>> Announcer: Live from Madrid Spain, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> We're back. This is theCUBE that you're watching, the leader in live tech coverage. We're at HPE Discover 2017 in Madrid. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host for the week, Peter Burris. Peter, it's been great working with you this week. >> Indeed, it's been great. >> We're winding down, and we're really excited to have Ric Lewis, >> Great ideas. >> Senior Vice President and General Manger of the Software Defined and Cloud Group. Many time CUBE guest with HPE, and Jeff Wike of Dreamworks. CTO, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> Great to see you. You're welcome. Been a good week? >> It's been a fantastic week. >> Things are coming into focus? >> They are. >> You killed it on the keynote, how are you feeling? >> Feeling really good, feeling really good. I mean, the momentum in the software defined and cloud arena is just fantastic. You know, there were times when I used to visit with you guys and we were only talking about what's coming in the future. Now we're talking a lot about what we have, what customers are buying, where we have momentum. And still introducing new things, so it's just a whole lot of fun. >> Jeff, Senior Vice President, CTO, can we talk a little bit about your role? What the scope is? >> Sure. Sure, so Dreamworks Animation, you may have heard of it. >> Yeah. We do we make animated films. >> Good friend Kate Swanberg's been on a number of times. >> Kate's, love her. We make animated films, we do a lot more than that. We're a digital content creation company. So we, we're the largest TV animation studio in the world. We're doing theme park ride work, cause we've got, we're now under NBC Universal. So we're doing a lot of projects, it's a very busy time for us. >> So, Synergy, we talked about Synergy a lot, there's nothing >> Yeah. >> like Synergy we've heard. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Fluid pools of infrastructure. >> Yeah, it just gets better. >> Wait and see and so, what can you tell us? How's the momentum? >> Yeah let's talk a little bit about that. So the momentum on Synergy is fantastic. We started shipping in volume at this conference last year, basically December of last year. And the response has been fantastic. We've looked at Momentum for new infrastructure plays. You know if you look back at our history, whether it was the C7000 or whether it was UCS from Cisco or whether it was VCEs built on UCS, Nutanix. If you kind of look at the first year of a new infrastructure play, Synergy looks like it's the fastest growing thing ever. It's just fantastic, really growing for us. We have over 1100 customers on Synergy now. You know, and that's in 11 months of shipping. And the business, it just continues to grow quarter by quarter. Just really thrilled with the progress there, so happy. >> And you guys are customers? >> We're big customers, if we're not the biggest customer, we're certainly the biggest fan. >> One of the biggest, one of the biggest customers, maybe the biggest fan. >> Certainly the biggest fan. >> Okay so Jeff, tell us, take us back to sort of pre-Synergy, you know, what was it like before and after and what has it done for your business in particular? >> Well one of the things that that we face going forward is we developed, in our infrastructure, and inner data center, we do a lot of rendering to make a movie. That's our largest high performance compute. You know, 80 million render hours, CPU hours to make one of these films. And we're making a lot of them at the same time. We really defined that work flow, and how we optimize the data center hardware to be able to go through that work flow and be able to be as efficient as possible. The issue came with we have a lot of other projects that are coming in, and since we are now under NBC Universal, there's a lot of other work that's happening there. And also, different types of media that's coming, you know, around the corner. And we want to be able to prepare for that. What we would have done traditionally would be to buy to peak, you know because it is rather cyclical, and that's what we would do that on prem, peak. But if we had a special project, we might buy or segment a portion of that and say, you know, this is for this purpose. This is for that purpose, but that's very inefficient. So with Synergy, the beauty of it is we can purchase you know that hardware, but then if we want to be able to use it for another project, we can do that. And we can do that very very quickly. >> You said you repurpose that across your application portfolio. Or your project portfolio. >> Yeah. Yeah, it gives us, I like to say it future proofs us. Because now no matter what the parent company or our own creative ambitions are, we can handle that. We can't say no, well we never say no. We usually say not right now, or wait a couple of weeks or a couple of months to be able to provision that. And now it's, it's instantaneous. >> And I know what Ric's answer would be to this, but