>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Raphael Meyerowitz, he is the VP Office of the CTO at Presidio, And Jake Smith, who is the Director Data Center Solutions and Technologies at Intel. Thank you both so much for coming back on theCUBE. You're both CUBE alums. >> Thank you for having us. >> It's great to be back. >> So, I want to start by laying out for our viewers, why you're here, and if you're part of the Microsoft ecosystem: Intel, Cisco, Dell and others. Can you explain a little bit, to our viewers, the roll you play in this ecosystem. >> Well, for us, Microsoft is a long time partner. I mean, it's pretty well documented, we don't want to go there today, but at this particular event we're announcing a bunch of new product solutions. We're announcing new technology capabilities. And at four PM we're going to announce some world record results, for performance with an operating system in an application environment. So it's a very exciting time for Intel to be a part of this event. >> Well, this is quite a tease. (giggles) Can you give us a little-- >> You're going to have to wait 'til four PM. I will say, it has to do with Windows Server. It has to do with Xeon scale of a processor family. And, our future Optane products. >> Well, so, these are all great lead ins. And, before the cameras were rolling we were talking about all of these things. You want to go through, a little bit, where we are with each of those businesses? >> Yeah, at Presidio, we've mostly been partnering with Intel for a long time. And one of the things that we've seen also, is how Intel has developed their ecosystem of partners. The software, like today, if you look at today what was in our today with desktop as a service with citrix. That's something that we have been involved in, probably, for about 10 years. And now we actually seen that come to market. We're not just, the control plane is in the cloud. But, the actual, virtual desktops are in the cloud. And, we think that that's going to be a really good viable options for our customers with Office 365. >> Raph, maybe expand on that a little bit for our audience. You know, one of the things I always say is you talk in this multi-cloud heterogeneous world. You want to follow the apps. You want to follow the data. Well, you know, the desktop is part of where those applications and data live. So, how does that, you know, tie into all the cloud stuff we've been talkin' about, the last few years? >> So, for a lot of customers, one of the reasons they move to cloud is really for simplicities sake, alright. When you look at the desktop, the desktop is really not necessarily being the most simple thing in the world. Whether it's virtual, or whether it's physical desktop. By having the control plane in the virtual desktop in the cloud, where you can consume it with Office 365. And also through Microsoft. And you can buy it through a single entity. Customers are already going to see a lot of value in that. And we think it's really going to play in the market really, really well. Upper Enterprise customers and some Healthcare customers may take a little bit more time to adapt to. >> Jake, one of the things we talk, for years, we talked about people did their upgrades based on the tick-tock of the Intel fees there. >> Correct. >> Now we're talkin' about things like, you know, Windows as a service, going Evergreen. Maybe, how does that relationship, the old traditional Wintel versus the cloud era. Upgrades. You're talkin' about the new latest generation. How do we think about that? >> You know what, I'm not going to use that, the merged term, because that's, you know. The work that Windows does on Xeon scalable processor family has been amazing. But, typically, we've done a two to three year cycle on a server release. With our new road map, which we announced in August, which you were there for, so thank you. We're actually going to release a new CPU every year. We're releasing a new CPU every year because we have to deal with the fact that cloud customers, in Azure, want to have the availability to the latest and greatest technology, right now. And partners, like Presidio and Raph's team, have developed technologies, like Concierge, which he'll talk about, that give customers the ability to manage their hybrid cloud environments, both in the cloud and on premises. When you start giving customers that flexibility they want the choice to say, I want to deploy your latest Xeon scalable processor family, Skylake processors this year, and next year, I'm going to maybe skip a year before I deploy your next version. >> Yeah, thanks Jake. One of the things that we've done at Presidio, we've tried to innovate ourselves, and we listen to our customers, and we know where our customers pain points are. So, Presidio Concierge is something that we developed from the ground up, that provides both shared space applications, provides customers with the usage on their shared space applications, how they're consuming their licenses, and also provides them with an allessor sign, so the infrastructure's a service. A lot of customers, when you talk about multi cloud, it doesn't always necessarily always mean the Harper scalers, right. It could mean shared space products, as well. So, we developed this product from the ground up in combination with Intel, and it's something that our customers are starting to use a lot, and we think that there's going to be a great grow in their first product. Some of the features that we actually give to our customers are actually for free, because we know that our customers are really battling with figuring out their usage patterns, internally. >> Well, I want to hear about those pain points. What were the problems that you were trying to solve with Concierge? >> So, some of the pain points, you know, we have customers today that get invoices from some of the public cloud companies or their service providers or with their infrastructures service. And the invoices are 50 pages long. They can never actually figure out what their true costs are. So we, through a shared space platform, that we developed from the ground up, we can provide customers with all of those metrics around their licenses. Plus, also, their usage around infrastructure as a service, as well. >> And, what has demand been like? >> The demand's been really good. Actually, when we launched product about two, three months ago, we were already at 20 customers. And we've seen a lot of interest. Presidio has about 7700 customers nationally, that we call on today. And we've grown tremendously, we have about a three billion dollar infrastructure partner today that provides both on premises and public cloud services. >> Yeah, I like, you brought up the fact that customers are looking for simplicity. Unfortunately, today, cloud is no longer simple. You know, I would say if you said, okay, If I went to my server vendor of choice and wanted to configure something, versus I went to my cloud vendor of choice and try to configure something, cloud might even be more challenging for somebody to do. But, one of the areas that we're trying to help customers get some simplicity back, is if you look at solutions like Azure Stack. So, Rebecca and I interviewed Jeffrey Snover earlier today, and that was the goal they had, was to give, kind of, that operational model and even some of the services from Azure and put them in my data center. Was wondering if Intel and Presidio are both partnering with Microsoft on this. What are you seeing, what are you hearing from customers? Any proof points as to how the roll outs are going, on there? >> We at Presidio, we are one of the first Azure Stack partners. Probably, about a year and a half ago, when it was actually announced and when it went, yeah, I think it was June of last year, and we partnered with Cisco, Dell, and also HP in the space, and we seen demand from our customers creep up. Single node solutions. We've seen demand with Single node PLC solutions are being deployed today. And then, in the public sector, we're also starting to see customers that are interested in it because it will provide them with a gateway to the public cloud in the future. >> Yeah, we're seeing the exact same thing. Obviously, we've been partnering together for some time. The beauty of Azure Stack is it's optimized for Xeon scalable processor family, as well as Intel Optane technologies, both the SSDs and in the future, our persistent memory capabilities. What we like in our work that we've done on Azure Stack and Azure Stack development, is that customers have had a lot of releases to begin to determine where Azure Stack's going to fit in their overall portfolio. And that's how you really have to look at Azure Stack, is how do you manage your portfolio between the cloud and on premises. Azure Stack is a great tool for that. >> You know, leading up to the release of Azure Stack, I talked to a number of service providers that had pent up demand. Leading up to this show, I was hearing a lot of non-North American interest. Can you give us any characterization as to how the roll out's going? >> Yeah, I think when you look at non-North American interest, there's a lot of localization, that has to take place in a lot of those countries. Maybe there's not actually an Azure, a public cloud Azure in those countries today, which is something that Microsoft is building towards. So, customers want to get used to their API's, they want to keep their data local. And when they're the same API's, on premises versus in the public cloud for all of their applications. And that's why I think you see, especially in Europe, as an example, a lot of countries in Europe where actually, data sovereignty's a big issue, alright. The data's not allowed to leave the country that they're actually in. And the demand, I think will, I always say, Microsoft, version two or version three. They always get it right. I mean, we've seen this time and time again. They've proven to us, they get this right all the time. >> I want to follow up on something you were just talking about, though with, sort of, risk management being a really big, hot opportunity. The next generation of risk management and mitigation. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing there, and what you're hearing from customers? >> Yeah, so, Presidio developed the next generation risk management framework, called NGRM. So, we found we do a lot of security with Cisco, Palo Alto. We have a lot of security vendors out there that we deal with, but what our CIO's were really looking for is they were looking for a single dashboard that could actually provide them with a scorecard: Green, Yellow, or Red. Basically saying this is where we're at in our security strategy and this is what we need to remediate right away. They can take that to their board, they can also use that internally for all of their CSO's and also all their internal IT infrastructure personnel that they have. So, it's something that we've seen customers adopt, because it provides that analysis and the remediation and it's not necessarily tied to a specific product. Again, this is a shared space platform that we developed from the ground up, because our customers are always saying, "Well, there's always security vulnerabilities. "How can we constantly check on this?" Right? And it doesn't matter whether you're running Azure, whether you have on-premises solutions, or whether you have some other cloud provider, we can provide that holistic view for customers today. >> One of the announcements that I think surprised everyone. I mean, things like Server 2019, we all expect. The open data initiative, the commentary that we had is if you talk about digital transformation. I mean, Microsoft, Adobe and SAP. Two companies at the center of it. What does it mean? When will customers see the benefits of this? And any commentary of digital transformation in general would be great. >> Well, typically, we've been involved in a lot of these open standards, and they typically take three to five years to work their way all the way through the system and build the proper ecosystem and standards. And then work their way into the product lines. I think, in this particular instance, there is a driver. We talked about the driver of cloud and why we, we Intel, are now producing chips every year, and you're not waiting for the three year release cycle. Well, the open data initiative, I think, falls into that camp. I think you're going to see an escalated transition to the open data initiative, because people have to be able to move their workloads. Presidio recognized it very early on in the process. We've been working with them for some time. But that's one of the values that they bring to customers, is their ability to do that. But, more and more customers and more and more data are being stretched and there has to be compatibility between file systems, file format, and data classification. The open data initiative is a start in that direction. >> Yeah, I mean, one of the examples that I could give you also is we always talk about IT transformation. We have a large customer that's actually a fleet truck company that underwent IT transformation, and they came to us and they said that they actually needed telematics on the trucks in the fleet of trucks. And the reason was because a lot of these trucks are breaking down and they would send it to a mechanic and the mechanic would diagnose it. So, we actually created, in partnership with Intel and with Microsoft, this telematic platform that actually can provide the customer, in real time, with what issues they actually have with the truck. And it saves the customer a lot of money. That's the type of information that customers are looking for. This customer has on premises data, plus, also in the public cloud, and I think stretching it and providing analytics around that is really important. >> And is it possible to take away the silos? I mean, you seem to be an optimist here. >> I'm very optimistic that we can take away the silos, but I'm also realistic. The only way to take away the silos is to develop new applications, new capabilities. And as my friends in Windows Server Team will tell you, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out, how do we use virtualization and container technologies to take old legacy data and carry it forward onto new modern IT infrastructure. And when you can do that, then you can extract value from the data. If you can not take it from an old, antiquated infrastructure to a new infrastructure as Presidio has done, you stranded the data. And that's where you have those silo breakdowns. So, I think we're developing the tools, but we're not all the way there. >> Yeah, you look at Windows 2019 coming out, there's Linux support in Windows 2019. Who would ever think that Microsoft would be releasing Linux support. >> Microsoft loves Linux. >> Microsoft loves Linux now, right? >> And they will in get it. >> And they'll get it now as well. Microsoft is really developed their ecosystem. Our partners also around the open API's and what they've been doing over the past few years. And I think customers are really starting to embrace that. And you look at even another feature that's coming with Windows 2019 with Storage Spaces Direct. Right, I think Microsoft, this is really going to be their entry into the Apple convert space. Customers are going to start building, they'll have to converge platform based on Windows 2019 Data Center. >> Wondering if you can give a little more color here, Raph. You and I lived through, kind of converged and hyperconvergence, when we wrote our original research at Wikibon, it was VMware is the one that's going to get everybody talking about it, but the one eventually that will be very important here is Microsoft. 'Cause, Microsoft owns the apps. They've got the operating systems, so absolutely, they can be critical in the HCI space. What are they doing and how does Presidio and partners go to market with this? >> So, I mean, when you look at Windows 2016, Windows 2016 was really the first iteration of Storage Spaces Direct. Windows 2019 has really improved upon that, and we're starting to see customers become more interested in that. The reason is because customers want a single platform that they can easily manage with a single operating system. So, there used to be the war, as you mentioned Stu, between VMware and Harper-V. ESXi and Harper-V. I don't really see that being talked about anymore. It's more around the features and the robust features that customers can actually get on as quickly as possible. I don't know if you have anymore. >> Well Raph, you're absolutely right on. I think people have taken virtualization for granted. We added virtualization technology in Xeon in 2006 and they've sort of taken it for granted. Obviously, VMware is a big partner for both Microsoft and Intel, but the reality is is that in a hyper convergent environment, you need a file system, you need an operating system, and you need apps. And Microsoft has all that capability. As you'll hear at four o'clock, we announce world record numbers and it's spectacular. And the reason for it is in our last version of Windows Server 2016, we delivered 16 million IOP's in a hyper converged environment. That got Raph and his team off the table saying, okay, you guys are legitimate. You have a legitimate platform now. But it's not good enough. We think this new instantiation that we've already started to announce in Windows 2019, and Jeff Wolsey announced it earlier today and started talking about the features in Project Honolulu. We think those kind of transitions are what it's going to take for Enterprise customers to begin to break down those silos that you discussed, and really start to look at their data holistically, build data lakes that can scale, and build frameworks that are, I don't even want to use the term convergent anymore, but hyper scalable. >> Yeah, I mean, to tie into that, right. You look at what Intel has developed around Optane and some of the storage platforms that they've come out with. 10 years ago? Intel wasn't really known as a storage company, right? But, you look at all the storage vendors out there today, they really are putting Intel aside. And when you start looking at what Storage Spaces Direct is going to deliver and some of the robustness around Optane, we really think that it's going to be something our customers are going to embrace with Windows 2019 and future versions and sequels. >> So, Raph, I got to give Presidio a lot of credit, though. We launched a program called Intel Select Solutions, and it really allowed us to take Windows and Storage Spaces Direct and create a solution that included both the CPU, the networking, the SSD's and the memory. And Presidio has led that. And so because we have these Intel Select Solutions for Storage Spaces Direct with Presidio, we have the flexibility now to give customers package solutions that are pre-configured. >> Great. Well, Jake and Raphael, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up just in a little bit. 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(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. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ba do ♪

(upbeat digital music) >> Hey welcome back, get ready. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio for a Cube Conversation. Again, we love talking with little companies, emerging companies, kind of maybe technology you haven't heard of before and we're excited to have our next guest 'cause he's right in the heart of security space, which is always a hot topic, continues to be a hot topic and will never go away 'cause the bad guys they just keep working hard to try to break everything that we create. So our next guest is Ambuj Kumar, the co-founder and CEO of Fortanix. Ambuj welcome. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> So give, for the people who aren't familiar with Fortanix kind of the basic 101. >> Yeah, so if you look at all the security today, it falls into three categories. One is protecting your data address. So what that means is, if somebody steals your laptop, how do you protect your hard drive from getting exposed? >> Right. >> So we use encryption for that. Similarly, we also use encryption to secure our data in use. So we connect to some bank website and our data goes encrypted through TELUS and so what that means is if somebody's doing wiretapping our data is protected. However once the applications start to run, whether it's in your data center or public cloud, then the data applications are being exposed. So to fix that Runtime vulnerabilities what the industry has done so far is to secure the infrastructure, try to secure the infrastructure and that is $80 billion per year industry. But we have failed to that because infrastructure is just so vastly complex. So what we do is we use something called Runtime encryption and idea is that your data and applications remain encrypted, so even when people who are running your cloud they're untrusted and they want to get your data, they can't do anything with it. >> So, a lot of stuff there to unpack. So first off we know the perimeter systems don't work anymore. >> Yeah >> I mean you got to put them up they do some level of stuff But you can't secure the perimeter anymore. So it is all this kind of working your security >> Yeah and the encryption all the way through the process. But this is pretty interesting I've never heard of encryption actually at Runtime, I mean it begs the question, you know how does the microprocessor run the encrypted data? >> That's right So it's a long research problem in security. People had been working on something called Fully homomorphic encryption and the idea is that: Can I take my program encrypted data encrypted and run in totally untrusted environment and give you the result that you can decrypt. Chances are that you can do that with very simple programs, like if you're adding some numbers, multiplying those numbers and even in those cases slow by many orders of magnitude. So what normally some operations takes one second will it will take three years. >> Okay >> Not good. >> Laughs >> So what we do is we use some new instructions from Intel called Software Guard Extension, Intel SGX and your data and your programs, they get decrypted in a secure region of CPU So all the memory, all the operating systems accessible things, anything that can be touched by any other process, they only can look at encrypted stuff. Your data get decrypted right when instructions are working on them and at that point it is accessible only to your write process. >> Right. >> So you use this hardware capability to accelerate the encryption decryption. So we can provide all the benefits of fully owned morphic encryption at a performance that is totally acceptable to our customers. >> So let me make sure I understand, So it decrypts it literally at the last possible obviously not second >> Yeah but last possible (laughs) in microprocessor time >> Yeah cycle, runs that process and then is write only to the output of that process. And is that immediately encrypted again >> Exactly >> On the write side as well? >> Yeah Yeah, exactly. Exactly. >> (laughs) So you mentioned the Intel instructions So is this relatively new, the SGX? >> Yeah, so we were first vendor to commercialize Intel SGX, its a new technology, but it's coming in all their CPU's so right now it's in all client CPU's, and some of the data centers CPU's But five years from now all the CPU's you will get from Intel will hopefully have this technology >> Right So obviously Skylake >> Yeah Skylake has it and all newer architecture. >> Wow So a little bit more about the company How long you guys been around, how long you been working on this problem you know funding kind of give us the overview on the company. >> Yeah >> So I have been working on encryption for last seven years the company was founded two years ago >> Okay >> We are funded by some well known security VC's including Foundation Capital and NeoTribe Ventures >> Okay >> We are widely recognized as the pioneers in this field that we are creating Runtime encryption. Recognized by Gartner's Cool Vendor we came number two in RSA Innovation Sandbox you know hundreds of security companies. We have several S&P 500 customers already so we are deployed in their products and environment, we are securing trillions of dollars of assets in realtime. Our goal is to convince CIA to run their most prestigious most sensitive applications on some untrusted cloud in some enemy country. >> Laughs >> It's a long shot >> Are you doing like a POC of something like that with them? Are you in active conversations or is that more of kind of a philosophical goal? >> I cannot confirm of deny that >> Okay, fair enough >> But that's our goal. And until we achieve that, we have something to keep working on. >> Okay. And then where do you guys sit kind of in the world of public clouds with AWS and Azure and Google versus either private (mumbles) or multiple clouds inside the company or you know some of these other kind of options like we hear like the Equinix which I think is one of the places >> Yeah >> How's that work? >> Yeah So our goal is to extricate security from infrastructure So in the end, our goal is that infrastructure will provide you compute cycles and the security will come from the customers, end customers who are developing the applications and deploying the applications. >> Right >> So its cloud agnostic security so meaning that we will go after on-prem customers, we'll go after public cloud, colo and all of that >> Right >> So in the meantime for our go-to market what we did was we partnered with two of really well known strong forces in the industry, one is IBM Cloud >> Yeah where IBM is putting this servers and running our technology and with Equinix, which is world's largest data provider and so if you are in any of the public cloud, if you are in IBM cloud you get our security by default so you are continuous running encryption >> Right >> Isolated from all the threats that might be there, or if you are in some other public cloud you can use it Equinix colo so if you have some applications that you don't want to be hacked you can use our SAS service to run those applications encrypted. >> Right And of course Equinix has got the direct connect to all the public clouds >> Yeah >> So minimum latency integration >> Couple of milliseconds. >> with all the other stuff >> in the public cloud. >> Yeah exactly. So what's the expense, both kind of the overhead expense on the computing side to do this when it's done properly and then what's the expense to run this is this something that is expensive can only be used for the most critical applications, or do you see this several times being more general purpose execution? >> So its will be used to secure anything that you don't want to be hacked and the cost of using Runtime encryption is minimal so I expect it to be wisely adopted and we make it really easy for developers and security organizations to use this technology. So you have to bring in your container and then Fortanix process attaches to your container you don't need to recompile your source code we never get to look at your source code there's no binary transfers nothing like that. And then so it's a simple millisecond long process and we give you modified container and now you can take this modified container run on any cloud you want and if it runs it runs securely. From that point onwards. >> Right And today you just have to make sure its got right microprocessor >> Yeah and in the future hopefully that will be more general purpose. >> Yeah >> Alright So what's next? What are you working on, what's a priority for the balance of 2018? >> Yeah, so we have lots of integration work going on VIA World is coming next week We have support for something called Kermit that allows you to secure your estorial box v send et cetera with Fortanix. Now we are also running integration with some data bases some multi party computers and things like that. So our goal is to make our technology more widely available to a large variety of customers. >> Alight, well Ambuj very interesting story, Encryption at Runtime so >> Yeah >> So we look forward to watching the story unfold. >> Awesome, yeah This is a decade long journey and I think when we have done infrastructure security will be irrelevant. So its going to be very exciting for all the parties involved. >> Alright, we'll keep eye, thanks for stopping by. >> Thanks >> Alrighty, Ambuj Kumar You're watching theCube from our Palo Alto studios See you next time. And thanks for watching. (epic orchestra music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018 here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Kevin Shatzkamer, who's the Vice President of Service Provider Strategy and Solutions with Dell EMC. Kevin thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, so