think about. Developer experience is huge for me which is why I took the job at Twitter six months ago, so I'm really excited to see what I can learn from the other co-chairs and to bring it back to my day-to-day. >> Yeah, Twitter's been very active in open source. Everyone knows that and it's a great chance to see you land there. One of the interesting trends is this year I'll see besides security is GitOps but the one that I think is relevant to your background so fresh is the end user contributions and involvement has been really exploding on the scene. It's always been there. We've covered, Envoy with Lyft but now enterprise is now mainstream enterprises have been kind of going to the open source well and bringing those goodies back to their camps and building out and bringing it back. So you starting to see that flywheel developing you've been on that side now here. Talk about that dynamic and how real that is an important and share some perspective of what's really going on around this explosion around more end user contribution, more end user involvement. >> Absolutely. So I really think that a lot of industry like players are starting to see the importance of contributing back to open source because historically we've done a lot of taking, utilizing these different components to drive the business logic and not really making an investment in the product itself. So it's really, really great to see large companies invest in open source, even have whole teams dedicated to open source and how it's consumed internally. So I really think it's going to be a big win for the companies and for the open source community because I really am a big believer in like giving back and making sure that you should give back as much as you're taking and by making it easy for companies to do the right thing and then even highlighting it as a part of CNCF, it'll be really, really great, just a drive for a great environment for everyone. So really excited to see that. >> That's really good. She has been awesome stuff. Great, great insight. Stephen, I just have you piggyback off that and comment on companies enterprises that want to get more involved with the Cloud Native community from their respective experiences, what's the playbook, is there a new on-ramps? Is there new things? Is there a best practice? What's your view? I mean, obviously everyone's growing and changing. You look at IT has changed. I mean, IT is evolving completely to CloudOps, SRE get ops day two operations. It's pretty much standard now but they need to learn and change. What's your take on this? >> Yeah, so I think that to Jasmine's point and I'm not sure how much we've discussed my background in the past, but I actually came from the corporate IT background, did Desktop Sr, Desktop helped us support all of that stuff up into operations, DevOps, SRE, production engineering. I was an SRE at a startup who used core West technologies and started using Kubernetes back when Kubernetes is that one, two, I think. And that was my first journey into Cloud Native. And I became core less is like only customer to employee convert, right? So I'm very much big on that end user story and figuring out how to get people involved because that was my story as well. So I think that, some of the work that we do or a lot of the work that we do in contributor strategy, the SIG CNCF St. Contributor Strategy is all around thinking through how to bring on new contributors to these various Cloud Native projects, Right? So we've had chats with container D and linker D and a bunch of other folks across the ecosystem, as well as the kind of that maintainer circle sessions that we hold which are kind of like a private, not recorded. So maintainers can kind of get raw and talk about what they're feeling, whether it be around bolstering contributions or whether it'd be like managing burnout, right? Or thinking about how you talk through the values and the principles for your projects. So I think that, part of that story is building for multiple use cases, right? You take Kubernetes for example, right? So Ameritas chair for sync PM over in Kubernetes, one of the sub project owners for the enhancements sub project which involves basically like figuring out how we intake new enhancements to the community but as well as like what the end user cases are all of the use cases for that, right? How do we make it easy to use the technology and how we make it more effective for people to have conversations about how they use technology, right? So I think it's kind of a continuing story and it's delightful to see all of the people getting involved in a SIG Contributor Strategy, because it means that they care about all of the folks that are coming into their projects and making it a more welcoming and easier to contribute place so. >> Yeah. That's great stuff. And one of the things you mentioned about IT in your background and the scale change from IT and just the operational change over is interesting. I was just talking with a friend and we were talking about, get Op and, SRAs and how, in colleges is that an engineering track or is it computer science and it's kind of a hybrid, right? So you're seeing essentially this new operational model at scale that's CloudOps. So you've got hybrid, you've got on-premise, you've got Cloud Native and now soon to be multi-cloud so new things come into play architecture, coding, and programmability. All these things are like projects now in CNCF. And that's a lot of vendors and contributors but as a company, the IT functions is changing fast. So that's going to require more training and more involvement and yet open source is filling the void if you look at some of the successes out there, it's interesting. Can you comment on the companies that are out there saying, "Hey, I know my IT department is going to be turning into essentially SRE operations or CloudOps at scale. How do they get there? How could they work with KubeCon and what's the key playbook? How would you answer that? >> Yeah, so I would say, first off the place to go is the one-on-one track. We specifically craft that one-on-one track to make sure that people who are new to Cloud Native get a very cohesive story around what they're trying to get into, right? At any one time. So head to the one-on-one track, please add to the one-on-one track, hang out, definitely check out all of the keynotes that again, the keynotes, we put a lot of work into making sure these keynotes tell a very nice story about all of the technology and the amount of work that our presenters put into it as well is phenomenal. It's top notch. It's top notch every time. So those will always be my suggestions. Actually go to the keynotes and definitely check out the one-on-one track. >> Awesome. Jasmine, I got to get your take on this now that you're on the KubeCon and you're co-chairing with Stephen, what's your story to the folks that are in the end user side out there that were in your old position that you were at Delta doing some great Kubernetes work but now it's going beyond Kubernetes. I was just talking with another participant in the KubeCon ecosystem is saying, "It's not just Kubernetes anymore. There's other systems that we're going to deploy our real-time metrics on and whatnot". So what's the story? What's the update? What do you see on the inside now now that you're on board and you're at a Hyperscale at Twitter, what's your advice? What's your commentary to your old friends and the end user world? >> Yeah. It's not an easy task. I think that was, you had mentioned about starting with the one-on-one is like super key. Like that's where you should start. There's so many great stories out there in previous KubeCon that have been told. I was listening to those stories and the great thing about our community is that it's authentic, right? We're telling like all of the ways we tripped up so we can prevent you from doing this same thing and having an easier path, which is really awesome. Another thing I would say is do not underestimate the cultural shift, right? There are so many tools and technologies out there, but there's also a cultural transformation that has to happen. You're shifting from, traditional IT roles to a really holistic like so many different things are changing about the way infrastructure was interacted with the way developers are developing. So don't underestimate the cultural shift and make sure you're bringing everyone to the party because there's a lot of perspectives from the development side that needs to be considered before you make the shift initially So that way you can make sure you're approaching the problem in the right way. So those would be my recommendation. >> Also, speaking of cultural shifts, Stephen I know this is a big passion of yours is diversity in the ecosystem. I think with COVID we've seen probably in the past two years a major cultural shifts on the personnel involved, the people participating, still a lot more work to get done. Where are we on diversity in the ecosystem? How would you rate the progress and the overall achievements? >> I would say doing better, but never stop what has happened in COVID I think, if you look across companies, if you look across the opportunities that have opened up for people in general, there have been plenty of doors that have shut, right? And doors that have really made the assumption that you need to be physical are in person to do good work. And I think that the Cloud Native ecosystem the work that the LF and CNCF do, and really the way that we interact in projects has kind of pushed towards this async first, this remote first work culture, right? So you see it in these large corporations that have had to change the travel policies because of COVID and really for someone who's coming off being like a field engineer and solutions architect, right? The bread and butter is hopping on and off a plane, shaking hands, going to dinner, doing the song and dance, right? With customers. And for that model to functionally shift, right? Having conversations in different ways, right? And yeah, sometimes it's a lot of Zoom calls, right? Zoom calls, webinars, all of these things but I think some of what has happened is, you take the release team, for example, the Kubernetes release team. This is our first cycle with Dave Vellante who's our 121 released team lead is based in India, right? And that's the first time that we've had APAC region release team lead and what that forced us to do, we were already working on it. But what that forced us to do is really focused on asynchronous communication. How can we get things done without having to have people in the room? And we were like, "With Dave Vellante in here, it either works or it doesn't like, we're either going to prove that what we've put in place works for asynchronous communication or it doesn't." And then, given that a project of this scale can operate just fine, right? Right just fine delivering a release with people all across the globe. It proves that we have a lot of flexibility in the way that we offer opportunities, both on the open source side, as well as on the company side. >> Yeah. And I got to say KubeCon has always been global from day one. I was in Shanghai and I was in hung, Jo, visiting Ali Baba. And who do I see in the lobby? The CNCF crew. And I'm like, "What are you guys doing here?" "Oh, we're here talking to the cloud with Alibaba." So global is huge. You guys have nailed that. So congratulations and keep that going. Jasmine, your perspective is women in tech. I mean, you're seeing more and more focus and some great doors opening. It's still not enough. We've been covering this for a long time. Still the numbers are down, but we had a great conference recently at Stanford Women in Data Science amazing conference, a lot of power players coming in, women in tech is evolving. What's your take on this still a lot more work to done. You're an inspiration. Share your story. >> Yeah. We have a long way to go. There's no question about it. I do think that there's a lot of great organizations CNCF being one of them, really doing a great job at sharing, networking opportunities, encouraging other women to contribute to open source and letting that be sort of the gateway into a tech career. My journey is starting as a systems engineer at Delta, working my way into leadership, somehow I'm not sure I ended up there but really sort of shifting and being able to lift other women up has been like so fortunate to be able to do that. Women who code being a mentor, things of that nature has been a great opportunity, but I do feel like the open source community has a long way go to be a more welcoming place for women contributors, things like code of conduct, that being very prevalent making sure that it's not daunting and scary, going into GitHub and starting to create a PR for out of fear of what someone might say about your contributions instead of it being sort of an educational experience. So I think there's a lot of opportunities but there's a lot of programs, networking opportunities out there, especially everyone being remote now that have presented themselves. So I'm very hopeful. And the CNCF, like I said is doing a great job at highlighting these women contributors that are making changes to CNCF projects in really making it something that is celebrated which is really great. >> Yeah. You know that I love Stephen and we thought this last time and the Clubhouse app has come online since we were last talking and it's all audio. So there's a lot of ideas and it's all open. So with a synchronous first you have more access but still context matters. So the language, so there's still more opportunities potentially to offend or get it right so this is now becoming a new cultural shift. You brought this up last time we chatted around the language, language is important. So I think this is something that we're keeping an eye on and trying to keep open dialogue around, "Hey it matters what you say, asynchronously or in texts." We all know that text moment where someone said, "I didn't really mean that." But it was offensive or- >> It's like you said it. (laughs) >> (murmurs) you passionate about this here. This is super important how we work. >> Yeah. So you mentioned Clubhouse and it's something that I don't like. (laughs) So no offense to anyone who is behind creating new technologies for sure. But I think that Clubhouse from, if you take platforms like that, let's generalize, you take platforms like that and you think about the unintentional exclusion that those platforms involve, right? If you think about folks with disabilities who are not necessarily able to hear a conversation, right? Or you don't provide opportunities to like caption your conversations, right? That either intentionally or unintentionally excludes a group of folks, right? So I've seen Cloud Native, I've seen Cloud Native things happen on a Clubhouse, on a Twitter Spaces. I won't personally be involved in them until I know that it's a platform that is not exclusive. So I think that it's great that we're having new opportunities to engage with folks that are not necessarily, you've got people prefer the Slack and discord vibe, you've got people who prefer the text over phone calls, so to speak thing, right? You've got people who prefer phone calls. So maybe like, maybe Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, insert new, I guess Disco is doing a thing too- >> They call it stages. Disco has stages, which is- >> Stages. They have stages. Okay. All right. So insert, Clubhouse clone here and- >> Kube House. We've got a Kube House come on in. >> Kube House. Kube House. >> Trivial (murmurs). >> So we've got great ways to engage there for people who prefer that type of engagement and something that is explicitly different from the I'm on a Zoom call all day kind of vibe enjoy yourselves, try to make it as engaging as possible, just realize what you may unintentionally be doing by creating a community that not everyone can be a part of. >> Yeah. Technical consequences. I mean, this is key language matters to how you get involved and how you support it. I mean, the accessibility piece, I never thought about that. If you can't listen, I mean, you can't there's no content there. >> Yeah. Yeah. And that's a huge part of the Cloud Native community, right? Thinking through accessibility, internationalization, localization, to make sure that our contributions are actually accessible, right? To folks who want to get involved and not just prioritizing, let's say the U.S. or our English speaking part of the world so. >> Awesome. Jasmine, what's your take? What can we do better in the world to make the diversity and inclusion not a conversation because when it's not a conversation, then it's solved. I mean, ultimately it's got a lot more work to do but you can't be exclusive. You got to be diverse more and more output happens. What's your take on this? >> Yeah. I feel like they'll always be work to do in this space because there's so many groups of people, right? That we have to take an account for. I think that thinking through inclusion in the onset of whatever you're doing is the best way to get ahead of it. There's so many different components of it and you want to make sure that you're making a space for everyone. I also think that making sure that you have a pipeline of a network of people that represent a good subset of the world is going to be very key for shaping any program or any sort of project that anyone does in the future. But I do think it's something that we have to consistently keep at the forefront of our mind always consider. It's great that it's in so many conversations right now. It really makes me happy especially being a mom with an eight year old girl who's into computer science as well. That there'll be better opportunities and hopefully more prevalent opportunities and representation for her by the time she grows up. So really, really great. >> Get her coding early, as I always say. Jasmine great to have you and Stephen as well. Good to see you. Final question. What do you hope people walk away with this year from KubeCon? What's the final kind of objective? Jasmine, we'll start with you. >> Wow. Final objective. I think that I would want people to walk away with a sense of community. I feel like the KubeCon CNCF world is a great place to get knowledge, but also an established sense of community not stopping at just the conference and taking part of the community, giving back, contributing would be a great thing for people to walk away with. >> Awesome. Stephen? >> I'm all about community as well. So I think that one of the fun things that we've been doing, is just engaging in different ways than we have normally across the kind of the KubeCon boundaries, right? So you take CNCF Twitch, you take some of the things that I can't mention yet, but are coming out you should see around and pose KubeCon week, the way that we're engaging with people is changing and it's needed to change because of how the world is right now. So I hope that to reinforce the community point, my favorite part of any conference is the hallway track. And I think I've mentioned this last time and we're trying our best. We're trying our best to create it. We've had lots of great feedback about, whether it be people playing among us on CNCF Twitch or hanging out on Slack silly early hours, just chatting it up. And are kind of like crafted hallway track. So I think that engage, don't be afraid to say hello. I know that it's new and scary sometimes and trust me, we've literally all been here. It's going to be okay, come in, have some fun, we're all pretty friendly. We're all pretty friendly and we know and understand that the only way to make this community survive and thrive is to bring on new contributors, is to get new perspectives and continue building awesome technology. So don't be afraid. >> I love it. You guys have a global diverse and knowledgeable and open community. Congratulations. Jasmine James, Stephen Augustus, co-chairs for KubeCon here on theCUBE breaking it down, I'm John Furrier for your host, thanks for watching. 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>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Last year in 2020 it was good to be in tech and even better to be in the cloud, as organizations had to rely on remote cloud services to keep things running. We believe that tech spending will increase seven to 8% in 2021. But we don't expect investments in cloud computing to sharply attenuate, when workers head back to the office. It's not a zero sum game, and we believe that pent up demand in on-prem data centers will complement those areas of high growth that we saw last year, namely cloud, AI, security, data and automation. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we'll provide our take on the latest ETR COVID survey, and share why we think the tech boom will continue, well into the future. So let's take a look at the state of tech spending. Fitch Ratings has upped its outlook for global GDP to 6.1% for January's 5.3% projection. We've always expected tech spending to outperform GDP by at least 100 to 200 basis points, so we think 2021 could see 8% growth for the tech sector. That's a massive swing from last year's,5% contraction, and it's being powered by spending in North America, a return of small businesses, and, the massive fiscal stimulus injection from the U.S led central bank actions. As we'll show you, the ETR survey data suggests that cloud spending is here to stay, and a dollar spent back in the data center doesn't necessarily mean less spending on digital initiatives, generally and cloud specifically. Moreover, we see pent up demand for core on-prem data center infrastructure, especially networking. Now one caveat, is we continue to have concerns for the macro on-prem data storage sector. There are pockets of positivity, for example, pure storage seems to have accelerating momentum. But generally the data suggests the cloud and flash headroom, continue, to pressure spending on storage. Now we don't expect the stock market's current rotation out of tech. We don't expect that that changes the fundamental spending dynamic. We see cloud, AI and ML, RPA, cybersecurity and collaboration investments still hovering above, that 40% net score. Actually cybersecurity is not quite there, but it is a priority area for CIOs. We'll talk about that more later. And we expect that those high growth sectors will stay steady in ETRs April survey along with continued spending on application modernization in the form of containers. Now let me take a moment to comment on the recent action in tech stocks. If you've been following the market, you know that the rate on the 10-year Treasury note has been rising. This is important, because the 10 years of benchmark, and it affects other interest rates. As interest rates rise, high growth tech stocks, they become less attractive. And that's why there's been a rotation, out of the big tech high flyer names of 2020. So why do high growth stocks become less attractive to investors when interest rates rise? Well, it's because investors are betting on the future value of cash flows for these companies, and when interest rates go up, the future values of those cash flows shrink, making the valuations less attractive. Let's take an example. Snowflake is a company with a higher revenue multiple than pretty much any other stock, out there in the tech industry. Revenues at the company are growing more than 100%, last quarter, and they're projected to have a revenue of a billion dollars next year. Now on March 8th, Snowflake was valued at around $80 billion and was trading at roughly 75x forward revenue. Today, toward the middle the end of March. Snowflake is valued at about 50 billion or roughly 45x forward revenue. So lower growth companies that throw off more cash today, become more attractive in a rising rate climate because, the cash they throw off today is more valuable than it was in a low rate environment. The cash is there today versus, a high flying tech company where the cash is coming down the road and doesn't have to be discounted on a net present value basis. So the point is, this is really about math, not about fundamental changes in spending. Now the ETR spending data has shown, consistent upward momentum, and that cycle is continuing, leading to our sanguine outlook for the sector. This chart here shows the progression of CIO expectations on spending over time, relative to previous years. And you can see the steady growth in expectations each quarter, hitting 6% growth in 2021 versus 2020 for the full year. ETR estimates show and they do this with a 95% confidence level, that spending is going to be up between 5.1 to 6.8% this year. We are even more up optimistic accounting for recent upward revisions in GDP. And spending outside the purview of traditional IT, which we think will be a tailwind, due to digital initiatives and shadow tech spending. ETR covers some of that, but it is really a CIO heavy survey. So there's some parts that we think can grow even faster, than ETR survey suggests. Now the positive spending outlook, it's broad based across virtually all industries that ETR tracks. Government spending leads the pack by a wide margin, which probably gives you a little bit of heartburn. I know it does for me, yikes. Healthcare is interesting. Perhaps due to pent up demand, healthcare has been so busy saving lives, that it has some holes to fill. But look at the sectors at 5% or above. Only education really lags notably. Even energy which got crushed last year, showing a nice rebound. Now let's take a look at some of the strategies that organizations have employed during COVID, and see how they've changed. Look, the picture is actually quite positive in our view. This data shows the responses over five survey snapshots, starting in March of 2020. Most people are still working from home that really hasn't changed much. But we're finally seeing some loosening of the travel restrictions imposed last year, is a notable drop in canceled business trips. It's still high, but it's very promising trend. Quick aside, looks like Mobile World Congress is happening in late June in Barcelona. The host of the conference just held a show in Shanghai and 20,000 attendees showed up. theCube is planning to be there in Barcelona along with TelcoDr, Who took over Ericsson's 65,000 square foot space, when Ericsson tapped out of the conference. We are good together we're going to lay out the future of the digital telco, in a hybrid: physical slash virtual event. With the ecosystem of telcos, cloud, 5G and software communities. We're very excited to be at the heart of reinventing the event experience for the coming decade. Okay, back to the data. Hiring freezes, way down. Look at new IT deployments near flat from last quarter, with big uptick from a year ago. Layoffs, trending downward, that's really a positive. Hiring momentum is there. So really positive signs for tech in this data. Now let's take a look at the work from home, survey data. We've been sharing this for several quarters now, remember, the data showed that pre pandemic around 15 to 16% of employees worked remotely. And we had been sharing the CIO is expected that figure to slowly decline from the 70% pandemic levels and come into the spring in the summer, hovering in the 50% range. But then eventually landing in the mid 30s. Now the current survey shows 31%. So, essentially, it's exactly double from the pre COVID levels. It's going to be really interesting to see because across the board organizations are reporting, big increases in productivity as a result of how they've responded to COVID in the remote work practices and the infrastructure that's been put in place. And look, a lot of workers are expecting to stay remote. So we'll see where this actually lands. My personal feelings, the number is going to be higher than the low 30s. Perhaps well into the mid to upper 30s. Now let's take a look at the cloud and on-prem MCS. So were a little bit out on a limb here with a can't have a cake and eat it too scenario. Meaning pent up demand for data center infrastructure on-prem is going to combine with the productivity benefits of cloud in the digital imperative. So that means that technology budgets are going to get a bigger piece of the overall spending pie, relative to other initiatives. At least for the near term. ETR asked respondents about how the return to physical, is going to impact on-prem architectures and applications. You can see 63% of the respondents, had a cloud friendly answer, as shown in the first two bars. Whereas 30% had an on-prem friendly answer, as shown in the next three bars. Now, what stands out, is that only 5% of respondents plan to increase their on-prem spend to above pre COVID levels. Sarbjeet Johal pinged me last night and asked me to jump into a clubhouse session with Martin Casado and the other guys from Andreessen Horowitz. They were having this conversation about the coming cloud backlash. And how cloud native companies are spending so much, too much, in their opinion, on AWS and other clouds. And at some point, as they scale, they're going to have to claw back technology infrastructure on-prem, due to their AWS vague. I don't know. This data, it certainly does not suggest that that is happening today. So the cloud vendors, they keep getting more volume, you would think they're going to have better prices and better economies of scales than we'll see on-prem. And as we pointed out, the repatriation narrative that you hear from many on-prem vendors is kind of dubious. Look, if AWS Azure, and Google can't provide IT infrastructure and better security than I can on-prem, then something is amiss. Now however, they are creating an oligopoly. And if they get too greedy and get hooked on the margin crack, of cloud, they'd better be careful, or they're going to become the next regulated utility? So, it's going to be interesting to see if the Andreessen scenario has (laughs) legs, maybe they have another agenda, maybe a lot of their portfolio companies, have ideas are around doing things to help on-prem? Why are we so optimistic that we'll see a stronger 2021 on-prem spend if the cloud continues to command so much attention? Well, first, because nearly 20% of customers say there will be an uptick in on-prem spending. Second, we saw in 2020, that the big on-prem players, Dell, VMware, Oracle, and SAP in particular, and even IBM made it through, okay. And they've managed to figure out how to work through the crisis. And finally, we think that the lines between on-prem and cloud, and hybrid and cross cloud and edge will blur over the next five years. We've talked about this a lot, that abstraction layer that we see coming, and there's some real value opportunities there. It'll take some time. But we do see there, that the traditional vendors, are going to attack those new opportunities and create value across clouds and hybrid systems and out to the edge. Now, as those demarcation lines become more gray, a hybrid world is emerging that is going to require hardware and software investments that reduce latency and are proximate to users buildings and distributed infrastructure. So we see spending in certain key areas, continuing to be strong across the board, will require connecting on-prem to cloud in edge workloads. Here's where it CIOs see the action, asked to cite the technologies that will get the most attention in the next 12 months. These seven stood out among the rest. No surprise that cyber comes out as top priority, with cloud pretty high as well. But interesting to see the uptick in collaboration in networking. Execs are seeing the importance of collaboration technologies for remote workers. No doubt, there's lots of Microsoft Teams in that bar. But there's some pent up demand it seems for networking, we find that very interesting. Now, just to put this in context, in a spending context. We'll share a graphic from a previous breaking analysis episode. This chart shows the net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis. And the market share or pervasiveness in the ETR data set on the horizontal axis. The big four areas of spend momentum are cloud, ML and AI, containers in RPA. This is from the January survey, we don't expect a big change in the upcoming April data, we'll see. But these four stand out above the 40% line that we've highlighted, which to us is an indicator of elevated momentum. Now, note on the horizontal axis only cloud, cloud is the only sector that enjoys both greater than 60% market share on the x axis, and is above the 40% net score line and the y axis. So even though security is a top priority as we were talking about earlier. It competes with other budget items, still right there certainly on the horizontal axis, but it competes with other initiatives for that spend momentum. Okay, so key takeaways. Seven to 8% tech spending growth expected for 2021. Cloud is leading the charge, it's big and it has spending momentum, so we don't expect a big rotation out of cloud back to on-prem. Now, having said that, we think on-prem will benefit from a return to a post isolation economy. Because of that pent up demand. But we caution we think there are some headwinds, particularly in the storage sector. Rotation away from tech in the stock market is not based on a fundamental change in spending in our view, or demand, rather it's stock market valuation math. So there should be some good buying opportunities for you in the coming months. As money moves out of tech into those value stocks. But the market is very hard to predict. Oh 2020 was easy to make money. All you had to do is buy high growth and momentum tech stocks on dips. 2021 It's not that simple. So you got to do your homework. And as we always like to stress, formulate a thesis and give it time to work for you. Iterate and improve when you feel like it's not working for you. But stay current, and be true to your strategy. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. So please subscribe. I publish weekly in siliconangle.com and wikibond.com and always appreciate the comments on LinkedIn. You can DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Don't forget to check out etr.plus where all the survey data science actually resides. Some really interesting things that they're about to launch. So do follow that. This is Dave vellante. Thanks for watching theCube Insights powered by ETR. Good health to you, be safe and we'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Coop con and cloud, native con Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners >>Welcome back. This is the Cube coverage of Cube Con Cloud, native con, the European show for 2020. I'm your host to Minuteman. And when we talk about the container world, we talk about what's happening in cloud. Native storage has been one of those sticking points. One of those things that you know has been challenging, that we've been looking to mature and really happy to welcome back to the program two of our cube alumni to give us the update on the state of storage for the container world. Both of them are oh, founders and CEOs. First of all, we have Xiang Yang from Rancher Labs, of course, was recently acquired by Sue Save it and the intention to acquire on and also joining us from early the relay. Who is with port works? Shang Amerli. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Alright. So early. I actually I'm going to start with you just cause you know we've seen, you know, a couple of waves of companies working on storage. In this environment, we know storage is difficult. Um, And when we change how we're building things, there's architectural things that can happen. Eso maybe if you could just give us a snapshot, you know, Port works, you know, was created to help unpack this. You know, straight on here in 2020 you know, where you see things in the overall kind of computer storage landscape? >>Absolutely. Still, before I kind of jump into port works. I just want to take a minute to publicly congratulate the the whole rancher team, and and Shang and Shannon And will China have known those folks for a while there? They're kind of true entrepreneurs. They represent the serial entrepreneur spirit that that so many folks know in the valley, and so, you know, great outcome for them. We're very happy for them and ah, big congrats and shout out to the whole team. What works is is a little over five years old, and we've been kind of right from the inception of the company recognized that to put containers in production, you're gonna have to solve, not just the orchestration problem. But the issue of storage and data orchestration and so in a natural kubernetes orchestrates containers and what works orchestrates storage and data. And more specifically, by doing that, what we enable is enterprises to be able to take APS that are containerized into production at scale and and have high availability. Disaster recovery, backup all of the things that for decades I t has had to do and has done to support application, reliability and availability. But essentially we're doing it for purpose with the purpose build solution for containerized workloads. >>Alright, shaming. Of course, storage is a piece of the overall puzzle that that ranchers trying to help with. Maybe if you could just refresh our audience on Longhorn, which your organization has its open source. It's now being managed by the CN. CF is my understanding. So help us bring Longhorn into the discussion >>thanks to. So I'm really glad to be here. We've I think rancher and port work started about the same time, and we started with a slightly different focus. More is exactly right to get containers going, you really need both so that the computer angle orchestrating containers as well as orchestrating the storage and the data. So rancher started with, ah, it's slightly stronger focus on orchestrating containers themselves, but pretty quickly, we realized, as adoption of containers grow, we really need it to be able to handle ah, storage feather. And like any new technology, you know, uh, Kubernetes and containers created some interesting new requirements and opportunities, and at the time, really, they weren't. Ah, a lot of good technologies available, you know, technologies like rook and SEF at the time was very, very premature, I think, Ah, the You know, we actually early on try to incorporate ah, the cluster technology. And it was just it was just not easy. And And at the time I think port Works was, ah, very busy developing. Ah, what turned out to be there flagship product, which we end up, end up, uh, partnering very, very closely. But but early on, we really had no choice but to start developing our own storage technology. So Long horn. As a piece of container storage technology, it's actually almost as oh, there's rancher itself. When about funding engineers, we hired he he ended up, you know, working on it and Then over the years, you know the focus shift that I think the original version was written in C plus plus, and over the years it's now being completely re written in Golan. It was originally written more for Docker workload. Now, of course, everything is kubernetes centric. And last year we you know, we we decided to donate the Longhorn Open Source project to CN CF. And now it's a CN CF sandbox project, and the adoption is just growing really quickly. And just earlier this year, we we finally ah decided to we're ready to offer a commercial support for it. So So that's that's where rancher is. And with longhorn and container storage technology. >>Yeah, it has been really interesting to watch in this ecosystem. A couple of years ago, one of the Q con shows I was talking to people coming out of the Believe It was the Sigs, the special interest group for storage, and it was just like, Wow, it was heated. Words were, you know, back and forth. There's not a lot of agreement there. Anybody that knows the storage industry knows that you know standards in various ways of doing things often are contentious and there's there's differences of opinion. Look at the storage industry. You know, there's a reason why there's so many different solutions out there. So maybe it love to hear from early. From your standpoint, things are coming to get a little bit more. There are still a number of options out there. So you know, why is this kind of coop petition? I actually good for the industry? >>Yeah, I think this is a classic example of Coop petition. Right? Let's let's start with the cooperation part right? The first part of time the you know, the early days of CN, CF, and even sort of the Google Communities team, I think, was really very focused on compute and and subsequent years. In the last 34 years, there's been a greater attention to making the whole stack works, because that's what it's going to take to take a the enterprise class production and put it in, you know, enterprise class application and put it in production. So extensions like C and I for networking and CS I container storage interface. We're kind of put together by a working group and and ah ah you know both both in the CN CF, but also within the kubernetes Google community. That's you talked about six storage as an example. And, you know, as always happens, right? Like it It looks a little bit in the early days. Like like a polo game, right where folks are really? Ah, you know, seemingly, uh, you know, working with each other on on top of the pool. But underneath they're kicking each other furiously. But that was a long time back, and we've graduated from then into really cooperating. And I think it's something we should all be proud of. Where now the CS I interface is really a A really very, very strong and complete solution tow, allowing communities to orchestrate storage and data. So it's really strengthened both communities and the kubernetes ecosystem. Now the competition part. Let's kind of spend. I want to spend a couple of minutes on that too, right? Um, you know, one of the classic things that people sometimes confuse is the difference between an overlay and an interface. CSC is wonderful because it defines how the two layers off essentially kind of old style storage. You know, whether it's a san or ah cloud, elastic storage bucket or all of those interact with community. So the the definition of that interface kind of lay down some rules and parameters for how that interaction should happen. However, you still always need an overlay like Port Works that that actually drives that interface and enables Kubernetes to actually manage that storage. And that's where the competition is. And, you know, she mentioned stuff and bluster and rook and kind of derivatives of those. And I think those have been around really venerable and and really excellent products for born in a different era for a different time open stack, object storage and all of that not really meant for kind of primary workloads. And they've been they've been trying to be adapted for, for for us, for this kind of workload. Port Works is really a built from right from the inception to be designed for communities and for kubernetes workloads at enterprise scale. And so I think, you know, as I as I look at the landscape, we welcome the fact that there are so many more people acknowledging that there is a vital need for data orchestration on kubernetes right, that that's why everybody and their brother now has a CS I interface. However, I think there's a big difference between having an interface. This is actually having the software that provides the functionality for H. A, D R. And and for backup, as as the kind of life cycle matures and doing it not just at scale, but in a way that allows kind of really significant removal or reduction off the storage admin role and replaces it with self service that is fully automated within communities. Yeah, if I >>can, you know, add something that that I completely agree. I mean, over the Longhorns been around for a long time. Like I said, I'm really happy that over the years it hasn't really impacted our wonderful collaborative partnership with what works. I mean, Poll works has always been one of our premier partners. We have a lot of, ah, common customers in this fight. I know these guys rave about what works. I don't think they'll ever get out for works. Ah, home or not? Uh huh. Exactly. Like Morissette, you know, in the in the storage space, there's interface, which a lot of different implementations can plugging, and that's kind of how rancher works. So we always tell people Rancher works with three types of storage implementations. One is let we call legacy storage. You know, your netapp, your DMC, your pure storage and those are really solid. But they were not suddenly not designed to work with containers to start with, but it doesn't matter. They've all written CS I interfaces that would enable containers to take advantage of. The second type is some of the cloud a block storage or file storage services like EBS, GFS, Google Cloud storage and support for these storage back and the CS I drivers practically come with kubernetes itself, so those are very well supported. But there's still a huge amount of opportunities for the third type of you know, we call container Native Storage. So that is where Port Works and the Longhorn and other solutions like open EBS storage OS. All these guys fitting is a very vibrant ecosystem of innovation going on there. So those solutions are able to create basically reliable storage from scratch. You know, when you from from just local disks and they're actually also able to add a lot of value on top of whatever traditional or cloud based, persistent storage you already have. So so the whole system, the whole ecosystem, is developing very quickly. A lot of these solutions work with each other, and I think to me it's really less of a competition or even Coop petition. It's really more off raising the bar for for the capabilities so that we can accelerate the amount of workload that's been moved onto this wonderful kubernetes platform in the end of the benefit. Everyone, >>Well, I appreciate you both laying out some of the options, you know, showing just a quick follow up on that. I think back if you want. 15 years ago was often okay. I'm using my GMC for my block. I'm using my netapp for the file. I'm wondering in the cloud native space, if we expect that you might have multiple different data engine types in there you mentioned you know, I might want port works for my high performance. You said open EBS, very popular in the last CN CF survey might be another one there. So is do we think some of it is just kind of repeating itself that storage is not monolithic and in a micro service architecture. You know, different environments need different storage requirements. >>Yeah, I mean quick. I love to hear more is view as well, especially about you know, about how the ecosystem is developing. But from my perspective, just just the range of capabilities that's now we expect out of storage vendors or data management vendors is just increased tremendously. You know, in the old days, if you can store blocks to object store file, that's it. Right. So now it's this is just table stakes. Then then what comes after that? There will be 345 additional layers of requirements come all the way from backup, restore the our search indexing analytics. So I really think all of this potentially off or in the in the bucket of the storage ecosystem, and I just can't wait to see how this stuff will play out. I think we're still very, very early stages, and and there, you know what? What, what what containers did is they made fundamentally the workload portable, but the data itself still holds a lot of gravity. And then just so much work to do to leverage the fundamental work load portability. Marry that with some form of universal data management or data portability. I think that would really, uh, at least the industry to the next level. Marie? >>Yeah. Shanghai Bean couldn't. Couldn't have said it better. Right? Let me let me let me kind of give you Ah, sample. Right. We're at about 160 plus customers now, you know, adding several by the month. Um, just with just with rancher alone, right, we are. We have common customers in all common video expedient Roche March X, Western Asset Management. You know, charter communications. So we're in production with a number off rancher customers. What are these customers want? And why are they kind of looking at a a a Port works class of solution to use, You know, Xiang's example of the multiple types, right? Many times, people can get started with something in the early days, which has a CS I interface with maybe say, $10 or 8 to 10 nodes with a solution that allows them to at least kind of verify that they can run the stack up and down with, say, you know, a a rancher type orchestrator, workloads that are containerized on and a network plug in and a storage plugging. But really, once they start to get beyond 20 notes or so, then there are problems that are very, very unique to containers and kubernetes that pop up that you don't see in a in a non containerized environment, right? Some. What are some of these things, right? Simple examples are how can you actually run 10 to hundreds of containers on a server, with each one of those containers belonging to a different application and having different requirements? How do you actually scale? Not to 16 nodes, which is sort of make typically, maybe Max of what a San might go to. But hundreds and thousands of notes, like many of our customers, are doing like T Mobile Comcast. They're running this thing at 600 thousands of notes or scale is one issue. Here is a critical critical difference that that something that's designed for Kubernetes does right. We are providing all off the storage functions that Shang just described at container granted, granularity versus machine granularity. One way to think about this is the old Data center was in machine based construct. Construct everything you know. VM Ware is the leader, sort of in that all of the way. You think of storage as villains. You think of compute and CPUs, everything. Sub sub nets, right? All off. Traditional infrastructure is very, very machine centric. What kubernetes and containers do is move it into becoming an app defined control plane, right? One of the things were super excited about is the fact that Kubernetes is really not just a container orchestrator, but actually a orchestrator for infrastructure in an app defined way. And by doing that, they have turned, uh, you know, control off the infrastructure via communities over to a kubernetes segment. The same person who uses rancher uses port works at NVIDIA, for example to manage storage as they use it, to manage the compute and to manage containers. And and that's marvellous, because now what has happened is this thing is now fully automated at scale and and actually can run without the intervention off a storage admin. No more trouble tickets, right? No more requests to say, Hey, give me another 20 terabytes. All of that happens automatically with the solution like port works. And in fact, if you think about it in the world of real time services that we're all headed towards right Services like uber now are expected in enterprises machine learning. Ai all of these things analytics that that change talk about are things that you expect to run in a fully automated way across vast amounts of data that are distributed sometimes in the edge. And you can't do that unless you're fully automated and and not really the storage admin intervention. And that's kind of the solution that we provide. >>Alright, well, we're just about out of time. If I could just last piece is, you know, early and saying to talk about where we are with long for and what we should expect to see through the rest of this year and get some early for you to you know, what differentiates port works from Just, you know, the open source version. So And maybe if we start with just kind of long or in general and then really from from your standpoint, >>yeah, so it's so so the go along one is really to lower the bar for folks to run state for workloads on on kubernetes we want you know, the the Longhorn is 100% open source and it's owned by CN cf now. So we in terms of features and functionalities is obviously a small subset of what a true enterprise grade solution like Port Works or, um, CEO on that that could provide. So there's just, you know, the storage role. Ah, future settle. The roadmap is very rich. I don't think it's not really Ranchers go Oh, our Longhorns goal to, you know, to try to turn itself into a into a plug in replacement for these enterprise, great storage or data management solutions. But But they're you know, there's some critical critical feature gaps that we need address. And that's what the team is gonna be focusing on, perhaps for the rest of the year. >>Yeah, uh, still, I would I would kind of, you know, echo what Chang said, right? I think folks make it started with solutions, like longer or even a plug in connector plug in with one of their existing storage vendors, whether it's pure netapp or or EMC from our viewpoint, that's wonderful, because that allows them to kind of graduate to where they're considering storage and data as part of the stack. They really should that's the way they're going to succeed by by looking at it as a whole and really with, You know, it's a great way to get started on a proof of concept architecture where your focus initially is very much on the orchestration and the container ization part. But But, as Xiang pointed out, you know what what rancher did, what I entered it for Kubernetes was build a simple, elegant, robust solution that kind of democratized communities. We're doing the same thing for communities storage right? What Port works does is have a solution that is simple, elegant, fully automated, scalable and robust. But more importantly, it's a complete data platform, right? We we go where all these solutions start, but don't kind of venture forward. We are a full, complete lifecycle management for data across that whole life cycle. So there's many many customers now are buying port works and then adding deal right up front, and then a few months later they might come back and I'd backup from ports. So two shanks point right because of the uniqueness of the kubernetes workload, because it is an app defined control plane, not machine to find what is happening is it's disrupting, Just like just like virtualization day. VM exist today because because they focused on a VM version off. You know, the their backup solution. So the same thing is happening. Kubernetes workloads are district causing disruption of the D r and backup and storage market with solutions like sports. >>Wonderful. Merlin Chang. Thank you so much for the updates. Absolutely. The promise of containers A Z you were saying? Really, is that that Atomic unit getting closer to the application really requires storage to be a full and useful solution. So great to see the progress that's being made. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Welcome, Shannon. We look forward to ah, working with you as you reach for the stars. Congratulations again. We look >>forward to the containing partnership morally and thank you. Still for the opportunity here. >>Absolutely great talking to both of you And stay tuned. Lots more coverage of the Cube Cube Con cloud, native con 2020 Europe. I'm stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

from the cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cute conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to this special presentation we have a launch from Dell technologies updates to the BX rail family we're gonna do things a little bit different here we actually have a launch video from Janet champion of Dell technologies and the way we do things a lot of times is analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things you might have questions on it though rather than me just walking it are you watching herself I actually brought in a couple of Dell technologies expert two of our cube alumni happy to welcome back to the program Jonathan Segal he is the vice president of product marketing and Chad Dunn who's the vice president at price today of product management both of them with Dell technologies gentlemen thanks so much for joining us it was too great to be here all right and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna be rolling the video here I've got a button I'm gonna press Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit go into some questions when we're all done we're actually holding a crowd chat where you will be able to ask your questions talk to the expert and everything and so a little bit different way to do a product announcement hope you enjoy it and with that it's VX rail taking API to the extremes is is the theme we'll see you know how what that means and everything but without any further ado it but let's look fanon take the video away hello and welcome my name is Shannon champion and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with the ex rail let's get started we have a lot to talk about our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the core edge and cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options as well as the latest in software innovations so let's jump right in before we talk about our announcements let's talk about where customers are adopting the ex rail today first of all on behalf of the entire Dell technologies and BX Rail teams I want to thank each of our over 8,000 customers big and small in virtually every industry who have chosen the x rail to address a broad range of workloads deploying nearly a hundred thousand nodes to date thank you our promise to you is that we will add new functionality improve serviceability and support new use cases so that we deliver the most value to you whether in the core at the edge or for the cloud in the core the X rail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VX rail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment now we can support even more demanding applications such as in-memory databases like s AP HANA and more AI and ML applications with support for more and more powerful GPUs at the edge video surveillance which also uses GPUs by the way is an example of a popular use case leveraging the X rail alongside external storage and right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing and as it relates to VDI the X Rail has always been a great option for that in the cloud it's all about kubernetes and how dell technologies cloud platform which is VCF on the x rail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and cloud native applications and we're doing that together with VMware the X ray o is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments designed to enhance the native VMware experience this joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers all right so Shannon talked a bit about you know the important role of IP of course right now with the global pandemic going on it's really you know calling in you know essential things you know putting you know platforms to the test so I'd really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers also you know VDI of course you know in the early days it was HDI only does VDI now we know there are many solutions but remote work is you know putting that back front and center so John why don't we start with you is you know what you're absolutely so first of all us - thank you I want to do a shout out to our BX real customers around the world it's really been humbling inspiring and just amazing to see the impact of our bx real customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here you know just for a few examples there are genomics companies that we have running the X rail that have a row about testing at scale we also have research universities out in the Netherlands on doing the antibody detection the US Navy has stood up a hosta floating Hospital >> of course care for those in need so look we are here to help that's been our message to our customers but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this so just just a pleasure there but as you mentioned just to hit on the the VDI comments so it's your points do you know HCI and vxr8 EDI that was initially use case years ago and it's been great to see how many of our existing VX real customers have been able to inhibit very quickly leveraging via trail to add and to help bring their remote workforce you know online and support them with your existing VX rail because V it really is flexible it is agile to be able to support those multiple workloads and in addition to that we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost-effective catered to everything from knowledge workers to multimedia workers you name it you know from 250 desktops up to a thousand but again back to your point BX rail ci is well beyond video it had crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually and you know where VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads any of our customers out there it supports now a range of workloads as you heard from Shannon whether it's video surveillance whether it's general purpose only to mission-critical applications now with SAV ha so you know this is this has changed the game for sure but the range of workloads and the flexibility of yet rail is what's really helping our existing customers from this pandemic we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments from the ones that we serve all knew and loved back in the the initial days of of HCI now the mission-critical things now to cloud native workloads as well and you know sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI and specifically VX rail gives them that ability to pivot when these you know shall we say unexpected circumstances arise and I think if that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IT strategies look like as they move forward they want that same level of agility and the ability to react quickly with our overall infrastructure excellent want to get into the announcements what I want my team actually your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo so maybe they can dig up that footage talk about how fast they pivoted you know using VX rail to really spin up things fast so let's hear from the announcements first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later so let's get to the actual news that and it's gonna share okay now what's new I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms to further enable IT modernization across core edge and cloud I will cover each of these announcements in more detail demonstrating how only the X rail can offer the breadth of platform configurations automation orchestration and lifecycle management across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent simple side operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications I'll start with hybrid cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell technologies cloud announcements just a few weeks ago related to VMware cloud foundation on the X rail then I'll cover two brand new VX rail hardware platforms and additional options and finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VX rail HCI system software capabilities for lifecycle management let's get started with our new cloud offerings based on the ex rail you xrail is the HCI foundation for dell technologies cloud platform bringing automation and financial models similar to public cloud to on-premises environments VMware recently introduced cloud foundation for dotto which is based on vSphere 7 as you likely know by now vSphere 7 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release in keeping with our synchronous release commitment we introduced the XR l 7 based on vSphere 7 in late April which was within 30 days of VMware's release two key areas that VMware focused on were embedding containers and kubernetes into vSphere unifying them with virtual machines and the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere lifecycle manager or VL CM I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how the X rail fits in in a moment for V cf4 with tansu based on vSphere 7 customers now have access to a hybrid cloud platform that supports native kubernetes workloads and management as well as your traditional vm based workloads and this is now available with VCF 4 on the ex rel 7 the X rails tight integration with VMware cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid cloud but also to deliver kubernetes a cloud scale with one complete automated platform the second cloud announcement is also exciting recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid cloud because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture and with that Dell technologies cloud platform can now be deployed with a four node configuration lowering the cost of an entry-level hybrid cloud this enables customers to start smaller and grow their cloud deployment over time VCF on the x rail can now be deployed in two different ways for small environments customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture it's ideal for getting started with an entry-level cloud to run general-purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost but still with a consistent cloud operating model for larger environments we're dedicated resources and role based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred you can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at 8 nodes for independent management and workload domains a standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes horizon VDI and vSphere with kubernetes all right John there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware's doing with vSphere 7 understand if you wanted to use the kubernetes piece you know it's it's VCF as that so we you know we've seen the announcements delt partnering there helped us connect that story between you know really the the VMware strategy and how they've talked about cloud and how you know where does the X rail fit in that overall Delta cloud story absolutely so so first of all is through the x-ray of course is integral to the Delta cloud strategy you know it's been VCF on bx r l equals the delta cloud platform and this is our flagship on-prem cloud offering that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any cloud right whether it's on prem in the edge or in a public cloud and we've seen the delta cloud platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons one is it offers the fastest hybrid cloud deployment in the market and this is really you know thanks to a new subscription on offer that we're now offering out there we're at less than 14 days it can be set up and running and really the deltek cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models overall comes to the extra secondly I would say is fast and easy upgrades I mean this is this is really this is what VX real brings to the table for all our clothes if you will and it's especially critical in the cloud so the full automation of lifecycle management across the hardware and software stack boss the VMware software stack and in the Dell software however we're supporting that together this enables essentially the third thing which is customers can just relax right they can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated and always be in a continuously validated state and this this is the kind of thing that you know those three value propositions together really fit well with with any on print cloud now you take what Shannon just mentioned and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same the x-ray link structure alongside traditional applications this is a game changer yeah it I love you know I remember in the early days that about CI how does that fit in with cloud discussion and align I've used the last couple years this you know modernize the platform then you can modernize the application though as companies are doing their full modernization this plays into what you're talking about all right let's get you know can't let ran and continue get some more before we dig into some more analysis that's good let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases first up I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new delhi MCB x rail series the DS series this is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of the x rail for workloads at the edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas the X ray LD series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the BX rail portfolio with simplicity agility and lifecycle management but in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches it's a durable form factor that's extremely temperature resilient shock resistant and easily portable it even meets mil spec standards that means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VX rail HCI system software and 24 by 7 single point of support enabling you to rapidly react to business needs no matter the location or how harsh the conditions so whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base running real-time GPS mapping on-the-go or implementing video surveillance in remote areas you can ensure availability integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VX Rail ruggedized D series had would love for you to bring us in a little bit you know that what customer requirement bringing bringing this to market I I remember seeing you know Dell servers ruggedized of course edge you know really important growth to build on what John was talking about clouds so yeah Chad bring us inside what was driving this piece of the offering sure Stu yeah you know having the the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important and that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these edges or some of the more exotic locations you know whether that's manufacturing plants oil rigs submarine ships military applications in places that we've never heard of but it's also been extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VX rails you're managing your edges the same way using the same set of tools so you don't need to learn anything else so operational simplicity is is absolutely key here but in those locations you can take a product that's designed for a data center where you're definitely controlling power cooling space and take it to some of these places where you get sand blowing or sub-zero temperatures so we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat extreme cold extreme altitude but still offer that operational simplicity if you look at the the resistance that it has to heat it can go from around operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range but it can do an excursion up to 55 °c or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours it's also resisted the heats and dust vibration it's very lightweight short depth in fact it's only 20 inches deep this is a smallest form factor obviously that we have in the BX rail family and it's also built to to be able to withstand sudden shocks it's certified it was stand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation it's pretty high and you know this is this is sort of like where were skydivers go to when they weren't the real real thrill of skydiving where you actually the oxygen to to be a put that out to their milspec certified so mil-std 810g which i keep right beside my bed and read every night and it comes with a VX rail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment and we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for for naval chakra quirements EMI and radiation immunity of all that yeah you know it's funny I remember when weights the I first launched it was like oh well everything's going to white boxes and it's going to be you know massive you know no differentiation between everything out there if you look at what you're offering if you look at how public clouds build their things what I call it a few years poor is there's a pure optimization so you need scale you need similarities but you know you need to fit some you know very specific requirements lots of places so interesting stuff yeah certifications you know always keep your teams busy alright let's get back to Shannon we are also introducing three other hardware based editions first a new VX rail eseries model based on were the first time AMD epic processors these single socket 1u nodes offered dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from 8 to 64 cores up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer-aided design next the addition of the latest NVIDIA Quadro RT X GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional workflows designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering deep learning and visual computing workloads and Intel obtain DC persistent memory is here and it offers high performance and significantly increase memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity even when power is lost enabling quicker recovery and less downtime with support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like sa P Hana alright let's finally dig into our HCI system software which is the core differentiation for the xrail regardless of your workload or platform choice our joint engineering with VMware and investments in the x-ray HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers under the covers the xrail offers best-in-class Hardware married with VMware HCI software either vcn or VCF but what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two Dell technologies has a dedicated VX rail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper-converged system that team has also developed our unique the X rail HDI system software which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver a seamless automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere the key components of the x rail HDI system software are shown around the arc here that include the X rail manager full stack lifecycle management ecosystem connectors and support I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today but if you're interested in learning more I encourage you to meet our experts and I will tell you how to do that in a moment I touched on VLC M being a key feature to vSphere seven earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of the xrail lifecycle management the LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them with the X ray all customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business customers tell us that lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively and that it isn't the most efficient economically Automation of lifecycle management in VX Rail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure but as shown here our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages and reduced overall cost of operations with the xrail HCI system software intelligent lifecycle management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated keeping clusters in continuously validated States while minimizing risks and operational costs how do we ensure continuously validated States Furby xrail the x-ray labs execute an extensive automated repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customer's choosing across their VX rail environment the VX rail labs are constantly testing analyzing optimising and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack all the while the x rail is backed by Delhi MCS world-class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software IT productivity skyrockets with