I want to hear from the customers. Is this really different than other products that you've experienced. >> It's totally unique. We haven't experienced it before. And I'll give you, I'll give you a little example. We just got our order. We got about 200 servers of Synergy that arrived a couple of months ago. And within seven working days, we were using it in production. And I just want to say, we took, I don't know if I told you this story, but we were able to provision all of that from the time we mounted in the racks within five hours, which is incredible. It would have taken us easily three weeks before. In fact, it took us longer to take it out of the cartons than it did to provision. >> Well, so let me see if I... You're talking about maybe 200 servers. You're probably talking about 8,000 individual tasks configured. To get it done in five hours you probably perform what, 40, 50 tasks? Administrative steps? >> By the way, first time doing it. And our engineers were saying, we could've used more parallelism. We could've done it faster. You know, it's almost a challenge to see just how easy you can do this. >> But I got that right? Is it really like 98 percent reduction in the administrative tasks? >> Absolutely. >> Really? >> That's incredible. >> It is. >> Huh, alright. >> That's before you start flexing work, flexing resources against different workloads and dynamically reprovisioning. This is just provisioning the first time. But it, if you think about it, if you're gonna do it dynamically, it can't take forever, so you've gotta make it, the first time it's gotta be super fast. >> Okay. >> So, I have to admit I'm a little stunned, I didn't know that. So, and as you said, the whole point is that you can reprovision >> Yes. >> Over and over. Which means that the... There's something in economics and technology that's known as an asset specificity. And an asset has high specificity when you buy it and can appropriate it to a specific purpose. And about the only thing in tech that makes something an asset specificity is the administrative tasks of changing it to prepare it to do something else. And you just told me that I can remove nearly 100% of the transaction costs associated with taking an asset from this and applying it to that. >> If you're gonna destroy silos in the data center, that's what you have to do. >> But that's... >> Right, so silo is this asset specificity. If you can repurpose it immediately. >> So I'm excited, that's my second question. How did your people respond to this? Because I talked to a lot of other CIOs that say one of the biggest challenges I'm having, or CTOs, one of the biggest challenges I'm having is I'm able to converge hardware, I'm able to converge to some software, I'm able to converge Administrative tasks, but my people don't like converge. What, they don't like to converge. How are you walking your people through some of these changes to liberate these opportunities? >> Well we've been moving toward, from more traditional, we'll call it IT for now. From traditional IT to dev ops environment and, you know what, it's change. So we've been bringing people along in that you know, to, and some people adapt to it. They say wow this is gonna be great for my career. And engineers want to always use the new stuff, so from that aspect of I know how I work, and I know what I do, to here's a better way of doing it to be more automated, it's been a good experience for people. And you know what, the chance of human error in configuring things... If I look to my long history at Dreamworks, 21 years, I look at any down time we've had or any problems, 90% of that has been from misconfiguration. And it's usually from somebody fat fingering, you know a parameter in the set up of the servers. And now, that's virtually eliminated. >> Did you have to go through some kind of organizational, internal sort of discussion, transformation, whatever you want to call it to actually get to the point where you could buy this way, buy a sort of single SKU of Synergy? Because you maybe previously you were buying bespoke, kind of roll your own components. A little server here, maybe some storage over there, maybe some networking here. Now maybe it's all HP that made it simpler, but you probably had specialist in each of those areas, did you not? >> We did. >> How did you deal with that organizational friction? >> You know, that was an issue as and by the way, there's so many, there's so much technology that's being developed some of it open source, some of it in this partner ecosystem that you have. And trying to stay abreast of that has been a real challenge. And one of the things that we always dreamed of is wouldn't it be nice if there was one way that you could control that. The single pane of glass, which is you know, to be able to have an API layer that everybody could hook in to. I think you've got a company like Hewlett Packard Enterprise that has that dominance in the market place to be able to dictate, I'm using that word. >> Yeah. >> Maybe dictate isn't the right word. >> Offer. >> Offer. (group laughing) >> That's the word we use. Enable. >> Enable, you know those APIs. And all of those are being developed you know almost in parallel. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> So this stuff is really coming in. Now we have our own... We're a snowflake like everybody else is to your point. And what we've done is we brought in the Pointnext team to go in and write those northbound APIs so that we can hook in to one view. To be able to manage all of our legacy, I'll call it legacy, our previous infrastructure along with you know, the new tech that we're buying. So that it makes it easy to manage. >> They made it match the composable API that we put into Synergy. It's natively integrated. All the ecosystem partners are adapting to it. And they said we'll just use that as our standard to even manage our legacy infrastructure. Plus, since Oneview runs on legacy infrastructure, all of the HPE stuff, it just adapts like that. So it's been a very good, good project. >> So you've got a lot of experience with this now. Can you share with, maybe you can quantify it, maybe you can't, but even subjectively the developer impact or the animator impact, the business impact to Dreamworks? >> So the biggest impact... Well I have three things that are my, actually I got this from Meg Whitman, I had a list of 12 objectives for the studio for technology and she said at one of the CIO summits, you've gotta have three. So I said okay, I've gotta pare it down to three. And one of those is provide the technology, the software and infrastructure to meet the creative needs. The second one was innovate for competitive advantage. And the third one was drive efficiency into operations. And if you look at what Synergy provides, it hits every single one of those. So we've actually, you know, over the past year or two, we've actually reduced the number of people that we have maintaining our infrastructure, which is amazing if you consider the fact that this year we doubled the size of our infrastructure. In what other business, in what other area can you actually reduce the amount of people that are maintaining something while you're doubling the amount that you're maintaining. That never happens. And I think it's because of this software defined infrastructure and the fact that you can write these recipes or profiles, whatever you want to call them, personalities. >> Yep, yep, yep. >> To be able to... And test them and harden them. And by the way, that reminds me, one of the things I really like about this is our ability to do proofs of concept, to try different workflows and all that without having to take away resources from the main thing that we're doing which is the artistic community. So we can actually say, you know what? We're gonna go in, reimage these servers. We're gonna do that at night to run this test, in the morning they're back, they're back in the pool. And that's an amazing thing. >> That's dynamic provisioning. No one else can dynamically provision. >> Yeah. >> All the converge systems, all the hyper converge, they're provisioned a certain way. They run VMs a certain way. They stay that way for their lifetime. This stuff dynamically reprovisions, and you guys, you're not even talking about kind of doing containers with VMs and containers with your bare metal, you can dynamically reprovision across that as well. >> Yeah, what he said. (laughter) >> Listen, we're just getting started so just relax, okay. These guys are telling me we gotta wrap. We're not gonna wrap. >> No. >> We haven't even gotten to One Sphere yet. >> We have other topics. Exactly. >> So let's get to One Sphere. >> Yeah. >> Yeah I want to talk about One Sphere. But I do want to say. >> Go ahead, last thought. >> One more thing, so you talked about artists, but the other part of it is for developers so one of the things we don't want the engineering teams to be a hindrance to the developers. Because they want to be able to move quickly, they want to be able to be assessing, and I think one of the things that's not just an impact on our artists, to be able to do these new projects, but also it makes our developers more efficient. They don't have to wait. >> Yeah. >> Okay, great. Now let's talk multi cloud. >> Yep. >> A lot of complexity, the more things get simple, the more complex they seem to get. So, One Sphere. You guys announced yesterday. >> Yeah, so. A core pillar of the HP strategy, make hybrid IT simple, right. And you can see from this conversation we're making hybrid IT simple on-prem. Not only do we have Synergy, but we have a fantastic offering in our Simplivity space. And that platform's over 2,000 customers and growing like crazy as well. But after we did that, we said look, we've got fantastically simple virtualization clusters in Simplivity, we've got great dynamic reprovisioning and composable infrastructure, but customer are not... That's part of their hybrid IT problem, that's the on-prem part. They're also wrestling with I've got multiple cloud instances, I need to get insights into