first time on the program, give us a little bit about your background, you know, what brought you to the Dell family of technical companies. >> Sure, absolutely. I've been in the service provider industry, supporting and working with service providers, about 20 years, working in areas first at the launch of 2G mobile data services, 3G, 4G. Now, we're at the advent of 5G. And during the entire time what we've continued to witness is this continued move away from proprietary more towards open technologies, obviously moving away from proprietary hardware appliances more towards X86-based appliances. The networking stacks moving more and more open in the last 18 months. During my journey here at Dell EMC, it was an opportunity to really come in and recognize Dell EMC and Dell Technologies family of companies as the foundational technologies for how we watch the telco industry really transform itself and start to embrace IT transformation into their own operations. >> Yeah, that's a great background. Keith and I had a great discussion with Tom Burns talking about networking. We've been watching the open networking feeds, but we haven't gotten into all the G's as much. Explain to our audience, we've got Interrupt down the street, we've done coverage of Mobile World Congress, but 5G, some of the standards are there, but some of the things are going to sort out. These type of transitions do take years to go, but why so important and how does Dell play into the story? >> I think if we go back towards kind of the 2012 timeframe, I think there were two acronyms that really came to the forefront. It was SDN and it was NFV. And at the time it was really discussed in the lens of how we saw the second half of 4G materializing and recognizing that for the second half of 4G with the early days of IoT, the economics of how you operate the network needed to change drastically. We saw some of that start to happen when we look at NFV in the industry, I think there's a little bit of trough of disillusionment out there, and I think we see some use cases that have been successful. We've seen some challenges in terms of operationalizing NFV at scale. I think SDN to date has really been confined to sitting within the data center or interconnecting servers and building overlay technologies for the data centers. But what I expect to see now as we go into 5G is not the need for incremental improvement but the need for an absolute step function in terms of performance, in terms of reliability, in terms of reduction in latency, all at a drastically different cost economics. So now when we start to think about the second wave of NFV and we think about SDN leaving the data center, I think that's where we're going to see 5G really play a lead. From taking some of the technologies we've been talking about in siloed pockets and really see them move to scaled operations. >> So, you mentioned a lot of the telco space and in this environment, I've got familiarity with how EMC used to work with the service providers. Dell, of course you know, plays up and down and all over the place. What's the relationship with the telcos and the service providers from the Dell family? >> I think when Dell Technology speaks about the four transformations, we talk about workforce transformation, IT transformation, digital transformation and security transformation. I think all of those are opportunities for the telcos and service providers in two ways. One, is recognizing that their own network operations are transforming and that embracing the concepts of the IT transformation inside of their own operations, obviously with the telco grade reliability, is an area that we work very closely with the telecos and SPs around. The second part is recognizing that the digital transformation and the shift towards digital for most of small medium business will be recognized through service providers, through cloud technologies. So the second way we work very closely with these service providers is helping them build the services that allow them to capture digital transformation as it moves off-prem into the cloud. >> Can you provide some clarity or vision into the service provider space, when it comes to the need for innovation to make that step transformation to 5G? With an enterprise we can see VMware NSX and we're blown away by it and that's way beyond what a lot of customers need, but there's still a lot of work to go through to your point. What are some of those innovations that have to happen? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think if you're at Mobile World Congress and just about any tradeshow event, and even Michael Dell's keynote this morning at Dell Technologies World, the conversation of the edge came up. I think that there's still a lot of debate around what the edge is, and I know that the conversation came up around distribution of compute. But I think that the conversation is really around decentralization. If we've looked over the last five years as cloud services like AWS and Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, various others, have really been built. They've been built around a model that said that to achieve efficiency and scale you have to build massively scaled centralized data centers. Now it turns out that low latency, highly interactive services that are very data driven just don't work well when the distance between the applications and the users consuming those applications is really large. Latency is too high, jitter's too high, it's a little bit too unpredictable. I think that the number one iteration, the number one innovation that we will see in the network's is the innovation at the edge. Now, the edge can be on-prem, it can sit on-prem at stadiums and venues. It can sit at the cell site, it can sit in the mobile backbone network, it can sit at central office locations. I think what we'll continue to see is recognition of, not necessarily, if you build it, they will come model, but recognition that there is a class of services and applications that the edge just makes sense to rally around. And we'll see the edge become the new cloud. >> We talk about NFV, the edge, shed some light, what would a CPE device look like at the edge? Is that NFV running on the customer's virtualized infrastructure, is that truly some x86 box that the service provider puts in place that's provided by Dell? Paint a clearer picture, I hope, for the edge. >> So the answer is yes. >> Keith: I was afraid you'd say that, It's a CPE that sits on the branch and at the enterprise prem right. Dell EMC and Mobile World Congress and most recently announced our Virtual Edge Platform family of products with the first platform being the Virtual Edge Platform 4600. The industry's first Skylake-D platform, specifically targeting the access and branch edge. But in addition to that, I think that what we're going to see is in the central office locations the boundaries between what is a compute device and what is a network device really start to blur. That modular servers, that include x86 and merchant silicon and FPGA to terminate certain circuit switch workloads, like cloud LAN and smart NICs to be able to process data on the NIC itself are really going to start to come to the forefront. Maybe we see GPU start to be included in that as well for more machine learning and artificial intelligence use cases. But I think that going forward the end goal of the programmability that we talked about, both at the application layer as well as at the infrastructure layer, means that the boundaries between what's a server, and what's a network device, really start to blur. >> Last question I have for you. When I talk to service providers, it feels like that they're being pulled from both sides. On the one side, there's public cloud, lots of them are figuring out how to do direct connect, work to integrate into those services for VMware's partnering with them on that. On the other side, there's all this edge stuff that you've been talking about. You know, massive footprint and there's so many pieces that they need to think about. What do you hear from your customers? What's their biggest challenges and opportunities that they're facing? >> Yeah, I think you're right. I think that when customers are being torn and service providers are being torn in the way that they are, they somewhat retreat to an or mindset, right. Is it this or this, do I live in the public cloud or do I live at my edge? Do I live in an open source environment or do I embrace technologies coming from industry vendors? I think more and more what we're seeing is a transition to an end environment and recognition that certain applications and workloads are well suited to reside in particular locations. Michael said in his keynote this morning that the cloud is not a place, it's a business model. I think that what we actually see is even extending that thought a little further, is that the cloud is just a whole bunch of different places. We're going to move services and applications and workloads to the locations that are best able to meet the subscriber experience and deliver on what the applications expect. >> Kevin, really appreciate your help giving us an instant insight into one of the more dynamic pieces of the IT industry. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Dell World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, this is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018 here in Las Vegas, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest Kevin Shatzkamer who's the vice president of Service Provider Strategy and Solution with Dell EMC. Kevin, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, so, first time on the program. Give us a little bit about your background, you know what brought you to the Dell family of tech companies. >> Sure, absolutely. So I've been in the service provider industry, supporting and working with service providers, gosh, about 20 years. Working in areas first at the launch of 2G mobile data services, 3G, 4G, now we're at the advent of 5G, and during the entire time, what we've continued to witness is continued move away from proprietary more towards open technologies, obviously moving away from proprietary hardware appliances, more towards x86 based appliances, the networking stacks moving more and more open. In the last 18 months, during my journey here at Dell EMC it was an opportunity to really come in and recognize Dell EMC and Dell Technologies' family of companies as the foundational technologies for how we watch the telco industry really transform itself and start to embrace IT transformation to their own operations. >> Great background. Keith and I had a great discussion with Tom Burns about networking. We've been watching the open networking piece. But we haven't gotten into all the Gs as much, so explain to our audience, you know, we've got interrupt down the street, we've done coverage of Mobile World Congress, but, 5G, some of the standards are there, some of the things are going to sort out. These types of transitions do take years to go, but why so important and how does Dell play into the story? >> Yeah I think, you know, if we go back towards kind of the 2012 timeframe, I think there were two acronyms that really came to the forefront. It was SDN and it was NFV, and at the time it was really discussed in the lens of how we saw the second half of 4G materializing and recognizing that for the second half of 4G, with the early days of IoT, the economics of how you operate the networks needed to change drastically. So we saw some of that start to happen. When we look at NFV in the industry, I think there's a little bit of trough of disillusionment out there. I think we see some use cases that have been successful. We've seen some challenges in terms of operationalizing NFV at scale. I think SDN to date has really been confined to sitting within the data center for interconnecting servers and building overlay technologies for the data centers. But what I expect to see now as we go into 5G is not the need for incremental improvement, but the need for an absolute step function in terms of performance, in terms of reliability, in terms of reduction in latency, all at a drastically different cost economics. So now when we start to think about the second wave of NFV, and we think about SDN leaving the data center, I think that's where we're going to see 5G really play a lead, from taking some of the technologies we've been talking about in siloed pockets and really seeing them move to scaled operations. >> So you mentioned a lot of the telco space in this environment. I've got familiarity with how EMC used to work with the service providers. Dell, of course, plays up and down and all over the place. What's the relationship with the telcos and the service providers from the Dell family? >> Yeah, I think when Dell Technologies speaks about the four transformations, we talk about workforce transformation, IT transformation, digital transformation, and security transformation, I think all of those are opportunities for the telcos and service providers in two ways. One is recognizing that their own network operations are transforming and that embracing the concepts of the IT transformation inside of their own operations, obviously with the telco grade reliability is an area that we work very closely with the telcos and SPs around. The second part is recognizing that the digital transformation and the shift towards digital for most of small-medium business will be recognized through service providers, through cloud technologies. So the second way we work very closely with these service providers is helping them build the services that allow them to capture digital transformation as it moves off-prem into the cloud. >> So Kevin can you help provide some clarity or vision into the service provider space when it comes to the need for innovation to make that step transformation to 5G? In the enterprise, you know, we can see (mumbles) we're blown away by it and that's way beyond what a lot of customers need, but there's still a lot of work to go through, to your point. What are some of those innovations that have to happen? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think if you're at Mobile World Congress, just about any trade show event, and even Michael Dell's keynote this morning at Dell Technologies World, the conversation of the edge came up. I think that there's still a lot of debate around what the edge is, and I know that the conversation came up around distribution of compute. But I think that the conversation is really around decentralization. So if we've looked over the last five years as cloud services like AWS and Microsoft Azure, IBM Softlayer, various others, have really been built, they've been built around a model that to achieve efficiency in scale, you have to build massively scaled centralized data centers. Now, it turns out that low latency, highly interactive services that are very data driven just don't work well when the distance between the applications and the users consuming those applications is really large. Latency is too high, jitter's too high. It's a little bit too unpredictable. So I think that the number one iteration, the number one innovation that we will see in the networks is the innovation at the edge. Now, the edge can be on-prem, it can sit on-prem at stadiums and venues. It can sit at the cell site. It can sit in the mobile backhaul network. It can sit at central office locations. And I think what we'll continue to see is recognition of not necessarily a if you build it they will come model, but recognition that there is a class of services and applications that the edge just makes sense to rally around, and we'll see the edge become the new cloud. >> So as we talk about NFV, the edge, shed some light. What would the CPE device look like at the edge. Is that NFV running on a customer's virtualized infrastructure? Is that truly some x86 box that the service provider puts in place that's provided by Dell? Paint a clearer picture, I hope, for the edge. >> So the answer is yes. >> Keith: (laughs) How dare you say that? >> It's a CPE that sits on the branch and at the enterprise prem, and Dell EMC and Mobile World Congress and most recently announced our Virtual Edge Platform family of products with the first platform being the Virtual Edge Platform 4600. The industry's first Skylake D platform specifically targeting the access of branch edge. But in addition to that, I think that what we're going to see is in the central office locations, the boundaries between what is a compute device and what is a network device really start to blur. And that modular servers that include x86, and merchant silicon, and FPGA to terminate certain circuit switch workloads like Cloud-RAN and SmartNICs to be able to process data on the NIC itself are really going to start to come to the forefront. Maybe we see GPUs start to be included in that as well for more machine learning and artificial intelligence use cases. But I think that going forward, the end goal of the programmability that we talk about, both at the application layer as well as at the infrastructure layer, means that the boundaries between what's a server and what's a network device really start to blur. >> Kevin, last question I have for you: when I talk to service providers it feels like they're being pulled from both sides, so on the one side there's public cloud. Lots of them are figuring out how to do direct connect, work integrate into those services for VMwares, partnering with them on that. And on the other side, there's all this edge stuff that you've been talking about. Massive footprint, and, you know, so many pieces that they need to think about. What do you hear from your customers? What's their biggest challenges and opportunities that they're facing? >> Yeah, I think you're right. I think that when customers are being torn and service providers are being torn in the way that they are, they somewhat retreat to an "or" mindset. Is it this or this, right? Do I live in the public cloud or do I live at my edge? Do I live in an open source environment or do I embrace technologies coming from industry vendors, right? And I think more and more what we're seeing is a transition to an "and" environment and recognition that certain applications and workloads are well suited to reside in particular locations. Michael said in his keynote this morning that the cloud is not a place, it's a business model. And I think that what we actually see is, even extending that thought a little further, is that the cloud is just a whole bunch of different places, and we're going to move services and applications and workloads to the locations that are best able to meet the subscriber experience and deliver on what the applications expect. >> Kevin, really appreciate you help giving us some insight into one of the more dynamic pieces of the IT industry. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Dell World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, this is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman. >> For several years now, the analysts at WikiBound have been talking about taking the cloud, the public cloud, operating model, and bringing it to your data, wherever that data lives. Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Welcome to HCI: A Foundation For IT Transformation. We're here with Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, at Dell EMC. Chad, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, glad to be here, good to spend time with you guys. >> So, we talk a lot about, you know, VxRail, speaking of foundations. Give us a quick update. What is it, and what's new with VxRail? >> Okay, well big news in VxRail land, right, we just completed our transition under the 14th generation of Dell Power Edge servers, so this gives us a substantially more powerful platform, a substantially more predictable performance, and a lot more configuration options that make it fit a lot of different workloads that our customers have, so it really makes it prime time for HCI. >> So, where is the power and performance come from? Is that predominantly, kind of, new compute? >> That's a big piece of it. Some of that is software as well, right? vSAN underlies VxRail as a software defined storage layer, and we've seen pretty amazing increases in performance, just from software, from our 13G, to our 14G transition, but when we look at that performance now, on 14G servers, with the Intel Skylake chipset, we're seeing 2x performance over the last generation, and we're seeing latencies that are very, very low. And that has to do with, more and faster memory channels, more threads, overall faster processors, so really off the hook, in terms of the performance that we're seeing. >> Chad, when we look at HCI, it's really about the software layer, often, it gets overlooked, you know, what actually has to happen between the software and that underlying hardware? Are there optimizations, does it matter if I'm using the software, you know, what's optimized for that next generation Intel chip? >> Yeah, it's all about the software, or so our software vendor would say, but we know that when you're treating something as a system, you need that hardware and that software to work together, in perfect unison, as a system, and, you know, we've done a lot in this generation, working with the PowerEdge team to make sure that we have the right hardware, hooks, and design points that are focused on HCI. That goes from things like the devices that we use to boot up, and where we would execute the hypervisor kernel, to network connectivity, and really importantly, to the inband channels that we use to update all of the little pieces of firmware that operate the hardware inside the system, right? You need to be able to treat those as a system, update, lifecycle manage those, all in context of one another, so having direct and deep, meaningful access into that hardware is critically important when you're operating a system like this. >> When we've looked at, kind of, our cloud strategy, in general, it's about the data. We talk about data, it's things like predictability and latency, it's about, kind of, the power of the underlying thing, maybe, give us a little bit more specifics, as to what you're getting in this generation. >> So, the big difference here, above and beyond the performance, which is about 2x what we saw from the last generation, if we look at the same hardware, the same software, running on the two different pieces of hardware, about 100% better. But that's really just part of the story. It's the predictability of latency that's critically important. If you're going to migrate Tier 1 workloads under this infrastructure, you need to ensure that other workloads are not going to disturb that performance. So when we look at this, we look at how the IOs per second increases, and we look at the overall latency. How long does that latency line stay flat, right? So when we look at this generation, we see over 2x the IOPS, but the horizontal line where we look at the response time in latency, it stays flat nine times longer in this generation than in the last. So if you've got that sub-millisecond response time, even at very high IOPS, you can put a lot of different workloads on that same infrastructure, and still get predictable performance. >> I think, the other thing that people don't understand, is that, oh, HCI, it's just like, it's that little LEGO block you build, but it's not just one LEGO block, what have you seen from customers, what's kind of, the portfolio, what are the decisions that they have to make, to kind of, pick the right configuration? >> Sure, so yeah, when you're a kid and you get your first LEGO set, you get a lot of pretty generalized blocks, they're all, you know, square and some are rectangle, but not a lot of variability. When you get up into the big leagues of the LEGO Star Wars set, right, you've got a lot of specialized parts, and you can do really advanced, really cool things. That's really where we're at with HCI right now. If you want to really tune the infrastructure for the workloads that you have, you need a lot of variability in the processors you choose, the amount of memory, the speed of memory, and even the storage. It could be hybrid, some people still choose hybrid HDDs, but even within flash, people will choose SAS or SATA drives depending on the performance and cost benefits that they want to realize. So being able to scale up and down the processors, the memory, different types of storage, is critically important, so you can fit it into those different workloads. Also, a lot more people use this for VDI, and for high end imaging. So the ability to pack these things full of graphical processing units, and still be able to power and cool the things, is critically important. We have a lot of applications in those verticals where there's video processing and these are required. So, we don't just have one model of VxRail, we've got a number of different VxRail models, all of which can scale up, and then of course, HCI can intrinsically scale out. So that lets you really fine-tune it and get to that expert level, in terms of your LEGO building blocks. >> So Chad, a minute ago, you mentioned workloads. So as you're bringing this sort of 14th generation server technology to VxRail, how has it affected workloads, what are you seeing is the sweet spot for workloads? >> So if I were to think back a year, the question that every customer would ask, is how do I know which workload is right for HCI? And a lot of times they even lack the vocabulary and taxonomy to say, okay, that fits, that doesn't fit. What's happened in the meantime though, are the software's gotten so much better, the hardware's gotten so much faster and more predictable, that the question is, well, what workloads are not right for HCI yet? And there are very few that aren't. So, we've seen people generally start off with one workload, right? Maybe it's VDI, maybe it's a database, and then they start to move other, as they get comfortable with it, they move other workloads over to it. Obviously, we've got a big install block, or install base of VxBlock, and Vblock. We see a lot of those customers start to migrate workloads from there onto a layer of HCI. And more and more, those are becoming Tier One workloads. Crate & Barrel is a great example, a great customer of ours. They're moving their point of sale systems onto VxRail. Now for a retailer, your point of sale system, that's about as mission critical as you can possibly get, so they and others now have the confidence to start to move these things over. The only outliers that we see are some of these very big data applications that are hugely write intensive, and we actually usually end up selling a layer of hyper-converge with our Isilon arrays, to store that data, and then put a layer of hyper-converge compute around it, because in some ways, hyper-converged is just a better way to server, if you know what I mean. >> Wondering if you can talk about the business impact, what a customer's seeing, how are they quantifying the value of these systems, share some stories, or color there. >> Sure, it's all about operational expense savings, right? How much more efficiently am I going to be able to operate this infrastructure? It's not so much about capital acquisition costs. So when you look at the typical operational expense savings, and that comes from us doing all the lifecycle management of the hardware, of the software, of the cluster as a system, you see those costs go down. Really good example, is First Credit of British Columbia. Another one of our good customers. Now, they've deployed this, they've seen 30% OPEX savings and they've seen 50% power and space savings. You get a smaller package because you don't have separate storage array, separate servers, but, you also have really, one function that needs to operate your environment and that's the virtual administrator. He or she is the one that really operates everything, you don't have separate storage, separate compute, separate virtualization teams that have to look after the infrastructure. So, that first run is very easy, very fast to deploy, but it's day two through 700 and day 900 where you see that recurring operational expense saving where it really pays off for customers, all the updates and updates and life cycle management. >> Yeah, so Chad you talk about the success and all the customers. What about the customers that haven't looked at kind of the HCI space yet? What are they missing? You know, what do you say to those customers that maybe, you know, aren't sure if the waters right to jump in yet? >> So there's really three ways that you're going to encounter a customer who's going to consider HCI. You're either going to refresh a server, you know, your servers are up for maintenance and you're going to take a look at HCI as the next step