(upbeat electronic music) >> Voiceover: Live from New York City, it's theCUBE, covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by Lenovo. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Lenovo Transform. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman, who is a senior analyst at Wikibon. We are joined today by Julian Box. He is the founder and CEO of Calligo, and Shekhar Mishra, who is the director of product management here at Lenovo. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> So Julian, I want to start with you. Tell us a little bit about Calligo and your business challenges. >> Calligo is six years old now. We're a cloud service provider, but we do things slightly differently. We were set up with data privacy at its core, which is a little bit of a paradox for cloud, of course, because you shouldn't really care where the data is, but I believed people would care where the data was, and what laws were applicable, and who could look at the data, and so forth. Fast forward to today, and we've had Edward Snowden, and now we've got the EU GDPR, which, some people would say, is a lot tougher now because of Edward Snowden's stuff that he actually showed was going on. Interestingly, a lot of that stuff, was really focused very much on the U.S. and not really about outside the U.S. We focus very much around any organization that touches EU citizens. We have a privacy play around that. We do it just slightly differently than a standard cloud service provider. >> I do want to get into that new EU regulation you were talking about, but can you tell us a little bit about why you chose Lenovo? >> There's a lot of history there. Right back in the day, I was true blue in the '80s, coding away in the midrange, and I've always had that link with IBM. Then, through the acquisition that Lenovo did, we flowed into Lenovo, and it's been actually very, very good. Some people questioned whether that was a good move, but I saw what they'd done with the ThinkPad, and the Think Range, and the PC, and I was pretty confident it was going to carry on. We've been very happy with what we've had so far. >> Shekhar, want to bring you into the discussion. You've been talking a lot about infrastructure, things like server, storage, and networking. Bring us into how cloud fits into the Lenovo portfolio with the announcements that we've been talking about today. >> Definitely. If you really look at, not the how, but why people are moving towards having cloud structure, people like as he was talking earlier, that service provider, they're looking really for the agility and simplicity that a lot of the public cloud brings, but then, as he was talking, that a lot of the regulatory issues, SLA, security concerns really prohibit them to actually put everything on a public cloud, right? They want those benefits, but they want that at their own terms, right? The best people who can provide that is one who are able to embrace openness, play with the ecosystem, like partners, like Microsoft, Nutanix, and VMware, and also provide a very solid infrastructure, to run those things, right? We, as a company, Lenovo DCG, can offer that. Those are the key values, but also going beyond that, if you think about, cloud is really simple, but once you get it deployed and working, that is a big "if" there, right? What we have done as a strategy is to simplify this, to increase the kind of value for our customers. We promote this as a pre-integrated solution, which is really a turnkey with the simple support so customers are not running around for support or having to deploy it on their own terms, things like that. >> I would actually say, the idea of cloud is simple. Once you really get into it, it's not so simple. I've been at the Amazon re:Invent show for many years. They're adding 1,000 new features every year. That's not simple. Julian, six years? I mean, that's like multiple lifetimes since you started your company. The whole service provider marketplace has changed a lot. Can you talk about what's been changing in your business? You're involved with the Microsoft Azure Stack. How do you look at the public cloud, and that hybrid layer, and envision your role going forward? >> Yeah, it has changed a lot. If someone had asked me that we would be doing a Microsoft stack cloud-based system a few years ago, I wouldn't have thought we would be, but because of the way people perceive data now, and where it is, and where it's held, there's more and more of a demand that, "I want my data, and I want it executed "in the location, the jurisdiction that I live in." Microsoft, and Amazon, and all the other places, they can't be in every single country in the world, clearly. The scale is not there. Even for them, it's not. The Azure Stack is a way, I think, that Microsoft's going to attempt to deal with some of those challenges around actually where data is processed. That gives us an opportunity because we have a lot of clients that won't put their data into the Azure cloud because of where the Azure cloud actually is right now, but when we put it into the jurisdictions we're in, we've got a lot of people wanting to use it. The sooner we get it, the better, really. >> You look at it more from a actual, physical location more than kind of control or governance? >> No, that all goes part and parcel, but the starting point is jurisdictional position in the data. With the EU, you're either in the EU, or you're not in the EU, clearly. With the GDPR law, it's switching. It's switching to become who that person actually is. At the moment, it's all around where the