where I'm spending my money, where workloads are deployed and all that. So we started this program, HPE OneSphere. We've had it going for almost three years. We had a small team on it early on. We ramped up the staffing a couple years ago. And what it really does, it's pretty simple. It allows you to build clouds, deploy apps, and gain insights extremely fast. So it's designed for IT ops to be able to build and deploy a private cloud as fast as they can and assemble that with their public cloud assets. And provide one place to look at all of those. For developers, it provides a common multi-tenant environment that has all the services and tools they need to be able to deploy an application whether it's on-prem or off-prem, and you can choose, you can build applications that have some of both inside that developer environment. And then for the business, it shows insights into where's the money being spent? Where are those workloads running and what's it costing me? So, think of it almost as composable at that next level where it's not just resources within chassis, now it's resources across the hybrid IT estate. It actually is public cloud assets from any of the public clouds, whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, Cloud28+, as well as your private cloud assets. And it automates the life cycle stuff that we were just talking about through this application into OneView. It's a SaaS environment, so actually OneSphere is software as a service. It lives in the cloud, it's a subscription that our customers buy, and it does all of this capability to simplify their hybrid environment and taps into the capabilities we just talked about. It's fantastic, nobody has anything like it. >> Okay well we've heard that before, but now... >> Exactly. >> You're putting your money where your mouth is. >> So I was right on that one. >> Okay but it's early days for OneSphere. >> Okay. >> And your private cloud is what we call a true private cloud. >> Which you said on stage yesterday. >> I did that's exactly right. >> It's evidence by your ability to reduce staff to manage infrastructure. >> It's a con experience wherever the data requires is how we put it. >> Yes, yes. We want the simplicity of management and the availability of apps that you get in public cloud in the private cloud. >> And the pricing. Yeah? >> Well, yeah, well... No, cause it's actually more expensive to go public cloud. >> I mean pricing models. >> Oh yes, yeah. >> The consumption is what you're basically talking about, yeah. >> And so you, Jeff you guys are OneSphere or OneSphere betas? >> Yeah, you bet. >> So what were you trying to learn? What were you kicking the tires on, testing? Where'd you focus? >> We, you know, if we look at the future, we're not gonna be on-prem forever, and I certainly don't want to be on-prem forever, I want to take advantage of flexing to public cloud, but again, for our films, you know, we want to be able to provide the producers of those movies, what is that gonna cost me? What is that, how can I tell you what that costs? And where can we move as we start to do more different types of projects? Which ones should go to the public cloud? Which ones should stay inside? And be able to understand that. The other thing that made us nervous about public cloud. Was what they call the zombie cloud instances, you know where you went in, you provision something and then you forget about, and you, but you're paying, you know. And that's, a lot of money is made. >> Kind of like app subscriptions. >> Group: Yes, exactly. >> I'm still paying for that? (laughter) >> Exactly but this gives you all of that... >> 4,000 dollars a month. >> A little different right. >> Or 15,000 a month. (laughter) >> Yeah, that's for sure. That visibility is something that all... We talk about it, CFOs hate this thing... Some of the consumption model is shifting from cap ex to op ex, but CFOs hate surprise op ex. And that's where they're actually surprised by oh my gosh look at that bill. Well this provides visibility into all of those assets, whether they're on-prem or off-prem and what they're costing you. And it's always up to date, and it's always consistent across your entire farm, so you can choose and say that's costing me too much, I want to move those apps over here. And immediately do it. And for a lot of our customers, they're over-provisioned so they have spare capacity on-prem they're not taking advantage of. Why not use some of that and it's instantly provisioned. >> And that's where you initially, anyway, see the business value of OneSphere. >> Well, look, it's OneSphere to rule them all. And I believe whether it's private, public, you know we really want to have what is my total resource availability? So in the future, we never say no anymore. Really, we can tell them how much, but you don't have to say no. And the other thing is we can do this stuff instantly. So, we don't even say when, we just go now here's what you have to pay if you want to do it, we can provide those options. It's a new world. >> I love the demo