single-click non-disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing taking you to the next VX rail version of your choice while always in a continuously validated state you can also confidently execute automated VX rail upgrades no matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster they don't have to all be the same and upgrades with VX rail are faster and more efficient with leap frogging simply choose any VX rail version you desire and be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between only the ex rail can do that all right so Chad you know the the lifecycle management piece that Jana was just talking about is you know not the sexiest it's often underappreciated you know there's not only the years of experience but the continuous work you're doing you know reminds me back you know the early V sand deployments versus VX rail jointly develop you know jointly tested between Dell and VMware so you know bring us inside why you know 2020 lifecycle management still you know a very important piece especially in the VL family yeah let's do I think it's sexy but I'm pretty big nerd yes even more the larger the deployments come when you start to look at data centers full of VX rails and all the different hardware software firmware combinations that could exist out there it's really the value that you get out of that VX r l HTI system software that Shannon was talking about and how its optimized around the VMware use case very tightly integrated with each VMware component of course and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware all of the drivers all of the software altogether tremendous value to our customers but to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment so she Anna mentioned we've run about twenty five thousand hours of testing across each major release four patches Express patches that's about seven thousand hours for each of those so obviously there's a lot of parallelism and and we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality one of the key things that were able to do as Shannon mentioned is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state we've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously a huge amount of automation and then when we talk about that investment to execute those tests that's well north of sixty million dollars of investment in our lab in fact we've got just over two thousand VH rail units in our testbed across the u.s. Shanghai China and corn island so a massive amount of testing of each of those those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state yeah well you know absolutely it's super important not only for the day one but the day two deployments but I think this actually be a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to so we've got the CIO of Amarillo Texas he was an existing VX rail customer and he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work from home initiative as well as you know we get to hear in his words the value of what lifecycle management means though Andrew if we could queue up that that customer segment please it was it's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it you know as we mature and they I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments but this instance really justified why I was driving progress so so fervently why it was so urgent today three years ago we the answer would have been no there would have been we wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt with it with the x-ray all in place you know in a week we spun up hundreds of instant phones we spawned us a seventy five person call center in a day and a half for our public health we will allow multiple applications for Public Health so they could do remote clinics it's given us the flexibility to be able to to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive and it's not only been apparent to my team but it's really made an impact on the business and now what I'm seeing is those those are my customers that were a little lagging or a little conservative or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well all right so rich you talked to a bunch about the the efficiencies that they tie put place how about that that overall just managed you know you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances you need to be able to do things much simpler so you know how does the overall lifecycle management fit into this discussion it makes it so much easier and you know in the in the old environment one it took a lot of man-hours to make change it was it was very disruptive when we did make change this it overburdened I guess that's the word I'm looking for it really over overburdened our staff it cost disruption to business it was it cost-efficient and then you simple things like you know I've worked for multi billion-dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production simply can't afford that at local government you know having the sort of environment lets me do a scaled-down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change as I said earlier it's allow us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on lifecycle management because it's greatly simplified and move those resources and rescale them in in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business it's hard to be innovated when a hundred percent of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat all right well you know nothing better than hearing straight from the end-user you know public sector reacting very fast to the Cova 19 and you know you heard him he said if this had hit his before he had run this project he would not have been able to respond so I think everybody out there understands if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology you know it would be much harder all right I'm looking forward to doing the crowd chat and everybody else digging with questions and get follow-up but a little bit more I believe one more announcement he came and got for us though let's roll the final video clip in our latest software release the x-ray of 4.7 dot 510 we continue to add new automation and self-service features new functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch this is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window of course running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates we are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific the xrail version or down Rev one or more more nodes that may be shipped at a higher Rev than the existing cluster this enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in cluster to sum up all of our announcements whether you are accelerating data center modernization extending HCI to harsh edge environments deploying an on-premises Dell technologies cloud platform to create a developer ready kubernetes infrastructure BX Rail is there delivering a turnkey experience that enables you to continuously innovate realize operational freedom and predictably evolve the x rail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations automation and lifecycle management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across core edge and cloud I now invite you to engage with us first the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about the ex rails new features and functionality and score some sweet digital swag while you're at it it delivered via an automated via an augmented reality app all you need is your device so go to the x-ray is slash passport to get started and secondly if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VX rail meet the experts sessions available for a limited time first-come first-served just go to the x-ray dot is slash expert session to learn more you all right well obviously with everyone being remote there's different ways we're looking to engage so we've got the crowd chat right after this but John gives a little bit more is that how Del's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got firfer options for them yeah absolutely so as Shannon said so in lieu of not having Dell tech world this year in person where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions whether it's in the booth or you know in in meeting rooms you know we are going to have these meet the experts sessions over the next couple of weeks and look we're gonna put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to to everyone out there so again definitely encourage you we're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we could still stay in touch answer questions be responsive and really looking forward to you know having these conversations over the next couple weeks all right well John and Chad thank you so much we definitely look forward to the conversation here in int in you'd if you're here live definitely go down below do it if you're watching this on demand you can see the full transcript of it at crowd chat /vx rocks sorry V xrail rocks for myself Shannon on the video John and Chad Andrew man in the booth there thank you so much for watching and go ahead and join the crowd chat

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

(upbeat music) >> Man: From San Francisco it's theCUBE covering Accenture Tech Vision 2020 (upbeat music) brought to you by Accenture. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Francisco. It is absolutely beautiful outside. Sun is going down, we're here for a really special event, It's the Accenture Tech Vision, kind of unveiling of the five things that we should be paying attention to as we look to 2020 the year that we're going to know everything with the benefit of hindsight. So it's pretty exciting, it's pretty exciting time. And we have a new guest, Mike Redding, he's the managing director of Accenture Ventures telling us where the Accenture Ventures plays in all this stuff, so Mike, well, welcome. >> Well, thanks for having me, I'm really excited to be here. It's a big day here at Accenture with the launch of the 2020 tech vision. You know, and one of the key trends is about innovation DNA, which is really saying, how does an organization connect to the external ecosystems to systematically and scalably and sustainably innovate? And that's part of the role of Accenture Ventures. >> Well, it's an interesting play, right? Because unfortunately Clayton Christensen just passed away, my favorite business writer ever. And the whole innovator's dilemma is that smart people working at big companies making sound business decisions based on revenue and their customers will always miss this continuous change. So really you need some other things to help motivate that. And that's really piece that you guys play. >> Right, exactly cause what, you know, we're a bridge builder between those highly successful large enterprises, which are big, they're slow and they're risk adverse, and the startups, which are small, fast and nothing but risk. And so for us, the role of Accenture and Accenture ventures as being part of that innovation DNA is to say, let's make a bridge, let's figure out how the elephant can dance. And as a result, not get caught up in those disruptions, but in fact leverage them to propel those big enterprises forward. >> Right, now you guys invest in all types of areas, Ais, looking through the portfolio, security, big data, I love this Industry X Dot O, what is Industry X Dot O? >> Well, so, you know, a lot of places talk about industry 4.0 but we're like, why put it, you know, X dot O, is make it a variable? five point O, six point O, which makes it evergreen. Which says, every industry on the planet is going through a transformation, you know, powered by AI, powered by all those areas you mentioned. And as a result, we want to make sure that whatever the future of any industry is, Accenture is part of it and we're bringing in the startups and of course the big technology players that are going to be the fundamental players making that transformation possible. >> Right, there's so much synergy, right? Because for the little guys, right? They've got all the juice behind the innovation and the really smart people and they're kind of breaking things and moving fast, but the challenges there are scale and a sales force and marketing and reach and distribution and all these things that are not too hard for the big guys. >> Right, and so that's why it's a marriage made heaven, right? Again, if you can bring, I always like to say the analogy of you've got the aircraft carrier and then you have all the battleships and the PT boats circling around it, that's a battle group. And so that's what we really see as the opportunity is to bring what each strength, the strength of that disruption and passion and energy and capital to marry to market scale and data and customer base, right? Put those things together, unstoppable force? >> How do the enterprises, you know, kind of view it, do they, obviously they see the value, you wouldn't be doing what you're doing, but is that something that's attracted to them? Is it too disruptive to them? How do they try to work these little startups? Cause (laughs) the other thing, right? Is always vendor viability when you're a little startup doing business with a big company and they can kill you with meetings and there's all kinds of, you know, kind of interesting things that can happen to screw that up. >> Well you're right on and so that's part of where, you know, Accenture comes in as that broker, that bridge maker, because we help each other find how to match up, how not to crush the little guy with infinite meetings, you know, in an enterprise, you know, six months is quick, in a startup, that's a funding cycle, right? And so we've got to find a way to meet each other in the middle and as a result, get the strength of each, but pointed in the same direction and really, you know, become really good dance partners. And that's what we really think any organization, cause they know they need to do it, they know they want to do it, they just don't know how. And that's the gap we help fill. >> And then how do you find your investments? Are you partnering with other venture firms? How are you kind of out prospecting for new opportunities? >> Well, so for us, since we're a corporate strategic, we're really focused on the future of our client's business, the future of the marketplace. And so for us, it's a network game. It's, you know, it's everything from what the corporate venture units at our clients are up to where they're seeing strategic bets. Of course, we're the VC, you know, of Sand Hill Road, of Tel Aviv, of Shenzhen and Shanghai, you know, Bangalore, you know, there's so many great venture capital communities. We love the syndicate, we love friends because we, you know, a financial VC will bring their discipline and we'll bring Accenture's discipline and that's a combo pack that one plus one is three. >> Right, so I want to get your take, you've been in this for a while -- >> Oh, yeah. and one of the themes that we hear over and over, right, is the acceleration of accelerating pace of technology innovation, right? And this exponential curve and people have a hard time with exponential curves, we like linear curves. But it's getting steeper and steeper and steeper. So you know, from your kind of cap bird seed, as you've watched the evolution, do you see, you know, kind of, is this the only way for the enterprises to keep ahead of these things? Is it just an augment? Is it more important than it used to be? How has the landscape kind of changing as this acceleration just keeps going and going and going? >> Well, I think that the era of build it all yourself vertically integrate it So, you know, start to finish, soup to nuts yourself, you can't do it, right? If you're a large incumbent and, but also if you think about this way, and I would talk to audience especially, you know, business audience and say, "Who's got enough budget?" Nobody, there's no such thing as enough budget, the government doesn't have enough budget, right? Nobody does, but if you partner, you can leverage other people's money, their investment cycles, and as a result, for every dollar you have, you can get multiple dollars of leverage. And as a result, no matter how fast it's going, because of the Public Clouds, because of the big software players, you can get so much further. So even though things are moving faster, what you can leverage to adapt to that change is more powerful than ever before. So the good news is the rate of change is fast, but you're not starting from dead stop. You're jumping on a moving train and going where it's going and putting your own business spin on it. >> Right, the other piece is kind of the disruptive speeds. It's funny you mentioned Amazon just, you know, watch a lot of great interviews with Bezos. One of them, he talks about AWS having, you know, a seven-year uninterrupted headstart because no one down the road in Redwood shores or Philadelphia or Waldorf was really paying attention to the little bookseller up in Seattle as a competitor for enterprise infrastructure. So you know that which is going to get you is often not the competitors that you're benchmarking against. It's not the same people that you've been competing with but can completely come out of left field. >> Well, and so that again, is why we really believe passionately that with this future, the next few years, those enterprises that have an innovation DNA that get out of their foxhole and don't just look at your bank, don't just look at FinTech, look at all tech and thanks to this thing called the internet. It's really possible, and language translation, even if you don't speak Chinese, you can get a sense of what's happening in China, where you can call a friend like Accenture and we can hook you up. And regardless of the fact is you can now, if you cast that wide net, if you challenge yourself to get out of that Foxhole and look around, well then suddenly you can't be surprised. You can see it coming and you can then use your superpowers, which is incumbency, scale, balance sheet, customer base, you know, loyalty, all those things that you brand, all the things that make you strong, you can now append that disruption to it and basically, not get disrupted. So I think that's, that's the formula for going forward. >> Yeah, well, I love the one plus one makes three formula cause it really is kind of a match made in heaven really bringing together two sets of strengths that the other person or the other party doesn't really have. So you guys been at it for awhile and continued success. >> Well, thank you very much. All right. Well, Mike, thanks for taking a minute. He's Mike, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. With the Accenture Tech Vision launch 2020. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE here in San Diego for KubeCon CloudNativeCon, with John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, and happy to welcome to the program two guests, first time guests, I believe. Julio Tapia, who's the director of Cloud BU partner and community with Red Hat and Gou Rao, who's the founder and CEO at Portworx. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright, let's start with community, ecosystem, it's a big theme we have here at the show. Tell us your main focus, what the team's doing here. >> Sure, so I'm part of a product team, we're responsible for OpenShift, OpenStack and Red Hat virtualization. And my responsibility is to build a partner ecosystem and to do our community development. On the partner front, we work with a lot of different partners. We work with ISVs, we work with OEMs, SIs, COD providers, TelCo partners. And my role is to help evangelize, to help on integrations, a lot of joint solutions, and then do a little bit of go to market as well. And the community side, it's to evangelize with upstream projects or customers with developers, and so forth. >> Alright, so, Gou, actually, it's not luck, but I had a chance to catch up with the Red Hat storage team. Back when I was on the vendor side I partnered with them. Red Hat doesn't sell gear, they're a software company. Everything open-source, and when it comes to data and storage, obviously they're working with partners. So put Portworx into the mix and tell us about the relationship and what you both do together. >> Sure, yeah, we're a Red Hat OpenShift partner. We've been working with them for quite some time now, partner with IBM as well. But yeah, Portworx, we focus on enabling cloud native storage, right? So we complement the OpenShift ecosystem. Essentially we enable people to run stateful services in OpenShift with a lot of agility and we bring DR backup functionality to OpenShift. I'm sure you're familiar with this, but, people, when they deploy OpenShift, they're running fleets of OpenShift clusters. So, multi-cluster management and data accessibility across clusters is a big topic. >> Yeah, if you could, I hear the term cloud native storage, what does that really mean? You know, back a few years ago, containers were stateless, I didn't have my persistent storage, it was super challenging as to how we deal with this. And now we have some options, but what is the goal of what we're doing here? >> There really is no notion of a stateless application, right? Especially when it comes to enterprise applications. What cloud native storage means is, to us at least, it signifies a couple of things. First of all, the consumer of storage is not a machine anymore, right? Typical storage systems are designed to provide storage to either a virtual machine or a hardware server. The consumer of storage is now a container that's running inside of a machine. And in fact, an application is never just one container, it's many containers running on different systems so it's a distributed problem. So what cloud native storage means is the following things. Providing container granular data services, being application aware, meaning that you're providing services to many containers that are running on different systems, and facilitating the data life cycle management of those applications from a Kubernetes way, right? The user experience is now driven through Kubernetes as opposed to a storage admin driving that functionality so it's these three things that make a platform cloud native. >> I want to dig into the operator concept for a little bit here, as it applies to storage. So, first, Operators. I first heard of this a couple years back with the CoreOS folks, who are now part of Red Hat and it's a piece of technology that came into the Kubernetes ecosystem, seems to be very well adopted, they talked about it today on the keynote. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about the ecosystem. But first I want to figure out what it is and in my head, I didn't quite understand it and I'm like, well, okay, automation and life cycle, I get it. There's a bunch of things, Puppet and Chef and Ansible and all sorts of things there. There's also things that know about cloud like Terraform, or Cloudform, or Halloumi, all these sort of things here. But this seems like this is a framework around life cycle, it might be a little higher in the semantic level or knows a little bit more about what's going on inside Kubernetes. >> I'll just touch on this, so Operators, it's a way to codify business logic into the application, so how to manage, how to install, how to manage the life cycle of the application on top of the Kubernetes cluster. So it's a way of automating. >> Right, but-- >> And just to add to that, you mentioned Ansible, Salt, right? So, as engineers, we're always trying to make our lives easier. And so, infrastructure automation certainly is a concept here. What Operators does is it elevates those same needs to more of an application construct level, right? So it's a piece of intelligent software that is watching the entire run-time of an application as opposed to provisioning infrastructure and stepping out of the way. Think of it as a living being, it is constantly running and reacting to what the application is doing and what its needs are. So, on one hand you have automation that sets things up and then the job is done. Here the job is never done, you're sort of, right there as a side car along with the application. >> Nice, but for any sort of life cycle or for any sort of project like this, you have to have code sharing and contributing, right? And so, Julio, can you tell us a little about that? >> What we do is we're obviously all in on Operators. And so we've invested a great deal in terms of documentation and training and workshops. We have certification programs, we're really helping create the ecosystem and facilitate the whole process. You may be familiar, we announced Operator Framework a year ago, it includes Operator SDKs. So we have an Operator SDK for Helm, for Ansible, for Go. We also have announced Operator Life Cycle Manager which does the install, the maintenance and the whole life cycle management process. And then earlier this year we did introduce also, Operatorhub.io which is a community of our Operators, we have about 150 Operators as part of that. >> How does the Operator Framework relate to OpenShare versus upstream Kubernetes? Is it an OpenShift and Red Hat specific thing, or? >> Yes, so, Operatorhub.io is a listing of Operators that includes community Operators. And then we also have certified Operators. And the community Operators run on any Kubernetes instance. The certified Operators make sure that we run on OpenShift specifically. So that's kind of the distinction between those two. >> I remember a Red Hat summit where you talked about some bits. So, give us a little walk around the show, some of the highlights from Operators, the ecosystem, obviously, we've got Portworx here but there's a broad ecosystem. >> Yeah, so we have a huge huge ecosystem. The ISVs play a big part of this. So we've got Operators database partners, security partners, app monitoring partners, storage partners. Yesterday we had an OpenShift commons event, we showcased five of our big Operator partnerships with Couchbase, with MongoDB, with Portworx obviously, with StorageOS and with Dynatrace. But we have a lot of partners in a lot of different areas that are creating these Operators, are certifying them, and they're starting to get a lot of use with customers so it's pretty exciting stuff. >> Gou, I'd love your viewpoint on this because of course, Portworx, good Red Hat partner but you need to work with all the Kubernetes opt-ins out there so, what's the importance of Operators to your business? >> Yeah, you know. OpenShift, obviously, it's one of the leading platforms for Kubernetes out there and so, the reason that is, it's because it's the expectations that it sets to an enterprise customer. It's that Red Hat experience behind it and so the notion of having an Operator that's certified by Red Hat and Red Hat going through the vetting process and making sure that all of the components that it is recommending from its ecosystem that you're putting onto OpenShift, that whole process gives a whole new level of enterprise experience, so, for us, that's been really good, right? Working with Red Hat, going through the process with them and making sure that they are actually double clicking on everything we submit, and there's a real, we iterate with them. So the quality of the product that's put out there within OpenShift is very high. So, we've deployed these Operators now, the Operator that Portworx just announced, right? We have it running in customers' hands so these are real end users, you'll be talking to Ford later on today. Harvard, for example, and so the level of automation that it has provided to them in their platform, it's quite high. >> I was kind of curious to shift maybe to the conference here that you all have a long history. With organizations and both of you personally in the Kubernetes world and cloud native world. We're here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America, 2019. It's pretty big. And I see a lot of folks here, a lot of vendors, a lot of engineers, huge conference, 12,000 people. I mean, any perspective? >> So I've been at Red Hat a little over six years and I was at the very first KubeCon many years ago in San Francisco, I think we had about 200 people there. So this show has really grown over the years. And we're obviously big supporters, we've participated in KubeCon in Shanghai and Barcelona, we're obviously here. We're just super excited about seeing the ecosystem and the whole community grow and expand, so, very exciting. >> Gou? >> Yeah, I mean, like Julio mentioned, right? So, all the way from DockerCon to where we are today and I think last year was 8000 people in Seattle and I think there're probably I've heard numbers like 12? So it's also equally interesting to see the maturity of the products around Kubernetes. And that level of consistency and lack of fracture, right? From mainstream Kubernetes to how it's being adopted in OpenShift, there's consistency across the different Kubernetes platforms. Also, it's very interesting to see how on-prem and public cloud Kubernetes are coexisting. Four years ago we were kind of worried on how that would turn out, but I think it's enabling those hybrid-cloud workloads and I think today in this KubeCon we see a lot of people talking about that and having interest around it. >> That's a really great point there. Julio, want to give you the final word, for people that aren't yet engaged in the ecosystem of Operators, how can they learn more and get involved? >> Yeah, so we're excited to work with everybody, our ecosystem includes customers, partners, contributors, so as long as you're all in on Operators, we're ready to help. We've got tools, we've documentation, we have workshops, we have training, we have certification programs. And we also can help you with go to market. We're very fortunate to have a huge customer footprint, and so for those partners that have solutions, databases, storage solutions, there's a lot of joint opportunities out there that we can participate in. So, really excited to do that. >> Julio, Gou, thank you so much, you have a final word, Gou? >> I was just going to say, so, to follow up on the Operator comment on the certification that Julio mentioned earlier, so the Operator that we have, we were able to achieve level five certification. The level five signifies just the amount of automation that's built into it, so the concept of having Operators help people deploy these complex applications, that's a very important concept in Kubernetes itself. So, glad to be a Red Hat partner. >> That's actually a really good point, we have an Operator maturity model, level one, two, three, four, five. Level one and two are more your installations and upgrades. But the really highly capable ones, the fours and fives, are really to be commended. And Portworx is one of those partners. So we're excited to be here with them. >> That is a powerful statement, we talk about the complexity and how many pieces are in there. Everybody's looking to really help cross that chasm, get the vast majority of people. We need to allow environments to have more automation, more simplicity, a story I heard loud and clear at AnsibleFest earlier this year and through the partner ecosystem. It's good to see progress, so congratulations and thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more here from KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019, thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here with Arpit Joshipura, GM of Networking, Edge, IoT for the Linux Foundation. Arpit, great to see you again, welcome back to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you. Happy to be here. >> So obviously, we love the Linux Foundation. We've been following all the events; we've chatted in the past about networking. Computer storage and networking just doesn't seem to go away with cloud and on-premise hybrid cloud, multicloud, but open-source software continues to surpass expectations, growth, geographies outside the United States and North America, just overall, just greatness in software. Everything's an abstraction layer now; you've got Kubernetes, Cloud Native- so many good things going on with software, so congratulations. >> Well thank you. No, I think we're excited too. >> So you guys got a big event coming up in China: OSS, Open Source Summit, plus KubeCon. >> Yep. >> A lot of exciting things, I want to talk about that in a second. But I want to get your take on a couple key things. Edge and IoT, deep learning and AI, and networking. I want to kind of drill down with you. Tell us what's the updates on the projects around Linux Foundation. >> Okay. >> The exciting ones. I mean, we know Cloud Native CNCF is going to take up more logos, more members, keeps growing. >> Yep. >> Cloud Native clearly has a lot of opportunity. But the classic in the set, certainly, networking and computer storage is still kicking butt. >> Yeah. So, let me start off by Edge. And the fundamental assumption here is that what happened in the cloud and core is going to move to the Edge. And it's going to be 50, 100, 200 times larger in terms of opportunity, applications, spending, et cetera. And so what LF did was we announced a very exciting project called Linux Foundation Edge, as an umbrella, earlier in January. And it was announced with over 60 founding members, right. It's the largest founding member announcement we've had in quite some time. And the reason for that is very simple- the project aims at unifying the fragmented edge in IoT markets. So today, edge is completely fragmented. If you talk to clouds, they have a view of edge. Azure, Amazon, Baidu, Tencent, you name it. If you talk to the enterprise, they have a view of what edge needs to be. If you talk to the telcos, they are bringing the telecom stack close to the edge. And then if you talk to the IoT vendors, they have a perception of edge. So each of them are solving the edge problems differently. What LF Edge is doing, is it is unifying a framework and set of frameworks, that allow you to create a common life cycle management framework for edge computing. >> Yeah. >> Now the best part of it is, it's built on five exciting technologies. So people ask, "You know, why now?" So, there are five technologies that are converging at the same time. 5G, low latency. NFV, network function virtualization, so on demand. AI, so predictive analytics for machine learning. Container and microservices app development, so you can really write apps really fast. And then, hardware development: TPU, GPU, NPU. Lots of exciting different size and shapes. All five converging; put it close to the apps, and you have a whole new market. >> This is, first of all, complicated in the sense of... cluttered, fragmented, shifting grounds, so it's an opportunity. >> It's an opportunity. >> So, I get that- fragmented, you've got the clouds, you've got the enterprises, and you've got the telcos all doing their own thing. >> Yep. >> So, multiple technologies exploding. 5G, Wi-Fi 6, a bunch of other things you laid out, >> Mhmm. >> all happening. But also, you have all those suppliers, right? >> Yes. >> And, so you have different manufacturers-- >> And different layers. >> So it's multiple dimensions to the complexity. >> Correct, correct. >> What are you guys seeing, in terms of, as a solution, what's motivating the founding members; when you say unifying, what specifically does that mean? >> What that means is, the entire ecosystem from those markets are coming together to solve common problems. And I always sort of joke around, but it's true- the common problems are really the plumbing, right? It's the common life cycle management, how do you start, stop, boot, load, log, you know, things like that. How do you abstract? Now in the Edge, you've 400, 500 interfaces that comes into an IoT or an edge device. You know, Zigbee, Bluetooth, you've got protocols like M2T; things that are legacy and new. Then you have connectivity to the clouds. Devices of various forms and shapes. So there's a lot of end by end problems, as we call it. So, the cloud players. So for LF Edge for example, Tencent and Baidu and the cloud leaders are coming together and saying, "Let's solve it once." The industrial IoT player, like Dynamic, OSIsoft, they're coming in saying, "Let's solve it once." The telcos- AT&T, NTT, they're saying "Let's solve it once. And let's solve this problem in open-source. Because we all don't need to do it, and we'll differentiate on top." And then of course, the classic system vendors that support these markets are all joining hands. >> Talk about the business pressure real quick. I know, you look at, say, Alibaba for instance, and the folks you mentioned, Tencent, in China. They're perfecting the edge. You've got videos at the edge; all kinds of edge devices; people. >> Correct. >> So there's business pressures, as well. >> The business pressure is very simple. The innovation has to speed up. The cost has to go down. And new apps are coming up, so extra revenue, right? So because of these five technologies I mentioned, you've got the top killer apps in edge are anything that is, kind of, video but not YouTube. So, anything that the video comes from 360 venues, or drones, things like that. Plus, anything that moves, but that's not a phone. So things like connected cars, vehicles. All of those are edge applications. So in LF Edge, we are defining edge as an application that requires 20 milliseconds or less latency. >> I can't wait for someone to define- software define- "edge". Or, it probably is defined. A great example- I interviewed an R&D engineer at VMware yesterday in San Francisco, it was at the RADIO event- and we were just riffing on 5G, and talking about software at the edge. And one of the advances >> Yes. >> that's coming is splicing the frequency so that you can put software in the radios at the antennas, >> Correct. Yeah. >> so you can essentially provision, in real time. >> Correct, and that's a telco use case, >> Yeah. >> so our projects at the LF Edge are EdgeX Foundry, Akraino, Edge Virtualization Engine, Open Glossary, Home Edge. There's five and growing. And all of these software projects can allow you to put edge blueprints. And blueprints are really reference solutions for smart cities, manufacturing, telcos, industrial gateways, et cetera et cetera. So, lots of-- >> It's kind of your fertile ground for entrepreneurship, too, if you think about it, >> Correct; startups are huge. >> because, just the radio software that splices the radio spectrum is going to potentially maybe enable a service provider market, and towers, right? >> Correct, correct. >> Own my own land, I can own the tower and rent it out, one radio. >> Yep. >> So, business model innovations also an opportunity, >> It's a huge-- >> not just the business pressure to have an edge, but-- >> Correct. So technology, business, and market pressures. All three are colliding. >> Yeah, perfect storm. >> So edge is very exciting for us, and we had some new announcements come out in May, and more exciting news to come out in June, as well. >> And so, going back to Linux Foundation. If I want to learn more. >> LFEdge.org. >> That's kind of the CNCF of edge, if you will, right? Kind of thing. >> Yeah. It's an umbrella with all the projects, and that's equivalent to the CNCF, right. >> Yeah. >> And of course it's a huge group. >> So it's kind of momentum. 