data is. With the GDPR, it's more focused on the individual. The individual doesn't have to live in the EU anymore, but it's still protected by these same laws. People do care, very much so, where the data is actually going to be. Businesses don't want to be caught out either, and they have the challenges of actually processing the data, or controlling the data, as it's known. As a service provider, one of the biggest changes for us, is that we're now liable for some of the processes of what actually happens to that data. Before, it was just the client that was using it. Now, it's proportionally between the two of us. We have a role as a processor, and they have a role as a control of that data. Therefore, again, it comes down to, how do we minimize the risks? How do we ensure that we are meeting the obligations that we have under these new laws? It becomes easier if you're actually doing it in a jurisdiction that has the appropriate laws, or is physically in the EU. There's a thing called a adequacy rating that the EU give to a certain set of countries. You can apply for it. Anybody can apply for it, but only about a dozen or so countries around the world actually have it. What this gives them is the ability to be seen as being in the EU, even though you're not in the EU, from a data protection perspective. >> Companies are really fundamentally rethinking how they approach data privacy. Shekhar, how are you partnering with other companies and helping them work through this? I mean, your example with Calligo, and other companies, too, that are affected? >> That is one of the biggest challenge, if you would think about this. Not only have the companies have to think about, yes, I have to go to a cloud and have a cloud strategy, but the whole deployment model, the mindset of the companies themselves are also shifting, and they need to shift. A very simple example I'll give you, for instance. We have a very prominent educational institute. They're budget right now was allocated to build three more buildings, for instance, to accommodate the influx of new students coming in. They're now talking to us, respect to Azure Stack, that, "Should I move some of that budget "to build up an Azure Stack versus building a new building?" No one thought two years back that IT will be actually competing with the construction. It's very weird to think of that way. One of the key reasons, when you ask them, is, look, Amazon is there, but I cannot just go there. I need that flexibility, but I need it on my own terms, and that this makes sense for me. We are partnering with people like Microsoft to create those. We are doing innovations on a platform itself from the compute all the way to the networking, so as you asked earlier, we own, enter, and stack, whether it is compute, storage, or networking, we have our own IP around it, so we can really create that security across the platform. We are not trying to create an island for customers where you have to work towards the propriety solution because that's totally against the whole cloud model then. That's why we partner with Microsoft. We are partners with VMware, we are partners with Nutanix, and then other networking players also, but that helps our clients to get the best of the breed solution, the software, on a best of breed infrastructure. >> Where do you see data privacy right now? I mean, famously, Europeans and Americans look at data privacy very differently, just individually, consumers, also businesses. Edward Snowden, is he a hero, is he a villain? I mean, there's so many questions, and we're still really a society wrestling with all of this. How does Lenovo approach this? You talked about the mindset. >> From a piracy perspective, you see that, we have a very strict policy around the security and, what do you call, the real vicinity of the infrastructure itself. We do unique things inside our infrastructure itself. We control our infrastructure lineup, the manufacturing and everything. We have certain features enabled which are default, like IPv6 for instance, right? It won't let us ever go in a mode where it can be compromised in any way. We bring that into our software stack all the way from the comware. Those kind of things are helping us drive and maintain that piracy issue. >> Julian, Lenovo, of course, has a long history partnering with both Intel and with Microsoft. When I look at the first generation of Azure Stack, there's not a lot of feature differentiation. Microsoft says, "This is the configuration "you're going to offer, lock it in." So why Lenovo, in your mind? Because there's another three companies, two of which have more market share and other positions. What led you down the path of Lenovo? >> For me, it was very much the history that Lenovo and the Lenovo team that they inherited from IBM have got. They led the way when virtualization first came out. I remember when the 440 was released back in 2001, 2002, something like that, people didn't understand why it was being built. It was because they were ahead of the game. They could see that virtualization was coming. I think Lenovo has the edge from a capabilities perspective. The XClarity tool, I think it's the best management tool that's out there right now. And reliability. I've been using their technology for a very long time now, in all it's forms, and you can see why they're number one, because they genuinely hardly ever ... Literally, I can hardly think, in the last six years, we've probably replaced a couple of spinning disks. That's about it. It really is that reliable, actually. >> Julian, want to get your