of, I don't know if you guys saw it, there's a demo with Pong, you know, it's the IT guy of the past. >> Yeah the guy saying no. >> And then they made it vertical. It's the IT guy of the future. So, alright my last question. What cool movies can we anticipate? What's coming? >> Well you know what, How to drain... How to Train, how to drain your tragon I was gonna say. (laughter) How to Train Your Dragon 3 is our next film out and it's gonna be unbelievable. >> I'll bet. >> So my last question. Am I gonna have to continue to sit through 15 minutes of IT credits at the end of future Dreamworks movies as a consequence of Synergy? >> There's less, cause there's less resources required to manage your Synergy hardware. So it's less people. >> I know you don't sit through the credits. (laughter) >> I do. (laughter) I love credits. Alright guys, thanks very much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> It's been a great pleasure. >> Thank you, always fun. >> Alright keep it there everybody, Peter and I will be back to wrap up HPE Discover 2017 from Madrid, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE. Covering HB Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here, day one of HPE Discover Madrid. HP's European show, I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Burris. Said Syed is here. He's the director of Software-Defined and Cloud Group at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and he's joined by Katreena Mullican, who is a senior architect and cloud whisperer at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotech. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Happy to be here. >> Great to be here, thanks. So Said, we're very excited about this new developer initiative that you're leading. After the Spin merge, lot of software chops and developer communities went, but Hewlett-Packard Enterprise committed to developers, so tell us about this new initiative. >> Yeah, absolutely, so we're launching this community next week at QCon, and it is a pan-HP program which enables all of the different developers that are already out there. We already have thriving communities, they were just individual and ad hoc, and we'll put them under the pan-HP developer community umbrella where developers can congregate with HPE developers and partners, ISVs like Mesosphere and others, and talk about how we can fix their problems, and they can help us get better at what we do. >> So, Katreena, I think dog whisperer, horse whisperer, they can tame my animals. Cloud whisperer, can you help me tame my cloud? What is a cloud whisperer? >> Sure, what I do is wrap my head around all of the different cloud architectures available for both private and public cloud, and research those, figure out quickly which ones can benefit HudsonAlpha and the type of research that we do with genomics, and put all the right pieces together. Make a solution out of it that's secure and available 24/7, 365. >> So tell us a little bit more about HudsonAlpha. >> So HudsonAlpha is a non-profit institute. We are an organization of entrepreneurs, scientists and educators, who are applying genomics to everyday life. We collaborate on our 150 acre campus in Huntsville, Alabama with 40 affiliate companies. So it really is an effort to come together between scientists and researchers, and IT. >> And you really can't talk about cloud without talking about developers, so from a developer's perspective what do you want from the guys who are providing infrastructure hardware and software? >> Well, we have turned our IT department into developers, and I think that's something that not everyone does, and I think it's an important first step to being able to really leverage the type of infrastructure that HPE offers. We have composible infrastructure in our data center. We have hyper-converged infrastructure. We have storage, we have all these different pieces that we are able to provision automatically and fluidly, rapidly, with API, which requires developer mindset, right? Not your traditional system administration, just keep an eye on a server. It's not like that any more, and I think it's really important that IT embraces developer practices and dev ops. And we're actually doing that at the hardware level, as well as then, right, you prep that foundation, so that your developer teams, your software developer teams can then build on it, too. >> I think this is a crucially important step for virtually every CIO to think about, and let me explain what I mean as quickly as I can. Every CIO says, "What am I going to do with my infrastructure people?" Analysts like us always say, "Oh, liberate your people to go solve problems." But having infrastructure people at least start thinking, acting like, imagining like developers is a step that allows you to solve near-term problems, and get them on the path to really using a developer mindset or developer problem-solving skills that may, in fact, help the business in other ways in the future. What do you think about that? >> Right, I think it is asking the IT