in your evolution of your compute strategy. Or you're going to refresh your storage, and you're going to look at hyperconvergence as the next step in the evolution of your storage strategy. Or you've got that one workload that's probably net new and it's going to be, sort of, an isolated case and they need an infrastructure and they need to stand if up fast. That third case is really the one that drove the initial adoption of HCI, I can't tell you how many of our customers started with VDI. I mean, it's so cliched now to talk about VDI as killer app for HCI, but that's how so many people started. Because it's, you know, a very bound, isolated infrastructure and from there they get comfortable with it and they start to bring other workloads onto it. So, if you're thinking about refreshing your servers and if you're thinking about refreshing storage, it's time to kick the tires onto HCI. If you've got a workload that you need to stand up quickly and you don't know how big it's going to be, you know, one, two, three years down the road. It's another opportunity to look at HCI. Because you can start with a very small infrastructure, but you can grow it to a very very large one. >> What if we could talk a little bit about digital transformation, I mean, everybody's talking about digital transformation, and to us, digital transformation is all about how you leverage data and the edges exploding. We've envisioned sort of a three tier data model. You've got the edge, you've got maybe an aggregation point and you bring it back to the cloud. And that cloud can be a public cloud or it can be on-prem. So you've got to have some kind of cloud infrastructure to manage all this data. So where does this fit in the context of transformations and why does hardware matter? >> Yep, well let's go from the end and work back to the beginning. Hardware matters because of form factor, for one. As you start to push compute out to the edge, right, you want form factors that are small, don't consume a lot of power but, you know, still have a lot of processing power and can manipulate that data. Right, the whole internet of things phenomenon that is, creating all this data out at the edge, you know, presents us with a conundrum right? The data itself is not that valuable, the insights that we get from the data are immensely valuable. Bringing all that data back to the core to do something with is not cost effective. So, it's how do we turn the data at the edge into information and then how do we funnel that valuable information back to the core and leave the unvaluable data out where it is. hyper-converge fits really well there because you can have, you know, devices of very small form factors that are very quick to deploy, very easy to manage remotely. At the aggregation point you can have, simply, larger versions of the same thing or more of the same thing. And then finally at the core you can have very large clusters of hyperconverged appliances, like VxRail, to do your processing. Now the key is from an operational perspective you've still got a single pane of glass that manages everything. Right, it's still the same set of tools, it's still the same hardware and software lifecycle management process that happens out at the edge, at the aggregation point and at the core. So again, it comes back to the operational expense of making decisions closer to the data and then managing everything with a consistent set of tools. >> So I wondered if we could also talk about the competition and when Stu and I think about competition in this sphere we look at, first of all this all sort of software defined, everything can moved into software defined. So we see two vectors, one is head to head competition with other software defined suppliers, and the second big competitor is, hey, I'm just going to roll on my own. >> Chad Dunn: Right >> So let's start with the former, why Delium C vs vendor A, B, C or D? >> Sure, sure it really gets down to what your goal is as a customer and we obviously have multiple options within our own portfolio and those perfectly, you know, find solutions for a lot of people. But, you know, number one if you're a VMware user and you want to optimize around the VMware user experience, then VxRail is the way to go. Because we do co-engineer this with Vmware, it's not just a regular partnership, we have engineers and marketing people and product managers at Vmware that functionally role up to our team and so we do behave as one engineering and one product management organization to really optimize the user experience for VMware. Secondly, architecturally from a VCM perspective, this is a service that's baked into the kernal of vSphere. So, in terms of performance and the overhead that it creates on CPU, memory, et cetera. This is the best game in town. We can do more IO more predictably with flatter latency than really any other solution that's on the market in the HCI space. Every other one takes a virtual storage appliance approach where they have something running on top of the hypervisor. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> The very long and circuitous data path, we'll performance test against solutions like that all day long, every day, that doesn't worry us at all. So, if you're a vSphere customer, VMware customer it's the most obvious choice and from a performance perspective you're not giving up anything right? We don't want users to have to sacrifice the storage functionality, the performance, the compute functionality. Just because it's hyper-converge and you scale out doesn't mean you can compromise on any to those axis. >> Okay, what about the guys who like to change their own oil in the car and the spark plugs and tune it up and they want to roll on their own. >> (laughs) It's been a long time since I've been able to work on my own car. So I encounter these kind of customers all the time. It's the build your own crowd and it's what they've been doing for a long time. And it's great, alright, I build my own computers at home and I have my own ESX server that I put together. I can't afford a VxRail. (laughing) There's no employee discount. So I'll tell you a story that will hopefully make sense, my first job when I got into this business, I went to Boston College, my first job and work study was to keep a spreadsheet that had all the MAC addresses and all the IP addresses for every host on the BC network and keep those in sync. >> You're really good at that I bet. >> I was excellent at that. That is not a skill set that is in demand right now. Or really even at that time. But when you think about what it means to take a software defined storage product like VMware vSAN and take an x86 server and put those together. Yes, you're getting to the same destination of running vSphere on a host with software defined storage. You're missing the systemness, right? We go to a lot of trouble to make sure we're managing all of things things in the context of the cluster level. All of the little pieces of firmware, and they're roughly 12 or so pieces of firmware that we have to take care of. From the BIOS to the drive controller firmware, the drives, the boss card, which is our boot media, the iDRAC firmware, the backplane, power supplies. In legacy EMC we spent 30 years building arrays. We had all those same challenges with all the different pieces of firmware and software that all had to function as a system, we did that. And we guaranteed that it would live up to 5/9ths of availability for the customer. That's exactly what we do when we deliver VxRail's hyperconverge. If you want to choose to build those things yourself that's fine if you have the skills and that's how you want to operate your business. The 5/9ths is now on you though. Right, because you're the one responsible for bringing all those parts together. So, yeah it's certainly a valid path for others but, the market is shifting and we see more often than not, people are moving towards a buy approach rather than build. >> You bring up a great point. I remember back in the early days before we even called it HCI, you think about vSAN, oh well is the storage admin going to buy it? Is the virtualization admin going to take that over? What's excited me about this wave is the oh, heres the cool stuff that companies are doing now that they're not spending their time keeping spreadsheets of MAC addresses. >> Chad Dunn: Yeah, yeah exactly. >> What is the kind of, you know, owner of this, look like in your environment? And any cool stories you're hearing from customers transforming their organization. >> By and large the operator is your virtual admin. The person who is at home in vCenter and vROps, you know, maybe even vRA if they're going full infrastructure as a service. That's really the user of this, and the dynamic you mention is similar to what we had with Vblock, right. Customers who went Vblock, who said, I'm going to change my operating model to a virtual administrator versus compute, storage, network. You know, customers who didn't change the operating model were not happy Vblock customers. Ones that did change the model did. And, I'll tell ya a real off script anecdote, recently I was traveling in Europe, and I started playing a game with the sales guy we were traveling with. Because in Europe, very often, they have more of an affinity to putting their logos on the sides of buildings in a lot of European cities. So, as we would go to these different cities and we went from Stockholm all the way down to Rome, to Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You know, we're just spotting VxRail customers, right, whose going to spot the most. And the one really interesting one is we checked into a hotel, you know, late night in Switzerland. Next morning we meet for breakfast and he goes, "Did you spot the rail customer?" I said "Who was it?" We went into the bathroom and they have these, you know, squeeze bottles that have the soap in the shower and it's a cosmetics company and they're located in Germany. And they do, obviously, a ton of business all over Europe, and they had outsourced a lot of their IT because, you know, their core competency is not IT, it's cosmetics. And they now have one guy that looks after all of IT for this company rather than outsource it to two different companies to manage all this and he runs it all on VxRail. So, transformative yes, to that company very transformative. But, at a very small scale, but that pattern sort of repeats itself the higher that you scale. >> Alright we're out of time but where can people go to get more information on this and other products your HTI strategy. >> If I were them I'd go to dellemc.com/hci. >> Excellent, Chad, thanks very much, Stu appreciate you co-hosting with me and check out videos on thecube.net, this and other videos will be up there. Thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman we'll see you next time! (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering AWS Re:invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live in Las Vegas for 45,000 tech industry folks and customers with Amazon re:Invent 2017. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage, I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Justin Warren this segment. Our next guest, Bill Magro, is the Chief Technologist for Intel covering HPC high performance computing. Bill, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> John: Thanks for coming on. You guys, your booth's behind us, I don't if they can see it in the wide shot, but Intel is really taking advantage of the I don't want to say Intel inside the Cloud 'cause that's really what you guys are doing, but you got so much compute, this is your wheelhouse. Compute is what Intel is. >> Bill: Right. >> Andy Jassy at AWS, talking with their customers, they want more compute, edge of the network, so HPC, high performance computing's been around for awhile. What's the state of the art and how should people think about HPC versus the Cloud, are they the same, what's the relationship? >> Intel actually thinks of HPC or high performance computing more in terms of the activity and the workloads than the infrastructure that it runs on. So very early in the days of Cloud computing, there were a lot of people who said that the Cloud was kind of the opposite of HPC and therefore, they could never go together. But we think of Cloud as a delivery vehicle, a way to get access to compute storage networking and HPC is what you're doing. And so then, if you think about HPC as kind of a range of workloads, you can start to think about which ones are a good fit for the Cloud, and which ones aren't. So we talk a little bit about the high performance computing and tailored infrastructure for the most extreme cases of HPC. That's where you see the biggest differences with Cloud, 'cause they're at opposite ends of the spectrum. >> But you see holistically the Cloud is interplaying with HPC. >> Yeah. >> They're not mutually exclusive. >> Absolutely, we see Cloud as a way to deliver HPC capabilities. So if you think of the most demanding HPC problems, the ones that are used in national security, that are used to design commercial airplanes, and so on, those are some of the hardest problems. Predicting the climate change, predicting the weather, paths of hurricanes, those are what we call grand challenge problems. Those are not running in the Cloud. Those are running on dedicated, tailored, infrastructure built for high performance computing at that extreme. And those systems have a lot of characteristics such as very high performance networks, different from ethernet, custom topologies and are designed with software to really minimize variation because it's one large problem that has to move forward. The Cloud is kinda the opposite in a sense. It started as taking a large amount of resources and making it possible to carve them up, right. It's the opposite of aggregating resources. And so that's where a lot of the early thoughts of Cloud and HPC being at odds with each other. >> It seems to be a dream scenario because I mean, in the old days, in 80s and 90s when I was breaking into the business. If you were a database guy or a compute guy, you were a specialist, it was high end kind of computing. Moore's Law, certainly Intel, you guys took advantage of it. But now, you see so much, it's cool to do more compute. So like, it's been democratized. Databases and compute, certainly in all the conversations, for everybody, not just, the technologists. >> Right, where that's where Cloud fits in for HPC. So if you think of HPC in terms of the characteristics of the workload, it's something that's really demanding computationally. The product of the computation is like an intellectual insight. You can design a better airplane wing, a safer car, you can figure out where that hurricane is going and tell which people to evacuate. There's an intellectual product to the compute. And then the last characteristic is when you apply more compute power appropriately, you get a more valuable result. So it could be better prediction of that hurricane path, it could be a safer car because you have more time, you have more capability and were able to build a better design ahead of that deadline to get that model year of the car out. And so, if you think about that, there's a lot, there's a broad spectrum and I talked about some of those most extreme problems, but even in something like designing an airplane, there might be 16, 20, a hundred different small design variations you want to explore. Well those can actually be great for The Cloud, 'cause they're small calculations and you run many of them at the same time. And the elastic capability of The Cloud augments the supercomputer that you might be using to run your hardest problems. >> So the aperture of problem-solving is huge now. >> Bill: That's right. >> You can do more. I mean we had Thorn on yesterday. Thorn was a company that partners with Intel to do, you know, find missing and exploited children. AI for good, so everything's possible. >> Yeah even AI we think of as an example of a high performance computing workload because what does it do? It gives you insights that you didn't have otherwise, it's compute intensive, and it does better when you apply more resources. So that fits our definition. So AI is definitely under the umbrella of high performance computing. >> One of the things, one of the great benefits of Cloud is the elasticity which you mentioned before. It's like, and some of the, we know that Amazon's just brought out the C5 Instances which is a specific instance site, which would be quite useful for HPC. But what is it about the bursting workloads or that elasticity that specifically works well for HPC do you think? >> Well, there's a couple use cases that we think are particularly relevant. One of them is an existing company. Just imagine some Fortune 50 manufacturer. They have a lot of stuff that they really need to build their own supercomputer for, their own high performance computing system, but their usage, even though they keep that system busy all the time, there is some variability and they have opportunity costs of an engineer sitting while their job is in the queue, 'cause you're paying that engineer but you're not giving them insights, right. And so the Cloud can augment that, but we have a lot of examples of large Fortune 500, Fortune 50 companies augmenting their on-premise with Cloud as a way to push those workloads that can run on the Cloud there, to free up those on-prem resources which are much more tailored, much more expensive and get more value out of them. >> Okay, and what's Intel doing to help customers figure out which of those workloads is best suited for Cloud and which ones are better suited for something which is running on site? >> Well, it's mostly through our influencer sales force who engages with many, many major companies and provides consulting, because Intel doesn't sell computers directly to anyone, so it's more of a knowledge, our knowledge and sharing that with people. And what we're trying to help enterprises understand is what workloads need to stay on premise, which ones can go to the Cloud and how this, the elasticity of the Cloud can augment those on-premise resources and thus, you know, go back and forth. >> It's the classic mission for Intel, make the apps go faster, faster, smaller, cheaper, right. >> And get 'em land in the right place. So really, the two biggest considerations we find in deciding whether a workload goes into the Cloud or stays on-premise in high performance computing are the following, one, is really the sensitivity of the IP. There's a lot of workloads that could run in the Cloud and people simply want to keep it on-premise 'cause they're more comfortable knowing that their IP is sitting inside their own firewall. Though the reality is, more and more companies are getting comfortable with Cloud security as they see data breaches. And realize that some of the big Cloud providers, like Amazon, maybe have better access to the security talent than they do. >> I think Goldman-Sachs just announced they're going all in. That's Goldman-Sachs, they never do a testimonial. >> So the privacy and the sensitivity of the data is king, you know, you have to be willing to put it in the Cloud. Then the second question is, is it a technical fit? And that's where this spectrum of workloads comes in. The bigger a workload goes and the more you want to speed it up but keep the workload the same size, that's what we call strong scaling and that starts to stress the network, and stress the system. And that's where these tailored systems come in. And so, you have to look at where things fall on the spectrum. A good example of workloads that would fit is these design space explorations, anything we would call pleasingly parallel or embarrassingly parallel in the industry where the communication does happen, but it's not the limiter of the calculation. So screening for a drug candidates, for personalized medicine, lot of life sciences applications, financial services is a good fit, in manufacturing a design space exploration maybe for different designs and materials for a dashboard or a component of a car. >> Bill, when you were at your Thanksgiving dinner and your family or wherever, you're moving around in your personal life, you're a technologist. How do explain the phenomenon of Amazon Web Services and the Cloud action right now? Because, you know, you're in it every day. You're close to all the action. But I get asked all the time, what's the hub-bub about AWS and it's hard to explain the phenomenon. How would describe the, I mean you're talking about tailored systems, elasticity, I mean it's a tech dream. I mean, how do you explain it to like a normal person? >> The conversation's usually pretty short because my family involves a historian, an English major, an accountant and people who really couldn't have, a musician, a singer, people who really don't have the slightest interest in technology. >> It's hard to talk about lambda, when you're. >> So I'm really the only technologist in my family so I just avoid it, but the question does come up with my parents. You know, parents like to brag on their kids so they like to know what you do, and every year my mom asks me what I do and I try to explain high performance computing to her and she says, oh, I don't get it. But when you explain it in terms of things like climate modeling and being able to support the nuclear test ban that's worldwide, that's done with high performance computing. Safing cars, finding missing children, better quality of life through all the AI that we're now experiencing. >> John: Analytics is a great use case. >> Then people say, oh, you know, they can understand the use cases. The elasticity of the Cloud, really is not something that I discuss with family, but even coworkers, I think, that's what the conversation focuses on. Recognizing that high performance computing is a range of workloads. >> Okay, so I'll rephrase it differently. What's your perspective on, what observations that you get excited about that are enabled now by these new use cases? 'Cause there's new things now that are possible. The number of computations, you got analytics, you mentioned a few of them. What jumps out at you, wow, that's really awesome, we can do that now? >> You know, this is gonna sound a little odd, and maybe not what you expected, but I'm not actually a technology enthusiast, believe it or not, despite. I think technology's cool, I like what it does, but I don't get super excited about technology. One of the things that I'm excited about with the Cloud is probably at the opposite extreme of what you would expect which is, back to, how does the elasticity of the Cloud fit? There's so many companies in this world who could benefit from high performance computing and don't today. A recent study showed that 95 percent of U.S. small medium manufacturers which is over 300,000 are not using HPC today. And so, as they're part of this supply chain, whether it's into a Boeing or and Airbus or a Lockheed Martin or a Honda or a Toyota, there's this whole supply chain. HPC's being used at the top, it's not being used at the bottom, so I think the Cloud is actually really, really exciting because it allows somebody to get over those initial hurdles, the cap-ex, getting access to pay as you go, prove the value proposition, because a small medium business actually has to take a risk to use HPC. They have to divert capital and divert resources. And they could lose a contract. >> So do you see a lot more companies starting to take advantage of some of this high performance computing capability just because it's now, you can rent it by the hour and try it out, give it a bit of a whirl, and then see, actually this is going to be really valuable for us, and then deploy a lot more of it. >> Exactly and that's one of the key things we're promoting is 'cause we want to bring more people into the world of high performance computing. So, AWS provides all the building blocks. Compute, elastic storage and so on. But high performance computing applications really expect a specific type of platform that they can run on, and that platform aggregates the resources so there's a number of companies Rescale is one, Psycho-Computing, and others who are actually providing that platform layer. And then once you've got the platform layer, all the, I'll call it the, geeky stuff that they do, AWS has abstracted away. Now the applications can run and that's that's what's bringing new users in. >> Bill, final question for you. AWS launched its C5 Instances. What's that about, what's it mean for customers? Can you explain a little bit more on that one piece? >> Sure, we're delighted to see Amazon deploying the C5 Instances. It's based on our latest technology in the Xeon product family. We call that the Intel Xeon scalable processor family. It includes, it's based on what we call Skylake technology or code name Skylake. There's a lot of innovations in that processor and that platform that are specifically driven by the needs of high performance computing. There's something called AVX 512, which is a doubling of the vector width. Means that every core can actually do 32 floating point, double-precision floating point operations per clock. That's tremendous, tremendous compute capability, in a 2X over the previous generation. On the memory bandwidth side, which is another huge factor for high performance computing applications, like 66 percent increase in memory bandwidth. So it's a balanced platform, and we're seeing improvements in high performance computing apps of anywhere from 1.7x sometimes almost up to 5x improvement in going from the C4 to C5 Instances on a per note basis. >> This is really going to enable a lot of action. IOT, tons of great stuff. >> Absolutely and as I talked about that range of HPC and you know, what fits and what doesn't fit in the Cloud, every generation of technology, what fits in the Cloud is growing, and C5 is another important step in that direction. >> Bill, thanks for coming on the Cube. Bill Magro, Chief Technologist at Intel, HPC, high performance computing. The Cloud is one big high performance machine in the sky, wherever you want to look at it, really great opportunity at enabling all new use cases, doing things for society benefits, and customers. Great stuff here, Cloud impact is significant. IOT to the Cloud. This is the Cube, doing our share here at AWS in Las Vegas. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2017, Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. >> The sun is shining here in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE. Happy to welcome back to the program two guests that we have had on before, Bob Wallace with Nutanix and Wilfredo Sotolongo who's with Lenovo. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, we're gettin' towards the end of another Nutanix .NEXT show. I've had the pleasure of being in all five of the shows, so a lot to kind of go through. Bob, we've had you on the program a couple of times. You've been involved with all the OEM relationships there. Bring us up to speed as to kind of you know, where does OEM fit in the overall Nutanix story? >> It's a big part of how we're going to market now. It really ties in with our interest in providing customers with choice like we do from a hypervisor perspective. We also do from a platform perspective to give customers the ability to, they love the goodness, let's say, of Nutanix and all the things that the Nutanix solution brings and then they get the opportunity to then connect with, connect that with the relationship they may have with Lenovo as a partner to tie in with that to truly work through the Lenovo goodness from a support perspective and everything like that. So, we see it as a broader theme in how Nutanix kind of goes to market which is providing a maximum amount of choice to our customers. >> So, Wilfredo, we've had the pleasure of kind of documenting some of the changes going on. You came in to Lenovo through the IBM X86 acquisition. We've watched Lenovo build out the data center group. I've interviewed Kirk Skaugen three times this year already and you know, have seen partner events at Lenovo events so talk to us just a little bit about how's your role changed and how do we think of Lenovo today, before we even get into the Nutanix piece of it. >> Well, Lenovo has a very different approach to the segment, right. We see a tremendous opportunity in tripling of our addressable market, primarily driven by the shift to software define architectures with Nutanix being one of the primary software define architectures and we see ourselves as having a technology disrupter responsibility, i.e., rather than being the legacy provider with protecting the status quo, we see ourselves as the challengers trying to shift the discussion to the future. And, it actually feeds right in to why we partner with Nutanix almost two years ago now, right. We saw Nutanix as an emerging, aggressive, forward looking provider of technology and new options and with that common vision and common role in the industry we decided to partner with them to accelerate the process. So, different role, new relationship, actually not as new anymore, almost two years, but the same common desire. >> What I think and I'd just build on that, it ties in perfectly with Nutanix disruptive technology and approach and I personally as a sales leader and sales rep myself overtime you should have a perspective and Lenovo has made choices to have a perspective in how they're approaching the market with the technology rather than some of the vendors that have kind of a menu approach and I think it's the right thing that serves the customers needs to be able to be a trusted advisor to the customer and not say, I can offer you anything, but to say, here's what I believe is the right solution for you, and Lenovo does a great job at that. >> Wilfredo, we've heard from Nutanix a lot this week. Their goal is to be an iconic software company. So, that means they're going to need hardware, they're going to need someone to help complete some of the pieces there. Why is Nutanix best in partnership with Lenovo? >> Okay, that's a perfect question, but you said something that triggered a comment that I made to you earlier today. I like the shift I'm seeing in the messaging and the strategy and the product direction that Nutanix has embarked upon the last six to 12 months because aspiring to be much more than a hyperconversion of such a provider is key, right, for the success. This multi-cloud hybrid environments, right, you need to play, to be much more than just the virtual storage player, right. Now, with that said, we got together with Nutanix and we started building our portfolio, right. The first few months of the relationship we were just trying to catch up to what was already there. The good news is we've been investing consistently in this two years and now instead of trying to catch up we're actually leading the transformation. So, to answer your very specific question, point number one, we're the first ones to market with Skylake, Intel Skylake versions of their solution. Even your own is not going to, is coming in a few months. Ours is already in market since last month. Point number two, we recognize the need to virtualize not only the server and the storage capability but also the network. And we invested in software in our switches, in the Lenovo switches that allow us to virtualize all three of them in Nutanix implementations. So, as a Nutanix system administrator you have the choice now with Lenovo, and only with Lenovo, to manage even the network and when there are unfortunate circumstances that create a failure all of that, the migration, all the workloads are completely automated including the networking changes required, right. Number three, this one I didn't even know til one of my Nutanix colleagues pointed it out today, is our latest version of hardware where we run the Nutanix workloads has unique resiliency and availability features that none of my competitors have, like unstoppable fans. Fans are actually the number one item that breaks in infrastructure. So, unstoppable fans makes a big difference for them, right. And then last but not least, there is the one that has characterized us the most over the almost two year long relationship is support, right. We come from a heritage of enterprise great support, right. Things don't go down. The quality of the hardware, the quality of the software, the quality of the support structure, that make sure that the client has peace of mind in terms of if anything goes wrong. Four points. >> Bob, one of the reasons of course Nutanix partners with companies like Lenovo is to help with reach. Can you speak to kind of the global go to market that they help with? >> Oh, absolutely, yeah. So, I've recently also taken on our channel organization from the sales perspective and from my perspective we really have, we have regional partners, we have national partners and we have global partners, and those global partners are OEMs like Lenovo. They had the ability to allow us to engage with global customers that have operations all over the world to not only get the right product in the right place, but also from a support perspective support those customers in place because just like Lenovo, Nutanix and we talk a lot about our NPS score and our support organization, but it really is that ties together in such a good way. Our 90 plus NPS score our customers depend and count on us for that and when they're looking at the underlying hardware platform they need something that keeps that level of commitment to the customer there and that's what Lenovo brings. And, from a global perspective, it gives us a reach frankly a company the size that we've been over the last two years, just couldn't serve some areas of the world. >> In a specific area where I think we can make a big difference together is in global Fortune 500. This is also part of my responsibility inside Lenovo and which I picked up recently, in the last few months, and as the Nutanix technology is maturing and proven into the largest, most complex environments, we're helping support their reach into those biggest accounts where we already tend to be a large provider of either PC or server technology, right. So, and it happens to be by the way, one of the strongest capabilities that Lenovo has as compared to what I expected when I first came in here, right. We're pretty good in terms of the global accounts program. >> Wilfredo, I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit 'cause absolutely goin' up market. You know every company wants to go up market. Is the enterprise, have they just not felt the maturity was there? Are they a little nervous about young companies or why is it now ready for those type of engagements? >> I'm not seeing that much resistance anymore. To be very candid I'm not sure why there was any resistance in the first place, maybe because of a young company. Right now it's more about the discipline to come in, pick a use case, demonstrate into approval concept and execute it flawlessly, right. Where we do that, which by the way, we most of the time do through systems integrators, like IBM, like Capgemini, like APMG, it works very well and we're beginning to see some I'm going to say, fairly large deployments that we hope to build on for the future. >> We had some meetings here this week with some of those, a lot of those customers here, those large organizations that we're partnering up on. >> Any specific verticals or geographies that you're especially excited for kind of catchin' fire lately? >> Well, AMIA, I think we've AMIA for Lenovo is the, if I had to rank the fastest growing market for Lenovo and I think we've had a lot of, Wilfredo and our team, have been working closely together over the last two years to really build that out. So, I'd say AMIA is very strong. I think we're seeing a lot of growth. But, with Lenovo clearly Asia, the Asian region, PRC is a huge market for them. It's, they obviously have a deep legacy there. So, we're doing a lot in Apak as well. >> From an industry perspective I actually don't pick up a pattern. I see your, our, technology quite applicable in almost all industries. I mean, earlier in the conference we had one of our customers speak, right, one of our young customers speak, right, one of the hospital in a server, right. Healthcare, state of the art hospital, state of the art IT infrastructure, running everything, running everything, right, from the hospital information system to the medical imaging OEM software, everything, right and we see more and more institutions, right, making the migration, making the jump to state of the art architectures technologies and running the totality of the workloads. >> And, that's a core government project and very important project for the government of Azerbaijan and having a trusted partner in Lenovo in that scenario not only gives us the reach to reach into Azerbaijan but to have the trust level with an institution that ultimately has to be successful. A hospital, you just, there's no room for error. >> Want to give you both really the final word here. Wilfredo, if somebody didn't come to the event, what might they not know about HX and the offering of that that you'd want to make sure that they dig in and learn a little more about? >> Lenovo is all about disrupting the status quo and helping you get to the future faster. Nutanix is about the same thing. Together we've actually created an offering now that is differentiated against all the OEMs. Come talk to both of us about it. >> I'd say if you weren't here at the show the thing you might have missed is Nutanix bringing our one click simplicity that we're known for to the cloud era and really helping customers manage what we call an enterprise cloud that includes multiple cloud offerings on prem and public cloud with our one click simplicity and removing a lot of the barriers and complexity that customers are dealing with today as they look at how to manage their infrastructure between the different clouds that are out there. >> Bob Wallace, Wilfredo Sotolongo, thank you gentlemen both for joining us again. We're getting towards the end of two days of live coverage but be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our coverage for this and all upcoming shows. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, It's theCUBE, covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching SiliconANGLE Media's production of The Cube here inside the Acropolis Conference Center in Nice, France. Beautiful location, happy to welcome back to the program off the keynote stage this morning, Sudheesh Nair, President with Nutanix, and a first-time guest, someone I've gotten to know through the industry, Dan McConnell, Vice-President of the CPSD group inside DELL EMC. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. >> Dan: Thanks for having us. Sudheesh needs no introduction, but Dan, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, your role inside of DELL EMC. Sure, I guess, I've been at DELL for about, I don't know, 18 years, in various forms, engineering, CTO, product management. Nowadays I've got a collection of the CPSD businesses. Chad will refer to it as the horizontal businesses but basically all the things that are multi-hypervisor in nature. XC series, clearly one of those products, one of the long relationships we've had with Nutanix, very successful. Matter of fact, coming off Q2 was our strongest quarter ever. We're still closing Q3 so I can't talk about that, but safe to say these last six months will be six months of the strongest we've had with Nutanix and the XC series. I've got a collection of products from Block to FlexTech C Series. Yeah, so you come from what was the DELL side of DELL EMC, in through, of course, the DELL VMware relationship, been a strong one, driven a lot of joint revenue for the companies, yeah. Yep, absolutely, it's been great. Been good getting to know Sudheesh over the years. It's been multiple years at this point. >> Sudheesh: Almost four years now. But it's been a great relationship. Sudheesh, please. Yeah, first of all, thank you for having us. It's always nice to see you. And I still am amazed by all this equipment and how professional you are when it comes to doing these sort of things. It's very nice to be here with Dan. He's one of the nicest guys in the company and I'm not just saying because he's sitting here. A very good human being, it's always been a pleasure. It's almost four years we've been working together. Sudheesh, our audience loves when, they're looking forward to this session because, come on, DELL EMC, Nutanix, wait, they're friends, no they're competitors. No, yeah, they're, you know, it's a mix together. They say it's like the macaroons. It's, a couple of pieces go together, some of the flavors you like, some maybe you don't as much. Probably a bad analogy. Bring us up to speed as to kind of the Dell relationship. You know, how important is it to Nutanix? I know it's something that I talk to customers that are running Dell EMC and say, "Does it concern you at all?" And it is something that at least is on the radar for most customers. I'll try to give a shorter answer. It's a long answer question. The first thing is, this is a relationship that is built to last. I know that it is not an easy relationship, but let me also be honest about, look inside the industry and tell me a single relationship that is absolutely black and white. I mean, it's not that long ago when in one of the VMworlds, I don't remember who exactly, but someone from VMware actually said, "We're not going to lose to a bookseller," right? And then in the last-- >> Stu: Yeah, he's a VC now, so doing quite well for himself. Yeah, he's a great guy, it was his call, yeah. Again, it's a point in time of opinion, and I would do the same thing because we all compete with our heart and mind. It's not about that point. The fact that the company evolved, and in the last VMworld I think the CEOs of both AWS and VMware were hugging it out. Does that mean they've built a relationship that will not have conflicts? Absolutely not. I fundamentally don't think that the relationships in IT industry specifically will no longer be black and white, and it will always be shades of gray. The question is, should we be focused on customers who wants us to stop bickering and deliver what's right for them, and continue to focus on the overlaps of interest as opposed to focus on the conflicts that will arise. Absolutely well said. It's clear, and Dell's always been focused on a strategy of customer choice and flexibility. One of our key strengths at DELL EMC now is the portfolio, the fact that we've got multiple offers, the fact that it's a focus on the customer, what the customer wants, giving them flexibility as opposed to always trying to pigeonhole a specific product. It's interesting because I've been watching since the first days of the relationship. Dell's goal is to be leader in infrastructure. Nutanix's goal, be an iconic software company. Well, you're not going to be a server manufacturer, there's room there. So, Dan, why is Nutanix best on Dell? That's a great question. So one, the long relationship, right? So, we actually have teams of people who focus on integrating the platform and the software. There's a software stack in there, we call Power Tools internally that, long story short, manages all of the firmware stacks as well as, essentially lifecycle management of the hardware up underneath Nutanix. So, one piece is the hardware integration. The second piece, which we talked about a year ago at .Next, that we would be focused on integrating the broader Dell EMC portfolio, namely data protection. So, you'll see in upcoming weeks, we've already announced it formally, it gets turned on here in a few weeks, tight integration of Data Domain and Avamar with the XC series. Not just to reference architecture, but actual integration into the management. So, full lifecycle integration of data protection leveraging Data Domain, Avamar, tightly integrated into XC series, keeping that focus of ease of use, lifecycle management not only around the infrastructure, but also from data protection. So, hardware integration as well as tight integration of other pieces of the ecosystem. One other piece there, not to take too long, but not only data protection but we're also leveraging our relationship with Microsoft, and you'll see us integrate XC series into Azure with things like OMS, with our Log Analytics solution, so building out that ecosystem around the infrastructure. Yeah, Sudheesh, the Microsoft relationship's an interesting one, of course. You know, Dell, very long, strong relationship. I remember Satya Nadella up onstage with Michael Dell at Dell World years ago. It seems like a good opportunity for even deeper partnership. I think it's not just Microsoft. I think Dell EMC is the single largest vendor in this space and ecosystem, for example Pivotal. The innovative things that Pivotal is doing, Nutanix has an opportunity to partner with that because of the ecosystem. The global support, the global reach that Dell has, we have access to that. Customers get choice. Pretty much every customer who's buying anything in this industry probably have a contract with Dell. We have access to that. So, it requires a level of maturity for the business to sort of turn off the noise and listen to the music. We have been able to do that, and I know that people would love to see a fight, and yes, sometimes we have friction, and I think that is healthy. But by and large both companies have figured out the most important thing is to focus on customers, do right by them. So, Sudheesh, I think it would be fair to say that both companies have a sales culture that many outside call a bit aggressive. And especially where it's been interesting and sometimes challenging to watch is when it hits the channel. So, I know a number of channel providers, love Dell, love Nutanix, and have felt pressure sometimes from the Dell side to move to some of the other products, many have stuck. How do you balance that to kind of keep the channel happy, keep them working on that? You're absolutely right. I think both companies have a sales-driven culture, no question about it. And Nutanix, even though we are a younger company, much smaller in size, I don't think our aspirations and the fighting spirit is any less. In fact, in some cases it might even be out there. However, what we have done is we always focused on partners as part of the customer in the same ecosystem. That is, do right by the customer, do right by the partner. And I think that applies to both companies. What we have done early on is actually put together some guard rails between companies, how do we approach when those sort of conflicts arises, number one. Number two, we put together processes in the field when it comes to dual registration which is somewhat convoluted on the back end, but extremely delightful on the front end. Now, that doesn't mean there won't be friction. What we've done is we made sure that number one, the frictions are exceptions, not an example always, and second, when it comes up, we talk. So, he's on my WhatsApp. When something really blows up he will say, "Sudheesh, what's going on?" It's less and less now because our people have actually done a pretty good job of managing it. But ultimately, the one thing that'll continue to sustain and grow this relationship would be trust and communication. In the last four years, we know the people. We have built the communication, we speak the language, and because of that we are able to overcome all those problems. Yeah, the key is when those arise, getting the right people involved and ultimately doing right by the customer. There's always going to be conflict, this, that in the field. It's getting the right people involved early managing it and making sure we're putting customers first, not getting them in the middle of it. >> Sudheesh: Absolutely. Alright, so Dan, one of the things we heard from Nutanix today and I've been hearing all week, Intel Skylake. You've got 14 Gs available. Since it's not announced yet as the date, what kind of guidance can you give, and how's that rollout going to look for customers? Especially, I love your viewpoint as you know the server world forever, and you've got a broad portfolio. How does customer adoption across the various buying modes happen? I'll dance around this a bit and say stay tuned, very soon you'll hear some announcement around the 14th Generation PowerEdge. >> Stu: If you're watching the replay, call your rep now, it might be ready. Exactly right, so yes, stay tuned, very, very soon. We've already talked about it back at Dell EMC World. You can expect us to fully embrace the 14th Generation PowerEdge. We've already having some conversations with folks in the field. Obviously, we've got the PowerEdge line out there already. It's actually, the adoption of 14 G has been very, very strong, so we expect that to pick up here on the XC series very shortly. So, like I said, stay tuned. I have to dance around a little bit, but it'll be very, very soon. But one point, it's not available any later on the XC than it is on the other hyperconverged offerings that you have, correct? Correct. Yeah, so that's, I think, kind of the main thing. But that also tells you that we don't just take the same server and ship it out. We actually go through a different process to make sure that this can actually run mission critical applications. That's part of the problem as well, we have to do this right. Take a lot of time hardening that, what we would call standard server, so that's what's in process now, and almost done. I'd like to give you both a last word. Talk about customers, talk about anything we should be looking at down the road from the partnership. Dan, we'll start with you. Sure, you'll see continued, what I'll say tight integration, focus on the ecosystem. I think big steps with data protection integration, focus on Microsoft. You'll see more integration in that vein filling out that overall ecosystem. Partnership continues to be strong. I think it's a very good combination of software, hardware, and ecosystem. So, on the Dell EMC side you'll see us bring that ecosystem focus, and continue working with these guys. Obvious integrations on the hardware side with some exciting technologies like NVNE and RDMA. So, we'll continue to leverage the hardware technology to promote HCI and to drive HCI, make it stronger, and continue to focus on the overall ecosystem. So, we're excited for the relationship, and I'll hand it over to Sudheesh. Yeah, I think, see Nutanix, we always were a software company. But taking a product like this without the help of an appliance form factor would not be feasible, because any problem happened, it would be our problems. But now that we have the last five years behind us, we know how to make it work. What sort of products do we need to build to support the installation process, the upgrade process, lifecycle management, all of those things are done. Now starting next year, you'll see Nutanix making a conscious decision to become a truly software company, without the reliance of being, pushing through hardware. Our sales organization will be retooled and restructured to become, and incentivized to focus more and more on software, and less and less on appliances, which will bring companies like Dell EMC and Nutanix closer, because they have the footprint. Some of the conflicts used to arise basically because we had our own appliances as well. And once the sales organization is differently incentivized, you will see the trust building faster between the resellers and the companies. So, I am very optimistic because of not just the technology vision. Nutanix with hyperconverged, and the Calm and Xi, and everything else that we laid out. We know that for us, hyperconverged is just the foundation, and the support for everything that we're building. That fully aligns with Dell EMC's aspirations on how Nutanix should proceed. So, we're pretty excited, but always cautious about what could go wrong, focused on those things. As long as we talk and communicate, and we focus on customers and partners, I am pretty confident on the future. Sudheesh Nair, Dan McConnell, thank you so much for catching up. Welcome to The Cube alumni. Much appreciated. He's a pro already. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .Next in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching The Cube. (electronic music)

>> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in downtown San Francisco at the Mission Bay Convention Center at Node Summit 2017. We've been coming to Node Summit off and on for a number of years. And it's pretty amazing, the growth of this application for development. It really seems to take off. There's about 800 or 900 people here. It's kind of the limits of the facility here at Mission Bay. But we're really excited to be here. And it's not surprising to have me see Intel is here in full force. Our first guest is Monica Ene-Pietrosanu. And she is the Director of Software Engineering for Intel, welcome. >> Thank you, hello, and thank you very much for inviting me. It's definitely exciting to be here. Node is this dynamic community that grows in one year, like others can. So it's always exciting to be part one of these events. And present about the work we are doing for Node. >> So you're on a panel later on Taking Benchmarking to the Next Level. So what is that all about? >> That is part of the work we are doing for Node. And I want to mention here the word stewardship. Intel is a long time contributor in the open source communities. And has assumed a performance leadership in many of these communities. We are doing the same for Node. We are driving, we are trying to be a steward for the performance in OJS. And what this means, is we are watching to make sure that every check in that happens, doesn't impact performance. We are also optimizing Nodes, so it give the best of the hardware, Node runs best on the newest hardware that we have. And also, we are developing, right now new measures, new benchmarks which better reflect the reality of the data center use cases. The way your Node is getting used in the Cloud. The way Node is getting used in the data center. There are very few ways to measure that today. And with this fast development of the ecosystem, my team has also taken this role of working with the industry partners and coming up with realistic measures for the performance. >> Right, so these new benchmarks that you're defining around the capabilities of Node. Or are you using old benchmarks? Or how are you kind of addressing that challenge? >> We started by running what was available. And most of the benchmarks were quite, let's say, isolated. They were focused on single Node, one operation, not realistic in terms of what the measurements were being done for the data center. Especially, in the data center everything is evolving. So nothing is just running with one single computer. Everything is impacted by network latencies. We have a significant number of servers out there. We have multiple software components interacting. So it's way more complex. And then you have containers coming into the picture. And everything makes it harder and harder to evaluate from the performance perspective. And I think Node is doing a pretty good job from the performance perspective. But who's watching that it stays the same? I think performance is one of those things that you value when you don't have it, right? Otherwise you just take it as granted, like it's there. So, my team at Intel is focused on top tier scripting languages. We are part of this larger software organization called Software and Services Group. And we are, right now, optimizing and writing the performance for Python, No-gs, PHP HHVM, and for some of the top tier languages used in the data centers. So Node is actually our interesting story in terms of evolution. Because we've seen, also, an extraordinary growth. We've seen, it's probably the one who's doubled for the past three years. The community has doubled. Everything has doubled for Node, right? Even, the number of commits, it depends on which statuses you look-- >> They're all up and to the right, very steep. >> Yeah, so then it's a very fast progress which we need to keep pace with. And one thing that is important for us is to make sure that we expose the best of our hardware to the software. With Node that is taking an interesting approach. Because Node is one of, what we called CPU front end bounce. It's having a large footprint. It's one of the largest footprint applications that we've seen. And for this we want to make sure that the newest CPUs we bring to market are able to handle it. >> I was just going to say, they have Trevor Livingston on it from HomeAway. Kicked off things today. We're talking about the growth. He said a year ago, they had one Node JS project. And this is a big site that competes with, like, Air B&B. That's now owned by Expedia. Now they say, he said, they had, "15 projects in production. "22 almost in production, and 75 other internal projects." In one year, from one. So that shows pretty amazing growth and the power of the application. And from Intel's point of view, you guys are all in on cloud. You're all in on data centers. You've all seen all the adds. So you guys are really, aggressively taking on the optimization, for the unique challenges and special environment that is Cloud. Which is computing everywhere, computing nowhere. But at the end of the day, it's got to sit on somebody's servers. And there's got to be a CPU in the background. So you look at all these different languages. Why do you think Node