input. You've been looking at the Azure Stack here. Azure Pack's existed for a while. We've been talking about Azure Stack for a couple of years. This'll be a 1.0 release. What does it mean for your business and your customers? Are there things that you're looking at beyond the 1.0 that will expand it even further? >> Yeah, clearly, on the first version, it's not going to have every single feature that you want it to have, but it will have a lot of the things that our clients are calling for right now. I'm speaking to them right now, and they're prepared to wait for the extra features to come along. Right now, they can't get any of it, so we're giving them a big chunk of it, and they will take the extra features as they come along. As to the point you mentioned a little bit earlier about, it is what we're given, that's true, but people want it to be exactly the same as the big one. We don't care that it's not exactly the same. That said, it will be deployed alongside our standard infrastructure and server offering, which we call CloudCore, and again, it's all Lenovo equipment, not just the Azure Stack. We're 100% Flash. We guarantee any workload. We do things very, very slightly differently in a lot of cases, and you combine these two technologies because clearly, the Azure Stack does stuff that CloudCore doesn't, and CloudCore can do stuff that Azure doesn't do, so we actually think we can give a combination there that you wouldn't typically be able to get. Of course, they're right next to each other running at super high speeds, and not different clouds going across much slower high latency links. Lots and lots of positive stuff. >> Shekhar, from your standpoint in product development, what excites you the most about Azure Stack, and what your customers expect today, and what you see in the future from Lenovo? >> You asked a question that, that it's fixed, and is that a constraint? Actually, my view, I feel that, other than minor tweaks, customers actually don't want a lot of variations because that actually simplifies an environment, right? Today, there's a lot of overhead and management. What my group is really focused on is not about so much on what infrastructure layer. It's more about what the end to end solution is, and not just from a point product, but how the customer is consuming in the entire life cycle of it. All the way from when they start thinking about Azure Stack, for instance, how do you make sure that what kind of data is right on Azure and what is not? How do you make sure that, how much of Azure do they really need? How do they make sure that it's going to audit and ship promptly? And then they can deploy it. By the way, once you deploy it, how am I going to maintain it, right? Our onsite professional go and train them. Then, once you have it deployed, how do I do ongoing management? I'm going to have issues. Who is going to help me? Because this is now built with multiple things. We think of all those entrance consumption, and that's what the whole motivation around ThinkAjile is, to make all of that simplified for our clients, all the way from deployment, to support, to management, and things like that. >> Great point on the consistency because, if you ask any customer, "What version of Azure are you running?" they'll laugh at you 'cause Microsoft takes care of that, and you would want the customer environment to be similar. >> For us, the fact that they're actually going to come and commission it for us is one less thing I have to organize, I have to resource. Literally, the rack turns up, they do the commission, and give us two cables to plug into our core switches, and away we go. The time to delivery is far quicker for us. As we want to roll these out quite quickly around the globe, with everything else that we are up to at the moment, that's another massive plus for us. We actually like the fact that it's coming in this set form, and these guys are going to look after it for us at that lower level, and we're operating, run it with our clients, and that, again, is huge benefit for us. >> Julian, Shekhar, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. >> [Julian And Shekhar] Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Lenovo Transform after this. (upbeat electronic music)

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back here on the Cube, we continue our coverage. We're live in San Francisco. Mosconi, North Day to wrapping up Day two of our three days of coverage here, Veum. World 2019 day Volante. John Wall's glad to have you with us here on the Cube. And we're now joined by Kevin Schatz. Camera. Who's the Vice president of service provider Strategy and solutions. A deli. Um, See, Kevin. Good to see this afternoon. Thank you. You as well. And, uh, yeah, Tarazi, Who is the S v p and chief technical officer at Dell Technologies in the heart. Good to see you. Thanks for taking the time to be with us. A couple of telco guys and we've had a lot of telco on and talking about it in terms of progress that you made. This was an area that you got into with a major commitment, some probably three years ago. Kind of bitch market for me then for where you were there on on day one to where you are now today and the progress you've made and maybe the service is that you're about to provide. Yeah, >> sure. So I think if we look over the last three years, our opportunity that we defined early on telecommunications space was the virtual ization, and software to find everything was leaving the data center. And we would see the software to find architecture extend all the way from radio