64 founding members-- >> Huge momentum. Yeah, now we are at 70 founding members, and growing. >> And how long has it been around? >> The umbrella has been around for about five months; some of the projects have been around for a couple of years, as they incubate. >> Well let us know when the events start kicking in. We'll get theCUBE down there to cover it. >> Absolutely. >> Super exciting. Again, multiple dimensions of innovation. Alright, next topic, one of my favorites, is AI and deep learning. AI's great. If you don't have data you can't really make AI work; deep learning requires data. So this is a data conversation. What's going on in the Linux Foundation around AI and deep learning? >> Yeah. So we have a foundation called LF Deep Learning, as you know. It was launched last year, and since then we have significantly moved it forward by adding more members, and obviously the key here is adding more projects, right. So our goal in the LF Deep Learning Foundation is to bring the community of data scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs, academia, and users to collaborate. And create frameworks and platforms that don't require a PhD to use. >> So a lot of data ingestion, managing data, so not a lot of coding, >> Platforms. >> more data analyst, and/or applications? >> It's more, I would say, platforms for use, right? >> Yeah. >> So frameworks that you can actually use to get business outcomes. So projects include Acumos, which is a machine learning framework and a marketplace which allows you to, sort of, use a lot of use cases that can be commonly put. And this is across all verticals. But I'll give you a telecom example. For example, there is a use case, which is drones inspecting base stations-- >> Yeah. >> And doing analytics for maintenance. That can be fed into a marketplace, used by other operators worldwide. You don't have to repeat that. And you don't need to understand the details of machine learning algorithms. >> Yeah. >> So we are trying to do that. There are projects that have been contributed from Tencent, Baidu, Uber, et cetera. Angel, Elastic Deep Learning, Pyro. >> Yeah. >> It's a huge investment for us. >> And everybody wins when there's contribution, because data's one of those things where if there's available, it just gets smarter. >> Correct. And if you look at deep learning, and machine learning, right. I mean obviously there's the classic definition; I won't go into that. But from our perspective, we look at data and how you can share the data, and so from an LF perspective, we have something called a CDLA license. So, think of an Apache for data. How do you share data? Because it's a big issue. >> Big deal. >> And we have solved that problem. Then you can say, "Hey, there's all these machine learning algorithms," you know, TensorFlow, and others, right. How can you use it? And have plugins to this framework? Then there's the infrastructure. Where do you run these machine learning? Like if you run it on edge, you can run predictive maintenance before a machine breaks down. If you run it in the core, you can do a lot more, right? So we've done that level of integration. >> So you're treating data like code. You can bring data to the table-- >> And then-- >> Apply some licensing best practices like Apache. >> Yes, and then integrate it with the machine learning, deep learning models, and create platforms and frameworks. Whether it's for cloud services, for sharing across clouds, elastic searching-- >> And Amazon does that in terms of they vertically integrate SageMaker, for instance. >> That's exactly right. >> So it's a similar-- >> And this is the open-source version of it. >> Got it- oh, that's awesome. So, how does someone get involved here, obviously developers are going to love this, but-- >> LF Deep Learning is the place to go, under Linux Foundation, similar to LF Edge, and CNCF. >> So it's not just developers. It's also people who have data, who might want to expose it in. >> Data scientists, databases, algorithmists, machine learning, and obviously, a whole bunch of startups. >> A new kind of developer, data developer. >> Right. Exactly. And a lot of verticals, like the security vertical, telecom vertical, enterprise verticals, finance, et cetera. >> You know, I've always said- you and I talked about this before, and I always rant on theCUBE about this- I believe that there's going to be a data development environment where data is code, kind of like what DevOps did with-- >> It's the new currency, yeah. >> It's the new currency. >> Yeah. Alright, so final area I want to chat with you before we get into the OSS China thing: networking. >> Yeah. >> Near and dear to your heart. >> Near and dear to my-- >> Networking's hot now, because if you bring IoT, edge, AI, networking, you've got to move things around-- >> Move things around, (laughs) right, so-- >> And you still need networking. >> So we're in the second year of the LF Networking journey, and we are really excited at the progress that has happened. So, projects like ONAP, OpenDaylight, Tungsten Fabric, OPNFV, FDio, I mean these are now, I wouldn't say household names, but business enterprise names. And if you've seen, pretty much all the telecom providers- almost 70% of the subscribers covered, enabled by the service providers, are now participating. Vendors are completely behind it. So we are moving into a phase which is really the deployment phase. And we are starting to see, not just PoCs [Proofs of Concept], but real deployments happening, some of the major carriers now. Very excited, you know, Dublin, ONAP's Dublin release is coming up, OPNFV just released the Hunter release. Lots of exciting work in Fido, to sort of connect-- >> Yeah. >> multiple projects together. So, we're looking at it, the big news there is the launch of what's called OVP. It's a compliance and verification program that cuts down the deployment time of a VNF by half. >> You know, it's interesting, Stu and I always talk about this- Stu Miniman, CUBE cohost with me- about networking, you know, virtualization came out and it was like, "Oh networking is going to change." It's actually helped networking. >> It helped networking. >> Now you're seeing programmable networks come out, you see Cisco >> And it's helped. >> doing a lot of things, Juniper as well, and you've got containers in Kubernetes right around the corner, so again, this is not going to change the need, it's going to- It's not going to change >> It's just a-- >> the desire and need of networking, it's going to change what networking is. How do you describe that to people? Someone saying, "Yeah, but tell me what's going on in networking? Virtualization, we got through that wave, now I've got the container, Kubernetes, service mesh wave, how does networking change? >> Yeah, so it's a four step process, right? The first step, as you rightly said, virtualization, moved into VMs. Then came disaggregation, which was enabled by the technology SDN, as we all know. Then came orchestration, which was last year. And that was enabled by projects like ONAP and automation. So now, all of the networks are automated, fully running, self healing, feedback closed control, all that stuff. And networks have to be automated before 5G and IoT and all of these things hit, because you're no longer talking about phones. You're talking about things that get connected, right. So that's where we are today. And that journey continues for another two years, and beyond. But very heavy focused on deployment. And while that's happening, we're looking at the hybrid version of VMs and containers running in the network. How do you make that happen? How do you translate one from the other? So, you know, VNFs, CNFs, everything going at the same time in your network. >> You know what's exciting is with the software abstractions emerging, the hard problems are starting to emerge because as it gets more complicated, end by end problems, as you said, there's a lot of new costs and complexities, for instance, the big conversation at the Edge is, you don't want to move data around. >> No, no. >> So you want to move compute to the edge, >> You can, yeah-- >> But it's still a networking problem, you've still got edge, so edge, AI, deep learning, networking all tied together-- >> They're all tied together, right, and this is where Linux Foundation, by developing these projects, in umbrellas, but then allowing working groups to collaborate between these projects, is a very simple governance mechanism we use. So for example, we have edge working groups in Kubernetes that work with LF Edge. We have Hyperledger syncs that work for telecoms. So LFN and Hyperledger, right? Then we have automotive-grade Linux, that have connected cars working on the edge. Massive collaboration. But, that's how it is. >> Yeah, you connect the dots but you don't, kind of, force any kind of semantic, or syntax >> No. >> into what people can build. >> Each project is autonomous, >> Yeah. >> and independent, but related. >> Yeah, it's smart. You guys have a good view, I'm a big fan of what you guys are doing. Okay, let's talk about the Open Source Summit and KubeCon, happening in China, the week of the 24th of June. >> Correct. >> What's going on, there's a lot of stuff going on beyond Cloud Native and Linux, what are some of the hot areas in China that you guys are going to be talking about? I know you're going over. >> Yeah, so, we're really excited to be there, and this is, again, life beyond Linux and Cloud Native; there's a whole dimension of projects there. Everything from the edge, and the excitement of Iot, cloud edge. We have keynotes from Tencent, and VMware, and all the Chinese- China Mobile and others, that are all focusing on the explosive growth of open-source in China, right. >> Yeah, and they have a lot of use cases; they've been very aggressive on mobility, Netdata, >> Very aggressive on mobility, data, right, and they have been a big contributor to open-source. >> Yeah. >> So all of that is going to happen there. A lot of tracks on AI and deep learning, as a lot more algorithms come out of the Tencents and the Baidus and the Alibabas of the world. So we have tracks there. We have huge tracks on networking, because 5G and implementation of ONAP and network automation is all part of the umbrella. So we're looking at a cross-section of projects in Open Source Summit and KubeCon, all integrated in Shanghai. >> And a lot of use cases are developing, certainly on the edge, in China. >> Correct. >> A lot of cross pollination-- >> Cross pollination. >> A lot of fragmentation has been addressed in China, so they've kind of solved some of those problems. >> Yeah, and I think the good news is, as a global community, which is open-source, whether it's Europe, Asia, China, India, Japan, the developers are coming together very nicely, through a common governance which crosses boundaries. >> Yeah. >> And building on use cases that are relevant to their community. >> And what's great about what you guys have done with Linux Foundation is that you're not taking positions on geographies, because let the clouds do that, because clouds have-- >> Clouds have geographies, >> Clouds, yeah they have agents-- >> Edge may have geography, they have regions. >> But software's software. (laughs) >> Software's software, yeah. (laughs) >> Arpit, thanks for coming in. Great insight, loved talking about networking, the deep learning- congratulations- and obviously the IoT Edge is hot, and-- >> Thank you very much, excited to be here. >> Have a good trip to China. Thanks for coming in. >> Thank you, thank you. >> I'm John Furrier here for CUBE Conversation with the Linux Foundation; big event in China, Open Source Summit, and KubeCon in Shanghai, week of June 24th. It's a CUBE Conversation, thanks for watching.

>> Live from Seattle, Washington it's the CUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We are here live with CUBE coverage at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2018 in Seattle. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman your hosts all week, three days of coverage. We're in day two. 8,000 attendees, up from 4,000, spanning to China, in Europe, everywhere, the CNCF is expanding. The Linux Foundation, and the ecosystems expanding, we're here with Dan Kohn who's the executive director of the CNCF. Dan, great to see you. I know you work hard. (laughs) I see you out in China. You've done the work. You guys and the team have taken this hockey stick as it's described on the Twittersphere, really up and to the right, you've doubled, it's almost like Moore's law for attendance. (laughs) Doubling every six months. It's really a testament of how it's structured, how you guys are managing it, the balances that you go through. So congratulations. >> So thank you very much, and I'm thrilled that you guys have been with us through that whole ride, that we met here in Seattle two years ago at the first KubeCon we ran with 1,000 attendees. And here we are eight times higher two years later. But I absolutely do need to say it is the community that's growing, and we try and organize them a little bit and harness some of that excitement and energy and then there is a ton of logistics and effort that it takes to go from 28 members to 349 and to put on an event like this, but we do have an amazing team at the Linux Foundation and this is absolutely an all hands on deck where the entire events team is out here and working really hard. >> You guys are smart, you know what you're doing, and you have the right tone and posture, but you set it up right, so it's end user driven, it's open-source community as the core of the event, and you're seeing end users that have contributed, they're now consuming, you have vendors coming in, but you set the nice playbook up, and the downstream benefits of that open-source core has impacted IT, developers, average developers, and this is the magic. And you guys don't take too many hard stands on things, you take a good enough stand on the enablement piece of it. This is a critical piece. Explain the rationale because I think this is a success formula. You don't go too far and say, here's the CNCF stack. >> Right. >> You pull back a little bit on that and let the ecosystem enable it. Talk about that rationale because I think this is an important point. >> Sure and I would say that one of the huge advantages that CNCF has had is that we came later after a lot of other projects. So our parent, the Linux Foundation, has been around for 15 years. We've been able to leverage all of their expertise. We've looked at some of the mistakes that OpenStack, and Apache, and IETF, and other giants who came before us did, and our aspiration has always been to make entirely new mistakes rather than to replicate the old ones. But as you mentioned end user is a key focus, so when you look at our community, how CNCF is set up, we have a governing board that's mainly vendors, it does have developer and other reps on it. We have our technical oversight committee of these nine experts, kind of like our supreme court, and then we have this end user community that is feeding requirements and feedback back to the other group. >> I want to ask you about the structure, and I think this is important because you guys have a great governance model, but you have this concept of graduation. You have Kubernetes, and it's really solid, people are very happy with it, and there's always debates in open-source as you know, but there's a concept of graduating. Anyone can have projects, and explain that dynamic. 'Cause that's, I've heard people say, oh that's part of the CNCF, and well it hasn't graduated, but it's a project. It's important as a laddering there, explain that concept. I think this is important for people to understand that you're open, but there's kind of a model of graduation. What does it mean? >> Sure and it, people have said, oh you mean they've graduated, so they've left now, right? Like the kids leaving the home. And it's definitely not that model. Kubernetes is still very much part of CNCF. We're happy to do it. But we think that one of CNCF's functions is as a signaling and a marketing to enterprise users. And we like the cliche of crossing the chasm where we talk about 2018 was really the year that Kubernetes crossed the chasm. Went from as early adopters who'd been using it for years and were thrilled with it but they actually jump over now to the early majority. I will say though that the late majority, the laggards, the skeptics, they're not using these technologies yet. We still have a ton of opportunity for years to come on that. So we say the graduated projects, which today is not just Kubernetes but also Prometheus and Envoy. Those are the ones that are suitable for really any enterprise company, and that they should feel confident these are very mature, serious technologies for companies of all size. The majority of our projects are incubating. Those are great projects, technically capable, companies should absolutely use them if the use case fits, but they're less mature. And then we have this other category of the Sandbox, 11 projects in there, and we say look, these are incredibly promising. If you are technical enough and you have the use cases, you absolutely should consider it, but they are less mature. And then our hope is to help the projects move along that graduation phase. >> And that's how companies start. Bloomberg's plan, I thinking jumping into Sandbox, they'll start getting some code in there that'll attract some people, they get their code, they don't have to come back after the fact and join in. So you have the Sandbox, you've got projects, you've got graduation, so. >> Now Bloomberg's a little bit unusual, and I like them as an example where they have, I don't know if they mentioned this, but almost a philosophy not to spend money on software. And of course that's great. All of our projects are free and open-source, and they're willing to spend money on people, and they hire a spectacular group of engineers, and then they support everything in-house. But in reality, the vast majority of end users are very happy to work with the vendor, including a lot of our members, and pay for some of that support. And so a Bloomberg can be a little bit more adventurous than many, I think. >> Dan, I wonder if you can provide a little bit of context. I hear some people look at really kind of the conformance and certification that the CNCF does. And I think in many ways learn from the mistakes of some of the things we've done in the past because they'll see there's so many companies, it's like, well there's too many distributions. Maybe you could help explain the difference between a distribution-- >> Sure. >> And what's supported and how that makes sense. >> And I think when you look back at, and we just had, CNCF just had our three-year birthday this week, we have a little birthday cake on Twitter and everything. But if you look at all the activities we've been involved in over those three years, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, we have a service provider program, we've done a lot of marketing, helping projects, I think it's the certification and the software conformance is the single thing that we've had done that's had the biggest impact on the community. And the idea here is that we wanted a way for individual companies to be able to make changes to Kubernetes because they all want to, but to still have confidence that you could take the same workload and move it between the different public clouds, between the different enterprise distros or just vanilla Kubernetes that you download or different installers out there. And so the solution was an open-source software conformance project that anyone can download these tasks and run them, and then a process where people upload the test results and say, yes my implementation is still conformant. I've made these changes, but I haven't broken anything. And we really have some amazing cases of our members, some of our biggest members, who had turned off APIs, maybe in their public cloud for good reasons. They said, oh this doesn't apply or we don't, but that's exactly the kind of thing that can cause incompatibility. >> Yeah, I mean that's critically important, and the other thing that is, what I haven't heard, is there's so many projects here. And we go to the Amazon show and it's like, I'm overwhelmed and I don't know what to do, and I can't keep up with everything. I'm actually surprised I don't hear that here because there are pockets, and this is multiple communities, not like a single monolithic community, so you've got, you know Envoy has their own little separate show and Operators has a thing on Friday that they're doing, and there's the Helm community and sometimes I'm putting many of the pieces together, but oftentimes I'm taking just a couple of the pieces. How do you manage this loosely coupled, it's like distributed architecture. >> Loosely coupled is a key phrase. I think the big advantage we have is our anchor tenant of Kubernetes has its own gravitational field. And so from a compatibility standpoint, we have this, excuse me, certification program for Kubernetes and then all of the other projects essentially ensure they're orbiting around and they ensure that they're compatible with Kubernetes, that also ensures they're compatible with each other. Now it's definitely the case that our projects are used beyond just Kubernetes. We were thrilled with Amazon's announcement two weeks ago of commercial support for Envoy and talking about how one of the things they loved about Envoy is that is doesn't just work on Kubernetes, they can use it on their proprietary ECS platform on their regular EC2 environment as well. And that's true for almost all of our projects. Prometheus is used in Mesos, is used in Docker Swarm, is used in VMs, but I do think that having so much traction and momentum around Kubernetes just is a forcing function for the whole community to come together and stay compatible. >> Well you guys did a great job. That happened last year. It's really to me is an example of a historic moment in the computer industry because this is a modern version of enabling technology that's going to enable a lot of value creation, a lot of wealth creation, a lot of customer, and it's all in a new way, so I think you guys really cracked the code on that and continued success. You've obviously had China going gangbusters, you're expanding, China by the way is one of the largest areas we've reported on Siliconangle.com and the CUBE in the past. China has emerged as one of the largest contributors and consumers of open-source given the rise of all the action going on in China. >> And we've been thrilled to see that, and I mean there was just the example yesterday where etcd is now the newest project, the newest incubating project in CNCF, and the co-creator of that and really the lead maintainer for it left CoreOS when it was acquired by Red Hat and is now with Alibaba. And he's originally from China. He is helping Alibaba just who's a platinum member of CNCF, who's been offering a certified Kubernetes service, but they're now looking at how they can move much more of their internal workloads over to it. JD.com has 25,000 servers. That's the second biggest retailer in China. >> It's a constituent. >> I was there six times last year. >> I know you were. >> I ran into you once in a hotel lobby. (laughing) >> What are you doing in China? It's huge, we're here. This is a big dynamic. This is new. I mean this is a big force and function. >> And to have so much energy, and I do also want to really emphasize the two-way street, that it's not just Chinese companies adopting these technologies that started in the US. >> They're contributing. >> We were thrilled a month ago to have Harbor come in as an incubating project and that started in China and is now being used across the world. >> Dan, 2019, you've got three shows again, Barcelona, Shanghai, and San Diego. >> Exactly. >> Of course the numbers are going to be up and to the right, but what else should we be looking for? >> So I think the two, so definitely China, we're going to continue doing it there, we continue to be relations serverless, we're thrilled with the progress of our serverless working group. They have this new cloud event spec, we have all of the different major clouds participating in it. The third area that I think you're going to see us that is somewhat new is looking at telcos. And our vision is that you can take a lot, most networking code today is done in virtual machines called virtual network functions. We think those should evolve to become cloud native network functions. The same networking code running in containers on Kubernetes. And so this is actually going to be our first time with a booth at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. And we're going to be talking about-- >> Makes a lot of sense. IOT, over the top, a lot of enablement there. Makes inefficiencies in that inefficient stacks. >> Yeah, and on the edge as well. >> Dan, thanks for coming out, I appreciate it. Again, you've done the work, hard work, and continue it, great success, congratulations. I know it's early days still but. >> I hope it is. At some date Kubernetes is going to plateau. But it really doesn't feel like it'll be 2019. >> Yeah, it definitely is not boring. (laughing) Even though we had much more, Dan. >> Dan Kohn, executive director of the CNCF. Here inside the CUBE, breaking it all down, again, another successful show. Just the growth, this is the tsunami, it's a rise of Kubernetes and the ecosystem around it, creating values, the CUBE coverage, live here in Seattle. I'll be back with more coverage after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Be right back. (upbeat music)

>> From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and the its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Seattle for KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2018, with theCUBE's coverage I'm John Furrier for Stu Miniman. We've been there from the beginning watching this community grow into a powerhouse. Almost a Moore's Law like growth, doubling every, actually six months, if you think about it. >> Yeah it's pretty wild. >> Chris Aniszczyk, CTO and COO of the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Super stoked to be here. Thank you for being with us since the beginning. >> So it's been fun to watch you guys, CNCF has done an exceptional job, I thought, a fabulous job of how you guys have built out a great community, open-source community as the main persona target, but brought in the vendor on terms that really work for open-source, Linux foundation, great shepherding this thing through, now you have, basically, looks like a conference. >> Yeah. >> End user conference, vendors are here, still open-source is pure. The growth has been phenomenal. Just take a minute to give us the update on just some of the stats, massive growth. >> Yeah, sure. I mean you know, we're 8,000 people here today, which is absolutely wild. What's actually crazy is when we planned this event, it was about two years ago when we had to start booking a venue, figuring out how many people may be here. And two years ago we thought 5,000 would have been a fantastic number. Well, we got to 8,000. We have about 1500 to 2,000 people on the wait list that could not get in. So, obviously we did not plan properly but sometimes it's hard to predict kind of the uptake of technology these days. Things just move quickly. I think we've kind of benefited from the turnaround that's happening in the industry right now where companies are finally looking to modernize their infrastructure. Whether it's moving to the cloud or just modernizing things, and that's happening everywhere, from traditional enterprises to internet scale companies. Everyone's looking to kind of modernize things and we're kind of at the forefront of that. >> I mean the challenge of events is, some of it is provisioning, over provision. You don't show up, you want elastic, dynamic, agile-- >> I want the Cloud Native events. >> Programmable space that could just go auto scale when you need it. >> Exactly. >> All kidding aside, congratulations on the success. But one thing we've been covering on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, and you guys have been actually executing on, is the growth in China in open-source. And it's been around for a while but just the scale, just pure numbers, tell them about the success in China and the impact to the open-source community and business. >> Yeah. We put on our first event in Shanghai, KubeCon China. It was fantastic. We sold out at 2500 people. Always a little bit difficult to do your first event in China. I have many stories to share on that one, but the amount of scale, in terms of software deployment there are just fascinating. You kind of have these companies like ofo, is like a bike sharing system right. You know in China they have hundreds of millions of these bicycles that they have to kind of manage in an infrastructural way. The software that you use to actually do that has to be built very well. And so the trend that we're actually seeing in CNCF now is about 10%, we have three projects that were born in China, dealing with China-scale problems. So one of those projects is TiKV, which is kind of a very well fine-tuned built distributed key value store that is used by a lot of the Chinese com providers and folks like ofo and LME out there that are just dealing with hundreds of millions of users. It's fascinating. I think the trend you're going to see in the future is there's going to be more technology that is kind of born dealing with China-scale issues, and having those lessons being shared with the rest of the world and collaborate. One of the goals in CNCF for us is to help bridge these communities. In China about 25% of our attendance was international, which was higher then we expected. But we had dual live simultaneous translation for everyone, to kind of try to bridge these... >> It's a big story. The consumption and the contribution side is just phenomenal. >> China is our number two contributor to all CNCF projects, it's very impressive in my opinion. >> So Chris there was a lot in the keynote. I wondered, give us a little insight, it's different for a foundation in open-source communities than it is for company when you talk about the core product being Kubernetes and then all these other projects, you've got the incubating projects, the ones that have been elevated, new FCD comes into it, how do you do the juggling act of this? >> Honestly, the whole goal of the foundation is basically to cultivate and sustain, and kind of grow projects that come in. Some are going to work and be very successful, some may never leave the sandbox, which is our early stage. So today I was very excited to finally have etcd come as an official incubating project. This is our 31st project, which is a little bit wild, since we started, it was just Kubernetes. We had other projects that moved from, say, sandbox to incubating. So in China, one of our big announcements was Harbor, which is a container registry, or actually, technically, we call it a Cloud Native Registry, because it does support things like helm charts, it doesn't only host container-based artifacts. It moved up to the incubating level and that is being embedded. It's in all of Cloud Foundry's and Pivotal's products. It's used by some cloud providers in China as their kind of registry as a service. Like their equivalent to ECR or GCR, essentially. And we've just seen incredible growth across all of our projects. I mean, we have three graduated projects. Envoy recently, which you saw Matt, Constance, and Jose on stage a little bit to talk about. To me, what I really like about Envoy and Prometheus, these are two projects that were not born from a vendor. You know. Envoy came from Lyft because they were just like, you know what? We're not happy with our current kind of reverse proxy, service proxy situation, let's build our own open-source and kind of share our lessons. Prometheus, born from SoundCloud. So I think CNCF has a good mix of, hey, we have some initial vendor-driven projects, like Kubernetes came from Google but now it's used by a ton of people. But then you have other projects that were born from the end-user community. I think having that healthy mix is good for everyone. >> I think the DNA of that early on in the culture has been a successful one for you guys. Not being vendor-led, being end-user led, but vendors can come in and participate. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So talk about the end-user perspective because we're very interested, a lot of people are interested in end-user. What are they doing with it? It used to be a joke. I stood up a bunch Hadoop but what are you using it for? What are people using Kubernetes for? You've got Apple, Uber, Capital One, Comcast, GoDaddy, Airbnb. They're all investing in Kubernetes as their main stack. >> And CNCF projects, not only Kubernetes. >> But what does that mean when they say Kubernetes as a stack? It's kind of been encapsulated to include other things. People are looking at this as a real alternative. Can you explain what that is about? >> So, I think people have to realize that CNCF is essentially more than just Kubernetes. Cloud Native is more than just Kubernetes. So what we'll see is, take a company like Lyft. Lyft did not start using Kubernetes, they are kind of on that migration path now but Lyft started to use Envoy, Prometheus, gRPC, other technologies that kind of lead them to that Cloud Native journey that eventually they're like, you know what? Maybe we don't need our homegrown orchestrator. We'll go use that. And use, (huffs) Everyone falls in differently in kind of a community. Some people start with Kubernetes and eventually subsume the other kind of ancillary projects. >> This is what the project cloud is about. Let me rephrase the question. So when people say, because this is a real trend we've been reporting on this, the CNCF stack, people have language semantics on how that's couched. Oh, on the Kubernetes-- >> I don't like stack because it means there's one proscribed solution, where I think it's more like an a la carte model. >> Well if I quote the CNCF stack, if there was a word for it, as an alternative, as a solution base with Kubernetes at the core of it, right. Okay, cool. What is that usage being looked like? How is that developing? How are end users looking at the CNCF holistically with Kubernetes at the core? >> So we have one of the largest end-user communities out there of any open-source foundation. We have about 80 members. When we talk to them directly, why are they adopting CNCF projects and technology? Most of the time is they want to deploy software faster, right? They want to use modern CICD tools and just development patterns. So it's all about faster time to market and making the developers lives easier so they're actually able to deliver business customer value. And it's basically similar to a whole DevOps mantra, right. If I could ship software faster and it's easier for my developers to get stuff done, I'm delivering value to whatever my end-user customer is at the end of the day. If you go to the CNCF end-user website, we have case studies from Nordstrom, Capital One, I think Lyft is there. Just a bunch of people that, we moved to these technologies because it improved the way we could monitor software, how fast we could ship. It's all about faster time to market, and modernizing their infrastructure. >> Chris, give us a little bit of a view coming forward. We're on 1.13 for Kubernetes, if I read it right. The contribution slowed down a little bit because we're actually reaching a level of maturity. >> Kubernetes is boring and mature. >> What do you see as we come, other than continued growth? >> So I think the wider ecosystem is going to continue to grow. So if you actually look at Kubernetes directly, it has been very focused on moving things out of the core as much as possible and trying to force people to extend things. I don't know if you saw, Tim Hockin had this great talk in terms of how all the Kubernetes components are either being ripped out or turned into custom resource definition of CODs. Basically trying to make Kubernetes as extensible as possible. Instead of trying to ram things into Kubernetes, hey, use the built in extensibility layer. >> Decompose a little bit. >> Decompose and the analogy here would be like kernel space versus user space if you're going to Linux. All the exciting things tend to happen in user space these days but, yeah, the kernel is still important, actively contributed to by a ton of people, very critical, everything. But a lot of the action happens in user space. And I think you'll see the same thing with Kubernetes, where it will kind of become like Linux where the kernel of Kubernetes, very stable, mature, focused on basically not breaking and trying to keep it as simple as possible and built good extensibility mechanisms so folks could plug in whatever systems. We saw this with storage in Kubernetes. A lot of the initial storage drivers, flex volume stuff, was baked into the Kubernetes with a new effort called the container storage interface. They all pulled that out and made they basically built an extensibility mechanism so any company or any project could bring in their storage solution. >> One of the key trends we're seeing, obviously, in cloud is automation. We see serverless around the corner, you see all these things going on around the cool things you guys are building. As automation continues to move down the track, where is that going to impact and create value for customer end-users as they roll with the CNCF? So Kubernetes at some point could be auto, why even be managing clusters? Well, that should be automated at some point. >> I mean, hey, you could do it both ways. A lot of people love the managed service approach. If I could pay a large hyper-scale cloud provider to manage everything, the more the merrier. Some want the freedom to roll their own. Some may want to pay a vendor, I don't know, Red Hat OpenShift looks great, let's pay them to help manage data. Or I just roll alone. And we've seen it all. You know it really depends on the organization. We've seen some very high end banks or financial institutions that have very good technical chops. They're okay rolling on their own. Some may not be as interested in that and just pay a vendor to manage it. >> It's a choice issue. >> For us it's all goodness, whatever you prefer. I think longer term we'll see more people, just for the convenience of managed services, go that route. But for CNCF Kubernetes there's multiple ways to do it; you could go Vanilla, you could go Managed Service, you could go through a vendor like Rancher or OpenShift. The cool thing about all these things is they all are conformant to the Kubernetes certified program, so it means there's no breakage or forking, everyone is compliant. >> So for the people that are watching that couldn't make it here or are on the waiting list, or doing LobbyCon. >> I'm sorry, I'm sorry for the waiting list. >> This is actually a good venue to do LobbyCon, there's places to meet here. I know a lot of people actually in town kind of LobbyCon-ing it. But for the people that aren't here, what's the most important story that's being told? I know we're not being talked about. What is happening here? What should people know about this year? In your mind's eye, in your understanding of the program, and how it's developed early on, what's the most important thing? >> I think in general CNCF, Cloud Native, Kubernetes all have matured a lot in the last three years, especially the last 12-18 months, where you've seen... Earlier it was all about technical-savvy folks scratching their itch. Now the end-users that I'm talking to, you have like Maersk, what does Maersk do? They actually ship containers, right? But now they are using Kubernetes to manage containers on the containers. >> They're in the container business. >> I'm seeing traditional insurance companies. So I think what we're doing is we're basically hitting, we're kind of past that threshold of early adopters and tinkerers, and now we're moving to full-blown mainstream adoption. Part of that is the cloud providers are all offering Managed Kubernetes, so it's convenient for companies that move in the cloud. And then on the distro front, OpenShift, PKS, Rancher, they're all mature products. So there's just a lot of stability and maturity in the ecosystem. >> Just talking about the mature stuff, give us your take on Knative. What should people be looking at that? How does Serverless fit into all this? >> So Serverless, you know we love Serverless in CNCF. We just view it as another kind of programing model that eventually runs on some type of containerized stack. For us at CNCF, we have a Serverless working group that's been putting out whitepapers. We have a spec around cloud events standardized. I think Knative is a fantastic approach of how to basically build a, kind of like CNCF where it's a set of components that you can use to build your own serverless framework. I think the adoption has been great. We've actually been talking to them about potentially bringing in some components of Knative into CNCF. I think, if you want to provide your own serverless offering, you're going to need the components in Knative to make that happen. I've seen SAPs picked up on it. GitLab just announced a serverless offering based on Knative today. I think it's a great technology. It's still very early days. I think serverless is great and will be continually used, but it's one option of many. We're going to have containers, we're going to have serverless, we're going to have mainframes. It's going to be a mix of everything. >> I'm old enough to remember the old client server days when multi-vendor was a big buzz word. Multi-cloud now is a subtext here. I think that one of the big stories in issue of the maturity is that you're starting to see people, I want choice. And hybrid-cloud is the word today but I think ultimately people view it as a multi-cloud environment of resource. >> So one interesting thing about KubeCon, I think one of our reasons that we've grown so much is if you look at it, there's really no other event you can go to that is truly multi-cloud. You have all the HyperScale folks, you've got your end-users and vendors in one area, right? Versus you going to a vendor-specific event. So I think that's kind of been part of our benefit and then luck to kind of stumble in this where everyone is in the same room. I think next year, big push on bringing all the clouds. >> Well, Chris, thanks for spending the time. I know you're super busy. CTO and COO of the CNCF, really making things happen. This is a real, important technology wave, the cloud computing, and having the kind of choices in ecosystem around open-source is making it happen. Congratulations to your success. We're going to continue coverage here. Day one of three days of CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier for Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more after this short break. (light music)

(spirited orchestral music) >> Hello and I'm John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE, founder of SiliconANGLE Media. I'm here at Palo Alto studios for CUBE Conversation as a preview for upcoming, the CNCF-sponsored KubeCon event coming up in Shanghai and in Seattle. I'm here with Janet Kuo, who is a software engineer at Google and recently named the co-chair of KubeCon, the main event around Kubernetes, multi-cloud, all the things happening in cloud-native. Janet, thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks for having me. So you were recently named co-chair, Kelsey was previously the co-chair and he always had those good demos but the program has been changing a lot and you're the new co-chair, what's it like? What's happening? What's the focus this year? What's the content going to look like? Tell us what's happening >> So we get a lot of overwhelming number of submissions, much more than last year, and I see a lot of interesting case studies and also I see that because Kubernetes is actually help you extract the infrastructure away and it runs anywhere so I see a lot of people are actually deploying it everywhere, multi-cloud, hybrid, and even in Edge. For example, I see Chick-Fil-A, they are going to talk about how they deploy Kubernetes in their Edge restaurants and the store owners, they are not tech expert, as you can expect. >> Yeah, I mean that's the edge of the network, a Chick-Fil-A, and you know, great retail example. We run a lot of Chick-Fil-A certainly out here in California it's like In-N-Out Burger, they go hand in hand. But this is a good use case of Edge and this is real world, so Kubernetes has certainly grown up. We know from the growth of KubeCon, the event itself has gotten to be pretty massive, the number of people involved has been great, how has Kubernetes grown up? Because we're seeing the conversation move from we love containers, Kubernetes is great for orchestrating everything, but now people are starting to really start really cranking it up a notch, is that the trend that you're seeing as well, and is that some of the content you'll be focused on? >> So I see, I took a lot at the Google trend for search for Kubernetes and it's still going way up since the beginning and also I look at a recent CNCF survey and I realize that about 40% of people who'll respond to their survey and they work in a enterprise and they said they run Kubernetes in production so that's a huge number. >> That's awesome. Well, now that you're the new co-chair, tell us a little bit about yourself, how, what's your background, how did you get there? >> I started working at Google in 2015 and that's before Kubernetes 1.0 was released and before CNCF and before the first KubeCon and when I joined Google, it's Kubernetes is a way, very new concept and not like it's fixed and it's already adopted by everyone so we work very hard to get the ease of use and get more people adoption and we get a lot of feedback from people and then Kubernetes is getting more and more popular, so after that I decided that I want to submit my first ever conference talk to KubeCon and I got selected and then I start to feel like I enjoy this and I did, and other CNCF hosted events, for example, a panel in San Francisco and I think that might be how I was selected. >> What was your first talk about, that you talked about? >> So I talk about running workloads in Kubernetes and I did an overview of the workloads API because I am the developer of that workloads API. >> So that's also, you got hooked on Kubernetes like everybody else, it's like the Kubernetes drug. So how did you get involved in open source? Were you always developing with open source? How did you get involved in the open source community? >> So Kubernetes is actually my first open source project and before that, I had a phone call with Tim Hawkins, he's the principal engineer at Google and he sold me the idea of Kubernetes and we need to be open and let people choose the best technology for them and he sold me the idea and I think Kubernetes is the future and also I want to work on open source but I just didn't have the chance to work on it yet. >> So we had a good fun time in Copenhagen for the last KubeCon, and we, theCUBE, has been at all the KubeCons as you know. We love this community, we think it's really special, not only because we've been there from the beginning, but we've gotten to see the people involved and the people have been very close-knit but yet so open and inclusive, we're seeing a lot of input, and then at the same time, so that's always great, open source, inclusive, and fun, but then the companies are coming in in waves, a massive amount of waves of commercial vendors jumping in, and I think this foundation's done a great job of balancing being a good upstream and good project but that dynamic is very interesting. It's probably the fastest open source kind of commercial, yet good vibes, commercial open source, how does that change or affect you guys as you pick and look at the data, 'cause you get surveys, you see what people want, vendors, users, industry participants, developers, what is the data telling you? What's all this data coming from the different KubeCons and how is that changing the selections and what's the trend I guess, what's the trends coming from the community? >> So from selecting talks, because we want to focus on make Kubernetes, make KubeCon, still community-focused conference so when we pick talks, we pick the ones that not just doing vendor pitch or sales pitch but we pick the ones that we think the community is going to benefit from and especially when they are talking about a solution that others could adopt or is it open source or not, then that affect our choice and then we also see a lot of people start customizing Kubernetes for their own needs and a lot of people are starting using Kubernetes API to managing resources outside of Kubernetes and that's a very interesting trend because with that, you can have Kubernetes to manage everything your infrastructure, lot of things running on Kubernetes. >> So what are some of those examples that are outside Kubernetes? So for example, you can use, so Kubernetes has a concept called custom resource that you can register a custom API in Kubernetes and so you can use that, you can register an API and you can implement a controller to manage anything you want, for example, different cloud resources or VMs, I even saw people use Kubernetes API to manage robots. >> Wow, so this is real world, so you mentioned you were working workload API at Google, the big trend that we're seeing on theCUBE and that crosses all the different events, not just cloud-native, is workload management, managing workloads and workloads are changing and it's very dynamic, it's not a static world anymore. So managing workloads to the infrastructure is where we see this nice activity happening from containers, Kubernetes, to service meshes, so there's a lot of activity going on there and some of the stuff is straightforward, I won't say straightforward, but containers and Kubernetes is easy to work with but services meshes are difficult. Istio, for instance, Kubeflow or Hot Projects, there's a real focus of stateless has been there, but stateful is hard, is there going to be talks about stateful applications, are you guys looking at some of the Istio, is service mesh going to be a focus this year? >> Yeah, we still see a lot of submissions from service meshes and so you can use service mesh to manage your service easily and secure them easily and we also see a lot of talks for stateful workloads, for example, how you customize something that manage your stateful workloads or what that best practice is and there is a pattern that's popular in the community which is called operator and the concept is that you write a controller, use the custom API that I just mentioned, and you just embed the knowledge of a human operator into that controller and let the controller do the automation for you. >> So it's putting intelligence, like an operator, into the software and letting that ride? >> Yeah and it will do all the work for you and you only need to write it once. >> And automation's a big trend, so if you could stack or rank the top three trends that we expect to see at KubeCon this year, what would they be? >> In the top three, I would say customize and multi-cloud and then service mesh or serverless they're both pretty popular, yeah. >> Is storageless coming? So if we have serverless, will there be storageless (laughs) I made that up, I tweeted that the other day, if there's servers, there's no servers, there's going to be no storage. I mean, service and storage go together so again, this is where the fun action is, the infrastructure is being programmable. And I think one of the things I like about what KubeCon has done is they've really enabled developers to be more efficient with DevOps, the DevOps trend, which is the cloud-native trend. The question I want to ask you is specifically kind of a Google question because I think this is important and Google cloud, I really love the trend of how application developers are being modernized, that's so cool, I love that, but the SRE concept that Google pioneered is becoming more of a trend as more of an operator role, not in the sense of what we just talked about but like an SRE, businesses are starting to look at that kind of scale out infrastructure where there's a need for kind of like an SRE, does that come up at KubeCon at all or is that too operator-oriented? Is that on the agenda? Does that come up in the KubeCon selection criteria, the notion of having operators or SRE-like roles? >> So we have a track called operations, so some of the operator, human operator, talks are submitting through that, to that topic, but we didn't see... >> Might be too early. >> Yeah, too early. >> It might be a little bit too early, that's what I think, alright and then since I brought up some of the tracks, we're always interested in knowing about startups 'cause there seems to be a lot of startup activity, doing a lot of AI stuff or applications, AI ops, and some new things going on, is there a startup activity involved that you're seeing, is there features of startups at all, do you guys look at that, is there going to be an emphasis of emerging companies and startups involved or is it mostly coming from the community? >> We definitely see a lot of startups and something in talks and also you just mentioned mission learning, we also see several talks on and about mission learning and AI submitting to both the Shanghai event and Seattle event. So projects like Kubeflow and Spark, that's being used a lot and we still, we see a lot of submissions from those. >> So those are the popular ones? >> Yeah, the popular ones and those are from Shanghai, I saw some AI submissions and I'm excited about those. >> Okay, so now back to the popular question, everyone wants to know where the popular parties are, what's the popular projects if you had to, in terms of contributors, activity, do you guys have like a rating like here's the most popular project? Do you guys look at just number of contributors? How do you rank the popularity of the projects? >> Or how would you rank them? >> We didn't actually look at the popularity of the projects because are you talking about CNCF projects or any projects? >> CNCF and KubeCon, let me ask the question differently... If I go to Shanghai or Seattle, what's going on? What do I engage, what should I pay attention to, what can I expect if I'm a user and I come to the event, what's going to happen at Shanghai and Seattle? What's the format? >> We separate all the talks in tracks so you can look up the track that you are interested in, for example, do you want to know all the case studies, then you can go to case studies and if you're interested in observability then you go to the observability track and they'll be a lot of different projects, they are presenting their own solutions and you can go and figure out which one fits you the best. >> And so multi-cloud's high, I'll ask you a multi-cloud question 'cause one of the things that we're tracking is what is multi-cloud and how is that different from hybrid? How would you describe that 'cause there are people that talk about hybrid cloud all the time but multi-cloud seems to have different definitions. Is there a different definition to hybrid cloud versus multi-cloud? >> So I think hybrid includes things that's not cloud, for example, your on-prem versus you have your on-premise solutions and you also use some cloud solutions and that's hybrid... >> And multi-cloud is multiple clouds so workloads on different clouds or sharing workloads across clouds? >> Workloads on different clouds. >> Yeah, so Office 365, that's Azure, a TensorFlow on Google and something, okay. I always want to know, comparing running workloads between clouds, that would be the ideal scenario. Here's the tough question for you, put you on the spot here, what is your favorite open source project in the CNCF and favorite track at KubeCon? >> My favorite project is of course Kubernetes and my favorite track would be case studies because I care a lot about user experience and I love to hear user stories. So for Seattle we picked a lot of user stories that we think are interesting and we also pick some keynote speakers that are going to talk about their large-scale usage of Kubernetes and that's very exciting for me, I can't wait to hear their story. >> Yeah, we love the end user stories too, 'cause it really puts the real world scenario around it. Okay, final question for you Janet, I wanted to ask you about diversity at KubeCon, what's going on and what can you share around that program? >> Yeah, we care about diversity a lot. We look at that when we select talks to accept and also we have a diversity scholarship that allows people to apply for a scholarship, we're going to cover the ticket to conference and also the travel to conference and also we have a diversity luncheon on December 12 and that will be sponsored by both Google and Heptio. >> So December 12 in Seattle? And that was a great, by the way, you did a great job last year, the program with scholarship got I think a standing ovation, so that's awesome. Thanks for doing that. >> Thank you, thanks. For the folks watching that might not be really deep on Kubernetes, in your opinion, why is Kubernetes so important and why should IT leaders, developers, and people in mainstream tech who are now new to Kubernetes and seeing the trends, why should they pay attention to Kubernetes, what's the relevance, what's the impact, why should they pay attention to Kubernetes? >> Because Kubernetes allows you to easily adopt cloud, because it's extract every infrastructure the infrastructure level away and allows you to easily run your infrastructure anywhere and most importantly, because a lot of people on different cloud and different stack of development, for example, CICD service mesh, they put a lot energy to integrate with Kubernetes so if you have Kubernetes you have everything. >> You have Kubernetes, you have everything. We love the work you're doing, thanks for co-chairing the KubeCon event, we love going there, CNCF's been very successful, been a great relationship, we love working with them, obviously it's a content-rich environment and I think everyone who is interested in cloud-native should go to the CNCF, there's a lot of sponsors, and more and more logos come on every day, so you guys are doing a good job. Thanks for doing that, appreciate it. Maybe we'll do two cubes this year. Janet Kuo, who is a software engineer at Google is joining me here at theCUBE. She's also the co-chair for KubeCon, the event put on by the CNCF and the industry around cloud-native and all things Kubernetes, multi-cloud, and really applications' workloads for a cloud environment. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, thanks for watching. (spirited orchestral music)

(electronic dance music) (Intel Jingle) (ethereal electronic dance music) ♪ Okay ♪ (upbeat techno dance music) ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Yeah everybody get loose yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Ye-yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody everybody yeah ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody get loose whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ >> As a courtesy to the presenters and those around you, please silence all mobile devices, thank you. (electronic dance music) ♪ Everybody get loose ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (upbeat salsa music) ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ So happy ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) >> Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our program will begin momentarily. ♪ Hey ♪ (female singer scatting) (male singer scatting) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) (electronic dance music) ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ Red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ In don't go ♪ ♪ Oh red go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red go ♪ >> Ladies and gentlemen, there are available seats. Towards house left, house left there are available seats. If you are please standing, we ask that you please take an available seat. We will begin momentarily, thank you. ♪ Let go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ (upbeat electronic dance music) ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ I live ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ah ah ah ah ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ (bouncy techno music) >> Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask that you please take the available seats to your left, house left, there are many available seats. If you are standing, please make your way there. The program will begin momentarily, thank you. Good morning! This is Lenovo Transform 2.0! (keyboard clicks) >> Progress. Why do we always talk about it in the future? When will it finally get here? We don't progress when it's ready for us. We need it when we're ready, and we're ready now. Our hospitals and their patients need it now, our businesses and their customers need it now, our cities and their citizens need it now. To deliver intelligent transformation, we need to build it into the products and solutions we make every day. At Lenovo, we're designing the systems to fight disease, power businesses, and help you reach more customers, end-to-end security solutions to protect your data and your companies reputation. We're making IT departments more agile and cost efficient. We're revolutionizing how kids learn with VR. We're designing smart devices and software that transform the way you collaborate, because technology shouldn't just power industries, it should power people. While everybody else is talking about tomorrow, we'll keep building today, because the progress we need can't wait for the future. >> Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappen! (electronic dance music) (audience applauding) >> Alright. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning. >> Ooh, that was pretty good actually, I'll give it one more shot. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning! >> Oh, that's much better! Hope everyone's had a great morning. Welcome very much to the second Lenovo Transform event here in New York. I think when I got up just now on the steps I realized there's probably one thing in common all of us have in this room including myself which is, absolutely no one has a clue what I'm going to say today. So, I'm hoping very much that we get through this thing very quickly and crisply. I love this town, love New York, and you're going to hear us talk a little bit about New York as we get through here, but just before we get started I'm going to ask anyone who's standing up the back, there are plenty of seats down here, and down here on the right hand side, I think he called it house left is the professional way of calling it, but these steps to my right, your left, get up here, let's get you all seated down so that you can actually sit down during the keynote session for us. Last year we had our very first Lenovo Transform. We had about 400 people. It was here in New York, fantastic event, today, over 1,000 people. We have over 62 different technology demonstrations and about 15 breakout sessions, which I'll talk you through a little bit later on as well, so it's a much bigger event. Next year we're definitely going to be shooting for over 2,000 people as Lenovo really transforms and starts to address a lot of the technology that our commercial customers are really looking for. We were however hampered last year by a storm, I don't know if those of you who were with us last year will remember, we had a storm on the evening before Transform last year in New York, and obviously the day that it actually occurred, and we had lots of logistics. Our media people from AMIA were coming in. They took the, the plane was circling around New York for a long time, and Kamran Amini, our General Manager of our Data Center Infrastructure Group, probably one of our largest groups in the Lenovo DCG business, took 17 hours to get from Raleigh, North Carolina to New York, 17 hours, I think it takes seven or eight hours to drive. Took him 17 hours by plane to get here. And then of course this year, we have Florence. And so, obviously the hurricane Florence down there in the Carolinas right now, we tried to help, but still Kamran has made it today. Unfortunately, very tragically, we were hoping he wouldn't, but he's here today to do a big presentation a little bit later on as well. However, I do want to say, obviously, Florence is a very serious tragedy and we have to take it very serious. We got, our headquarters is in Raleigh, North Carolina. While it looks like the hurricane is just missing it's heading a little bit southeast, all of our thoughts and prayers and well wishes are obviously with everyone in the Carolinas on behalf of Lenovo, everyone at our headquarters, everyone throughout the Carolinas, we want to make sure everyone stays safe and out of harm's way. We have a great mixture today in the crowd of all customers, partners, industry analysts, media, as well as our financial analysts from all around the world. There's over 30 countries represented here and people who are here to listen to both YY, Kirk, and Christian Teismann speak today. And so, it's going to be a really really exciting day, and I really appreciate everyone coming in from all around the world. So, a big round of applause for everyone whose come in. (audience applauding) We have a great agenda for you today, and it starts obviously a very consistent format which worked very successful for us last year, and that's obviously our keynote. You'll hear from YY, our CEO, talk a little bit about the vision he has in the industry and how he sees Lenovo's turned the corner and really driving some great strategy to address our customer's needs. Kirk Skaugen, our Executive Vice President of DCG, will be up talking about how we've transformed the DCG business and once again are hitting record growth ratios for our DCG business. And then you'll hear from Christian Teismann, our SVP and General Manager for our commercial business, get up and talk about everything that's going on in our IDG business. There's really exciting stuff going on there and obviously ThinkPad being the cornerstone of that I'm sure he's going to talk to us about a couple surprises in that space as well. Then we've got some great breakout sessions, I mentioned before, 15 breakout sessions, so while this keynote section goes until about 11:30, once we get through that, please go over and explore, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. We have all of our subject matter experts from both our PC, NBG, and our DCG businesses out to showcase what we're doing as an organization to better address your needs. And then obviously we have the technology pieces that I've also spoken about, 62 different technology displays there arranged from everything IoT, 5G, NFV, everything that's really cool and hot in the industry right now is going to be on display up there, and I really encourage all of you to get up there. So, I'm going to have a quick video to show you from some of the setup yesterday on a couple of the 62 technology displays we've got on up on stage. Okay let's go, so we've got a demonstrations to show you today, one of the greats one here is the one we've done with NC State, a high-performance computing artificial intelligence demonstration of fresh produce. It's about modeling the population growth of the planet, and how we're going to supply water and food as we go forward. Whoo. Oh, that is not an apple. Okay. (woman laughs) Second one over here is really, hey Jonas, how are you? Is really around virtual reality, and how we look at one of the most amazing sites we've got, as an install on our high-performance computing practice here globally. And you can see, obviously, that this is the Barcelona supercomputer, and, where else in New York can you get access to being able to see something like that so easily? Only here at Lenovo Transform. Whoo, okay. (audience applauding) So there's two examples of some of the technology. We're really encouraging everyone in the room after the keynote to flow into that space and really get engaged, and interact with a lot of the technology we've got up there. It seems I need to also do something about my fashion, I've just realized I've worn a vest two days in a row, so I've got to work on that as well. Alright so listen, the last thing on the agenda, we've gone through the breakout sessions and the demo, tonight at four o'clock, there's about 400 of you registered to be on the cruise boat with us, the doors will open behind me. the boat is literally at the pier right behind us. You need to make sure you're on the boat for 4:00 p.m. this evening. Outside of that, I want everyone to have a great time today, really enjoy the experience, make it as experiential as you possibly can, get out there and really get in and touch the technology. There's some really cool AI displays up there for us all to get involved in as well. So ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a lover of tennis, as some of you would've heard last year at Lenovo Transform, as well as a lover of technology, Lenovo, and of course, New York City. I am obviously very pleasured to introduce to you Yang Yuanqing, our CEO, as we like to call him, YY. (audience applauding) (upbeat funky music) >> Good morning, everyone. >> Good morning. >> Thank you Rod for that introduction. Welcome to New York City. So, this is the second year in a row we host our Transform event here, because New York is indeed one of the most transformative cities in the world. Last year on this stage, I spoke about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and our vision around the intelligent transformation, how it would fundamentally change the nature of business and the customer relationships. And why preparing for this transformation is the key for the future of our company. And in the last year I can assure you, we were being very busy doing just that, from searching and bringing global talents around the world to the way we think about every product and every investment we make. I was here in New York just a month ago to announce our fiscal year Q1 earnings, which was a good day for us. I think now the world believes it when we say Lenovo has truly turned the corner to a new phase of growth and a new phase of acceleration in executing the transformation strategy. That's clear to me is that the last few years of a purposeful disruption at Lenovo have led us to a point where we can now claim leadership of the coming intelligent transformation. People often asked me, what is the intelligent transformation? I was saying this way. This is the unlimited potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by artificial intelligence being realized, ordering a pizza through our speaker, and locking the door with a look, letting your car drive itself back to your home. This indeed reflect the power of AI, but it just the surface of it. The true impact of AI will not only make our homes smarter and offices more efficient, but we are also completely transformed every value chip in every industry. However, to realize these amazing possibilities, we will need a structure built around the key components, and one that touches every part of all our lives. First of all, explosions in new technology always lead to new structures. This has happened many times before. In the early 20th century, thousands of companies provided a telephone service. City streets across the US looked like this, and now bundles of a microscopic fiber running from city to city bring the world closer together. Here's what a driving was like in the US, up until 1950s. Good luck finding your way. (audience laughs) And today, millions of vehicles are organized and routed daily, making the world more efficient. Structure is vital, from fiber cables and the interstate highways, to our cells bounded together to create humans. Thankfully the structure for intelligent transformation has emerged, and it is just as revolutionary. What does this new structure look like? We believe there are three key building blocks, data, computing power, and algorithms. Ever wondered what is it behind intelligent transformation? What is fueling this miracle of human possibility? Data. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, not only PCs, mobile phones, have come online and been generating data. Today it is the cameras in this room, the climate controls in our offices, or the smart displays in our kitchens at home. The number of smart devices worldwide will reach over 20 billion in 2020, more than double the number in 2017. These devices and the sensors are connected and generating massive amount of data. By 2020, the amount of data generated will be 57 times more than all the grains of sand on Earth. This data will not only make devices smarter, but will also fuel the intelligence of our homes, offices, and entire industries. Then we need engines to turn the fuel into power, and the engine is actually the computing power. Last but not least the advanced algorithms combined with Big Data technology and industry know how will form vertical industrial intelligence and produce valuable insights for every value chain in every industry. When these three building blocks all come together, it will change the world. At Lenovo, we have each of these elements of intelligent transformations in a single place. We have built our business around the new structure of intelligent transformation, especially with mobile and the data center now firmly part of our business. I'm often asked why did you acquire these businesses? Why has a Lenovo gone into so many fields? People ask the same questions of the companies that become the leaders of the information technology revolution, or the third industrial transformation. They were the companies that saw the future and what the future required, and I believe Lenovo is the company today. From largest portfolio of devices in the world, leadership in the data center field, to the algorithm-powered intelligent vertical solutions, and not to mention the strong partnership Lenovo has built over decades. We are the only company that can unify all these essential assets and deliver end to end solutions. Let's look at each part. We now understand the important importance data plays as fuel in intelligent transformation. Hundreds of billions of devices and smart IoTs in the world are generating better and powering the intelligence. Who makes these devices in large volume and variety? Who puts these devices into people's home, offices, manufacturing lines, and in their hands? Lenovo definitely has the front row seats here. We are number one in PCs and tablets. We also produces smart phones, smart speakers, smart displays. AR/VR headsets, as well as commercial IoTs. All of these smart devices, or smart IoTs are linked to each other and to the cloud. In fact, we have more than 20 manufacturing facilities in China, US, Brazil, Japan, India, Mexico, Germany, and more, producing various devices around the clock. We actually make four devices every second, and 37 motherboards every minute. So, this factory located in my hometown, Hu-fi, China, is actually the largest laptop factory in the world, with more than three million square feet. So, this is as big as 42 soccer fields. Our scale and the larger portfolio of devices gives us access to massive amount of data, which very few companies can say. So, why is the ability to scale so critical? Let's look again at our example from before. The early days of telephone, dozens of service providers but only a few companies could survive consolidation and become the leader. The same was true for the third Industrial Revolution. Only a few companies could scale, only a few could survive to lead. Now the building blocks of the next revolution are locking into place. The (mumbles) will go to those who can operate at the scale. So, who could foresee the total integration of cloud, network, and the device, need to deliver intelligent transformation. Lenovo is that company. We are ready to scale. Next, our computing power. Computing power is provided in two ways. On one hand, the modern supercomputers are providing the brute force to quickly analyze the massive data like never before. On the other hand the cloud computing data centers with the server storage networking capabilities, and any computing IoT's, gateways, and miniservers are making computing available everywhere. Did you know, Lenovo is number one provider of super computers worldwide? 170 of the top 500 supercomputers, run on Lenovo. We hold 89 World Records in key workloads. We are number one in x86 server reliability for five years running, according to ITIC. a respected provider of industry research. We are also the fastest growing provider of hyperscale public cloud, hyper-converged and aggressively growing in edge computing. cur-ges target, we are expand on this point soon. And finally to run these individual nodes into our symphony, we must transform the data and utilize the computing power with advanced algorithms. Manufactured, industry maintenance, healthcare, education, retail, and more, so many industries are on the edge of intelligent transformation to improve efficiency and provide the better products and services. We are creating advanced algorithms and the big data tools combined with industry know-how to provide intelligent vertical solutions for several industries. In fact, we studied at Lenovo first. Our IT and research teams partnered with our global supply chain to develop an AI that improved our demand forecasting accuracy. Beyond managing our own supply chain we have offered our deep learning supply focused solution to other manufacturing companies to improve their efficiency. In the best case, we have improved the demand, focused the accuracy by 30 points to nearly 90 percent, for Baosteel, the largest of steel manufacturer in China, covering the world as well. Led by Lenovo research, we launched the industry-leading commercial ready AR headset, DaystAR, partnering with companies like the ones in this room. This technology is being used to revolutionize the way companies service utility, and even our jet engines. Using our workstations, servers, and award-winning imaging processing algorithms, we have partnered with hospitals to process complex CT scan data in minutes. So, this enable the doctors to more successfully detect the tumors, and it increases the success rate of cancer diagnosis all around the world. We are also piloting our smart IoT driven warehouse solution with one of the world's largest retail companies to greatly improve the efficiency. So, the opportunities are endless. This is where Lenovo will truly shine. When we combine the industry know-how of our customers with our end-to-end technology offerings, our intelligent vertical solutions like this are growing, which Kirk and Christian will share more. Now, what will drive this transformation even faster? The speed at which our networks operate, specifically 5G. You may know that Lenovo just launched the first-ever 5G smartphone, our Moto Z3, with the new 5G Moto model. We are partnering with multiple major network providers like Verizon, China Mobile. With the 5G model scheduled to ship early next year, we will be the first company to provide a 5G mobile experience to any users, customers. This is amazing innovation. You don't have to buy a new phone, just the 5G clip on. What can I say, except wow. (audience laughs) 5G is 10 times the fast faster than 4G. Its download speed will transform how people engage with the world, driverless car, new types of smart wearables, gaming, home security, industrial intelligence, all will be transformed. Finally, accelerating with partners, as ready as we are at Lenovo, we need partners to unlock our full potential, partners here to create with us the edge of the intelligent transformation. The opportunities of intelligent transformation are too profound, the scale is too vast. No company can drive it alone fully. We are eager to collaborate with all partners that can help bring our vision to life. We are dedicated to open partnerships, dedicated to cross-border collaboration, unify the standards, share the advantage, and market the synergies. We partner with the biggest names in the industry, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, and Disney. We also find and partner with the smaller innovators as well. We're building the ultimate partner experience, open, shared, collaborative, diverse. So, everything is in place for intelligent transformation on a global scale. Smart devices are everywhere, the infrastructure is in place, networks are accelerating, and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and Lenovo is at the center of it all. We are helping to drive change with the hundreds of companies, companies just like yours, every day. We are your partner for intelligent transformation. Transformation never stops. This is what you will hear from Kirk, including details about Lenovo NetApp global partnership we just announced this morning. We've made the investments in every single aspect of the technology. We have the end-to-end resources to meet your end-to-end needs. As you attend the breakout session this afternoon, I hope you see for yourself how much Lenovo has transformed as a company this past year, and how we truly are delivering a future of intelligent transformation. Now, let me invite to the stage Kirk Skaugen, our president of Data Center growth to tell you about the exciting transformation happening in the global Data C enter market. Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) >> Well, good morning. >> Good morning. >> Good morning! >> Good morning! >> Excellent, well, I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk about how we're transforming the Data Center and taking you as our customers through your own intelligent transformation journey. Last year I stood up here at Transform 1.0, and we were proud to announce the largest Data Center portfolio in Lenovo's history, so I thought I'd start today and talk about the portfolio and the progress that we've made over the last year, and the strategies that we have going forward in phase 2.0 of Lenovo's transformation to be one of the largest data center companies in the world. We had an audacious vision that we talked about last year, and that is to be the most trusted data center provider in the world, empowering customers through the new IT, intelligent transformation. And now as the world's largest supercomputer provider, giving something back to humanity, is very important this week with the hurricanes now hitting North Carolina's coast, but we take this most trusted aspect very seriously, whether it's delivering the highest quality products on time to you as customers with the highest levels of security, or whether it's how we partner with our channel partners and our suppliers each and every day. You know we're in a unique world where we're going from hundreds of millions of PCs, and then over the next 25 years to hundred billions of connected devices, so each and every one of you is going through this intelligent transformation journey, and in many aspects were very early in that cycle. And we're going to talk today about our role as the largest supercomputer provider, and how we're solving humanity's greatest challenges. Last year we talked about two special milestones, the 25th anniversary of ThinkPad, but also the 25th anniversary of Lenovo with our IBM heritage in x86 computing. I joined the workforce in 1992 out of college, and the IBM first personal server was launching at the same time with an OS2 operating system and a free mouse when you bought the server as a marketing campaign. (audience laughing) But what I want to be very clear today, is that the innovation engine is alive and well at Lenovo, and it's really built on the culture that we're building as a company. All of these awards at the bottom are things that we earned over the last year at Lenovo. As a Fortune now 240 company, larger than companies like Nike, or AMEX, or Coca-Cola. The one I'm probably most proud of is Forbes first list of the top 2,000 globally regarded companies. This was something where 15,000 respondents in 60 countries voted based on ethics, trustworthiness, social conduct, company as an employer, and the overall company performance, and Lenovo was ranked number 27 of 2000 companies by our peer group, but we also now one of-- (audience applauding) But we also got a perfect score in the LGBTQ Equality Index, exemplifying the diversity internally. We're number 82 in the top working companies for mothers, top working companies for fathers, top 100 companies for sustainability. If you saw that factory, it's filled with solar panels on the top of that. And now again, one of the top global brands in the world. So, innovation is built on a customer foundation of trust. We also said last year that we'd be crossing an amazing milestone. So we did, over the last 12 months ship our 20 millionth x86 server. So, thank you very much to our customers for this milestone. (audience applauding) So, let me recap some of the transformation elements that have happened over the last year. Last year I talked about a lot of brand confusion, because we had the ThinkServer brand from the legacy Lenovo, the System x, from IBM, we had acquired a number of networking companies, like BLADE Network Technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last year we've been ramping based on two brand structures, ThinkAgile for next generation IT, and all of our software-defined infrastructure products and ThinkSystem as the world's highest performance, highest reliable x86 server brand, but for servers, for storage, and for networking. We have transformed every single aspect of the customer experience. A year and a half ago, we had four different global channel programs around the world. Typically we're about twice the mix to our channel partners of any of our competitors, so this was really important to fix. We now have a single global Channel program, and have technically certified over 11,000 partners to be technical experts on our product line to deliver better solutions to our customer base. Gardner recently recognized Lenovo as the 26th ranked supply chain in the world. And, that's a pretty big honor, when you're up there with Amazon and Walmart and others, but in tech, we now are in the top five supply chains. You saw the factory network from YY, and today we'll be talking about product shipping in more than 160 countries, and I know there's people here that I've met already this morning, from India, from South Africa, from Brazil and China. We announced new Premier Support services, enabling you to go directly to local language support in nine languages in 49 countries in the world, going directly to a native speaker level three support engineer. And today we have more than 10,000 support specialists supporting our products in over 160 countries. We've delivered three times the number of engineered solutions to deliver a solutions orientation, whether it's on HANA, or SQL Server, or Oracle, et cetera, and we've completely reengaged our system integrator channel. Last year we had the CIO of DXE on stage, and here we're talking about more than 175 percent growth through our system integrator channel in the last year alone as we've brought that back and really built strong relationships there. So, thank you very much for amazing work here on the customer experience. (audience applauding) We also transformed our leadership. We thought it was extremely important with a focus on diversity, to have diverse talent from the legacy IBM, the legacy Lenovo, but also outside the industry. We made about 19 executive changes in the DCG group. This is the most senior leadership team within DCG, all which are newly on board, either from our outside competitors mainly over the last year. About 50 percent of our executives were now hired internally, 50 percent externally, and 31 percent of those new executives are diverse, representing the diversity of our global customer base and gender. So welcome, and most of them you're going to be able to meet over here in the breakout sessions later today. (audience applauding) But some things haven't changed, they're just keeping getting better within Lenovo. So, last year I got up and said we were committed with the new ThinkSystem brand to be a world performance leader. You're going to see that we're sponsoring Ducati for MotoGP. You saw the Ferrari out there with Formula One. That's not a surprise. We want the Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands to be synonymous with world record performance. So in the last year we've gone from 39 to 89 world records, and partners like Intel would tell you, we now have four times the number of world record workloads on Lenovo hardware than any other server company on the planet today, with more than 89 world records across HPC, Java, database, transaction processing, et cetera. And we're proud to have just brought on Doug Fisher from Intel Corporation who had about 10-17,000 people on any given year working for him in workload optimizations across all of our software. It's just another testament to the leadership team we're bringing in to keep focusing on world-class performance software and solutions. We also per ITIC, are the number one now in x86 server reliability five years running. So, this is a survey where CIOs are in a blind survey asked to submit their reliability of their uptime on their x86 server equipment over the last 365 days. And you can see from 2016 to 2017 the downtime, there was over four hours as noted by the 750 CXOs in more than 20 countries is about one percent for the Lenovo products, and is getting worse generation from generation as we went from Broadwell to Pearlie. So we're taking our reliability, which was really paramount in the IBM System X heritage, and ensuring that we don't just recognize high performance but we recognize the highest level of reliability for mission-critical workloads. And what that translates into is that we at once again have been ranked number one in customer satisfaction from you our customers in 19 of 22 attributes, in North America in 18 of 22. This is a survey by TVR across hundreds of customers of us and our top competitors. This is the ninth consecutive study that we've been ranked number one in customer satisfaction, so we're taking this extremely seriously, and in fact YY now has increased the compensation of every single Lenovo employee. Up to 40 percent of their compensation bonus this year is going to be based on customer metrics like quality, order to ship, and things of this nature. So, we're really putting every employee focused on customer centricity this year. So, the summary on Transform 1.0 is that every aspect of what you knew about Lenovo's data center group has transformed, from the culture to the branding to dedicated sales and marketing, supply chain and quality groups, to a worldwide channel program and certifications, to new system integrator relationships, and to the new leadership team. So, rather than me just talk about it, I thought I'd share a quick video about what we've done over the last year, if you could run the video please. Turn around for a second. (epic music) (audience applauds) Okay. So, thank you to all our customers that allowed us to publicly display their logos in that video. So, what that means for you as investors, and for the investor community out there is, that our customers have responded, that this year Gardner just published that we are the fastest growing server company in the top 10, with 39 percent growth quarter-on-quarter, and 49 percent growth year-on-year. If you look at the progress we've made since the transformation the last three quarters publicly, we've grown 17 percent, then 44 percent, then 68 percent year on year in revenue, and I can tell you this quarter I'm as confident as ever in the financials around the DCG group, and it hasn't been in one area. You're going to see breakout sessions from hyperscale, software-defined, and flash, which are all growing more than a 100 percent year-on-year, supercomputing which we'll talk about shortly, now number one, and then ultimately from profitability, delivering five consecutive quarters of pre-tax profit increase, so I think, thank you very much to the customer base who's been working with us through this transformation journey. So, you're here to really hear what's next on 2.0, and that's what I'm excited to talk about today. Last year I came up with an audacious goal that we would become the largest supercomputer company on the planet by 2020, and this graph represents since the acquisition of the IBM System x business how far we were behind being the number one supercomputer. When we started we were 182 positions behind, even with the acquisition for example of SGI from HP, we've now accomplished our goal actually two years ahead of time. We're now the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers, 117 on the list, are now Lenovo computers, and you saw in the video where the universities are said, but I think what I'm most proud of is when your customers rank you as the best. So the awards at the bottom here, are actually Readers Choice from the last International Supercomputing Show where the scientific researchers on these computers ranked their vendors, and we were actually rated the number one server technology in supercomputing with our ThinkSystem SD530, and the number one storage technology with our ThinkSystem DSS-G, but more importantly what we're doing with the technology. You're going to see we won best in life sciences, best in data analytics, and best in collaboration as well, so you're going to see all of that in our breakout sessions. As you saw in the video now, 17 of the top 25 research institutions in the world are now running Lenovo supercomputers. And again coming from Raleigh and watching that hurricane come across the Atlantic, there are eight supercomputers crunching all of those models you see from Germany to Malaysia to Canada, and we're happy to have a SciNet from University of Toronto here with us in our breakout session to talk about what they're doing on climate modeling as well. But we're not stopping there. We just announced our new Neptune warm water cooling technology, which won the International Supercomputing Vendor Showdown, the first time we've won that best of show in 25 years, and we've now installed this. We're building out LRZ in Germany, the first ever warm water cooling in Peking University, at the India Space Propulsion Laboratory, at the Malaysian Weather and Meteorological Society, at Uninett, at the largest supercomputer in Norway, T-Systems, University of Birmingham. This is truly amazing technology where we're actually using water to cool the machine to deliver a significantly more energy-efficient computer. Super important, when we're looking at global warming and some of the electric bills can be millions of dollars just for one computer, and could actually power a small city just with the technology from the computer. We've built AI centers now in Morrisville, Stuttgart, Taipei, and Beijing, where customers can bring their AI workloads in with experts from Intel, from Nvidia, from our FPGA partners, to work on their workloads, and how they can best implement artificial intelligence. And we also this year launched LICO which is Lenovo Intelligent Compute Orchestrator software, and it's a software solution that simplifies the management and use of distributed clusters in both HPC and AI model development. So, what it enables you to do is take a single cluster, and run both HPC and AI workloads on it simultaneously, delivering better TCO for your environment, so check out LICO as well. A lot of the customers here and Wall Street are very excited and using it already. And we talked about solving humanity's greatest challenges. In the breakout session, you're going to have a virtual reality experience where you're going to be able to walk through what as was just ranked the world's most beautiful data center, the Barcelona Supercomputer. So, you can actually walk through one of the largest supercomputers in the world from Barcelona. You can see the work we're doing with NC State where we're going to have to grow the food supply of the world by 50 percent, and there's not enough fresh water in the world in the right places to actually make all those crops grow between now and 2055, so you're going to see the progression of how they're mapping the entire globe and the water around the world, how to build out the crop population over time using AI. You're going to see our work with Vestas is this largest supercomputer provider in the wind turbine areas, how they're working on wind energy, and then with University College London, how they're working on some of the toughest particle physics calculations in the world. So again, lots of opportunity here. Take advantage of it in the breakout sessions. Okay, let me transition to hyperscale. So in hyperscale now, we have completely transformed our business model. We are now powering six of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world, which is a significant difference from where we were two years ago. And the reason we're doing that, is we've coined a term called ODM+. We believe that hyperscalers want more procurement power than an ODM, and Lenovo is doing about $18 billion of procurement a year. They want a broader global supply chain that they can get from a local system integrator. We're more than 160 countries around the world, but they want the same world-class quality and reliability like they get from an MNC. So, what we're doing now is instead of just taking off the shelf motherboards from somewhere, we're starting with a blank sheet of paper, we're working with the customer base on customized SKUs and you can see we already are developing 33 custom solutions for the largest hyperscalers in the world. And then we're not just running notebooks through this factory where YY said, we're running 37 notebook boards a minute, we're now putting in tens and tens and tens of thousands of server board capacity per month into this same factory, so absolutely we can compete with the most aggressive ODM's in the world, but it's not just putting these things in in the motherboard side, we're also building out these systems all around the world, India, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, China. This is an example of a new hyperscale customer we've had this last year, 34,000 servers we delivered in the first six months. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 68 days. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 35 days, with more than 99 percent on-time delivery to 35 data centers in 14 countries as diverse as South Africa, India, China, Brazil, et cetera. And I'm really ashamed to say it was 99.3, because we did have a forklift driver who rammed their forklift right through the middle of the one of the server racks. (audience laughing) At JFK Airport that we had to respond to, but I think this gives you a perspective of what it is to be a top five global supply chain and technology. So last year, I said we would invest significantly in IP, in joint ventures, and M and A to compete in software defined, in networking, and in storage, so I wanted to give you an update on that as well. Our newest software-defined partnership is with Cloudistics, enabling a fully composable cloud infrastructure. It's an exclusive agreement, you can see them here. I think Nag, our founder, is going to be here today, with a significant Lenovo investment in the company. So, this new ThinkAgile CP series delivers the simplicity of the public cloud, on-premise with exceptional support and a marketplace of essential enterprise applications all with a single click deployment. So simply put, we're delivering a private cloud with a premium experience. It's simple in that you need no specialists to deploy it. An IT generalist can set it up and manage it. It's agile in that you can provision dozens of workloads in minutes, and it's transformative in that you get all of the goodness of public cloud on-prem in a private cloud to unlock opportunity for use. So, we're extremely excited about the ThinkAgile CP series that's now shipping into the marketplace. Beyond that we're aggressively ramping, and we're either doubling, tripling, or quadrupling our market share as customers move from traditional server technology to software-defined technology. With Nutanix we've been public, growing about more than 150 percent year-on-year, with Nutanix as their fastest growing Nutanix partner, but today I want to set another audacious goal. I believe we cannot just be Nutanix's fastest growing partner but we can become their largest partner within two years. On Microsoft, we are already four times our market share on Azure stack of our traditional business. We were the first to launch our ThinkAgile on Broadwell and on Skylake with the Azure Stack Infrastructure. And on VMware we're about twice our market segment share. We were the first to deliver an Intel-optimized Optane-certified VSAN node. And with Optane technology, we're delivering 50 percent more VM density than any competitive SSD system in the marketplace, about 10 times lower latency, four times the performance of any SSD system out there, and Lenovo's first to market on that. And at VMworld you saw CEO Pat Gelsinger of VMware talked about project dimension, which is Edge as a service, and we're the only OEM beyond the Dell family that is participating today in project dimension. Beyond that you're going to see a number of other partnerships we have. I'm excited that we have the city of Bogota Columbia here, an eight million person city, where we announced a 3,000 camera video surveillance solution last month. With pivot three you're going to see city of Bogota in our breakout sessions. You're going to see a new partnership with Veeam around backup that's launching today. You're going to see partnerships with scale computing in IoT and hyper-converged infrastructure working on some of the largest retailers in the world. So again, everything out in the breakout session. Transitioning to storage and data management, it's been a great year for Lenovo, more than a 100 percent growth year-on-year, 2X market growth in flash arrays. IDC just reported 30 percent growth in storage, number one in price performance in the world and the best HPC storage product in the top 500 with our ThinkSystem DSS G, so strong coverage, but I'm excited today to announce for Transform 2.0 that Lenovo is launching the largest data management and storage portfolio in our 25-year data center history. (audience applauding) So a year ago, the largest server portfolio, becoming the largest fastest growing server OEM, today the largest storage portfolio, but as you saw this morning we're not doing it alone. Today Lenovo and NetApp, two global powerhouses are joining forces to deliver a multi-billion dollar global alliance in data management and storage to help customers through their intelligent transformation. As the fastest growing worldwide server leader and one of the fastest growing flash array and data management companies in the world, we're going to deliver more choice to customers than ever before, global scale that's never been seen, supply chain efficiencies, and rapidly accelerating innovation and solutions. So, let me unwrap this a little bit for you and talk about what we're announcing today. First, it's the largest portfolio in our history. You're going to see not just storage solutions launching today but a set of solution recipes from NetApp that are going to make Lenovo server and NetApp or Lenovo storage work better together. The announcement enables Lenovo to go from covering 15 percent of the global storage market to more than 90 percent of the global storage market and distribute these products in more than 160 countries around the world. So we're launching today, 10 new storage platforms, the ThinkSystem DE and ThinkSystem DM platforms. They're going to be centrally managed, so the same XClarity management that you've been using for server, you can now use across all of your storage platforms as well, and it'll be supported by the same 10,000 plus service personnel that are giving outstanding customer support to you today on the server side. And we didn't come up with this in the last month or the last quarter. We're announcing availability in ordering today and shipments tomorrow of the first products in this portfolio, so we're excited today that it's not just a future announcement but something you as customers can take advantage of immediately. (audience applauding) The second part of the announcement is we are announcing a joint venture in China. Not only will this be a multi-billion dollar global partnership, but Lenovo will be a 51 percent owner, NetApp a 49 percent owner of a new joint venture in China with the goal of becoming in the top three storage companies in the largest data and storage market in the world. We will deliver our R and D in China for China, pooling our IP and resources together, and delivering a single route to market through a complementary channel, not just in China but worldwide. And in the future I just want to tell everyone this is phase one. There is so much exciting stuff. We're going to be on the stage over the next year talking to you about around integrated solutions, next-generation technologies, and further synergies and collaborations. So, rather than just have me talk about it, I'd like to welcome to the stage our new partner NetApp and Brad Anderson who's the senior vice president and general manager of NetApp Cloud Infrastructure. (upbeat music) (audience applauding) >> Thank You Kirk. >> So Brad, we've known each other a long time. It's an exciting day. I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say NetApp's perspective on this announcement. >> Very good, thank you very much, Kirk. Kirk and I go back to I think 1994, so hey good morning and welcome. My name is Brad Anderson. I manage the Cloud Infrastructure Group at NetApp, and I am honored and privileged to be here at Lenovo Transform, particularly today on today's announcement. Now, you've heard a lot about digital transformation about how companies have to transform their IT to compete in today's global environment. And today's announcement with the partnership between NetApp and Lenovo is what that's all about. This is the joining of two global leaders bringing innovative technology in a simplified solution to help customers modernize their IT and accelerate their global digital transformations. Drawing on the strengths of both companies, Lenovo's high performance compute world-class supply chain, and NetApp's hybrid cloud data management, hybrid flash and all flash storage solutions and products. And both companies providing our customers with the global scale for them to be able to meet their transformation goals. At NetApp, we're very excited. This is a quote from George Kurian our CEO. George spent all day yesterday with YY and Kirk, and would have been here today if it hadn't been also our shareholders meeting in California, but I want to just convey how excited we are for all across NetApp with this partnership. This is a partnership between two companies with tremendous market momentum. Kirk took you through all the amazing results that Lenovo has accomplished, number one in supercomputing, number one in performance, number one in x86 reliability, number one in x86 customers sat, number five in supply chain, really impressive and congratulations. Like Lenovo, NetApp is also on a transformation journey, from a storage company to the data authority in hybrid cloud, and we've seen some pretty impressive momentum as well. Just last week we became number one in all flash arrays worldwide, catching EMC and Dell, and we plan to keep on going by them, as we help customers modernize their their data centers with cloud connected flash. We have strategic partnerships with the largest hyperscalers to provide cloud native data services around the globe and we are having success helping our customers build their own private clouds with just, with a new disruptive hyper-converged technology that allows them to operate just like hyperscalers. These three initiatives has fueled NetApp's transformation, and has enabled our customers to change the world with data. And oh by the way, it has also fueled us to have meet or have beaten Wall Street's expectations for nine quarters in a row. These are two companies with tremendous market momentum. We are also building this partnership for long term success. We think about this as phase one and there are two important components to phase one. Kirk took you through them but let me just review them. Part one, the establishment of a multi-year commitment and a collaboration agreement to offer Lenovo branded flash products globally, and as Kurt said in 160 countries. Part two, the formation of a joint venture in PRC, People's Republic of China, that will provide long term commitment, joint product development, and increase go-to-market investment to meet the unique needs to China. Both companies will put in storage technologies and storage expertise to form an independent JV that establishes a data management company in China for China. And while we can dream about what phase two looks like, our entire focus is on making phase one incredibly successful and I'm pleased to repeat what Kirk, is that the first products are orderable and shippable this week in 160 different countries, and you will see our two companies focusing on the here and now. On our joint go to market strategy, you'll see us working together to drive strategic alignment, focused execution, strong governance, and realistic expectations and milestones. And it starts with the success of our customers and our channel partners is job one. Enabling customers to modernize their legacy IT with complete data center solutions, ensuring that our customers get the best from both companies, new offerings the fuel business success, efficiencies to reinvest in game-changing initiatives, and new solutions for new mission-critical applications like data analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Channel partners are also top of mind for both our two companies. We are committed to the success of our existing and our future channel partners. For NetApp channel partners, it is new pathways to new segments and to new customers. For Lenovo's channel partners, it is the competitive weapons that now allows you to compete and more importantly win against Dell, EMC, and HP. And the good news for both companies is that our channel partner ecosystem is highly complementary with minimal overlap. Today is the first day of a very exciting partnership, of a partnership that will better serve our customers today and will provide new opportunities to both our companies and to our partners, new products to our customers globally and in China. I am personally very excited. I will be on the board of the JV. And so, I look forward to working with you, partnering with you and serving you as we go forward, and with that, I'd like to invite Kirk back up. (audience applauding) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Well, thank you, Brad. I think it's an exciting overview, and these products will be manufactured in China, in Mexico, in Hungary, and around the world, enabling this amazing supply chain we talked about to deliver in over 160 countries. So thank you Brad, thank you George, for the amazing partnership. So again, that's not all. In Transform 2.0, last year, we talked about the joint ventures that were coming. I want to give you a sneak peek at what you should expect at future Lenovo events around the world. We have this Transform in Beijing in a couple weeks. We'll then be repeating this in 20 different locations roughly around the world over the next year, and I'm excited probably more than ever about what else is coming. Let's talk about Telco 5G and network function virtualization. Today, Motorola phones are certified on 46 global networks. We launched the world's first 5G upgradable phone here in the United States with Verizon. Lenovo DCG sells to 58 telecommunication providers around the world. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai, you saw China Telecom and China Mobile in the Lenovo booth, China Telecom showing a video broadband remote access server, a VBRAS, with video streaming demonstrations with 2x less jitter than they had seen before. You saw China Mobile with a virtual remote access network, a VRAN, with greater than 10 times the throughput and 10x lower latency running on Lenovo. And this year, we'll be launching a new NFV company, a software company in China for China to drive the entire NFV stack, delivering not just hardware solutions, but software solutions, and we've recently hired a new CEO. You're going to hear more about that over the next several quarters. Very exciting as we try to drive new economics into the networks to deliver these 20 billion devices. We're going to need new economics that I think Lenovo can uniquely deliver. The second on IoT and edge, we've integrated on the device side into our intelligent devices group. With everything that's going to consume electricity computes and communicates, Lenovo is in a unique position on the device side to take advantage of the communications from Motorola and being one of the largest device companies in the world. But this year, we're also going to roll out a comprehensive set of edge gateways and ruggedized industrial servers and edge servers and ISP appliances for the edge and for IoT. So look for that as well. And then lastly, as a service, you're going to see Lenovo delivering hardware as a service, device as a service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and hardware as a service, not just as a glorified leasing contract, but with IP, we've developed true flexible metering capability that enables you to scale up and scale down freely and paying strictly based on usage, and we'll be having those announcements within this fiscal year. So Transform 2.0, lots to talk about, NetApp the big news of the day, but a lot more to come over the next year from the Data Center group. So in summary, I'm excited that we have a lot of customers that are going to be on stage with us that you saw in the video. Lots of testimonials so that you can talk to colleagues of yourself. Alamos Gold from Canada, a Canadian gold producer, Caligo for data optimization and privacy, SciNet, the largest supercomputer we've ever put into North America, and the largest in Canada at the University of Toronto will be here talking about climate change. City of Bogota again with our hyper-converged solutions around smart city putting in 3,000 cameras for criminal detection, license plate detection, et cetera, and then more from a channel mid market perspective, Jerry's Foods, which is from my home state of Wisconsin, and Minnesota which has about 57 stores in the specialty foods market, and how they're leveraging our IoT solutions as well. So again, about five times the number of demos that we had last year. So in summary, first and foremost to the customers, thank you for your business. It's been a great journey and I think we're on a tremendous role. You saw from last year, we're trying to build credibility with you. After the largest server portfolio, we're now the fastest-growing server OEM per Gardner, number one in performance, number one in reliability, number one in customer satisfaction, number one in supercomputing. Today, the largest storage portfolio in our history, with the goal of becoming the fastest growing storage company in the world, top three in China, multibillion-dollar collaboration with NetApp. And the transformation is going to continue with new edge gateways, edge servers, NFV solutions, telecommunications infrastructure, and hardware as a service with dynamic metering. So thank you for your time. I've looked forward to meeting many of you over the next day. We appreciate your business, and with that, I'd like to bring up Rod Lappen to introduce our next speaker. Rod? (audience applauding) >> Thanks, boss, well done. Alright ladies and gentlemen. No real secret there. I think we've heard why I might talk about the fourth Industrial Revolution in data and exactly what's going on with that. You've heard Kirk with some amazing announcements, obviously now with our NetApp partnership, talk about 5G, NFV, cloud, artificial intelligence, I think we've hit just about all the key hot topics. It's with great pleasure that I now bring up on stage Mr. Christian Teismann, our senior vice president and general manager of commercial business for both our PCs and our IoT business, so Christian Teismann. (techno music) Here, take that. >> Thank you. I think I'll need that. >> Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, you and I last year, we had a bit of a chat about being in New York. >> Exports. >> You were an expat in New York for a long time. >> That's true. >> And now, you've moved from New York. You're in Munich? >> Yep. >> How does that feel? >> Well Munich is a wonderful city, and it's a great place to live and raise kids, but you know there's no place in the world like New York. >> Right. >> And I miss it a lot, quite frankly. >> So what exactly do you miss in New York? >> Well there's a lot of things in New York that are unique, but I know you spent some time in Japan, but I still believe the best sushi in the world is still in New York City. (all laughing) >> I will beg to differ. I will beg to differ. I think Mr. Guchi-san from Softbank is here somewhere. He will get up an argue very quickly that Japan definitely has better sushi than New York. But obviously you know, it's a very very special place, and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. What about Munich? Anything else that you like in Munich? >> Well I mean in Munich, we have pork knuckles. >> Pork knuckles. (Christian laughing) Very similar sushi. >> What is also very fantastic, but we have the real, the real Oktoberfest in Munich, and it starts next week, mid-September, and I think it's unique in the world. So it's very special as well. >> Oktoberfest. >> Yes. >> Unfortunately, I'm not going this year, 'cause you didn't invite me, but-- (audience chuckling) How about, I think you've got a bit of a secret in relation to Oktoberfest, probably not in Munich, however. >> It's a secret, yes, but-- >> Are you going to share? >> Well I mean-- >> See how I'm putting you on the spot? >> In the 10 years, while living here in New York, I was a regular visitor of the Oktoberfest at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, where I actually met my wife, and she's German. >> Very good. So, how about a big round of applause? (audience applauding) Not so much for Christian, but more I think, obviously for his wife, who obviously had been drinking and consequently ended up with you. (all laughing) See you later, mate. >> That's the beauty about Oktoberfest, but yes. So first of all, good morning to everybody, and great to be back here in New York for a second Transform event. New York clearly is the melting pot of the world in terms of culture, nations, but also business professionals from all kind of different industries, and having this event here in New York City I believe is manifesting what we are trying to do here at Lenovo, is transform every aspect of our business and helping our customers on the journey of intelligent transformation. Last year, in our transformation on the device business, I talked about how the PC is transforming to personalized computing, and we've made a lot of progress in that journey over the last 12 months. One major change that we have made is we combined all our device business under one roof. So basically PCs, smart devices, and smart phones are now under the roof and under the intelligent device group. But from my perspective makes a lot of sense, because at the end of the day, all devices connect in the modern world into the cloud and are operating in a seamless way. But we are also moving from a device business what is mainly a hardware focus historically, more and more also into a solutions business, and I will give you during my speech a little bit of a sense of what we are trying to do, as we are trying to bring all these components closer together, and specifically also with our strengths on the data center side really build end-to-end customer solution. Ultimately, what we want to do is make our business, our customer's businesses faster, safer, and ultimately smarter as well. So I want to look a little bit back, because I really believe it's important to understand what's going on today on the device side. Many of us have still grown up with phones with terminals, ultimately getting their first desktop, their first laptop, their first mobile phone, and ultimately smartphone. Emails and internet improved our speed, how we could operate together, but still we were defined by linear technology advances. Today, the world has changed completely. Technology itself is not a limiting factor anymore. It is how we use technology going forward. The Internet is pervasive, and we are not yet there that we are always connected, but we are nearly always connected, and we are moving to the stage, that everything is getting connected all the time. Sharing experiences is the most driving force in our behavior. In our private life, sharing pictures, videos constantly, real-time around the world, with our friends and with our family, and you see the same behavior actually happening in the business life as well. Collaboration is the number-one topic if it comes down to workplace, and video and instant messaging, things that are coming from the consumer side are dominating the way we are operating in the commercial business as well. Most important beside technology, that a new generation of workforce has completely changed the way we are working. As the famous workforce the first generation of Millennials that have now fully entered in the global workforce, and the next generation, it's called Generation Z, is already starting to enter the global workforce. By 2025, 75 percent of the world's workforce will be composed out of two of these generations. Why is this so important? These two generations have been growing up using state-of-the-art IT technology during their private life, during their education, school and study, and are taking these learnings and taking these behaviors in the commercial workspace. And this is the number one force of change that we are seeing in the moment. Diverse workforces are driving this change in the IT spectrum, and for years in many of our customers' focus was their customer focus. Customer experience also in Lenovo is the most important thing, but we've realized that our own human capital is equally valuable in our customer relationships, and employee experience is becoming a very important thing for many of our customers, and equally for Lenovo as well. As you have heard YY, as we heard from YY, Lenovo is focused on intelligent transformation. What that means for us in the intelligent device business is ultimately starting with putting intelligence in all of our devices, smartify every single one of our devices, adding value to our customers, traditionally IT departments, but also focusing on their end users and building products that make their end users more productive. And as a world leader in commercial devices with more than 33 percent market share, we can solve problems been even better than any other company in the world. So, let's talk about transformation of productivity first. We are in a device-led world. Everything we do is connected. There's more interaction with devices than ever, but also with spaces who are increasingly becoming smart and intelligent. YY said it, by 2020 we have more than 20 billion connected devices in the world, and it will grow exponentially from there on. And users have unique personal choices for technology, and that's very important to recognize, and we call this concept a digital wardrobe. And it means that every single end-user in the commercial business is composing his personal wardrobe on an ongoing basis and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and based where he's going and based what task he is doing. I would ask all of you to put out all the devices you're carrying in your pockets and in your bags. You will see a lot of you are using phones, tablets, laptops, but also cameras and even smartwatches. They're all different, but they have one underlying technology that is bringing it all together. Recognizing digital wardrobe dynamics is a core factor for us to put all the devices under one roof in IDG, one business group that is dedicated to end-user solutions across mobile, PC, but also software services and imaging, to emerging technologies like AR, VR, IoT, and ultimately a AI as well. A couple of years back there was a big debate around bring-your-own-device, what was called consumerization. Today consumerization does not exist anymore, because consumerization has happened into every single device we build in our commercial business. End users and commercial customers today do expect superior display performance, superior audio, microphone, voice, and touch quality, and have it all connected and working seamlessly together in an ease of use space. We are already deep in the journey of personalized computing today. But the center point of it has been for the last 25 years, the mobile PC, that we have perfected over the last 25 years, and has been the undisputed leader in mobility computing. We believe in the commercial business, the ThinkPad is still the core device of a digital wardrobe, and we continue to drive the success of the ThinkPad in the marketplace. We've sold more than 140 million over the last 26 years, and even last year we exceeded nearly 11 million units. That is about 21 ThinkPads per minute, or one Thinkpad every three seconds that we are shipping out in the market. It's the number one commercial PC in the world. It has gotten countless awards but we felt last year after Transform we need to build a step further, in really tailoring the ThinkPad towards the need of the future. So, we announced a new line of X1 Carbon and Yoga at CES the Consumer Electronics Show. And the reason is not we want to sell to consumer, but that we do recognize that a lot of CIOs and IT decision makers need to understand what consumers are really doing in terms of technology to make them successful. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> When you're the number one business laptop of all time, your only competition is yourself. (wall shattering) And, that's different. Different, like resisting heat, ice, dust, and spills. Different, like sharper, brighter OLA display. The trackpoint that reinvented controls, and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, built by an engineering and design team, doing the impossible for the last 25 years. This is the number one business laptop of all time, but it's not a laptop. It's a ThinkPad. (audience applauding) >> Thank you very much. And we are very proud that Lenovo ThinkPad has been selected as the best laptop in the world in the second year in a row. I think it's a wonderful tribute to what our engineers have been done on this one. And users do want awesome displays. They want the best possible audio, voice, and touch control, but some users they want more. What they want is super power, and I'm really proud to announce our newest member of the X1 family, and that's the X1 extreme. It's exceptionally featured. It has six core I9 intel chipset, the highest performance you get in the commercial space. It has Nvidia XTX graphic, it is a 4K UHD display with HDR with Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos Audio, two terabyte in SSD, so it is really the absolute Ferrari in terms of building high performance commercial computer. Of course it has touch and voice, but it is one thing. It has so much performance that it serves also a purpose that is not typical for commercial, and I know there's a lot of secret gamers also here in this room. So you see, by really bringing technology together in the commercial space, you're creating productivity solutions of one of a kind. But there's another category of products from a productivity perspective that is incredibly important in our commercial business, and that is the workstation business . Clearly workstations are very specifically designed computers for very advanced high-performance workloads, serving designers, architects, researchers, developers, or data analysts. And power and performance is not just about the performance itself. It has to be tailored towards the specific use case, and traditionally these products have a similar size, like a server. They are running on Intel Xeon technology, and they are equally complex to manufacture. We have now created a new category as the ultra mobile workstation, and I'm very proud that we can announce here the lightest mobile workstation in the industry. It is so powerful that it really can run AI and big data analysis. And with this performance you can go really close where you need this power, to the sensors, into the cars, or into the manufacturing places where you not only wannna read the sensors but get real-time analytics out of these sensors. To build a machine like this one you need customers who are really challenging you to the limit. and we're very happy that we had a customer who went on this journey with us, and ultimately jointly with us created this product. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> My world involves pathfinding both the hardware needs to the various work sites throughout the company, and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, laptop, or workstation to match those needs. My first impressions when I first seen the ThinkPad P1 was I didn't actually believe that we could get everything that I was asked for inside something as small and light in comparison to other mobile workstations. That was one of the I can't believe this is real sort of moments for me. (engine roars) >> Well, it's better than general when you're going around in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, and going on a track is not necessarily the best bet, so having a lightweight very powerful laptop is extremely useful. It can take a Xeon processor, which can support ECC from when we try to load a full car, and when we're analyzing live simulation results. through and RCFT post processor or example. It needs a pretty powerful machine. >> It's come a long way to be able to deliver this. I hate to use the word game changer, but it is that for us. >> Aston Martin has got a lot of different projects going. There's some pretty exciting projects and a pretty versatile range coming out. Having Lenovo as a partner is certainly going to ensure that future. (engine roars) (audience applauds) >> So, don't you think the Aston Martin design and the ThinkPad design fit very well together? (audience laughs) So if Q, would get a new laptop, I think you would get a ThinkPad X P1. So, I want to switch gears a little bit, and go into something in terms of productivity that is not necessarily on top of the mind or every end user but I believe it's on top of the mind of every C-level executive and of every CEO. Security is the number one threat in terms of potential risk in your business and the cost of cybersecurity is estimated by 2020 around six trillion dollars. That's more than the GDP of Japan and we've seen a significant amount of data breach incidents already this years. Now, they're threatening to take companies out of business and that are threatening companies to lose a huge amount of sensitive customer data or internal data. At Lenovo, we are taking security very, very seriously, and we run a very deep analysis, around our own security capabilities in the products that we are building. And we are announcing today a new brand under the Think umbrella that is called ThinkShield. Our goal is to build the world's most secure PC, and ultimately the most secure devices in the industry. And when we looked at this end-to-end, there is no silver bullet around security. You have to go through every aspect where security breaches can potentially happen. That is why we have changed the whole organization, how we look at security in our device business, and really have it grouped under one complete ecosystem of solutions, Security is always something where you constantly are getting challenged with the next potential breach the next potential technology flaw. As we keep innovating and as we keep integrating, a lot of our partners' software and hardware components into our products. So for us, it's really very important that we partner with companies like Intel, Microsoft, Coronet, Absolute, and many others to really as an example to drive full encryption on all the data seamlessly, to have multi-factor authentication to protect your users' identity, to protect you in unsecured Wi-Fi locations, or even simple things like innovation on the device itself, to and an example protect the camera, against usage with a little thing like a thinkShutter that you can shut off the camera. SO what I want to show you here, is this is the full portfolio of ThinkShield that we are announcing today. This is clearly not something I can even read to you today, but I believe it shows you the breadth of security management that we are announcing today. There are four key pillars in managing security end-to-end. The first one is your data, and this has a lot of aspects around the hardware and the software itself. The second is identity. The third is the security around online, and ultimately the device itself. So, there is a breakout on security and ThinkShield today, available in the afternoon, and encourage you to really take a deeper look at this one. The first pillar around productivity was the device, and around the device. The second major pillar that we are seeing in terms of intelligent transformation is the workspace itself. Employees of a new generation have a very different habit how they work. They split their time between travel, working remotely but if they do come in the office, they expect a very different office environment than what they've seen in the past in cubicles or small offices. They come into the office to collaborate, and they want to create ideas, and they really work in cross-functional teams, and they want to do it instantly. And what we've seen is there is a huge amount of investment that companies are doing today in reconfiguring real estate reconfiguring offices. And most of these kind of things are moving to a digital platform. And what we are doing, is we want to build an entire set of solutions that are just focused on making the workspace more productive for remote workforce, and to create technology that allow people to work anywhere and connect instantly. And the core of this is that we need to be, the productivity of the employee as high as possible, and make it for him as easy as possible to use these kind of technologies. Last year in Transform, I announced that we will enter the smart office space. By the end of last year, we brought the first product into the market. It's called the Hub 500. It's already deployed in thousands of our customers, and it's uniquely focused on Microsoft Skype for Business, and making meeting instantly happen. And the product is very successful in the market. What we are announcing today is the next generation of this product, what is the Hub 700, what has a fantastic audio quality. It has far few microphones, and it is usable in small office environment, as well as in major conference rooms, but the most important part of this new announcement is that we are also announcing a software platform, and this software platform allows you to run multiple video conferencing software solutions on the same platform. Many of you may have standardized for one software solution or for another one, but as you are moving in a world of collaborating instantly with partners, customers, suppliers, you always will face multiple software standards in your company, and Lenovo is uniquely positioned but providing a middleware platform for the device to really enable multiple of these UX interfaces. And there's more to come and we will add additional UX interfaces on an ongoing base, based on our customer requirements. But this software does not only help to create a better experience and a higher productivity in the conference room or the huddle room itself. It really will allow you ultimately to manage all your conference rooms in the company in one instance. And you can run AI technologies around how to increase productivity utilization of your entire conference room ecosystem in your company. You will see a lot more devices coming from the node in this space, around intelligent screens, cameras, and so on, and so on. The idea is really that Lenovo will become a core provider in the whole movement into the smart office space. But it's great if you have hardware and software that is really supporting the approach of modern IT, but one component that Kirk also mentioned is absolutely critical, that we are providing this to you in an as a service approach. Get it what you want, when you need it, and pay it in the amount that you're really using it. And within UIT there is also I think a new philosophy around IT management, where you're much more focused on the value that you are consuming instead of investing into technology. We are launched as a service two years back and we already have a significant number of customers running PC as a service, but we believe as a service will stretch far more than just the PC device. It will go into categories like smart office. It might go even into categories like phone, and it will definitely go also in categories like storage and server in terms of capacity management. I want to highlight three offerings that we are also displaying today that are sort of building blocks in terms of how we really run as a service. The first one is that we collaborated intensively over the last year with Microsoft to be the launch pilot for their Autopilot offering, basically deploying images easily in the same approach like you would deploy a new phone on the network. The purpose really is to make new imaging and enabling new PC as seamless as it's used to be in the phone industry, and we have a complete set of offerings, and already a significant number customers have deployed Autopilot with Lenovo. The second major offering is Premier Support, like in the in the server business, where Premier Support is absolutely critical to run critical infrastructure, we see a lot of our customers do want to have Premier Support for their end users, so they can be back into work basically instantly, and that you have the highest possible instant repair on every single device. And then finally we have a significant amount of time invested into understanding how the software as a service really can get into one philosophy. And many of you already are consuming software as a service in many different contracts from many different vendors, but what we've created is one platform that really can manage this all together. All these things are the foundation for a device as a service offering that really can manage this end-to-end. So, implementing an intelligent workplace can be really a daunting prospect depending on where you're starting from, and how big your company ultimately is. But how do you manage the transformation of technology workspace if you're present in 50 or more countries and you run an infrastructure for more than 100,000 people? Michelin, famous for their tires, infamous for their Michelin star restaurant rating, especially in New York, and instantly recognizable by the Michelin Man, has just doing that. Please welcome with me Damon McIntyre from Michelin to talk to us about the challenges and transforming collaboration and productivity. (audience applauding) (electronic dance music) Thank you, David. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> We on? >> So, how do you feel here? >> Well good, I want to thank you first of all for your partnership and the devices you create that helped us design, manufacture, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? I just had to say it and put out there, alright. And I was wondering, were those Michelin tires on that Aston Martin? >> I'm pretty sure there is no other tire that would fit to that. >> Yeah, no, thank you, thank you again, and thank you for the introduction. >> So, when we talk about the transformation happening really in the workplace, the most tangible transformation that you actually see is the drastic change that companies are doing physically. They're breaking down walls. They're removing cubes, and they're moving to flexible layouts, new desks, new huddle rooms, open spaces, but the underlying technology for that is clearly not so visible very often. So, tell us about Michelin's strategy, and the technology you are deploying to really enable this corporation. >> So we, so let me give a little bit a history about the company to understand the daunting tasks that we had before us. So we have over 114,000 people in the company under 170 nationalities, okay? If you go to the corporate office in France, it's Clermont. It's about 3,000 executives and directors, and what have you in the marketing, sales, all the way up to the chain of the global CIO, right? Inside of the Americas, we merged in Americas about three years ago. Now we have the Americas zone. There's about 28,000 employees across the Americas, so it's really, it's really hard in a lot of cases. You start looking at the different areas that you lose time, and you lose you know, your productivity and what have you, so there, it's when we looked at different aspects of how we were going to manage the meeting rooms, right? because we have opened up our areas of workspace, our CIO, CEOs in our zones will no longer have an office. They'll sit out in front of everybody else and mingle with the crowd. So, how do you take those spaces that were originally used by an individual but now turn them into like meeting rooms? So, we went through a large process, and looked at the Hub 500, and that really met our needs, because at the end of the day what we noticed was, it was it was just it just worked, okay? We've just added it to the catalog, so we're going to be deploying it very soon, and I just want to again point that I know everybody struggles with this, and if you look at all the minutes that you lose in starting up a meeting, and we know you know what I'm talking about when I say this, it equates to many many many dollars, okay? And so at the end the day, this product helps us to be more efficient in starting up the meeting, and more productive during the meeting. >> Okay, it's very good to hear. Another major trend we are seeing in IT departments is taking a more hands-off approach to hardware. We're seeing new technologies enable IT to create a more efficient model, how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, and how they are ultimately supporting themselves. So what's your strategy around the lifecycle management of the devices? >> So yeah you mentioned, again, we'll go back to the 114,000 employees in the company, right? You imagine looking at all the devices we use. I'm not going to get into the number of devices we have, but we have a set number that we use, and we have to go through a process of deploying these devices, which we right now service our own image. We build our images, we service them through our help desk and all that process, and we go through it. If you imagine deploying 25,000 PCs in a year, okay? The time and the daunting task that's behind all that, you can probably add up to 20 or 30 people just full-time doing that, okay? So, with partnering with Lenovo and their excellent technology, their technical teams, and putting together the whole process of how we do imaging, it now lifts that burden off of our folks, and it shifts it into a more automated process through the cloud, okay? And, it's with the Autopilot on the end of the project, we'll have Autopilot fully engaged, but what I really appreciate is how Lenovo really, really kind of got with us, and partnered with us for the whole process. I mean it wasn't just a partner between Michelin and Lenovo. Microsoft was also partnered during that whole process, and it really was a good project that we put together, and we hope to have something in a full production mode next year for sure. >> So, David thank you very, very much to be here with us on stage. What I really want to say, customers like you, who are always challenging us on every single aspect of our capabilities really do make the big difference for us to get better every single day and we really appreciate the partnership. >> Yeah, and I would like to say this is that I am, I'm doing what he's exactly said he just said. I am challenging Lenovo to show us how we can innovate in our work space with your devices, right? That's a challenge, and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. We've done some in the past, but I'm really going to challenge you, and my whole aspect about how to do that is bring you into our workspace. Show you how we make how we go through the process of making tires and all that process, and how we distribute those tires, so you can brainstorm, come back to the table and say, here's a device that can do exactly what you're doing right now, better, more efficient, and save money, so thank you. >> Thank you very much, David. (audience applauding) Well it's sometimes really refreshing to get a very challenging customers feedback. And you know, we will continue to grow this business together, and I'm very confident that your challenge will ultimately help to make our products even more seamless together. So, as we now covered productivity and how we are really improving our devices itself, and the transformation around the workplace, there is one pillar left I want to talk about, and that's really, how do we make businesses smarter than ever? What that really means is, that we are on a journey on trying to understand our customer's business, deeper than ever, understanding our customer's processes even better than ever, and trying to understand how we can help our customers to become more competitive by injecting state-of-the-art technology in this intelligent transformation process, into core processes. But this cannot be done without talking about a fundamental and that is the journey towards 5G. I really believe that 5G is changing everything the way we are operating devices today, because they will be connected in a way like it has never done before. YY talked about you know, 20 times 10 times the amount of performance. There are other studies that talk about even 200 times the performance, how you can use these devices. What it will lead to ultimately is that we will build devices that will be always connected to the cloud. And, we are preparing for this, and Kirk already talked about, and how many operators in the world we already present with our Moto phones, with how many Telcos we are working already on the backend, and we are working on the device side on integrating 5G basically into every single one of our product in the future. One of the areas that will benefit hugely from always connected is the world of virtual reality and augmented reality. And I'm going to pick here one example, and that is that we have created a commercial VR solution for classrooms and education, and basically using consumer type of product like our Mirage Solo with Daydream and put a solution around this one that enables teachers and schools to use these products in the classroom experience. So, students now can have immersive learning. They can studying sciences. They can look at environmental issues. They can exploring their careers, or they can even taking a tour in the next college they're going to go after this one. And no matter what grade level, this is how people will continue to learn in the future. It's quite a departure from the old world of textbooks. In our area that we are looking is IoT, And as YY already elaborated, we are clearly learning from our own processes around how we improve our supply chain and manufacturing and how we improve also retail experience and warehousing, and we are working with some of the largest companies in the world on pilots, on deploying IoT solutions to make their businesses, their processes, and their businesses, you know, more competitive, and some of them you can see in the demo environment. Lenovo itself already is managing 55 million devices in an IoT fashion connecting to our own cloud, and constantly improving the experience by learning from the behavior of these devices in an IoT way, and we are collecting significant amount of data to really improve the performance of these systems and our future generations of products on a ongoing base. We have a very strong partnership with a company called ADLINK from Taiwan that is one of the leading manufacturers of manufacturing PC and hardened devices to create solutions on the IoT platform. The next area that we are very actively investing in is commercial augmented reality. I believe augmented reality has by far more opportunity in commercial than virtual reality, because it has the potential to ultimately improve every single business process of commercial customers. Imagine in the future how complex surgeries can be simplified by basically having real-time augmented reality information about the surgery, by having people connecting into a virtual surgery, and supporting the surgery around the world. Visit a furniture store in the future and see how this furniture looks in your home instantly. Doing some maintenance on some devices yourself by just calling the company and getting an online manual into an augmented reality device. Lenovo is exploring all kinds of possibilities, and you will see a solution very soon from Lenovo. Early when we talked about smart office, I talked about the importance of creating a software platform that really run all these use cases for a smart office. We are creating a similar platform for augmented reality where companies can develop and run all their argumented reality use cases. So you will see that early in 2019 we will announce an augmented reality device, as well as an augmented reality platform. So, I know you're very interested on what exactly we are rolling out, so we will have a first prototype view available there. It's still a codename project on the horizon, and we will announce it ultimately in 2019, but I think it's good for you to take a look what we are doing here. So, I just wanted to give you a peek on what we are working beyond smart office and the device productivity in terms of really how we make businesses smarter. It's really about increasing productivity, providing you the most secure solutions, increase workplace collaboration, increase IT efficiency, using new computing devices and software and services to make business smarter in the future. There's no other company that will enable to offer what we do in commercial. No company has the breadth of commercial devices, software solutions, and the same data center capabilities, and no other company can do more for your intelligent transformation than Lenovo. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) >> Thanks mate, give me that. I need that. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are done. So firstly, I've got a couple of little housekeeping pieces at the end of this and then we can go straight into going and experiencing some of the technology we've got on the left-hand side of the room here. So, I want to thank Christian obviously. Christian, awesome as always, some great announcements there. I love the P1. I actually like the Aston Martin a little bit better, but I'll take either if you want to give me one for free. I'll take it. We heard from YY obviously about the industry and how the the fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting us all from a digital transformation perspective, and obviously Kirk on DCG, the great NetApp announcement, which is going to be really exciting, actually that Twitter and some of the social media panels are absolutely going crazy, so it's good to see that the industry is really taking some impact. Some of the publications are really great, so thank you for the media who are obviously in the room publishing right no. But now, I really want to say it's all of your turn. So, all of you up the back there who are having coffee, it's your turn now. I want everyone who's sitting down here after this event move into there, and really take advantage of the 15 breakouts that we've got set there. There are four breakout sessions from a time perspective. I want to try and get you all out there at least to use up three of them and use your fourth one to get out and actually experience some of the technology. So, you've got four breakout sessions. A lot of the breakout sessions are actually done twice. If you have not downloaded the app, please download the app so you can actually see what time things are going on and make sure you're registering correctly. There's a lot of great experience of stuff out there for you to go do. I've got one quick video to show you on some of the technology we've got and then we're about to close. Alright, here we are acting crazy. Now, you can see obviously, artificial intelligence machine learning in the browser. God, I hate that dance, I'm not a Millenial at all. It's effectively going to be implemented by healthcare. I want you to come around and test that out. Look at these two guys. This looks like a Lenovo management meeting to be honest with you. These two guys are actually concentrating, using their brain power to race each others in cars. You got to come past and give that a try. Give that a try obviously. Fantastic event here, lots of technology for you to experience, and great partners that have been involved as well. And so, from a Lenovo perspective, we've had some great alliance partners contribute, including obviously our number one partner, Intel, who's been a really big loyal contributor to us, and been a real part of our success here at Transform. Excellent, so please, you've just seen a little bit of tech out there that you can go and play with. I really want you, I mean go put on those black things, like Scott Hawkins our chief marketing officer from Lenovo's DCG business was doing and racing around this little car with his concentration not using his hands. He said it's really good actually, but as soon as someone comes up to speak to him, his car stops, so you got to try and do better. You got to try and prove if you can multitask or not. Get up there and concentrate and talk at the same time. 62 different breakouts up there. I'm not going to go into too much detai, but you can see we've got a very, very unusual numbering system, 18 to 18.8. I think over here we've got a 4849. There's a 4114. And then up here we've got a 46.1 and a 46.2. So, you need the decoder ring to be able to understand it. Get over there have a lot of fun. Remember the boat leaves today at 4:00 o'clock, right behind us at the pier right behind us here. There's 400 of us registered. Go onto the app and let us know if there's more people coming. It's going to be a great event out there on the Hudson River. Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote. I want to thank you all for being patient and thank all of our speakers today. Have a great have a great day, thank you very much. 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(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From the VMware campus in Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE covering Women Transforming Technology. >> Hi, I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE. We are on the ground at VMware in Palo Alto, with the third annual Women Transforming Technology event and I'm very excited to be joined by the CEO of Women Who Code, Alaina Percival. Alaina, nice to have you here. >> Hi, thank you very much for having me. >> So tell me about Women Who Code. You co-founded it a while ago. Give us a little bit of a background about what your organization is. >> Yeah, Women Who Code is the largest and most active community of technical women in the world. Our mission is to see women excel in technology careers, and that's because we have a vision of women becoming executives, technical executives, founders, board members, and of course through a pathway of being software engineers. >> So Women Who Code started, originally, back in 2011 as a community. Tell me a little bit about the genesis of that and what you've transformed it into, today. >> Yeah, it started off as a local community, and it was just a space to get together with other technologists, and what we started to see is it was this thing that was just fun and kind of our little secret for, you know, that first year, and we realized-- at one point I said, "Hey other women around the world deserve to have this, as well." And, that's really where the focus to grow globally came about and focus on women: building on their skills and building up their leadership skills and if you invite software engineers to a leadership and networking event, they won't come, but we hold an average of five free technical events every single day, throughout the world, and at those events, they're primarily technology events where we weave in a little bit of leadership and networking, but it feels authentic and its an event that software engineers are excited to be. >> Five events per day, that's incredible. So, VMware became a partner back in 2015, when you had around nine or 10,000 members. Now, today, its over 137,000 global members. Talk to us about the strategic partnership with VMware and what that's enabled Women Who Code to achieve. >> Yeah, we can't accomplish what we accomplish without the partners that support us. We try not to charge our members for anything. So, those 1,900 events we put on last year were free. We've given away $2.8 million in our weekly newsletter of scholarships, and conference tickets, encouraging our community to go out there in the broader tech community and we can do those things, we can launch in the cities that we can launch in, we can elevate women as leaders around the world, but we can only do that through partners, and VMware is one of our founding partners and what that took is someone in executive leadership to see who we could be, because we're very small, and we were very local when we came to VMware and talked to them about what our vision was and what we were going to accomplish and I say now, what I said back then, is we've only scratched the surface of what we are going to achieve. >> There's some commonalities, some parallels that Women Who Code has with VMware. You know, this is the third annual Women Transforming Technology event at VMware here and its sold out within hours. Walking into that room it's very empowering. The excitement and the passion are there and you just start to feel a sense of community. Tell me about the parallels that you see with VMware and some of the visions that they share about, not just raising awareness for the diversity gaps and challenges, but also taking a stand to be accountable in that space. And what they announced this morning with Stanford, with this massive $15 million investment in this Innovation Lab of actually wanting to dig deep into these barriers to help identify them to help eradicate them. What are some of the visionary similarities with Women Who Code and VMware? >> Yeah, so what you see with that is you know, you're investing in someone or an organization that already has the potential. Our average age of our community is 30. We have a lot of trouble claiming that you achieve what you achieve in your career, because of us. We know we play a part in it, but we know that potential, that raw power, exists within you, and when someone sees and knows that that's there and gives you what you need to be able to harness that potential, you are able to achieve great things, global things. You're able to change the world, and that's what we do for our members and their careers, and that's what our partners, like VMware do for us. >> I saw on your website: 80% of members experience a positive career impact, after joining Women Who Code. 80% of women, that's huge. >> Yeah, and a lot of that comes from the people that you connect with, the sense of belonging. We had a women at the end of Hackathon, in Manila come up to our leaders, there, and she started crying. She said, "I was about to leave the industry and I realize I have a place." And that sense of belonging that you get from coming to a Women Who Code event that's very welcoming, it can really help to override all of those unconscious biases that you encounter every day, throughout the course of your career, and it helps you to realize, "I'm not alone. There's a lot of really smart, talented women in the tech industry, who want me to be in my job and being in my job isn't just for me. I'm lifting up the people around me, as well." >> So one of the things that we hear a lot about is a lot of focus on STEM programs and getting young girls interested in STEM fields to study in college, but another thing that's huge is the attrition rates. Women are leaving technology at alarming rates, and a lot of people think it's to go off and have children, and it's actually not the case. What are some of the things that have surprised you about women kind of in that, maybe, mid-stage of their career that are leaving, and how can Women Who Code help to impact that, positively? >> Yeah, so what you're speaking to is definitely the data showing that women are leaving their technical careers at a rate of 50% at the mid-career level, and they're leaving their overall careers, if you aggregate women in careers, at a rate of 20% over a 30 year period, so that gap is huge and the industry is a great industry for women. You've got a lot of job security, a lot of job opportunity, a lot of flexibility. All of these things are great for women and their careers, but what you're encountering is often being the only, or one of the only, and you really don't overcome that, until you're getting above 20%, 25%, 30% of that feeling of being the only on a team, and what I think is the biggest issue with women coming into their careers at what kind of wears you down is the unconscious bias. It's something that you encounter on a daily, or multiple times a day basis. That thing that if you complained about a single one of them, you'd be the weird person who complains, at your company. And so, what Women Who Code really does is: one, it helps to create a sense of belonging, it helps to build domain-specific and non-domain-specific skills, it helps you to envision your career, not just the next step in your career, but the step after that, and the step after that, so it's really working to combat those things that you're to, on a daily basis, to provide that sense of community, to remind you, you do belong, and to really help you envision and achieve your career goals, long-term. >> So you have about 137,000 members, globally. And when we had Lily Chang on earlier, she was talking about the Shanghai and Beijing and kind of what that sort of thing meant to her going back there now, on the board. Tell us, maybe give me an example of a real shining star, who joined Women Who Code and was able to get that support, and that guidance, and that camaraderie to continue to be successful, and actually be promoted, and succeed. >> Yeah, so one example that I love is a woman came up to me at an event, last year, and she said, "Hey Alaina, I was going to the Women Who Code Python events, and I now, today, because of what I learned, ended up choosing a path in data science. I'm a senior data scientist, and this year, I'm being flown across country to speak, as an expert in data science. I would not be in this career path, without Women Who Code." Another story that I love is a woman who came up to me at a Hackathon and she told me her story that she had joined Women Who Code, in February, and she was going to our events and kind of figured out what she wanted to do, and by the summer she had transitioned into a new job, gotten a job with The Weather Channel, as a software engineer, and she was making more than double any salary that she had had prior to that. >> Wow. >> And so its career direction, competing job offers, which really increases your likelihood of having a higher salary, those are kind of two examples that I love. The one thing that we haven't talked about is our leadership program. We have a global leadership program, which really actions you to build skill-based volunteering and become a local tech leader. It opens up lines of communication between you and executives at your company. You often get called in as a thought leader at companies. You typically will receive a promotion or a pay increase, at a higher rate than you would otherwise. Some of our leaders get press mentions, get invited to be speakers at conferences, or even advisors on advisory boards. And so, when I look at the stories that are coming from our leaders, one of my favorite stories is a woman in Atlanta. She had a master's in CS. She was inside of the box, you know, the person that every company wants to hire. She was incredibly shy, and when she stepped up as a Women Who Code leader she said, "Oh Alaina, I'm going to be the worst leader." And, okay you've got this. At her first event, she stoop up and she was like, "My name's Erica. Feel free to ask me questions," and kind of sat down, as quickly as possible, but she stood in the front of that room. She began to be perceived by the community, and by herself, as a leader. And in under one year, she was invited, she didn't even apply, to speak at three different tech conferences, and she went from barely being able to say her name in front of a nice community to giving a talk to a standing-room-only crowd. >> Wow, very impactful. And is that for other opportunities that you guys deliver, in terms of public speaking, or was that because she was able to, through Women Who Code, to start to get more confidence in her own capabilities and in her own skin? >> Experience, confidence, self-perception, community-perception, I had one lead at our community tell me that she became a leader at Women Who Code, by regularly attending events. One day, the leader was running late, so she said, "Oh, well, you know I can probably get this started. I've been coming enough," so she went and stood at the front of the room, welcomed everyone, got everything going, said our pitch and she said, by the end of that three-hour event, people thought she was a leader and she began to think, "Oh yeah, I'm a leader," and she says, "Hey, I know that I can get an interview anywhere I want. I know that this opens doors for me." I had one leader tell me that she interviewed with SpaceX, and they specifically told her in the interview that they were impressed with her Women Who Code leadership and that was one of the reasons they were interviewing her. >> Wow, what have been some of the things that have really blown you away, in the few years that this organization has been around? >> It's just the individual stories. It's, every step of the way, the impact that it has in the lives of our leaders in our community. And I honestly feel, everyday, that I get to do this for a job. >> With what VMware announced this morning, with Stanford and this huge investment that they're making into Women's Leadership and Innovation Lab, to look at some significant barriers that women in technology are facing and to identify those barriers that we can then eradicate, what are some of the things that you're looking forward to, from that research and how you think that can actually benefit Women Who Code? >> Yeah, I'm very excited to see what comes out from there. I think we need a lot more research to help us to understand at what point things are happening and what things you can be doing that really help to overcome. I think that combining research with the real-world, in-person action that Women Who Code does and the work that we do with our community would have an even bigger impact. >> I also think what it speaks to is accountability. You know, a very large, very successful, 20-year-old organizations standing up saying, "We actually want to study this," and I think that there's a message there of accountability, which is, I think, a very important one that other organizations can definitely learn from. >> Yeah, I think that also they're going to an organization outside of them and funding that. And so, the research that comes out of there might come back and say, "You're doing this wrong. This is how you can be doing it better." And so, the fact that they're willing to make an investment and say, "Hey, we want to see this better, not only for us. It's not just going to be internal. This data's going out to the world." That's an investment in global change. That's not just holding that in at a personal or organizational level. >> Right, so in addition to that news that came out today, what are some of the things that you're going to walk away, from this third annual Women Transforming Technology event going, "Ah, that was awesome. Now, this gives me even more ideas for Women Who Code." >> Yeah, I think this is a great opportunity to connect with, especially, women who are in leadership positions and figure out how we can better service women at the higher tiers of their career, because you don't stop needing support, and you don't stop growing your career, once you become a director or a vice president. You continue to invest in your career, and you continue to needs support. And so, I'm really looking for ways that we can better serve those women. >> And hopefully, we start to see that attrition number at 50% start to come down. >> Alaina: Definitely. >> Alaina, thanks so much for your time. It was a pleasure to chat with you, and we wish you continued success with Women Who Code. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE, on the ground at VMware, for the third annual Women Transforming Technology event. Thanks for watching. (funky electronic music)

>> Narrator: From the VMware Campus in Palo Alto California, it's The Cube covering Women Transforming Technology. (upbeat music) >> I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube and we are on the ground in Palo Alto with VMware for the third annual, Women Transforming Technology event. Excited to welcome back to the Cube, Lily Chang, VP of strategic transformation here at VMware. Lily it's great to have you back. >> Thank you, it's fantastic to have this event again, for the third time in the history. >> Yes, in fact, I read online that it was sold out within hours and the keynote this morning was... >> Lily: Fantastic >> Fantastic >> And very inspiring. >> Very inspiring. For those of you who don't know, Laila Ali was the keynote this morning. What a great analogy, not just being a sports star, but being someone, a woman, in a very male dominated industry who just had this sort of natural confidence that she just knew what her purpose was. I thought that was a very inspiring message for those of us in tech as well. >> Yeah, and it's also very key that women leaders, such as herself, is willing to come out and share the story, and be the role model and set a path and show the example for the younger generation to follow and to look up to. That is incredible. >> I love for one of the things she said, Lily, when she said she still sometimes kind of loses sight and has to reignite that inner warrior. I thought that was a really important and empowering message too that even really strong women who are naturally confident still have times where they have to kind of remind themselves of what their purpose is. I just thought that was a very impactful statement and I think regardless of any industry you're in. >> That is absolutely true. I mean, we're only human, right? So every one of us experiences challenges in life so there are times even all genders, you're going to bump into road blocks, you're going to bump into challenges and then you need to self motivating and lift yourself up and rise to the ocassions of the challenge. A lot of times these changes, and I'm sure it's true for her as well, that actually make her a better leader. >> Definitely. So you are one of the board members of Women Who Code. This is something that's very near and dear to VMwear's heart. VMwear got involved in 2016 when it was about a 10,000 person organization. >> Actually, a little bit less than that. >> A little less than 10,000? And now it's? >> We were very young. >> And now how large is it? >> It's 137,000 members globally, 20 counties, 60 cities. >> So what's the mission of Women Who Code? >> The mission is very simple. Basically we want to basically help all women that inspire and excel in their technical career journey and in their career development. So that's basically the simple mission statement and for that a very critical thrust that Women Who Code has and kind of coincide with VMware's community vision, is basically technical woman community. So they were very young but we saw the passion, we saw the commitment, and we believed that this is a great mutual opportunity because we want to be a global company. We want to not only view leadership within U.S., we wanted it to be in NIA, to be in APJ, We have R & D research offices everywhere and so we basically collaborated with Women Who Code and that has been a very successful leadership program which only work with them. And they basically blossomed under the collaboration and we're not the only company but we are the one of two founding partner in sponsor for Women Who Code. >> It's grown dramatically as you said. >> Lily: Dramatically. >> Yeah, just a couple of years since you've been involved with VMware. What are a some of things that have surprised you about, not just the growth, but about some of the lesson that maybe you've learned by watching some of these other women come into this organization and be inspired and impact their careers? >> So I see the story, both in VMware woman leadership, and also in outside community woman leadership. Right? So what I see is all these woman basically have the passion but they were a little bit worried about let it come out but when you're actually in a community you're supporting one and other and you have that platform where they feel very comfortable to communicate, network, share, and learn, and so basically that is a very powerful thing and I see the growth and the booster of the potential, it's kind of like we lift them up all of a sudden. Right? One of the stories recently is that, for example, on the external side, We have basically a Canada city director is all volunteer positions. Right. And within a year, she actually moved from a line management position to basically to a director position because the city director role basically expose you to basically get the community view out and that encourage you and challenge you to basically has hands on soft leadership skill and so a lot of the technical woman have a lot of technology and a lot of the technologist mentality but you need to accompany that with a lot of the soft skill. And then the combination of the two that makes a perfect combination. And we see a lot of that in our VMware women as well. So we set out to do basically cities in China, we actually opened China for Women Who Code. It was zero member, and now it has like 3,000-4,000 members. It's actually in China. It's a little bit of a difficult mysterious place. Right? But we made it happen in Beijing. We made it happen in Shanghai. And it's basically participate by a lot of the local company, not just multi-national company. And in India we actually open it up, and in India now is blossomed like crazy so there are like since VMware's opening up in Bangalore basically there are three other cities that joined in. India is like basically a rose in blossoming peak point right now. And we also opened up a Sophia, so basically we work with women who go to do a corporate leadership program. And within the first year, where we appointed some of the city directors from our women, basically we have experience about a 50% promotion rate and pretty much 100% retention rate. >> Lisa: Wow. >> Yeah. >> 50% promotion and 100% retention is incredible. >> It is incredible, so I see that miracle happening and then I become very convinced after year one and then I've also learned that I'm not the only leader in the world that believes in this. That's the reason why they blossom like crazy. >> I imagine growing up in China, I was reading a little bit about your story, that the expansion in China must mean something a bit personal for you as well. It sounds like you were a bit fortunate though, with your parents saying "hey," you had two choices when you graduated from college, flight attendant, or secretary and your parents thought "she should have more options that that." So maybe kind of full circle, how was that for you when those two in Shanghai and Beijing opened? >> To me, I feel like, that is what is 21st century supposed to be. I wish it were true in the 19th century and but bottom line is, minor correction, actually I did interview for those two positions. I was rejected. I was not qualified. >> Lisa: Lucky VMware. >> Yeah. (laughing) Actually lucky United State. >> There you go. >> So basically my dad and my mom, they basically raised me up very differently in that era. They basically feel that they give me kind of almost a virtual space where I do not feel there is any difference between genders. They always made me feel like I'm a equal citizen in the family. I have the same speaking right, my dad, my mom both foster me that so when they learned that I could not get those two possible jobs and I was very well educated, graduated from the best university in the island, quoting my dad, he basically "invested on me," right? So he basically said "well" what he needs to do is "continue to invest in me." So that's the reason why he exported me to United States and then basically I went to the graduate school here and then since then I been very blessed. So this is almost like the Beijing and Shanghai success of the Women Who Code. It's almost like I'm giving it back to my origin. Right? And I'm bringing a lot of the blend between the western and eastern culture together. Right? To open that up which is fantastic and basically in the global environment to make it very diverse and inclusive at the same time. >> So you had really strong parents who instilled this belief in you that you could do anything. When we look at some of the statistics that show that less than 25% of technical roles are held by women and then we also look at the retention, the attrition is so high in tech. What were some of the things that kept you kind of focused on your dreams? How did you kind of foster that persistence? And I'm wondering what your advice is for women who are in tech and might be thinking of leaving. >> Well, very interesting, so first advice I have is, basically believe in yourself and dream very big. Because that, and the second this is never afraid of change. Change is always a good thing and that has been throughout my growth in a foreign country as well as here. Right? And I remember when I was in the university, even thought it was the best university, and I actually changed department and major twice and the third time I attempted to do it, because at that time I told my dad, say "hey, I heard there's this cool computer science thing I really want to go do" he did some calculation and said "look, if you transfer again, the third time, it will take you five to six years to graduate" so he said "no, just stick with it and then later on you want to move, go ahead." Right? So in grad school I changed again and I was very blessed that there are a lot of sponsors and mentors. Not just my parents. Throughout my growth and throughout my journey in the career basically really foster and help me, supported me, give me a lot of advice, so I'm a big believer in mentorship and sponsorship and that's what I believe the technical woman community will offer. It's kind of a genetically built it within that philosophy in the community. Right? It doesn't matter which forum. It is basically bringing in the common belief and the vision together and it's basically peer to peer mentorship and because there are different walks and different levels of women and technologist in that community then you actually could do the tiering and peering and basically help people to either inspire, basically move into new career journey, or elevating themselves. So I'm a very big believer in mentorship and sponsorship. >> Speaking of change, we talked about the changes you've made previously. You've made a big change from R & D to financier. >> Lily: That's correct. >> The very first at VMware to do that? >> Lily: Yes, very first... >> Tell us about kind of the impetus and what excited you and what you are benefiting from. >> Well, I'd been in the R & D career for a couple decades and so every ten years I look at my resume and then I kind of try to have an out of body experience to basically advise myself and say, what would you do differently, so that you actually are setup for the growth for the next ten years. Right? So when I look at my career about a year ago I basically said to myself and said "well, you've got enough R & D experience, you made enough investment. For you to be in the next journey you really need to have the business experience." And even though I have basically with VMware's support and sponsorship I did go back to the business school and got kind of the Berkeley business certificate and I got lots of great executives supporting me. But the reality is if you don't do that role, day in and day out, and really experience it blended into your DNA, it's not going to come natural. Right? And I don't want to be an imposter, so essentially I made a fairly major determination that I want to basically switch into business world. So I'm kind of a unique case in the sense that I'm both over-qualified and under-qualified at the same time. I'm very lucky that I have a lot of the executive sponsorship that I was able to find a perfect role that allowed me to learn and excel and basically be inspired basically in my role today and that is something fantastic. Only after I transfer that's where I learn that I'm actually the first employee in VMware's history that moved from R & D to finance and I still remain as the only one so far and I hope that my success can actually inspire more R & D people because I truly believe that a lot of times when you can actually can look at from the other lens it would just simply make you be able to do your original job better. Like right now, I would tell my old R & D self that some of the decision I made I would have debated and petitioned and argued and thought about it in a completely different way because my thinking has shift which I think is a very healthy shift. >> I agree, and you know, one of the things that Laila Ali said this morning was basically encouraging people to get uncomfortable, to be comfortable and that's, you talked about change, absolutely there's so many opportunities and we know that on one level but it can be pretty intimidating to change something. But I love also what you said. I think there's a parallel with saying now that you have this business experience looking through that other lens at R & D, you would have made decisions differently and I think that is very reflective and an opportunity for organizations to invest in creating a more diverse executive team. When you bring in that though diversity. >> Lily: Exactly. >> And it just opens the door, not just seeing things through different lenses and perspectives whether we're talking about gender or what not, but the profitability that can come from that alone is tremendous. >> Yeah, so for example one of the things that there is a statistics actually based on McKinsey for company that basically has reasonable percentage blend of woman leadership actually grows better and makes much sounder decision and so the experience I have moving from R & D to business and then now I work still very closely with R & D community and the product business unit, basically that's kind of a testemonial for that because the decision making all of a sudden is multi facet. And you always will be able to make a better decision and a sound decision. Now, you will be able to see a different risk at a different level, and we will be communicating in a more common language, like I used to not be able to speak the business tone and the business language, now I actually can be that effective communication bridge, which I find it very powerful and very exciting and very illuminating in terms of just the whole shift, make it a very worth while actually. It's just a very fantastic personal and professional experiences so far. >> You studied that Mckinsey report and that was actually mentioned this morning that the press release that VMwear did with the Stanford Institute investing 15 million in building a womens innovation lab to study the barriers, identify how to remove those barriers, but in that press release McKinsey report found that, and this is shocking, that companies that have more diversity at the executive level, are 21% more profitable. >> Lily: Exactly. >> That's a huge number. >> That's because you actually, for business, right? The technology moves so fast and there are so many different factors will be coming in hitting the business, giving business decision, you just go down a unique lane and not basically bringing all the different facets of perspective, you tend to basically gradually work yourself into a corner or you may just believe what you want to believe. Right? So that's where the other genders perspective or even the inclusive culture will bring you, basically. So this is my firm belief. Right? It's just in a different dimension basically. >> And I think that's great advice for all walks of life Lily. Thank you so much for stopping by The Cube and sharing with us what you're doing with Women Who Code and congratulations on being the first VMware to successfully transition from R & D to finance. >> Yeah, I actually hit my one year anniversary. >> Oh congratulations and thanks so much for your time. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching the cube. I'm Lisa Martin, on the ground at Women Transforming Technology VMware. Thanks for watching. (digital music)