has gone so crazy? >> I think there are several reasons. And my background is a C++ developer, coming and security. So coming into the Node space, one thing amazed me. Like, only 2% of the code is yours, when you write an application. So that is like-- >> Jeff: 2%? >> So where is the other 98% coming from? Or it's already pre developed. It's an ecosystem, you just pull in those libraries. So that's what brings, in addition to the security risks you have. It brings a fantastic time to market. So it enables you as the developer to launch an application in a matter of days, instead of months or a year. So time to market is an unbeatable proposition. And I think that's what drives this space. When you need to launch new applications faster and faster, and upgrade. For us, that's also an interesting challenge. Because we have, our super road maps are not days, right? Are years? So what we want to make sure is that we feed back into the CPU road map the developments we are seeing into this space. I have on my team, I have several principal engineers who are working with the CPU architects to make sure that we are continuously providing this information back. One thing I wanted to mention is, as you probably know, since you've been talking to other Intel people, we've been launching recently, the latest generation server, Skylake. And on this latest generation Nodes. So all the Node workloads we've been optimizing and measuring. So one point five x performance improvement, from the prior generation. So this is a fantastic boost. And this doesn't happen only from hardware. It happens from a combination of hardware and software. And we are continuing to work now with the CPU architects to make sure that the future generation also keeps space with the developments. >> It's interesting, kind of the three horsemen of computing, if you will, right? There's compute, there's store, and there's IO. And now we're working, and it's interesting that Ryan Dahl, it's funny, they brought up Ryan Dahl. We interviewed him back at the Node JS, I think back in 2011? Still one of our most popular segments on theCUBE. We do thousands of interviews a year. He's still one of the most popular. But to really rethink the IO problem, in this asynchronous form, seems to be just another real breakthrough that opens up all types of capacity in compute and store. When you don't have to sit and wait. So that must be another thing that you guys have addressed from coming from the hardware and the software perspective? >> You are right on spot, because I think Node, comparing to other scripting languages brings more into the picture, the whole platform. So it's not only a CPU. It's also a networking. It's also related to storage. Also, it makes the entire platform to shine if it's optimized to the right capability. And we've been investing a lot into this. We have all our work is made available is open source. All our contributions are up-streamed back into the mainstream. We also started an effort to work with the industry in developing these new workloads. So last year at Node Interactive, we launched one new workload, benchmark, for Node. Which we called Node DC. With his first use case, which is an employee information system, simulating what a large data center distributed application will be doing. This year, now at Node Summit, we will be presenting the updated version of that, one point zero, this time. It was version zero point nine, last time. Where we added support for containers. We included several capabilities to be able to run, in a configural manner, in as many configurations as needed. And we are also contributing this back. We submitted it to the Node Foundation. So it becomes an official benchmark for the Node Foundation. Which means, every night, after the build system runs, this will be run as part of the regressions. To make sure that the performance doesn't degrade. So that's part of our work. And that's also continuing an effort we started with what we call the languages performance portal. If you go to languagesperformance.intel.com we have an entire lab behind that portal, in which every night we build this top tier scripting languages. Including Python, including Node, including PHP, and we run performance regressions on the latest Intel architecture. So we are contributing the results back into the open source community, to make sure that the community is aware if any regression happens. And we have a team of engineers who jumps on those regression center root causes and analyzes it. So to figure it out. >> So Monica, but we're almost out of time. But before I let you go, we talked before we got started, I love Kim Stevenson, I've interviewed her a bunch of times. And one of the conversations that we had was about Moore's Law. And that Moore's Law's really an attitude. And it's kind of a way to do things more than hitting the physical limitations on chips, which I think is a silly conversation. You're in a constantly, the role of constantly optimizing. And making things better, faster, cheaper. As you sit back and look at, kind of, what you've done to date, and looking forward, do you see any slowdown in this ability to continue to tweak, optimize, tweak, optimize? And just get more and more performance out of some of these new technologies? >> I wouldn't see slow down. At least from where I sit on the software side. I'm seeing only acceleration. So, the hardware brings a 30%, 40% improvement. We add, on top of that, the software optimizations. Which bring 10%, 20% improvements as well. So that continuously is going on. And I am not seeing it improving. I'm seeing it becoming more, there is a need for customization. So that's where when we design the workloads, we need to make them customizable. Because there are different use cases across the data center customers. So they are used differently. And we want to make sure that we reflect the reality. That's how they're in the world. And that's how our customers, our partners can also leverage them, to measure something that's meaningful for them. So in terms of speed, now, we want to make sure that we fully utilize our CPU. And we grow to more and more cores and increase frequency. We also grow to more capabilities. And our focus is also to make the entire platform to shine. And when we talk about platform we talk about networking. We talk about non volatile memory. We talk about storage as well as CPU. >> So Gordon's safe. You're safe, Gordon Moore. Your law's still solid. Monica, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and good luck on your panel later this afternoon. >> Thank you very much for having me here. It was pleasure. >> Absolutely, all right, Jeff Frick checking in from Node Summit 2017 in San Francisco. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: 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 co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Kamran Amini. He is the General Manager, Server and Storage Business Unit, here at Lenovo. Thanks so much. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I should say. (Kamran laughs) >> Thank you. >> So today we've heard a lot about the largest product portfolio data storage product portfolio launch in Lenovo history. >> Kamran: Umhmm. Can you put this in perspective for us, though, in terms of the customer and why is this meaningful for the customer? >> Absolutely, so one of the key things with the entire Think System Portfolio, we started three years ago. A clean sheet and really listening to our clients, listening to our channel partner. What are their challenges with IT? Outside of wanting performance and everything else? How can we simplify their experience, from the buying experience, to life cycle management of the products, simplify part purchases. So a couple of things we did was common building blocks. So, the majority of the Think System Server Portfolio have common power supplies that go across. One of the things customer asked us was you have too many power supplies, right? I'm buying a part, I have to decide which server you have, and what form factor goes in. Now, we have one common across the board. Same thing with management software, we provide one look, and one feel experience for our clients. The whole philosophy of our Think System was start clean, deliver what customers are really valuing around IT and be able to help accelerate and future-proof the technology for them. As they're evolving their workloads and applications, as they're moving to Flash technologies, how do we provide that flexibility? And that's really the foundation of the Think System. >> Yeah, so, Kamran, there was discussion in the keynote this morning, it's about harnessing the intelligence revolution and AI. Can you connect the dots for us as to how that fits into servers, and specifically this launch the new Skylake Chipset? >> Absolutely, so, of course with the new scalable xenon processor, you're getting tremendous increase in performance. And I think when you look at AI and machine learning, there's the aspect that requires acceleration applications, and there's still computing happening on the CPU aspect of the AI machine learning. And you're seeing more the analytics and big data coming into this play. So that's really where we're leveraging the foundational excellence we have with our analytic platforms, and also looking at big data. And bring in with the accelerator's platforms to drive that end to end view around artificial intelligence. And that's where the Think System Portfolio is really shining. It's bringing that end to end view from a client perspective for all their purpose to drive the AI platform environments. >> One of the things we keep hearing about is Lenovo being number one in customer satisfaction, number one in reliability. Can you talk about how you make that happen? How do you ensure that you are as reliable as you come to be known to be? >> Yeah, so one of the things with Lenovo is we listen. If you're not listening to your clients and understand where they're going, what their challenges are, it's hard to be able to adapt. And one of the things you'll see from a reliability perspective, we believe even as you think about the future of software defined, that foundational server is going to be, it has to be reliable. You're getting away from the legacy thinking of redundancy of infrastructure to running everything on a server base. So now that server has to truly deliver five nines. So, we design stuff. A lot of people think x86 is a commodity space. My background is engineering, and I think you can do different styles of engineering. And our engineer team is a great team that thinks about how do we take the Intel processor technology, build a platform around it to be able to have the highest reliability? And, of course, with the highest reliability, it also leads to customers basically having gooder customer engagement, customer satisfaction. So they sort of go hand in hand, right? And that's where we try to continue drive innovation. As you heard from Curt in the main tent, our purpose is not to let go of that, but figure out how we can continuously drive improvement in our reliability. Ideally, I like to have six nines if I can in the server one day. But that's the foundation from an engineering aspect, and innovation that's leading into the actual platforms and offerings for our clients. >> Kamran, can you bring us inside what your customers are asking for? You talked about massive amounts of data, there's so many choices out there, I hear. You look in the AI space, it's like, oh, there's the public cloud with their GPUs and TPUs, versus moving to more distributed architectures internally. What kind of feedback are you getting from your customers, and what are they excited about that they can do this year that they couldn't do next? >> So I think a lot of >> Stu: Last. >> customers will love to have purpose-driven platforms. And I think, if you look at the market today, there's plenty of servers out there by a variety of different vendors. The challenge for customers is some customers are very price performance sensitive. And you know, sometimes they get siloed into I have to buy the expensive thing, even though my application might not require Flash, might not require GPUs. So if you look at the Think System Portfolio, we really focused on the segments of clients. All the way from SMB to large enterprises. And how are they actually using it? What's their purchasing philosophy? And build the platforms that accommodate that segment, plus the capabilities inside those platforms. So you'll see, for example, our mainstream two socket server where it has full capability with GPU, NVMe capabilities, future Intel technology built-in, versus we have our value line really focused around customers that are looking for really SMB environment. Give me that price performance that fits my budget friendly environment. And then you also see places like dense optimized platforms, really driving innovation around our HPC but also being leveraged around hyper-converg platforms and general purpose consolidations. And finally, we do believe that the big data analytics platforms are going to be mainstream one day. They're sitting in your backend of your center running your mission critical but they're becoming more and more relevant today. As you see AI happening. More and more stuff is going to go on those backend system to drive the analytics. And that's where we believe we're positioned very well in the portfolio we're delivering across the 14 servers. >> So what will it take for big data to really become an important part of they way companies do business. There is a deluge of data right now. And we're still trying to figure out how to, what to do with it, how to slice it and dice it. And how to, how to make improvements based on it. What will it take do you think? >> I think you're seeing a lot of ISP that we're doing traditionally. Traditional analytics are bring big data into the analytics. So that's their first movement, that the ISPs are merging those two environments together. The next thing is for people like Lenovo be able to deliver the infrastructure platform that actually can leverage that environment. Big data requires a lot of storage. And you'll see in our next gen analytics system, we almost quadruple the amount of storage you have in that platform because we know more and more is going to go from a storage perspective, and analytic and memory database environment. So it's really looking how the ISPs are looking in this challenge and building the right platform that actually leverage those those ISP solutions. >> Kamran, I loved how you were talking about some of the applications because when I talk to customers, it's that spectrum of application they have that they're struggling. Everything from building new microservices-based architecture to I've got my ERP solution, sitting back there. How do you help customers with that portfolio to modernize their infrastructure, optimize what they're doing and stay agile. >> Well, part of that is actually our service organization. It's really sitting and listening to understanding where the customer wants to go. Sometimes I think a lot of companies approach customers by saying here's what I have and try and force feed that offering into the customer environment. We actually are leveraging our professional service and consulting services to get a better idea. What does the customer want to do today but moving into tomorrow. And what platform or solutions will actually benefit the client from server storage or networking or even our engineers solutions that we have at Lenovo. >> When you're thinking about, when you're hearing the customer feedback, and trying to anticipate what the customer needs tomorrow, is there any area that worries you in particular that the customer may be have have a blind spot for? It could be about data storage or it could be about internet of things or cloud computing. What keeps you up at night? >> I think a lot of it is, to be personal, is around cloud. I think cloud initially provides a value prop around, for public cloud economics. But I think what we're seeing is a lot of customers have that philosophy of clouds but I think as they start looking into the actual deployment and how you manage that environment, the economics evolves. So what keeps me awake is, making sure that clients understand our story. Understand what Lenovo can bring into the table both for what their traditional IT needs, but also their next gen IT. Plus have establish for them a private cloud environment and tie into hybrid environment as well. We want to make sure our clients understand and drive the best value. One of things I always tell my clients is, look, if I could sell you one less server, but you're getting more benefit, I'm here to consult you in that way. I want to make sure the result that you see is what we want to achieve. And that's what we're focused on. And to me, that's what keeps me up is making sure our clients understand the journey as they want to go to cloud and what's the right path for them. >> Kamran, it's been about three years since Lenovo acquired the x86 business. Give us, as you look back, what surprised you in those three years. The keynote this morning, Y Y said, we wouldn't be able to think 18 months ago where we are today. So, what's changed the most, what surprised you the most about the journey with x86? >> So I did come from system X as part of the acquisition. And to be very frank, I think one of things that was stated in the keynote today was, the agility that Lenovo acts on. It's okay to make a mistake. As long as you quickly react and fix the mistake. And I think what I've noticed in the three years I've been here Lenovo now is, one, the culture is very flat. Everyone is empowered to make a decision. There's no hierarchical decision making. Of course, there's always the president. There's always the CEO. But people are empowered to make decisions that's beneficial for our clients. And we're seeing a huge focus around customer experience. It's not just a organizationally, it's not just a individual KPIs. It's really looking from end to end of our business. How can we transform our customer experience? To drive a better experience for our customers. And I think that's, with Lenovo being that agile of a company. I had great service years at, 17 years at IBM, very successful. But because of the size of the company and the different structures of the company, a lot of clients didn't feel we could adjust their needs immediately. And I think with Lenovo you're seeing a lot more faster agility. From our supply chain to how customers get quotes. From a product perspective and support. Those are all the things that I see slightly different, and we've been transforming as we've been going. Enhancing those capabilities. And we've learned through our mistakes through the last three years. It hasn't been any mistakes that we haven't came out with. But we constantly learn and try enhance as we go forward. And I'm very excited going into this year. Especially with these announcements that we're going to be driving a lot more enhancements and how our customers see Lenovo as a data center provider. >> A lot have been made about the fact that this is, Thinkpad and x86 25th year anniversary. Which seems amazing, really. >> Mmhmm. >> Now that these products are in their sort of adulthood so to speak, what do you think we should expect in terms performance and in terms of approach. Just because they are now, they've fully worked out the kinks of the youth and their adolescence. >> Yeah so if you look at, for example, in the server business, and the server portfolio Think System, from just gen to gen, literally, this is three years ago, two three years ago. You're going to see customers be able to run 150% more VDI, users. And that drives a better economics, dollar per user. So just from a gen to gen you're seeing tremendous platform improvements. And that's where I think, we're going to see customers. Customer, I think are going to see driving more and faster applications. I think we're going to see huge adoption of Flash within the server technology. And therefore, I think you're going to see where software define and server generation we're delivering come together very nicely. Where we believe that, my personal belief, you're going to see a lot more customers moving away from a traditional storage array to now software defined or all Flash software define environments. Where they're leveraging a commodity server base with huge amount of performance capabilities and software on top to deliver the business value. >> Kamran, where do you think we're going to be, next year but then also 10 years down the road. As you talk about the pace of business, change is incredible aren't they now. Can you predict a little bit into the future? (Kamran laughs) >> About what we're going to, I know it's a tough one. >> Kamran: I wish I could predict. I think you're going to see a lot of different applications coming together. I think you're going to see AI being a key factor to drive and generate a lot of information with machine learning. And being able to take that information and figure out how you drive business agility. I think you're going to see retail driving AI aggressively. I think you're already seeing automotive industry driving machine learning and everything else into their cars. So for us, it's very exciting as an IT provider. Were we see an evolution happening and eventually another revolution happening in IT, I think in the next 10, 15 years. You're going to see I think more dense platforms because you're going to drive more density with the nut form factor. I think you're going to see a lot more powerful systems. And I think you're going to see software becoming more relevant. And I think that the legacy status goal is going to eventually be gone I think. I think legacy, 10 years from now, legacy is going to be considered software defined I believe. >> Great. Bold predictions. (Rebecca laughs) >> Predictions. (Kamran laughs) >> Well, Kamran Amini, thank you so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure having you on the show. >> Kamran: Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from theCUBE at Lenovo Transform just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by Lenovo. >> Welcome to The Cube's coverage of the Lenovo Transform event. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. He is the senior analyst at Wikibon. Thanks so much, Stu, it's great to always be working with you here. >> It's great to be with you here, Rebecca, in New York City. What a time it is in New York City. >> Rebecca: How lucky we are to be alive right now. >> (chuckles) All right, enough Hamilton humor. Yeah, Y.Y., the CEO of Lenovo, got up on stage, talked about how there's no better transformation story than New York City, from a humble trading company, city, over 200 years ago to the center of innovation and just global commerce that it is today. >> So I want to ask you about Y.Y.'s keynote address. He was talking about how this was really an inflection point for Lenovo. He said this is the time where we celebrate what we've done, our past, and think about the impact we've had on society, and on business. And then also really look at the future, and what we aspire to, where Lenovo wants to go. I mean, where do you see Lenovo in terms of all your coverage of this company? >> Yeah, so we know that we're at an interesting time in really what's happening in IT today. One of my favorite lines that Y.Y. had is he said, you look back a hundred years, he said heck, look back 18 months, and you probably couldn't predict where we would be today 18 months ago. And that's true, the pace of change is just off the charts. On the one hand, they're talking about how ThinkPad is now 25 years old, and the server, the x86 line is also-- >> Also 25 years old. >> 25 years ago. >> Rebecca: We are grown up. >> But, you know, I've been in a lot of events this year where you talk whether it's 10, 25, or 100 years, and they say we know we're entering a new era where everything's going to change. Lenovo feels they are a good mashup of their tradition, but they're different and they're new, and one of the people in the keynote this morning said that they're a startup. Now, I wouldn't call them a startup with 43 billion in revenue, and 52,000 employees globally? >> A big startup. >> Um, no. You know, culturally, I think, Rebecca, you'd agree with me, a company of that size, I don't care if you started yesterday, because you all got moved in, you're not a startup. There's certain structure and certain things involved that make up startups and that innovation, you can't move a 52,000-person company on a dime, and say ope, hey, we're just going to go pivot into this. But, they are looking to take advantage of really the whole wave of AI, how do they harness the intelligence, is what they talked about. And what they said is they don't have some of the legacy. So what that means is that while they have a server business that has been around for many years, they've only had it for two years. They don't have the storage, they don't have some of the baggage that we've been watching the industry is, storage is trying to transfer. >> They're unencumbered. Particularly Kirk Skaugen, who we're going to have on the program later today, made the point about the lack of legacy and how that makes it easier not only to innovate, but also to sell. >> Yeah, absolutely. We've been watching that transformation about how software is eating the world, and Lenovo very much wants to focus on those software solutions. What one of the two brand names that they put out today are the ThinkAgile brand. And ThinkAgile is really focused on those software-defined solutions, highlighted by, they've got the OEM of Nutanix solutions and they're also partnering with Microsoft, where we're going to have Azure Stack coming out later this year. And Lenovo of course being one of the top server manufacturers, close partnership with Microsoft is going to drive that forward for really delivering on the promise of hybrid cloud solutions. >> So, yeah, I want to hear what you think about these product announcements. This is the largest product launch in the data portfolio in Lenovo history. Is it a game changer? >> So, ThinkSystems is the other big brand that they have, and it's server, storage and network. So, they have Intel up on stage, and a matter of fact both Kirk and Kim Stevenson both came from Intel, so we know Intel's place in the market. We understand how important they are, and with the Skylake chipset coming out later this year, it's important. Anytime Intel comes out with the next generation, it's important. The caution I have is this is, I think, the fourth or fifth show this year that theCUBE's done where Intel's up on stage talking about their next generation chipset. I was at the Google Cloud event in February, you were at the Dell EMC show in Los Vegas, we had the team at the HPE Discover, and all of them, arm-in-arm with Intel, talking about how this next generation is going to be transformative, and of course leveraging the data, being ready for all of those edge solutions, devices, and really be able to take that infrastructure and tie it to lots of different devices. But it's really that wave that Intel is, that rising tide that rises all boats, because revenue for servers actually in the first quarter this year were down a little bit because really big companies, especially the hyper-scales, are waiting for this next generation chipset. >> So in talking about how Intel is this great partner to all of these companies, what do you think sets Lenovo apart? Where does it compete, what's it's, what's unique about it? >> Yeah, so Kirk in the keynote this morning laid out a couple of places that they want to really tie their brand to. Their goal is to be the most trusted provider in the data center today, and trust is really important. Security, absolutely, it's at the board level, it's one of the top things that everyone discusses there. And when they talk about trust, it starts with up time. So, if you start with we're all using some of the same base pieces, there shouldn't be much difference between them at that point, but Lenovo has some data points to show that they had the least amount of unplanned downtime of any of their competitors. Going out at saying compare them to Dell, and HPE, and they were far and away in the lead. >> And that is huge, particularly as you were saying, the pace of business change and innovation is so fast. >> And the second piece, customer support. So we hear lots of lip service to things like customer support. Lenovo, from a cultural standpoint, they push it through the entire product line. And really, you also hear some of the leverage between the PC, laptop, and even tablet market, and even the device all the way through the servers. So talked