through the core network through the cloud over a period of time. And it started with technologies like network function virtualization. So if we flash back three years ago, where our entire strategy was built on the premise that relationships with the network equipment providers like Nokia and Ericsson, where our primary path to market our primary opportunity, I think what we've realized is we've emerged in this space to a greater detail is that our expertise, our expertise and experience in building I T Networks and Building Cloud has led to the first wave of conversations in the telecommunications industry directly not through the network equipment providers, but that carriers want to engage directly with Delhi emcee for the lessons learned and how did to play. I tr detectors. And now, as we extend towards the edge that they want to engage directly with Del Technologies in terms of how we build cloud architectures. We've had a number of big announcements. Over the last several years. We've announced partnerships and engagements with NTT. We've announced partnerships and engagements with China Unicom. Just in the last three months, we've announced partnerships with our rounds around network EJ out of France and then most recently with 18 C on the automation of EJ infrastructure related to their airship project. I think from a benchmark perspective, it's just been a continued growth opportunity for us and recognition that the more we engaged in, the more we contribute as a productive member of what is a very complex and changing and transforming industry, the more success in relationships that will build, and the more it will translate into opportunity to sell to >> when you think about you have the the modernization of N F. E. For example, as a former technologist inside a large telco, Um, what were some of the challenges? Is it? It's taken a long time. Obviously, when you talk to some of the telcos, they say, Well, you know it affects our infrastructure, but we still get this application mass. I mean, maybe you could add some color and describe for our audience why it's been so challenging. >> Yeah, I think that's an excellent question. Um, going back to my days at Telco on data centers, even S d n and the software defined tools were just beginning to show up. So the biggest challenges where you were basically having toe work with predefined operating system. But he defined hardware. The hardware was not exposed for for GAM ability, the ability to take advantage of it. And then you had to interrogate multiple players of technology in a way where it took significant time, too, not only for software development, but for product development and user experience. Since then, many of those walls have come down, and some of them have come down very hard. When you look at what we're doing, Adele here and we lead for the open networking. Not only do you have the choice of operating system were also pushing hard. Don't new open operating systems for networking like Sonic with Microsoft and bade calm. And then we're taking industry leading steps to expose the silicon chips themselves for four GAM ability. These are all the components that are critical. When you talk about five G, for example, do you really have to have those capabilities? I also would say that the software evolution have made it to infrastructure. The Dev ops and the modern applications we talk about here is also available for infrastructure, which means you really can develop a capability in weeks instead of years and months. Five people can do in amazing parkas. All of this was not possible before, >> so we talked to Shekhar about this in the earlier segment challenges in the telco business. I mean, the one hand you got these quasi monopolies in some cases real monopolies that just chug along and do pretty well. But the same time you got the cost for a bit dramatically coming down, you've got the data growth doing this. You got over the top providers taking advantage of the those those networks, and so new infrastructure allows them to be more more agile. But there's a workforce component to that, and there's a skill set, and that's how they got to transform. I wonder if you could maybe talk about that a little bit. Kevin. >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think when we work within this industry, it's not just a technology conversation. It's the ability to consume an operationalized technology. And I think that comes down to a number of different things, comes down to the processes that exist when it comes down to the skill sets that exists to be able to build these new processes around. And I think if we flash back several years ago, the model of how we build networks was that the team that operated it needed to understand networking. Right now, if you look at the team that needs to operate it, they need to understand networking. They need to understand, compute. They need to understand virtualization. They need to understand AP eyes. They need to be able to script and program. They need to understand some level of data science that they can close a loop in the operational models eventually with a I and machine learning technologies. So I think that the teams that are getting built look very different than the single soul capabilities that they've had in the past, right? These air smaller teams they're more agile teams that can develop and have their own more unique processes in each part of the network. Right? And even if we think about the organizational structures, we've always built vertical organizations. Right? When I had an appliance, that