traditional roles to step up, and learn a new skill set, which is not easy. It's an investment of time and resources, but well worth the effort. I think if you do not do that and expand your skill set, you will not be able to leverage these solutions that are out there. Or you'll just be using them kind of out of the box, which they'll work out of the box, but is that really what they're capable of doing? >> So how long did this take, to go through this transition at HudsonAlpha? >> Well, I've been with HudsonAlpha for two years, and from the moment that I arrived, we have a very small IT department, just a handful of people, so from the moment that I arrived, we just architect the job description that way, right? We write into the job description, "Welcome to IT. "By the way, you're a dev op software engineer now. "You're an infrastructure administrator. "You need to understand software to find networking." All of these pieces are expected, and it can be a lot of work to learn that on the side, but well worth it, yeah. >> Absolutely, absolutely, and I can tell you HudsonAlpha obviously is ahead of its time in terms of things that they are doing, 'cause trying to organize your workforce around software development mindset versus infrastructure administration mindset, it's a huge ordeal. But the way they have done it, is actually, I'm very happy to partner with them on this thing. >> So Said, how are you going to sort of measure success of this initiative? What are your objectives and what should we be looking for over the next 12, 18 months? >> Yeah, so our measure of success is how many developers are joining the community, and actually active. 'Cause people can join but if they're not active it's not really worth their time, right? So developers getting active on our slat channels, which we have all integrated into a platform, and then on our side, our developers, and our R-and-D guys are actually going to be collaborating directly with our users, the developers, you know, people like Katreena and others. And so measure of success is going to be how many problems we're able to solve, how much contribution people like Katreena are going to have on the platform itself, and what type of contribution, what type of API integration we're good doing, those are the kind of things we're looking for in short term. How many HP platform, how many, number of SDKs, number of blogs, those kinds of things, right? So those are the kind of analytics that we're going to actually follow through over the next 12 to 18 months. The idea needs to be every software platform, or every software solution that we launch, like OneSphere, it will be API-driven right from the start. And partner-driven, and developer-centric, right from the start. That's our idea of how we measure success here. >> Okay, we got to go, but Katreena, we'll give you the last word. What are you looking for, how will you measure success of this initiative? >> Well, success for us are completed projects and saving lives, literally. That's the wonderful thing about working at HudsonAlpha. It's very measurable in the amount of compute that we can accomplish, and storage that we can provision, and keep up the environment for the researchers, so-- >> Great, excellent. Well, have a great rest of Discover. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you, all right, bye-bye. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (electronica flourish)

(the Cube jingle) >> Hello, welcome to the CUBEConversation here in Palo Alto, California in theCUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of the CUBE and co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. Junaid Islam is president and CTO of Vidder, supports the public sector as well as the defense community as well as other perimeterless oriented security paradigms, expert in the field, also part of up and coming Vidder that's doing a lot of work in the area. Thanks for sharing your time here with us. >> Well thanks for having me. >> We had a segment earlier on cyber security in the government so that was phenomenal but also we talked about the impact of hacking on business. So the number one issue on the board room agenda is security. >> Yeah. >> Data, security, it's all, it's a big data problem, it's a AI opportunity. Some things that are coming out is embryonic early shifts. Security is a challenge. The old model of the firewall, a mode, doors, access, you get in, then you're done. It's over, it's a perimeterless world. People can get access to these networks. Security is screwed right now. Everyone kind of generally feels that. So the question for you is in the enterprise and in businesses who are looking to sure up security, is it a do-over? >> Yeah, yeah, I think, like other industries, whether you talk about-- >> Yeah, so that's a yes? >> The PBS-- Yes, yes. >> Yes, it's a do-over. >> This is where you're talking about computers shifting to the data center and then the cloud, I think last year, or I think this year, Gardner said 100 billion will be spent on security. I cannot believe