about how when they bring in the sheet metals and the screws. You turn one way, and you go to the consumer side, you turn the other way in the factory, and it goes to the enterprise and the server division. And we know that there's leverage that can be made out of that; the economies of scale are good. And we've seen a lot of splitting of consumer and enterprise, HP cut those in two, there were rumors for years that Dell was going to sell off their PC division. Lenovo feels that they have the strength to do both of them. And as we start seeing edge solutions and mobile and all these other devices planned, Lenovo can build an end-to-end story that few companies still can. >> I want to keep, talk more about this end-to-end, because this is another thing that many executives played up in the keynote. I mean, how important is that in terms of how it competes? >> So, there are some pieces that are easy, and you say okay, from a brand standpoint, if I have the new Moto Z and I have a laptop that I like, you build that brand trust, you have a similar user interface. We've seen what Apple and Google can do pushing out across all those devices. But the second one is really if we start talking about data. If I want to have insight in con activity, Y.Y. said in his keynote, this fourth revolution is really going to be focused on the user and therefore you want to be where the data is, where the users are, where the devices are. And Lenovo has a lot of pieces that touch to those end devices. >> We're going to have a number of executives on the program too, also a customer too. One of the things that Y.Y. was talking about is harnessing AI to not only understand where your customers are today but also understand, anticipate their needs, where they want to go tomorrow. Is this something that you view as a strength of Lenovo? >> So, we're still pretty early in the AI. I feel like many of the times here, you heard Big Data and AI both being thrown out there. We know that there's so much data being created, especially with the peripheral proliferation of all of the end devices that are there. So how do we gather that data, turn that into insight, and we're starting to see where that goes. Lenovo still, primarily, is an infrastructure player, so it's devices, it's boxes, you want to hear more about the software that helps drive that, and a lot of that is through partnerships. So I walked around the area here around me. There are many partners here that are helping to be able to transfer that data and create more insight out of them. So, you know, we'll see. It's a lot of that is positioning where they want to be and where they know the new goal lines are, but I want to see some of the proof, I want to talk to customers that are using this and getting advantage from it. >> So much of Lenovo's strategy has really been about partnering and forging these alliances to augment its offerings. And Kirk had said he was going to foreshadow a bit of possible mergers and acquisitions, possible partnerships. What do you see in store for Lenovo in terms of how it moves forward in this hyper-converged world? >> Yeah, so in the software-defined storage space, Lenovo has a lot of partnerships. So whether it's Nexenta, the resale the solution, Nutanix is an OEM solution. Last year they had announced a deeper integration with a storage partner that was bought by one of their biggest competitors. So HPE has been acquisitive as of late. They've bought both SimpliVity and Nimble, both of which were good Lenovo partners. So, the question is, yeah, it's not surprising to hear Kirk say that they are going to be acquisitive. It's great to see him up on stage. I'm sure a question I'm going to have for him is what do you look for? I don't expect him to come out and say yes, this is the company I buy and I'm going to spend 10 billion dollars to go buy a company. But where are they going to fit and where are they going to partner in there? Just behind me here you've got VMware, Red Hat, Nutanix, Micron, all storage-based solutions that Lenovo can work with. Lenovo wants to be one of those platforms for infrastructure and partner with companies that help round out that stack. And therefore buying software solutions that help augment that software-defined infrastructure that Lenovo does would make a lot of sense. >> So you talked about some of your burning questions you have for Kirk, but what else do you want our viewers to come away with after a day of coverage about the Lenovo Transform event? >> Yeah, so one of the other things that Lenovo was highlighting is what they're doing in the HPC or supercomputer market. Because there's a supercomputing show going on in Europe right now, and Lenovo says that they now have 92 of the top 500 are running Lenovo, they're the fastest growth, but what I'd like to hear from him and I want to hear more of, is it's not just oh, we've got the speeds and feeds and this is great, but we're helping scientists do breakthroughs, we're helping the medical industry help out, find new cures for diseases. We usually hear about CERN and what they're doing with advancing science, so those are the kinds of things that connect the technology to the greater good. Y.Y. talked about it, Kirk talked about it, the greater good, because infrastructure at the end of the day, is only there for the applications that the business runs. And of course those applications are there to drive value to the business and hopefully for the greater world. >> Well, and that is true, and that is something that we've heard at a number of technology conferences is using technology, and these transformative new products to make huge advancements in society, and to solve big problems. I mean, how serious is the technology industry, I mean, is this just sort of a side note that you hear at conferences, do you think this really is a raison d'etre of tech right now? >> Yeah, so Rebecca, you and I were at the Red Hat Summit, and it felt ingrained in their culture. There were some companies, you hear, you talk about it, and like, oh great, you give employees time to go work on charitable events or what are you giving to schools, and helping to make things possible? So I'd love to hear from Lenovo, really, as John Furrier would say, the meat on the bone for some of these solutions. I think it is more than lip service, but how deeply ingrained is it? We'd love to hear. The technology industry in general seems to be understanding that their mission should be broader than just selling licenses or selling boxes. As a, I'm a sci-fi fan, and most science fiction is about how we can take technology and make a better future. I have friends of mine that say, if you're a technologist that means you're optimistic about what technology can do for you for the future. An area that you and I like to talk about is what will automation do to the future of jobs? So that needs to be part of the equation, 'cause it's not just oh hey, we've got this cool new data center, and I could just lock it and nobody needs to go into it. Well, what are those people doing, and what does that improve for the business, and improve the world? >> Right, and how will people work side-by-side with these technologies, how will their jobs be improved by the technology taking over some of the perhaps more monotonous tasks, things like that? >> Stu: Absolutely. >> Great. Thanks so much, Stu. I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll be back with more from Lenovo Transform just after this. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. (bright music) Covering Google Cloud Next 17. >> Hi, and welcome to the second day of live coverage here of theCUBE covering Google Next 2017. We're at the heart of Silicon Valley here at our 4,500 square foot new studio in Palo Alto. We've got a team of reporters and analysts up in San Francisco checking out everything that's happening in Google. I was up there for the day two keynote, and happy to have with me is the first guest of the day, friend of theCUBE, Marc Farley, Vulcancast, guy that knows clouds, worked for one the big three in the past and going to help me break down some of what's going on in the marketplace. Mark, it's great to see you. >> Oh, it's really nice to be here, Stu, thanks for asking me on. >> Always happy to have you-- >> And what a lot of fun stuff to get into. >> Oh my god, yeah, this is what we love. We talked about, I wonder, Amazon Reinvent is like the Superbowl of the industry there. What's Google there if, you know-- >> Well, Google pulls a lot of resources for this. And they can put on a very impressive show. So if this is, if Invent is the Superbowl, then maybe this, maybe Next is the college championship game. I hate to call it college, but it's got that kind of draw, it's a big deal. >> Is is that, I don't want to say, arena football, it's the up and coming-- >> Oh, it's a lot better than that. Google really does some spectacular things at events. >> They're Google, come on, we all use Google, we all know Google, 10,000 people showed up, there's a lot of excitement. So what's your take of the show so far in Google's positioning in cloud? >> It's nothing like the introduction of Glass. And of course, Google Glass is a thing of the past, but I don't know if you remember when they introduced that, when they had the sky diver. Sky divers diving out of an airplane and then climbing up the outside of the building and all that, it was really spectacular. Nobody can ever reach that mark again, probably not even the Academy Awards. But you asked the second part of the question, what's Google position with cloud, I think that's going to be the big question moving forward. They are obviously committed to doing it, and they're bringing unique capabilities into cloud that you don't see from either Amazon or Microsoft. >> Yeah. I mean, coming into it, there's certain things that we've been hearing forever about Google, and especially when you talk about Google in the enterprise. Are they serious, is this just beta, are they going to put the money in? I thought Eric Schmidt did a real good job yesterday in the close day keynote, he's like, "Look, I've been telling Google to push hard "in the enterprise for 17 years. "Look, I signed a check for 30 billion dollars." >> 30 billion! >> Yeah, and I talked to some people, they're a little skeptical, and they're like, "Oh, you know, that's not like it all went to build "the cloud, some of it's for their infrastructure, "there's acquisitions, there's all these other things." But I think it was infrastructure related. Look, there shouldn't be a question that they're serious. And Diane Greene said, in a Q&A she had with the press, that thing about, we're going to tinker with something and then kill it, I want to smash that perception because there's certain things you can do in the consumer side that you cannot get away with on the enterprise side, and she knows that, they're putting a lot of effort to transform their support, transform the pricing, dig in with partners and channels. And some of it is, you know, they've gotten the strategy together, they've gotten the pieces together, we're moving things from beta to GA, and they're making good progress. I think they have addressed some of the misperceptions, that being said, everybody usually, it's like, "I've been hearing this for five years, "it's probably going to take me a couple of years "to really believe it." >> Yeah, but you know, the things is, for people that know Diane Greene and have watched VMware over the years, and then her being there at Google is a real commitment. And she's talking about commitment when she talks about that business. It's full pedal to the metal, this is a very serious, the things that's interesting about it, it's a lot more than infrastructure as a service. >> Yeah. >> The kinds of APIs and apps and everything that they're bringing, this is a lot more than just infrastructure, this is Google developed, Google, if you will, proprietary technology now that they're turning to the external world to use. And there's some really sophisticated stuff in there. >> Yes, so before we get into some of the competitive landscape, some of the things you were pretty impressed with, I think everybody was, the keynote this morning definitely went out much better, day one keynote, a little rocky. Didn't hear, the biggest applauses were around some of the International Women's Day, which is great that they do that, but it's nice when they're like, "Oh, here's some cool new tech," or they're like, oh, wow, this demo that they're doing, some really cool things and products that people want to get their hands on. So what jumped out at you at the keynote this morning? >> I'm trying to remember what it's called. The stuff from around personal identifiable information. >> Yeah, so that's what they call DLP or it's the Data Loss Prevention API. Thank goodness for my Evernote here, which I believe runs on Google cloud, keeping up to date, so I'm-- >> Data loss prevention shouldn't be so hard to remember. >> And by the way, you said proprietary stuff. One thing about Google is, that Data Loss Prevention, it's an API, they want to make it easy to get in, a lot of what they do is open source. They feel that that's one of their differentiations, is to be, we always used to say on the infrastructure side, it's like everybody's pumping their chest. Who's more open than everybody else? Google. Lots of cool stuff, everything from the TensorFlow and Kubernetes that's coming out, where some of us are like, "Okay, how will they actually make money on some of this, "will it be services?" But yeah, Data Loss Prevention API, which was a really cool demo. It's like, okay, here's a credit card, the video kind of takes it and it redacts the number. It can redact social security numbers, it's got that kind of machine learning AI with the video and all those things built in to try to help security encrypt and protect what you're doing. >> It's mind boggling. You think about, they do the facial recognition, but they're doing content recognition also. And you could have a string of numbers there that might not be a phone number, it might not be a social security number, and the question is, what DLP flagged that to, who knows, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that they can actually do this. And as a storage person, you're getting involved, and compliance and risk and mitigation, all these kinds of things over the years. And it's hard for software to go in and scan a lot of data to just look for text. Not images of numbers on a photograph, but just text in a document, whether it's a Word file or something. And you say, "Oh, it's not so hard," but when you try to do that at scale, it's really hard at scale. And that's the thing that I really wonder about DLP, are they going to be able to do this at large scale? And you have to think that that is part of the consideration for them, because they are large scale. And if they can do that, Stu, that is going to be wildly impressive. >> Marc, everything that Google does tends to be built for scale, so you would think they could do that. And I'd think about all the breaches, it was usually, "Oh, oops, we didn't realize we had this information, "didn't know where it was," or things like that. So if Google can help address that, they're looking at some of those core security issues they talked about, they've got a second form factor authentication with a little USB tab that can go into your computer, end to end encryption if you've got Android and Chrome devices, so a lot of good sounding things on encryption and security. >> One of the other things they announced, I don't know if this was part of the same thinking, but they talk about 64 core servers, and they talk about, or VMs, I should say, 64 core VMs, and they're talking about getting the latest and greatest from Intel. What is it, Skylink, Sky-- >> Stu: Skylake. >> Skylake, yeah, thanks. >> They had Raejeanne actually up on stage, Raejeanne Skillern, Cube alumn, know her well, was happy to see her up on stage showing off what they're doing. Not only just the chipset, but Intel's digging in, doing development on Kubernetes, doing development on TensorFlow to help with really performance. And we've seen Intel do this, they did this with virtualization with the extensions that they did, they're doing it with containers. Intel gets involved in these software pieces and makes sure that the chipset's going to be optimized, and great to see them working with Google on it. >> My guess is they're going to be using a lot of cycles for these security things also. The security is really hard, it's front and center in our lives these days, and just everything. I think Google's making a really interesting play, they take their own internal technology, this security technology that they've been using, and they know it's compute heavy. The whole thing about DLP, it's extremely compute heavy to do this stuff. Okay, let's get the biggest, fastest technology we can to make it work, and then maybe it can all seem seamless. I'm really impressed with how they've figured out to take the assets that they have in different places, like from YouTube. These other things that you would think, is YouTube really an enterprise app? No, but there's technology in YouTube that you can use for enterprise cloud services. Very smart, I give them a lot of credit for looking broadly throughout their organization which, in a lot of respects, traditionally has been a consumer oriented experience, and they're taking some of these technologies now and making it available to enterprise. It's really, really hard. >> Absolutely. They did a bunch of enhancements on the G Suite product line. It felt at times a little bit, it's like, okay, wait, I've got the cloud and I've got the applications. There are places that they come together, places that data and security flow between them, but it still feels like a couple of different parts, and how they put together the portfolio, but building a whole solution for the enterprise. We see similar things from Microsoft, not as much from Amazon. I'm curious what your take is as to how Google stacks up against Microsoft who, disclaimer, you did work for one time on the infrastructure side. >> Yeah, that's a whole interesting thing. Google really wants to try to figure out how to get enterprises that run on Microsoft technology moving to Google cloud, and I think it's going to be very tough for them. Satya Nadella and Microsoft are very serious about making a seamless experience for end users and administrators and everybody along managing the systems and using their systems. Okay, can Google replicate that? Maybe on the user side they can, but certainly not on the administration side. And there are hooks between the land-based technology and the cloud-based technology that Microsoft's been working on for years. Question is, can Google come close to replicating those kinds of things, and on Microsoft's side, do customers get enough value, is there enough magic there to make that automation of a hybrid IT experience valuable to their customers. I just have to think though that there's no way Google's going to be able to beat Microsoft at hybrid IT for Microsoft apps. I just don't believe it. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think one of the not so secret weapons that Google has there is what they're doing with Kubernetes. They've gotten Kubernetes in all the public clouds, it's getting into a lot of on premises environment. Everything from we were at the KubeCon conference in Seattle a couple of months ago. I hear DockerCon and OpenStacks Summit are going to have strong Kubernetes discussions there, and it's growing, it's got a lot of buzz, and that kind of portability and mobility of workload has been something that, especially as guys that have storage background, we have a little bit of skepticism because physics and the size of data and that whole data gravity thing. But that being said, if I can write applications and have ways to be able to do similar things across multiple environments, that gives Google a way to spread their wings beyond what they can do in their Google cloud. So I'm curious what you think about containers, Kubernetes, serverless type activity that they're doing. >> I think within the Google cloud, they'll be able to leverage that technology pretty effectively. I don't think it's going to be very effective, though, in enterprise data centers. I think the OpenStack stuff's been a really hard road, and it's a long time coming, I don't know if they'll ever get there. So then you've got a company like Microsoft that is working really hard on the same thing. It's not clear to me what Microsoft's orchestrate is going to be, but they're going to have one. >> Are you bullish on Asure Stack that's coming out later this year? >> No, not really. >> Okay. >> I think Asure Stack's a step in the right direction, and Microsoft absolutely has to have it, not so much for Google, but for AWS, to compete with AWS. I think it's a good idea, but it's such a constrained system at this point. It's going to take a while to see what it is. You're going to have HPE and Lenovo and Cisco, all have, and Dell, all having the same basic thing. And so you ask yourself, what is the motivation for any of these companies to really knock it out of the park when Microsoft is nailing everybody's feet to the floor on what the options are to offer this? And I understand Microsoft wanting to play it safe and saying, "We want to be able to support this thing, "make sure that, when customers install it, "they don't have problems with it." And Microsoft always wants to foist the support burden onto somebody else anyway, we've all been working for Microsoft our whole lives. >> It was the old Dilbert cartoon, as soon as you open that software, you're all of a sudden Microsoft's pool boy. >> (laughs) I love that, yeah. Asure Stack's going to be pretty constrained, and they keep pushing it further out. So what's the reality of this? And Asure Pack right now is a zombie, everybody's waiting for Asure Stack, but Asure Stack keeps moving out and Asure Stack's going to be small and constrained. This stuff is hard. There's a reason why it's taking everybody a long time to get it out, there's a reason why OpenStack hasn't had the adoption that people first expected, there's going to be a reason why I think Asure Stack does not have the adoption that Microsoft hoped for either. It's going to be an interesting thing to watch over what will play out over the next five or six years. >> Yeah, but for myself, I've seen this story play out a few times on the infrastructure side. I remember the original precursor, the Vblock with Acadia and the go-to-market. VMware, when they did the VSAN stuff, the generation one of Evo really went nowhere, and they had to go, a lot of times it takes 18 to 24 months to sort out some of those basic pricing, packaging, partnering, positioning type things, and even though Asure Stack's been coming for a while, I want to say TP3 is like here, and we're talking about it, and it's going to GA this summer, but it's once we really start getting this customer environment, people start selling it, that we're going to find out what it is and what it isn't. >> It's interesting. You know how important that technology is to Microsoft. It's, in many respects, Satya's baby. And it's so important to them, and at the same time, it's not there, it's not coming, it's going to be constrained. >> So Marc, unfortunately, you and I could talk all day about stuff like this, and we've had many times, at conferences, that we spend a long time. I want to give you just the final word. Wrap up the intro for today on what's happening at Google Next and what's interesting you in the industry. >> Well, I think the big thing here is that Google is showing that they put their foot down and they're not letting up. They're serious about this business, they made this commitment. And we sort of talk and we give lip service, a little bit, to the big three, we got Asure, we got Amazon, and then there's Google. I think every year it's Google does more, and they're proving themselves as a more capable cloud service provider. They're showing the integration with HANA is really interesting, SAP, I should say, not HANA but SAP. They're going after big applications, they've got big customers. Every year that they do this, it's more of an arrival. And I think, in two years time, that idea of the big three is actually going to be big three. It's not going to be two plus one. And that is going to accelerate more of the movement into cloud faster than ever, because the options that Google is offering are different than the others, these are all different clouds with different strengths. Of the three of them, Google, I have to say, has the most, if you will, computer science behind it. It's not that Microsoft doesn't have it, but Google is going to have a lot more capability and machine learning than I think what you're going to see out of Amazon ever. They are just going to take off and run with that, and Microsoft is going to have to figure out how they're going to try to catch up or how they're going to parley what they have in machine learning. It's not that they haven't made an investment in it, but it's not like Google has made investment in it. Google's been making investment in it over the years to support their consumer applications on Google. And now that stuff is coming, like I said before, the stuff is coming into the enterprise. I think there is a shift now, and we sort of wonder, is machine learning going to happen, when it's going to happen? It's going to happen, and it's going to come from Google. >> All right, well, great way to end the opening segment here. Thank you so much, Marc Farley, for joining us. We've got a full day of coverage here from our 4,500 square foot studio in the heart of Silicon Valley. You're watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> Narrator: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud, Next 17. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in the Palo Alto Studios, SiliconANGLE Media, is theCUBE's new 4400 square foot studio, here in our studio, this is our sports center. I'm here with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon on the team. I was at the event all day today, drove down to Palo Alto to give us the latest in-person updates, as well as, for the past two days, Stu has been at the Analyst Summit, which is Google's first analyst summit, Google Cloud. And Stu, we're going to break down day one in the books. Certainly, people starting to get onto there. After-meetups, parties, dinners, and festivities. 