was an e p. C. I had an operations team that was focused on an e p. C. And I even broke that into an S gateway P Gateway and Emma, me et cetera. If we look at the world now, that s Gateway P Gateway. Mm E consists of a server consists of the networking that connects at server consists of a virtual ization layer. It consists of a stack of a software application, and all of those need to be automated, orchestrated program toe work as any PC does. So I think that the skill sets have just really expanded in terms of what's expected, >> and this is really important because the process is used to be pretty well known and hardened, so the infrastructure could be hard, and now it's of every every months, the more the market changes right. What kind of what kind of challenges is that bring to the telco provider? But also to the infrastructure provider. >> Yeah, I actually I have a really good way to describe what I think is happening. We heard it from a lot of our customers and not just tell cause but enterprises. I would say the last 5 to 10 years everybody's been dealing with Hybrid Cloud. The Move to Cloud Waas. The Big Challenge. While this remains a key challenge, a new challenge showed up, which is how to succeed in this new modern software development model. You know, are you able to do to move at that speed, which means you have full stack engineers? Can you develop the app beginning to end? It's not a nightie model anymore. Also, you no longer have an operations team. You really have to have saris who, able with software and also the customer service, changed to a softwood Devyn. So we're starting to hear from a lot of our customers. That's the next journey they really need help with. If you think of infrastructure, those challenges are even bigger, and this is where it's important to lean on technology partners who can help you with that, >> and you hit on five G a little bit ago. You have in your initial statement and we've kind of touched on the impact that it can have in terms of you understanding there. They're going to a transformative time, right? I mean, telcos are with new capabilities, and new opportunities in this whole edge is gonna be crazy. So you've got to you've got I would say some learning to do, but you have. You've got to get up to speed on what their new fundamentals are going to be, right? Yeah, I think that's >> true. I think where you know, we we've understood >> their fundamentals because it's the same transition that the IittIe world's gone through. And to a large degree, that cloud world has gone through. I think that the challenge we've we've been working to break through collectively as an industry is the paralysis at the rate of adoption of new technologies because they're so much change so quickly because we talk about virtualization. And then we're talking about kubernetes. We're talking about cloud native we're talking about Ah, bare Metal Service's. We continue to talk about Micro Micro Service's architectures. We see this progression of technology that's happening so fast in various segments of the industry. I think that the telecommunications industry has been somewhat paralyzed in terms of where do they jump in and which do they adopt and how fast they migrate between them. And which of them can be capable of being hardened to be telco grade and fit into their requirements. That they have for being able to offer regulated service >> is paralyzed because it's just too fast. It's too fast for a big amazed, a big decision to make for big. But but things are evolving too quickly. That's that's It's evolving >> too quickly. And they also sometimes have a concern that they get stuck on a dead end path, right, Because things change so quickly it's Do I jump here? Then here, then here, then here, Then here. Where do I follow a logical path and what we tend to find when we work with the telecommunications industry is that, yes, del technologies can define a strategy. Certainly VM wear and L E. M. C can define our individual strategies. Are operators can define their strategies. But there's just not one strategy for this industry. Reality is, is that when you get when you get together with an ecosystem of partners, and you work at a particular telecommunications company. That is a strategy, and you start from scratch when you go to the next right because they're their ability to consume technology. It's just so different the end game, maybe the same across the board. But the path to get there will look different, >> so every customer's different Get that. But clearly some patterns must be emerging. So my question is, where do you start your sitting down with What are you seeing in terms of common starting points and advice you'd give Thio? >> I think that to Maine has everybody starting with First of all, the physical infrastructure. Compute storage Networking is moving to X 86 model of some sort, which means many, many parts of their infrastructure today that is not based on X 86 needs to transition. So what? Seeing big art piece significant discussions of how you take compute and this new programmable networking and put it everywhere like in thousands of locations. So infrastructure wise, that is a known specific thing to be solved at early stages and given you know, that capability he's we've delivered toward enterprises. We have a lot of tools and capabilities to give them, and the 2nd 1 is that a lot of people are approaching this as a network issue. In reality, it's a cloud decision, not a network. You hurt Shaker, talk about it so the tools capabilities you need to build a cloud is