anybody who is involved in that 100 billion dollar expenditure is happy. In fact, we have something interesting. Security expenditure has risen consistently over the past five or six years. And cyber attacks have also risen consistently. That's not the kind of correlation you want. >> Yeah, they'll buy anything that moves basically. They're desperate-- >> That's correct. >> So it seems like they're like drunken sailors. Just like, "Give me something." They're like thirsty for solution so they're groping for something. >> Yeah, what we're seeing is a couple of things. One is the attackers have gotten much more sophisticated and they basically can by-pass all of the existing security appliances. So what we need is a new approach or a new security stack that really fits both the architectural environment of American companies where they use clouds and data centers, and they have employees and contractors, but also cyber attacks which have gotten much more sophisticated. And the classic cyber attack used to be connecting to the server remotely or stealing a password. We still have the classics but we have some new ones where we have malware that can actually go from the users device to inside the network. And you find that existing security products just don't work well in this environment. And so it'-- >> So what is in the do-over ideas. Obviously malware, we see it. Ransomware is super hot, the HBO example recently. They didn't give in, who knows what they actually did. They weren't public about it but I'm sure they did maybe give a little bit in. But these are organized businesses. >> Yeah. >> Right? They're targeting... The Sony hack's well documented, but again, businesses have not always funded this. And then you got the move to the clouds. Couple dynamics. Cloud computing. Amazon's done extremely well, they're leading now getting a lot more in the enterprise. They won the CIA deal a few years ago over IBM. >> Yeah. >> And you've seen a lot, GovCloud rockin' and rollin'. And then you got the on-premise data center challenges. So that's the situation of the customer. But then now you have potentially an understaffed security force. >> Well, actually it's so. I think let's start with that point in terms of our theme of a do-over. Talk about that first-- >> Yeah, all right. >> Then let's talk the techno part. I think one do-over that America needs is security has to move out of the IT department and become a standalone department reporting ideally to the executive staff, if not being on it. I think one of the unfortunate things is because security is a cost center within IT it competes with other IT expenditures such as new applications which are revenue generating. It's very hard to be a cost center asking for money when there's a guy sitting next to you who's doing something to make money. But unfortunately, unless security is properly funded and staffed, it never happens. And this unfortunately is a chronic issue through all U.S. companies. One of the things we've seen that has worked, for example, in the financial world, is most financial institution, probably all, now security is a pure organization to IT and that helps a lot. This is actually not a new idea. This was something the intelligence community probably started 15 years ago. >> And the cost structure-- >> Yeah. >> Is just a cost structure. >> Reduce the cost as-- >> Yeah. >> As the optimization behavior. What you're saying is just like Apple cases are tied to top line revenue, which gives them power-- >> Yeah. >> And mojo, you got-- >> Security. >> You got to think of security as a money saving table stake. >> That's right. >> People are losing money. The costs are now becoming obvious. >> Yeah. >> And in some cases crippling. >> Yes, so I think people need to think of security as fundamental to the life of a company, number one. I think the other thing that needs to happen from a security perspective, now that we've broken off this entity, is that security needs to become threat based or risk based. Too much of a merit security in the United States is based on compliance models. Unfortunately cyber attackers do not follow that model when they want to attack us. They basically work outside the model and come up with creative ways to get inside-- >> Yeah. >> Of organization. >> And basically blindside-- >> That's right. >> bleeding the companies. >> Yeah, so I can't tell you how many meetings, probably all, where I meet the security team and they're totally busy just going through this list of 20 or 50 things they're supposed to do. So when you talk about attack vectors, they say, "You know that's really great and I know "it's important but we can't "get to it." So this is another important shift organizationally. First break it out, second get focus on something that's important. >> Yeah. >> Once we have that, we get to the next part, which is technologies, and right now what happens is people buy a security point product for different networks; one for data center, one for cloud, and this doesn't work. So I think we have to move to