10,000 people came to the Google Annual Cloud Next Conference. A lot of customer conversations, not a lot of technology announcements, Stu. But we got another day tomorrow. >> John, first of all, congrats on the studio here. I mean, it's really exciting. I remember the first time I met you in Palo Alto, there was the corner in ColoSpace-- >> Cloud Air. >> A couple towards down for fries, at the (mumbles) And look at this space. Gorgeous studio. Excited to be here. Happy to do a couple videos. And I'll be in here all day tomorrow, helping to break down. >> Well, Stu, first allows us to, one, do a lot more coverage. Obviously, Google Next, you saw, was literally a blockbuster, as Diane Greene said. People were around the block, lines to get in, mass hysteria, chaos. They really couldn't scale the event, which is Google's scale, they nailed the scale software, but scaling event, no room for theCUBE. But we're pumping out videos. We did, what? 13 today. We'll do a lot more tomorrow, and get more now. So you're going to be coming in as well. But also, we had on-the-ground, cause we had phone call-ins from Akash Agarwal from SAP. We had an exclusive video with Sam Yen, who was breaking down the SAP strategic announcement with Google Cloud. And of course, we have a post going on siliconangle.com. A lot of videos up on youtube.com/siliconangle. Great commentary. And really the goal was to continue our coverage, at SiliconANGLE, theCUBE, Wikibon, in the Cloud. Obviously, we've been covering the Cloud since it's really been around. I've been covering Google since it was founded. So we have a lot history, a lot of inside baseball, certainly here in Palo Alto, where Larry Page lives in the neighborhood, friends at Google Earth. So the utmost respect for Google. But really, I mean, come on. The story, you can't put lipstick on a pig. Amazon is crushing them. And there's just no debate about that. And people trying to put that out there, wrote a post this morning, to actually try to illustrate that point. You really can't compare Google Cloud to AWS, because it's just two different animals, Stu. And my point was, "Okay, you want to compare them? "Let's compare them." And we're well briefed on the Cloud players, and you guys have the studies coming out of Wikibon. So there it is. And my post pretty much sums up the truth, which is, Google's really serious about the enterprise. Their making steps, there's some holes, there's some potential fatal flaws in how they allow customers to park their data. They have some architectural differences. But Stu, it's really a different animal. I mean, it's apples and oranges in the Cloud. I don't think it's worthy complaining, because certainly Amazon has the lead. But you have Microsoft, you have Google, you have Oracle, IBM, SAP, they're all kind of in the cluster of this, I call "NASCAR Formation", where they're all kind of jocking around, some go ahead. And it really is a race to get the table stake features done. And really, truly be serious contender for the enterprise. So you can be serious about the enterprise, and say, "Hey, I'm serious about the enterprise." But to be serious winner and leader, are two different ball games. >> And a lot to kind of break down here, John. Because first of all, some of the (mumbles) challenges, absolutely, they scaled that event really big. And kudos to them, 10,000 people, a lot of these things came together last minute. They treated the press and analysts really well. We got to sit up front. They had some good sessions. You just tweeted out, Diane Greene, in the analyst session, and in the Q&A after, absolutely nailed it. I mean, she is an icon in the industry. She's brilliant, really impressive. And she's been pulling together a great team of people that understand the enterprise. But who is Google going after, and how do they compete against so of the other guys, is really interesting to parse. Because some people were saying in the keynote, "We heard more about G Suite "than we heard about some of the Cloud features." Some of that is because they're going to do the announcements tomorrow. And you keep hearing all this G Suite stuff, and it makes me think of Microsoft, not Amazon. It makes me think of Office 365. And we've been hearing out of Amazon recently, they're trying to go after some of those business productivity applications. They're trying to go there where Microsoft is embedded. We know everybody wants to go after companies like IBM and Oracle, and their applications. Because Google has some applications, but really, their strength is been on the data. The machine the AI stuff was really interesting. Dr. Fei-Fei Li from Stanford, really good piece in the keynote there, when they hired her not that long ago. The community really perked up, and is really interesting. And everybody seems to think that this could be the secret weapon for Google. I actually asked them like, in some of the one-on-ones, "Is this the entry point? "Are most people coming for this piece, "when it's around these data challenges in the analytics, "and coming to Google." And they're like, "Well, it's part of it. "But no, we have broad play." Everything from devices through G Suite. And last year, when they did the show, it was all the Cloud. And this year, it's kind of the full enterprise suite, that they're pulling in. So there's some of that sorting out the messaging, and how do you pull all of these pieces together? As you know, when you've got a portfolio, it's like, "Oh well, I got to have a customer for G Suite." And then when the customer's up there talking about G Suite for a while, it's like, "Wait, it's--" >> Wait a minute. Is this a software? >> "What's going on?" >> Is this a sash show? Is this a workplace productivity show? Or is this a Cloud show? Again, this is what my issue is. First of all, the insight is very clear. When you start seeing G Suite, that means that they've got something else that they are either hiding or waiting to announce. But the key though, that is the head customers. That was one important thing. I pointed out in my blog post. To me, when I'm looking for it's competitive wins, and I want to parse out the G Suite, because it's easy just to lay that on, Microsoft does it with 365 of Office, Oracle does it with their stuff. And it does kind of make the numbers fuzzy a little bit. But ultimately, where's the beef on infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service? >> And John, good customers out there, Disney, Colgate, SAP as a partner, HSBC, eBay, Home Depot, which was a big announcement with Pivotal, last year, and Verizon were there. So these are companies, we all know them. Dan Greene was joking, "Disney is going to bring their magic onto our magic. "And make that work." So real enterprise use cases. They seem to have some good push-around developers. They just acquired Kaggle, which is working in some of that space. >> Apogee. >> Yeah, Apogee-- >> I think Apogee's an API company, come on. What does that relate to? It has nothing to do with the enterprise. It's an API management solution. Okay, yes. I guess it fits the stack for Cloud-Native, and for developers. I get that. But this show has to nail the enterprise, Stu. >> And John, you remember back four years ago, when we went to the re:Invent show for the first time, and it was like, they're talking to all the developers, and they haven't gotten to the enterprise. And then they over-pivoted to enterprise. And I listen to the customers that were talking and keynote today, and I said, "You know, they're talking digital transformation, "but it's not like GE and Nike getting up on stage, "being like, "'We're going to be a software company, "'and we're hiring lots--'" >> John: Moving our data center over. >> They were pulling all of over stuff, and it's like, "Oh yeah, Google's a good partner. "And we're using them--" >> But to be fair, Stu. Let's be fair, for a second. First of all, let's break down the keynotes. And then we'll get to some of the things about being fair. And I think, one, people should be fair to Diane Greene, because I think that the press and the coverage of it, looking at the media coverage, is weak. And I'll tell you why it's weak. Cause everyone has the same story as, "Oh, Google's finally serious about Cloud. "That's old news. "Diane Greene from day one says "we're serious with the Cloud." That's not the story. The story is, can they be a serious contender? That's number one. On the keynote, one, customer traction, I saw that, the slide up there. Yeah, the G Suite in there, but at least they're talking customers. Number two, the SAP news was strategic for Google. SAP now has Google Cloud platform, I mean, Google Cloud support for HANA, and also the SAP Cloud platform. And three, the Chief Data Science from AIG pointed. To me, those were the three highlights of the keynote. Each one, thematically, represents at least a positive direction for Google, big time, which is, one, customer adoption, the customer focus. Two, partnerships with SAP, and they had Disney up there. And then three, the real game changer, which is, can they change the AI machine learning, TensorFlow has a ton of traction. Intel Xeon chips now are optimized with TensorFlow. This is Google. >> TensorFlow, Kubernetes, it's really interesting. And it's interesting, John, I think if the media listened to Eric Schmidt at the end, he was talking straight to them. He's like, "Look, bullet one. "17 years ago, I told Google that "this is where we need to go. "Bullet two, 30 billion dollars "I'm investing in infrastructure. "And yes, it's real, "cause I had to sign off on all of this money. And we've been all saying for a while, "Is this another beta from Google. "Is it serious? "There's no ad revenue, what is this?" And Diane Greene, in the Q&A afterwards, somebody talked about, "Perpetual beta seems to be Google." And she's like, "Look, I want to differentiate. "We are not the consumer business. "The consumer business might kill something. "They might change something. "We're positioning, "this a Cloud that the enterprise can build on. "We will not deprecate something. "We'll support today. "We'll support the old version. "We will support you going forward." Big push for channel, go-to-market service and support, because they understand that that-- >> Yeah, but that's weak. >> For those of us that used Google for years, understand that-- >> There's no support. >> "Where do I call for Google?" Come on, no. >> Yeah, but they're very weak on that. And we broke that down with Tom Kemp earlier, from Centrify, where Google's play is very weak on the sales and marketing side. Yeah, I get the service piece. But go to Diane Greene for a second, she is an incredible, savvy enterprise executive. She knows Cloud. She moved from server to virtualization. And now she can move virtualization to Cloud. That is her playbook. And I think she's well suited to do that. And I think anyone who rushes to judgment on her keynote, given the fail of the teleprompter, I think is a little bit overstepping their bounds on that. I think it's fair to say that, she knows what she's doing. But she can only go as fast as they can go. And that is, you can't like hope that you're further along. The reality is, it takes time. Security and data are the key points. On your point you just mentioned, that's interesting. Because now the war goes on. Okay, Kubernetes, the microservices, some of the things going on in the applications side, as trends like Serverless come on, Stu, where you're looking at the containerization trend that's now gone to Kubernetes. This is the battleground. This is the ground that we've been at Dockercon, we've been at Linux, CNCF has got huge traction, the Cloud Native Compute Foundation. This is key. Now, that being said. The marketplace never panned out, Stu. And I wanted to get your analysis on this, cause you cover this. Few years ago, the world was like, "Oh, I want to be like Facebook." We've heard, "the Uber of this, and the Airbnb of that." Here's the thing. Name one company that is the Facebook of their company. It's not happening. There is no other Facebook, and there is no other Google. So run like Google, is just a good idea in principle, horizontally scalable, having all the software. But no one is like Google. No one is like Facebook, in the enterprise. So I think that Google's got to downclock their messaging. I won't say dumb down, maybe I'll just say, slow it down a little bit for the enterprise, because they care about different things. They care more about SLA than pricing. They care more about data sovereignty than the most epic architecture for data. What's your analysis? >> John, some really good points there. So there's a lot of technology, where like, "This is really cool." And Google is the biggest of it. Remember that software-defined networking we spent years talking about? Well, the first big company we heard about was Google, and they got up of stage, "We're the largest SDN deployer in the world on that." And it's like, "Great. "So if you're the enterprise, "don't deploy SDN, go to somebody else "that can deliver it for you. "If that's Google, that's great." Dockercon, the first year they had, 2014, Google got up there, talked about how they were using containers, and containers, and they spin up and spin down. Two billion containers in a week. Now, nobody else needs to spin up two billion containers a week, and do that down. But they learned from that. They build Kubernetes-- >> Well, I think that's a good leadership position. But it's leadership position to show that you got the mojo, which again, this is again, what I like about Google's strategy is, they're going to play the technology card. I think that's a good card to play. But there are some just table stakes they got to nail. One is the certifications, the security, the data. But also, the sales motions. Going into the enterprise takes time. And our advice to Diane Greene was, "Don't screw the gold Google culture. "Keep that technology leadership. "And buy somebody, "buy a company that's got a full blown sales force." >> But John, one of the critiques of Google has always been, everything they create, they create like for Google, and it's too Googley. I talked to a couple of friends, that know about AWS for a while, and when they're trying to do Google, they're like, "Boy, this is a lot tougher. "It's not as easy as what we're doing." Google says that they want to do a lot of simplicity. You touched on pricing, it's like, "Oh, we're going to make pricing "so much easier than what Amazon's doing." Amazon Reserved Instances is something that I hear a lot of negative feedback in the community on, and Google's like, "It's much simpler." But when I've talked to some people that have been using it, it's like, "Well, generally it should be cheaper, "and it should be easier. "But it's not as predictable. "And therefore, it's not speaking to what "the CFO needs to have. "I can't be getting a rebate sometime down the road. "Based on some advanced math, "I need to know what I'm going to be getting, "and how I'm going to be using it." >> And that's a good point, Stu. And this comes down to the consumability of the Cloud. I think what Amazon has done well, and this came out of many interviews today, but it was highlighted by Val Bercovici, who pointed out that, Amazon has made their service consumable by the enterprise. I think that's important. Google needs to start thinking about how enterprises want to consume Cloud, and hit those points. The other thing that Val and I teased at, was kind of some new ground, and he coined the term, or used the term, maybe he coined it, I'm not sure, empathy. Enterprise empathy. Google has developer empathy, they understand the developer community. They're rock solid on open source. Obviously, their mojo's phenomenal on technology, AI, et cetera, TensorFlow, all that stuff's great. Empathy for the enterprise, not there. And I think that's something that they're going to have to work on. And again, that's just evolution. You mentioned Amazon, our first event, developer, developer, developer. Me and Pat Gelsinger once called it the developer Cloud. Now they're truly the enterprise Cloud. It took three years for Amazon to do that. So you just can't jump to a trajectory. There's a huge amount of diseconomies of scale, Stu, to try and just be an enterprise player overnight, because, "We're Google." That's just not going to fly. And whether it's sales motions, pricing and support, security, this is hard. >> And sorting out that go-to-market, is going to take years. You see a lot of the big SIs are there. PwC, everywhere at the show. Accenture, big push at the show. We saw that a year or two ago, at the Amazon show. I talked to some friends in the channel, and they're like, "Yeah, Google's still got work to do. "They're not there." Look, Amazon has work to do on the go-to-market, and Google is still a couple-- >> I mean, Amazon's not spring chicken here. They're quietly, slowly, ramming up. But they're not in a good position with their sales force, needs to be where they want to be. Let's talk about technology now. So tomorrow we're expecting to see a bunch of stuff. And one area that I'm super excited about with Google, is if they can have their identity identified, and solidified with the mind of the enterprise, make their product consumable, change or adjust or buy a sales force, that could go out and actually sell to the enterprise, that's going to be key. But you're going to hear some cool trends that I like. And if you look at the TensorFlow, and the relationship, Intel, we're going to see Intel on stage tomorrow, coming out during one of the keynotes. And you're going to start to see the Xeon chip come out. And now you're starting to see now, the silicon piece. And this has been a data center nuisance, Stu. As we talked about with James Hamilton at Amazon, which having a hardware being optimized for software, really is the key. And what Intel's doing with Xeon, and we talked to some other people today about it, is that the Cloud is like an operating system, it's a global computer, if you want look at that. It's a mainframe, the software mainframe, as it's been called. You want a diversity of chipsets, from two cores Atom to 72 cores Xeon. And have them being used in certain cases, whether it's programmable silicon, or whether it's GPUs, having these things in use case scenarios, where the chips can accelerate the software evolution, to me is going to be the key, state of the art innovation. I think if Intel continues to get that right, companies like Google are going to crush it. Now, Amazon, they do their own. So this is going to another interesting dynamic. >> Yeah, it was actually one of the differentiating points Google's saying, is like, "Hey, you can get the Intel Skylake chip, "on Google Cloud, "probably six months before you're going to be able to "just call up your favorite OEM of choice, "and get that in there." And it's an interesting move. Because we've been covering for years, John, Google does a ton of servers. And they don't just do Intel, they've been heavily involved in the openPOWER movement, they're looking at alternatives, they're looking at low power, they're looking at from their device standpoint. They understand how to develop to all these pieces. They actually gave to the influencers, the press, the analysts, just like at Amazon, we all walked home with Echo Dot, everybody's walking home with the Google Homes. >> John: Did you get one? >> I did get one, disclaimer. Yeah, I got one. I'll be playing with it home. I figured I could have Alexa and Google talking to each other. >> Is it an evaluation unit? You have to give it back, or do you get to keep? >> No, I'm pretty sure they just let us keep that. >> John: Tainted. >> But what I'm interested to see, John, is we talk like Serverless, so I saw a ton of companies that were playing with Alexa at re:Invent, and they've been creating tons of skills. Lambda currently has the leadership out there. Google leverages Serverless in a lot of their architecture, it's what drives a lot of their analytics on the inside. Coming into the show, Google Cloud Functions is alpha. So we expect them to move that forward, but we will see with the announcements come tomorrow. But you would think if they're, try to stay that leadership though there, I actually got a statement from one of the guys that work on the Serverless, and Google believes that for functions, that whole Serverless, to really go where it needs to be, it needs to be open. Google isn't open sourcing anything this week, as far as I know. But they want to be able to move forward-- >> And they're doing great at open source. And I think one of the things, that not to rush to judgment on Google, and no one should, by the way. I mean, certainly, we put out our analysis, and we stick by that, because we know the enterprise pretty well, very well actually. So the thing that I like is that there are new use cases coming out. And we had someone who came on theCUBE here, Tarun Thakur, who's with Datos, datos.io. They're reimagining data backup and recovery in the Cloud. And when you factor in IoT, this is a paradigm shift. So I think we're going to see use cases, and this is a Google opportunity, where they can actually move the goal post a bit on the market, by enabling these no-use cases, whether it's something as, what might seem pedestrian, like backup and recovery, reimagining that is huge. That's going to take impact as the data domains of the world, and what not, that (mumbles). These new uses cases are going to evolve. And so I'm excited by that. But the key thing that came out of this, Stu, and this is where I want to get your reaction on is, Multicloud. Clearly the messaging in the industry, over the course of events that we've been covering, and highlighted today on Google Next is, Multicloud is the world we are living in. Now, you can argue that we're all in Amazon's world, but as we start developing, you're starting to see the emergence of Cloud services providers. Cloud services providers are going to have some tiering, certainly the big ones, and then you're going to have secondary partner like service providers. And Google putting G Suite in the mix, and Office 365 from Microsoft, and Oracle put in their apps in their Clouds stuff, highlights that the SaaS market is going to be very relevant. If that's the case, then why aren't we putting Salesforce in there, Adobe? They all got Clouds too. So if you believe that there's going to be specialism around Clouds, that opens up the notion that there'll be a series of Multicloud architectures. So, Stu-- >> Stu: Yeah so, I mean, John, first of all-- >> BS? Real? I mean what's going on? >> Cloud is this big broad term. From Wikibon's research standpoint, SaaS, today, is two-thirds of the public Cloud market. We spend a lot of time talking-- >> In revenue? >> In revenue. Revenue standpoint. So, absolutely, Salesforce, Oracle, Infor, Microsoft, all up there, big dollars. If we look at the much smaller part of the world, that infrastructures a service, that's where we're spending a lot of time-- >> And platforms a service, which Gartner kind of bundles in, that's how Gartner looks at it. >> It's interesting. This year, we're saying PaaS as a category goes away. It's either SaaS plus, I'm sorry, it's SaaS minus, or infrastructure plus. So look at what Salesforce did with Heroku. Look at what company service now are doing. Yes, there are solutions-- >> Why is PaaS going away? What's the thesis? What's the premise of that for Wikibon research? >> If we look at what PaaS, the idea was it tied to languages, things like portability. There are other tools and solutions that are going to be able to help there. Look at, Docker came out of a PaaS company, DockCloud. There's a really good article from one of the Docker guys talking about the history of this, and you and I are going to be at Dockercon. John, from what I hear, we're going to spending a lot of time talking about Kubernetes, at Dockercon. OpenStack Summit is going to be talking a lot about-- >> By the way, Kubernetes originated at Google. Another cool thing from Google. >> All right, so the PaaS as a market, even if you talk to the Cloud Foundry people, the OpenShift people. The term we got, had a year ago was PaaS is Passe, the nice piffy line. So it really feeds into, because, just some of these categorizations are what we, as industry watchers have a put in there, when you talk to Google, it's like, "Well, why are they talking about G Suite, "and Google Cloud, and even some of their pieces?" They're like, "Well, this is our bundle "that we put together." When you talk to Microsoft, and talk about Cloud, it's like, "Oh, well." They're including Skype in that. They're including Office 365. I'm like, "Well, that's our productivity. "That's a part of our overall solutions." Amazon, even when you talk to Amazon, it's not like that there are two separate companies. There's not AWS and Amazon, it's one company-- >> Are we living in a world of alternative facts, Stu? I mean, Larry Ellison coined the term "Fake Cloud", talking about Salesforce. I'm not going to say Google's a fake Cloud, cause certainly it's not. But when you start blending in these numbers, it's kind of shifting the narrative to having alternative facts, certainly skewing the revenue numbers. To your point, if PaaS goes away because the SaaS minuses that lower down the stack. Cause if you have microservices and orchestration, it kind of thins that out. So one, is that the case? And then I saw your tweet with Sam Ramji, he formally ran Cloud Foundry, he's now at Google, knows his stuff, ex-Microsoft guy, very strong dude. What's he take? What's his take on this? Did you get a chance to chat with Sam at all? >> Yeah, I mean, it was interesting, because Sam, right, coming from Cloud Foundry said, what Cloud Foundry was one of the things they were trying to do, was to really standardize across the clouds. And of course, little bias that he works at Google now. But he's like, "We couldn't do that with Google, "cause Google had really cool features. And of course, when you put an abstraction layer on, can I actually do all the stuff? And he's like, "We couldn't do that." Sure, if you talked to Amazon, they'll be like, "Come on. "Thousand features we announced last year, "look at all the things we have. "It's not like you can just take all of our pieces, "and use it there." Yes, at the VM, or container, or application microservices layer, we can sit on a lot of different Clouds, public or private. But as we said today, the Cloud is not a utility. John, you've been in this discussion for years. So we've talked about, "Oh, I'm just going "to have a Cloud broker, "and go out in a service." It's like, this is not, I'm not buying from Domino's and Pizza Hut, and it's pepperoni pizza's a pepperoni pizza. >> Well, Multicloud, and moving workloads across Clouds, is a different challenge. Certainly, I might have to some stuff here, maybe put some data and edge my bets on leveraging other services. But this brings up the total cost of ownership problem. If you look at the trajectory, say OpenStack, just as a random example. OpenStack, at one point, had a great promise. Now it's kind of niched down into infrastructural service. I know you're going to be covering that summit in Boston. And it's going to be interesting to see how that is. But the word in the community is, that OpenStack is struggling because of the employment challenges involved with it. So to me, Google has an opportunity to avoid that OpenStack kind of concept. Because, talking about Sam Ramji, open source is the wildcard in all of this. So if you look at a open source, and you believe that that PaaS layer's thinning down, to infrastructure and SaaS, then you got to look at the open source community, and that's going to be a key area, that we're certainly watching, and we've identified, and we've mentioned it before. But here's my point. If you look at the total cost of ownership. If I'm a customer, Stu, I'm like, "Okay, if I'm just going to move to the Cloud, "I need to rely and lean on my partner, "my vendor, my supplier, "Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft, whoever, "to provide really excellent manageability. "Really excellent security. "Because if I don't, I have to build it myself." So it's becoming the shark fin, the tip of the iceberg, that you don't see the hidden cost, because I would much rather have more confidence in manageability that I can control. But I don't want to have to spend resources building manageability software, if the stuff doesn't work. So there's the issue about Multicloud that I'm watching. Your thoughts? Or is that too nuance? >> No, no. First of all, one of the things is that if I look at what I was doing on premises, before versus public Cloud, yes, there are some hidden costs, but in general I think we understand them a little bit better in public Cloud. And public Cloud gives us a chance to do a do-over for this like security, which most of us understand that security is good in public Cloud. Now, security overall, lots of work to do, challenges, not security isn't the same across all of them. We've talked to plenty of companies that are helping to give security across Clouds. But this Multicloud discussion is still something that is sorting out. Portability is not simple, but it's where we're going. Today, most companies, if I'm not really small, have some on-prem pieces. And they're leveraging at least one Cloud. They're usually using many SaaS providers. And there's this whole giant ecosystem, John, around the Cloud management platforms. Because managing across lots of environment, is definitely a challenge. There's so many companies that are trying to solve them. And there's just dozens and dozens of these companies, attacking everything from licensing, to the data management, to everything else. So there's a lot of challenges there, especially the larger you get as a company, the more things you need to worry about. >> So Stu, just to wrap up our segment. Great day. Wanted to just get some color on the day. And highlighting some parody from the web is always great. Just got a tweet from fake Andy Jassy, which we know really isn't Andy Jassy. But Cloud Opinion was very active to the hashtag, that Twitter handle Cloud Opinion. But he had a medium post, and he said, "Eric Schmidt was boring. "Diane Greene was horrible. "Unfortunately, day one keynote were missed opportunity, "that left several gaps, "failed to portray Google's vision for Google Cloud. "They could've done the following, A, "explain the vision for the Cloud, "where do they see Google Cloud going. "Identify customer use cases that show samples "and customer adoption." They kind of did that. So discount that. My favorite line is this one, "Differentiate from other Cloud providers. "'We're Google damn it,' isn't working so well. "Neither is indirect shots as S3 downtime, "didn't work either as well as either. "Where is the customer's journey going? "And what's the most compelling thing for customers?" This phrase, "We're Google damn it," has kind of speaks to the arrogance of Google. And we've seen this before, and always say, Google doesn't have a bad arrogance. I like the Google mojo. I think the technology, they run hard. But they can sometimes, like, "Customer support, self-service." You can't really get someone on the phone. It's hard to replies from Google. >> "Check out YouTube video. "We own that too, don't you know that?" >> So this is a perception of Google. This could fly in the face, and that arrogance might blow up in the enterprise, cause the enterprises aren't that sophisticated to kind of recognize the mojo from Google. And they, "Hey, I want support. "I want SLAs. "I want security. "I want data flexibility." What's your thoughts? >> So Cloud Opinion wrote, I thought a really thoughtful piece leading up to it, that I didn't think was satire. Some of what he's putting in there, is definitely satire-- >> John: Some of it's kind of true though. >> From the keynote. So I did not get a sense in the meetings I've been in, or watching the keynote, that they were arrogant. They're growing. They're learning. They're working with the community. They're reaching out. They're doing all the things we think they need to do. They're listening really well. So, yes, I think the keynote was a missed opportunity overall. >> John: But we've got to give, point out that was a teleprompter fail. >> That was a piece of it. But even, we felt with a little bit of polish, some of the interactions would've been a little bit smoother. I thought Eric Schmidt's piece was really good at end. As I said before, the AI discussion was enlightening, and really solid. So I don't give it a glowing rating, but I'm not ready to trash it. And tomorrow is when they're going to have the announcements. And overall, there's good buzz going at the show. There's lots going on. >> Give 'em a letter. Letter grade. >> For the keynote? Or the show in general? >> So far, your experience as an analyst, cause you had the, again, to give them credit, I agree with you. First analyst conference. They are listening. And the slideshow, you see what they're doing. They're being humble. They didn't take any real direct shots at its competitors. They were really humble. >> And that is something that I think they could've helped to focus one something that differentiated a little bit. Something we had to pry out of them in some of the one-on-ones, is like, "Come on, what are you doing?" And they're like, "We're winning 50, 60% of our competitive deals." And I'm like, "Explain to us why. "Because we're not hearing it. "You're not articulating it as well." It's not like we expect them, it's like, "Oh wait, they told us we're arrogant. "Maybe we should be super humble now." It's kind of-- >> I don't think they're thinking that way. I think my impression of Google, knowing the companies history, and the people involved there, and Diane Greene in particular, as you know from the Vmware days. She's kind of humble, but she's not. She's tough. And she's good. And she's smart. >> And she's bringing in really good people. And by the way, John, I want to give them kudos, really supported International Women's Day, I love the, Fei-Fei got up, and she talked about her, one of her compatriots, another badass woman up there, that got like one of the big moments of the keynote there. >> John: Did they have a woman in tech panel? >> Not at this event. Because Diane was there, Fei-Fei was there. They had some women just participating in it. I know they had some other events going on throughout the show. >> I agree, and I think it's awesome. I think one of the things that I like about Google, and again, I'll reiterate, is that apples and oranges relative to the other Cloud guys. But remember, just because Amazon's lead is so far ahead, that you still have this jocking of position between the other players. And they're all taking the same pattern. Again, this is the same thing we talked about at our other analysis, is that, certainly at re:Invent, we talked about the same thing. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and now Google, are differentiating with their apps. And I think that's smart. I don't think that's a bad move at all. It does telegraph a little bit, that maybe they got, they could add more to show, we'll see tomorrow. But I don't think that's a bad thing. Again, it does make the numbers a little messy, in terms of what's what. But I think it's totally cool for a company to differentiate on their offering. >> Yeah, definitely. And John, as you said, Google is playing their game. They're not trying to play Amazon's game. They're not, Oracle's thing was what? You kind of get a little bit of the lead, and kind of just make sure how you attack and stay ahead of what they're doing, going to the boating analogy there. But Google knows where they're going, moving themselves forward. That they've made some really good progress. The amount of people, the amount of news they have. Are they moving fast enough to really try to close a little bit on the Amazon's world, is something I want to come out of the show with. Where are customers going? >> And it's a turbulent time too. As Peter Burris, our own Peter Buriss at Wikibon, would say, is a turbulent time. And it's going to really put everyone on notice. There's a lot to cover, if you're an analyst. I mean, you have compute, network storage, services. I mean, there's a slew of stuff that's being rolled out, either in table stakes for existing enterprises, plus new stuff. I mean, I didn't hear a lot of IoT today. Did you hear much IoT? Is there IoT coming to you at the briefing? >> Come on. I'm sure there's some service coming out from Google, that'll help us be able to process all this stuff much faster. They'll just replace this with-- >> So you're in the analyst meeting. I know you're under NDA, but is there IoT coming tomorrow? >> IoT was a term that I heard this week, yes. >> So all right, that's a good confirmation. Stu cannot confirm or deny that IoT will be there tomorrow. Okay, well, that's going to end day one of coverage, here in our studio. As you know, we got a new studio. We have folks on the ground. You're going to start to see a new CUBE formula, where we have in-studio coverage, and out in the field, like our normal CUBE, our "game day", as we say. Getting all the signal, extracting it from that noise out there, for you. Again, in-studio allows us to get more content. We bring our friends in. We want to get the content. We're going to get the summaries, and share that with you. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, day one coverage. We'll see you tomorrow for another full day of special coverage, sponsored by Intel, two days of coverage. I want to thank Intel for supporting our editorial mission. We love the enterprise, we love Cloud, we love big data, love Smart Cities, autonomous vehicles, and the changing landscape in tech. We'll be back tomorrow, thanks for watching.

(bright music) >> Narrator: Live from Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 17. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live in Palo Alto for theCUBE special two day coverage here in Palo Alto. We have reporters, we have analysts on the ground in San Francisco, analyzing what's going on with Google Next, we have all the great action. Of course, we also have reporters at Open Compute Summit, which is also happening in San Hose, and Intel's at both places, and we have Intel senior manager on the line here, on the phone, Lisa Spelman, vice president and general manager of the Xeon product line, product manager responsibility as well as marketing across the data center. Lisa, welcome to theCUBE, and thanks for calling in and dissecting Google Next, as well as teasing out maybe a little bit of OCP around the Xeon processor, thanks for calling. >> Lisa: Well, thank you for having me, and it's hard to be in many places at once, so it's a busy week and we're all over, so that's that. You know, we'll do this on the phone, and next time we'll do it in person. >> I'd love to. Well, more big news is obviously Intel has a big presence with the Google Next, and tomorrow there's going to be some activity with some of the big name executives at Google. Talking about your relationship with Google, aka Alphabet, what are some of the key things that you guys are doing with Google that people should know about, because this is a very turbulent time in the ecosystem of the tech business. You saw Mobile World Congress last week, we've seen the evolution of 5G, we have network transformation going on. Data centers are moving to a hybrid cloud, in some cases, cloud native's exploding. So all new kind of computing environment is taking shape. What is Intel doing here at Google Next that's a proof point to the trajectory of the business? >> Lisa: Yeah, you know, I'd like to think it's not too much of a surprise that we're there, arm in arm with Google, given all of the work that we've done together over the last several years in that tight engineering and technical partnership that we have. One of the big things that we've been working with Google on is, as they move from delivering cloud services for their own usage and for their own applications that they provide out to others, but now as they transition into being a cloud service provider for enterprises and other IT shops as well, so they've recently launched their Google Cloud platform, just in the last week or so. Did a nice announcement about the partnership that we have together, and how the Google Cloud platform is now available and running and open for business on our latest next generation Intel Xeon product, and that's codenamed Skylake, but that's something that we've been working on with them since the inception of the design of the product, so it's really nice to have it out there and in the market, and available for customers, and we very much value partnerships, like the one we have with Google, where we have that deep technical engagement to really get to the heart of the workload that they need to provide, and then can design product and solution around that. So you don't just look at it as a one off project or a one time investment, it's an ongoing continuation and evolution of new product, new features, new capabilities to continue to improve their total cost of ownership and their customer experience. >> Well, Lisa, this is your baby, the Xeon, codename Skylake, which I love that name. Intel always has great codenames, by the way, we love that, but it's real technology. Can you share some specific features of what's different around these new workloads because, you know, we've been teasing out over the past day and we're going to be talking tomorrow as well about these new use cases, because you're looking at a plethora of use cases, from IoT edge all the way down into cloud native applications. What specific things is Xeon doing that's next generation that you could highlight, that points to this new cloud operating system, the cloud service providers, whether it's managed services to full blown down and dirty cloud? >> Lisa: So it is my baby, I appreciate you saying that, and it's so exciting to see it out there and starting to get used and picked up and be unleashing it on the world. With this next generation of Xeon, it's always about the processor, but what we've done has gone so much beyond that, so we have a ton of what we call platform level innovation that is coming in, we really see this as one of our biggest kind of step function improvements in the last 10 years that we've offered. Some of the features that we've already talked about are things like AVX-512 instructions, which I know just sounds fun and rolls of the tongue, but really it's very specific workload acceleration for things like high performance computing workloads. And high performance computing is something that we see more and more getting used in access in cloud style infrastructure. So it's this perfect marrying of that workload specifically deriving benefit from the new platforms, and seeing really strong performance improvements. It also speaks to the way with Intel and Xeon families, 'cause remember, with Xeon, we have Xeon Phi, you've got standard Xeon, you've got Xeon D. You can use these instructions across the families and have workloads that can move to the most optimized hardware for whatever you're trying to drive. Some of the other things that we've talked about announced is we'll have our next generation of Intel Resource Director technology, which really helps you manage and provide quality of service within you application, which is very important to cloud service providers, giving them control over hardware and software assets so that they can deliver the best customer experience to their customers based on the service level agreement they've signed up for. And then the other one is Intel Omni-Path architecture, so again, fairly high performance computing focused product, Omni-Path is a fabric, and we're going to offer that in an integrated fashion with Skylake so that you can get even higher level of performance and capability. So we're looking forward to a lot more that we have to come, the whole of the product line will continue to roll out in the middle of this year, but we're excited to be able to offer an early version to the cloud service providers, get them started, get it out in the market and then do that full scale enterprise validation over the next several months. >> So I got to ask you the question, because this is something that's coming up, we're seeing a transition, also the digital transformation's been talked about for a while. Network transformation, IoTs all around the corner, we've got autonomous vehicles, smart cities, on and on. But I got to ask you though, the cloud service providers seems to be coming out of this show as a key storyline in Google Next as the multi cloud architectures become very clear. So it's become clear, not just this show but it's been building up to this, it's pretty clear that it's going to be a multi cloud world. As well as you're starting to see the providers talk about their SaaS offerings, Google talking about G Suite, Microsoft talks about Office 365, Oracle has their apps, IBM's got Watson, so you have this SaaSification. So this now creates a whole another category of what cloud is. If you include SaaS, you're really talking about Salesforce, Adobe, you know, on and on the list, everyone is potentially going to become a SaaS provider whether they're unique cloud or partnering with some other cloud. What does that mean for a cloud service provider, what do they need for applications support requirements to be successful? >> So when we look at the cloud service provider market inside of Intel, we are talking about infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and software as a service. So cutting across the three major categories, I give you like, up until now, infrastructure of the service has gotten a lot of the airtime or focus, but SaaS is actually the bigger business, and that's why you see, I think, people moving towards it, especially as enterprise IT becomes more comfortable with using SaaS application. You know, maybe first they started with offloading their expense report tool, but over time, they've moved into more sophisticated offerings that free up resources for them to do their most critical or business critical applications the they require to stay in more of a private cloud. I think that's evolution to a multi cloud, a hybrid cloud, has happened across the entire industry, whether you are an enterprise or whether you are a cloud service provider. And then the move to SaaS is logical, because people are demanding just more and more services. One of the things through all our years of partnering with the biggest to the smallest cloud service providers and working so closely on those technical requirements that we've continued to find is that total cost of ownership really is king, it's that performance per dollar, TCO, that they can provide and derive from their infrastructure, and we focused a lot of our engineering and our investment in our silicon design around providing that. We have multi generations that we've provided even just in the last five years to continue to drive those step function improvements and really optimize our hardware and the code that runs on top of it to make sure that it does continue to deliver on those demanding workloads. The other thing that we see the providers focusing on is what's their differentiation. So you'll see cloud service providers that will look through the various silicon features that we offer and choose, they'll pick and choose based on whatever their key workload is or whatever their key market is, and really kind of hone in and optimize for those silicon features so that they can have a differentiated offering into the market about what capabilities and services they'll provide. So it's an area where we continue to really focus our efforts, understand the workload, drive the TCO down, and then focus in on the design point of what's going to give that differentiation and acceleration. >> It's interesting, the definition's also where I would agree with you, the cloud service provider is a huge market when you even look at the SaaS. 'Cause whether you're talking about Uber or Netflix, for instance, examples people know about in real life, you can't ignore these new diverse use cases coming out. For instance, I was just talking with Stu Miniman, one of our analysts here, Wikibon, and Riot Games could be considered a cloud, right, I mean, 'cause it's a SaaS platform, it's gaming. You're starting to see these new apps coming out of the woodwork. There seems to be a requirement for being agile as a cloud provider. How do you enable that, what specifically can you share, if I'm a cloud service provider, to be ready to support anything that's coming down the pike? >> Lisa: You know, we do do a lot of workload and market analysis inside of Intel and the data center group, and then if you have even seen over the past five years, again, I'll just stick with the new term, how much we've expanded and broadened our product portfolio. So again, it will still be built upon that foundation of Xeon and what we have there, but we've gone to offer a lot of varieties. So again, I mentioned Xeon Phi. Xeon Phi at the 72 cores, bootable Xeon but specific workload acceleration targeted at high performance computing and other analytics workloads. And then you have things at the other end. You've got Xeon D, which is really focused at more frontend web services and storage and network workloads, or Atom, which is even lower power and more focused on cold and warm storage workloads, and again, that network function. So you could then say we're not just sticking with one product line and saying this is the answer for everything, we're saying here's the core of what we offer, and the features people need, and finding options, whether they range from low power to high power high performance, and kind of mixed across that whole kind of workload spectrum, and then we've broadened around the CPU into a lot of other silicon innovation. So I don't know if you guys have had a chance to talk about some of the work that we're doing with FPGAs, with our FPGA group and driving and delivering cloud and network acceleration through FPGAs. We've also introduced new products in the last year like Silicon Photonics, so dealing with network traffic crossing through-- >> Well, is FPGA, that's the Altera stuff, we did talk with them, they're doing the programmable chips. >> Lisa: Exactly, so it requires a level of sophistication and understanding what you need the workload to accelerate, but once you have it, it is a very impressive and powerful performance gain for you, so the cloud service providers are a perfect market for that, as are the cloud service providers because they have very sophisticated IT and very technically astute engineering teams that are able to really, again, go back to the workload, understand what they need and figure out the right software solution to pair with it. So that's been a big focus of our targeting. And then, like I said, we've added all these different things, different new products to the platform that start to, over time, just work better and better together, so when you have things like Intel SSD there together with Intel CPUs and Intel Ethernet and Intel FPGA and Intel Silicon Photonics, you can start to see how the whole package, when it's designed together under one house, can offer a tremendous amount of workload acceleration. >> I got to ask you a question, Lisa, 'cause this comes up, while you're talking, I'm just in my mind visualizing a new kind of virtual computer server, the cloud is one big server, so it's a design challenge. And what was teased out at Mobile World Congress that was very clear was this new end to end architecture, you know, re-imagined, but if you have these processors that have unique capabilities, that have use case specific capabilities, in a way, you guys are now providing a portfolio of solutions so that it almost can be customized for a variety of cloud service providers. Am I getting that right, is that how you guys see this happening where you guys can just say, "Hey, just mix and match what you want and you're good." >> Lisa: Well, and we try to provide a little bit more guidance than as you wish, I mean, of course, people have their options to choose, so like, with the cloud service providers, that's what we have, really tight engineering engagement, so that we can, you know, again, understand what they need, what their design point is, what they're honing in on. You might work with one cloud service provider that is very facilities limited, and you might work with another one that is, they're face limited, the other one's power limited, and another one has performance is king, so you can, we can cut some SKUs to help meet each of those needs. Another good example is in the artificial intelligence space where we did another acquisition last year, a company called Nervana that's working on optimized silicon for a neural network. And so now we have put together this AI portfolio, so instead of saying, "Oh, here's one answer "for artificial intelligence," it's, "Here's a multitude of answers where you've got Xeon," so if you have, I'm going to utilize capacity, and are starting down your artificial intelligence journey, just use your Xeon capacity with an optimized framework and you'll get great results and you can start your journey. If you are monetizing and running your business based on what AI can do for you and you are leading the pack out there, you've got the best data scientists and algorithm writers and peak running experts in the world, then you're going to want to use something like the silicon that we acquired from the Nervana team, and that codename is Lake Crest, speaking of some lakes there. And you'll want to use something like Xeon with Lake Crest to get that ultimate workload acceleration. So we have the whole portfolio that goes from Xeon to Xeon Phi to Xeon with FPGAs or Xeon with Lake Crest. Depending on what you're doing, and again, what your design point is, we have a solution for you. And of course, when we say solution, we don't just mean hardware, we mean the optimized software frameworks and the libraries and all of that, that actually give you something that can perform. >> On the competitive side, we've seen the processor landscape heat up on the server and the cloud space. Obviously, whether it's from a competitor or homegrown foundry, whatever fabs are out there, I mean, so Intel's always had a great partnership with cloud service providers. Vis-a-vis the competition and context to that, what are you guys doing specifically and how you'd approach the marketplace in light of competition? >> Lisa: So we do operate in a highly competitive market, and we always take all competitors seriously. So far we've seen the press heat up, which is different than seeing all of the deployments, so what we look for is to continue to offer the highest performance and lowest total cost of ownership for all our customers, and in this case, the cloud service providers, of course. And what do we do is we kind of stick with our game plan of putting the best silicon in the world into the market on a regular beat rate and cadence, and so there's always news, there's always an interesting story, but when you look at having had eight new products and new generations in market since the last major competitive x86 product, that's kind of what we do, just keep delivering so that our customers know that they can bet on us to always be there and not have these massive gaps. And then I also talked to you about portfolio expansion, we don't bet on just one horse, we give our customers the choice to optimize for their workloads, so you can go up to 72 cores with Xeon Phi if that's important, you can go as low as two cores with Atom, if that's what works for you. Just an example of how we try to kind of address all of our customer segments with the right product at the right time. >> And IoT certainly brings a challenge too, when you hear about network edge, that's a huge, huge growth area, I mean, you can't deny that that's going to be amazing, you look at the cars are data centers these days, right? >> Lisa: A data center on wheels. >> Data center on wheels. >> Lisa: That's one of the fun things about my role, even in the last year, is that growing partnership, even inside of Intel with our IoT team, and just really going through all of the products that we have in development, and how many of them can be reused and driven towards IoT solution. The other thing is, if you look into the data center space, I genuinely believe we have the world's best ecosystem, you can't find an ISV that we haven't worked with to optimize their solution to run best on Intel architecture and get that workload acceleration. And now we have the chance to put that same playbook into play in the IoT space, so it's a growing, somewhat nascent but growing market with a ton of opportunity and a ton of standards to still be built, and a lot of full solution kits to be put together. And that's kind of what Intel does, you know, we don't just throw something out to the market and say, "Good luck," we actually put the ecosystem together around it so that it performs. But I think that's kind of what you see with, I don't know if you guys saw our Intel GO announcement, but it's really like the software development kit and the whole product offering for what you need for truly delivering automated vehicles. >> Well, Lisa, I got to say, so you guys have a great formula, why fix what's not broken, stay with Moore's law, keep that cadence going, but what's interesting is you are listening and adapting to the architectural shifts, which is smart, so congratulations and I think, as the cloud service provider world changes, and certainly in the data center, it's going to be a turbulent time, but a lot of opportunity, and so good to have that reliability and, if you can make the software go faster then they can write more software faster, so-- >> Lisa: Yup, and that's what we've seen every time we deliver a step function improvement in performance, we see a step function improvement in demand, and so the world is still hungry for more and more compute, and we see this across all of our customer bases. And every time you make that compute more affordable, they come up with new, innovative, different ways to do things, to get things done and new services to offer, and that fundamentally is what drives us, is that desire to continue to be the backbone of that industry innovation. >> If you could sum up in a bumper sticker what that step function is, what is that new step function? >> Lisa: Oh, when we say step functions of improvements, I mean, we're always looking at targeting over 20% performance improvement per generation, and then on top of that, we've added a bunch of other capabilities beyond it. So it might show up as, say, a security feature as well, so you're getting the massive performance improvement gen to gen, and then you're also getting new capabilities like security features added on top. So you'll see more and more of those types of announcements from us as well where we kind of highlight the, not just the performance but that and what else comes with it, so that you can continue to address, you know, again, the growing needs that are out there, so all we're trying to say is, day a step ahead. >> All right, Lisa Spelman, VP of the GM, the Xeon product family as well as marketing and data center. Thank you for spending the time and sharing your insights on Google Next, and giving us a peak at the portfolio of the Xeon next generation, really appreciate it, and again, keep on bringing that power, Moore's law, more flexibility. Thank you so much for sharing. We're going to have more live coverage here in Palo Alto after this short break. (bright music)