completely different. This cloud may not be genetic cloud it needs to be. It needs to support the defense specific platforms under for they want Cloud, and they needed to support the specific capabilities. So that's the two. A year ago, nobody even could articulate. That was the challenge they were facing. But I would say that's what we are today. >> I would add to that that as we kind of think about the infrastructure and then that cloud decision that there's abstractions that exist between those right at the infrastructure layer, there is the need tohave, an automation system that has the ability to support multiple different cloud platforms that sit on top of it. And that's work that we're doing in the deli in seaside and then secondary to that at the cloud layer. It's the ability to support a multi virtualization environment. Virtual machines do exist and will continue to exist. Kubernetes and cloud native containerized applications do exist and will continue to exist. And the challenge becomes. How do I orchestrate an environment that allows those two exist simultaneously and be layered on top of a common building block of infrastructure? And I think that's really the power that the broader Del Technologies has is that we have all of these entities and capabilities in house. >> How long does this take? A telco toe transform is this decade. Is it? Is it Maur can Obviously certain parts can happen faster. But when when you sit down with with customers and they put together their plans, I mean, what what what's their time horizon? >> So I would argue that we define the first NFI standards and 2012. And if we look globally and even within the vast majority of the Indus story and carriers were somewhere in the 10 to 15% range, yeah, >> yeah, that too compelling. Uh, hey, is that enough? Maybe be a forcing function for making some of those decisions. Are the economics on moving toe X 86 are very compelling. It's 10 times the speed to deploy, and it's a massive order of magnitude and costs. Therefore, it's not something that you could wait on as you continue to build capacity. So that's is forcing the infrastructure decision. The second forcing function is that what five G's starting to look like is not network and wireless, independent from enterprise solutions, you really have to collapse. The single infrastructure you know to offer service is and why it lists embedded on That's another forcing function in terms of enterprises is starting to ask for those capabilities. >> You know, you mentioned X 86 couple times and when you think about the Telco Cloud generically what we're talking about here in the in the commercial cloud not to tell ghost no commercial but the mainstream cloud you're getting a lot of offload, you know, hardware offload alternative processing arm uh, GP use F p g a Z even, you know, custom, a six coming back. You've seen the same thing in the Telco club >> for sure, I think I think if if you look at what we've done over the last several years, we've seen this dramatic shift in almost a pendulum swing away from a six and proprietary hardware towards everything on X 86 I think what we've learned over the last several years at X 86 is a platform that has its value. But it's just not for every work with So we've seen things like network slicing and control, user plane separation and technologies that her first moving user playing very high Io applications back onto smart nicks and F PJs and eventually onto merchant silicon with programmable silicate in the network switches. But I think that even if you look at what's happening in in Public Cloud with things like GPU virtualization, they're still largely virtualized in the time domain, which means that they're used by a particular application for a period of time and then the next application scheduled it in the next application schedule. Is it that doesn't work for network workloads? So I think that what we're finding is we go to this Toko Cloud model, especially with offload in the virtual ization of Acceleration Technologies, is that it's an entire set of problems that just aren't solved in public cloud yet. >> Yeah, I would say, based on experience, the vast majority of network workloads have to be x 86 I definitely think arm cores and GPO offloads will play all at some point in the future. But they that's not the heavy duty that you need to offload those functions because most of these network applications were it. And for custom, a sick. That's very high performance that you know, it has high throughput. Security, built in ability to build service is directly into the silicon. So that kind of transition over time you'll feed. You see a lot of distributed applications, it and container formats all the way at the edge. But that transition to that kind of distributed model from what we are today is probably not possible. And I would argue you'll always have their mics off high performance, high throughput. I mean, think about it. If you're trying to activate 20,000 I ot devices instantly, you really need a high core density, you know, x 86 chip with significant memory. You really worry about the data plane and how much data you can put. So it's better >> we didn't even hit I ot dead. Wait, wait Another day, Another conversation. Hey, thanks for the time. We certainly appreciate it. Been a good show I for you all to write for, sir? Good. Good energy. Good vibes and good business. Thanks for the time We appreciate it. >> Thank you, guys. Thank >> you very much for your time. >> Watching the Cube live coverage Here it Veum World 2019 in San Francisco. Thank you.