security solutions that can work across hybrid environments and can also work across different roles. I think that is kind of critical. Unless we get that in technically, I-- (laughs) >> Yeah, and this is the dynamic with cloud and the data center. I want to bring this up. I had a multiple chance to sit down with Andy Jassy who's the CEO of Amazon Web services. Fantastic executive, built a great business there. What's on his mind and what's been important for him for many years has been security. And Amazon has done an amazing job with security. But that's in the cloud. Now, Andy Jassy and Amazon thinks everyone should be in the public cloud. >> Yeah. >> Now they have a deal with VMware but they're just powering VMware's OnPrem in their cloud. It's not really their... VMware issue, but Amazon's world is everything's in the public cloud. But they've done really, really good on security. But yet most of the buyers would say, "Hey, the cloud "is unsecure, I can't trust it." So you have the dynamic between the data center on premise resource. So people kind of default to the behavior of I'm leaving everything on premise or I'm only putting a little on the cloud, a little bit of work loads here, a little bit in the Microsoft. Google's got some, I'll keep the tires on Google. But they're never really leaving the home base of the data center. >> Yeah. >> But yet some are arguing, and Dave Vellante my co-host on theCUBE talks about this all the time, there's actually more scale in the cloud, more data sharing going on in the cloud-- >> Yeah. >> And that the cloud actually has got better security. >> Yeah. >> So how do you see that resolving because this is a key architectural opportunity and challenge for enterprises. >> So I actually, I think there's an optimal model which is if you think about what the data center gives you, it gives you a lot of visibility and physical control, as in with your hands. The problem is when you put everything in the data center you don't have enough people to manage it all properly. The cloud on other hand gives you a lot of skill but you can't actually touch the cloud. So the optimal mix is, imagine your encryption and access control solutions live in your data center but what they control access to is to cloud resources. So you can actually... If you just open your mind conceptually, as-- >> So instead of saying... It's like segmenting a network, you're segmenting capability. >> That's right. So now you don't need a gigantic data center because what's in your data center which can be a lot smaller now, are things like your identity based access management solution, you can keep your cryptographic elements, you can have your HSM, things that generate random numbers and certs there. But now this is, actually can be very tiny. It could just be a rack of year. >> Yeah. >> But through that rack of year, you can have very fine control of people accessing cloud resources. And I think this idea of building, it's not so much a hybrid network, but it's a notion that a small physically locked down asset can control a lot of virtual assets is gaining a mind share in the banking world. In fact, just this summer there was a bank that implemented such an architecture where the control elements for the cloud when their FFIAC data center and it include... It basically managed access to Amazon DPCs and it worked well. >> So interlocking is a strategy, I can see that playing-- >> Yeah. >> And by the way I can see that playing very well. So I got to ask the next question which kind of comes to mind as, that sounds great-- >> Yeah. >> On paper, or actually in certain situations, it might be perfect. But what about the geopolitical landscape because Amazon has people that develop on the cloud that aren't U.S. citizens. >> Yeah. >> So the government might say, "Wait a minute. "You got to only employ Americans." So they got to carve out and do some whatever weird things with the numbers to get the certification. But they need data centers in Germany because the German government wants certain things. So you have geopolitical issues now on the companies. How does that affect security because now a cloud like Amazon or a multi-national company has two things going on. I had multiple offices and I've been operating in multiple geopolitical landscapes with these regional centers, the regional cloud, or on Amazon they're called regions. >> Yeah. >> Or zones. >> So actually Amazon actually has done a great job. They basically have their global market but they also have data centers now which are only open to U.S. persons and U.S. companies like GovCloud as well as the support C2S which is the intelligence community's black cloud, which is basically off net. So I think now-- >> So they're doing a good job, you think? >> Yeah, they're doing a good job. But the key thing is how you use that resource is really still up to the enterprise. And that's where enterprises have to get good at creating the architecture and policies to be able to harness Amazon's kind of compute capacity. Amazon can, it's kind of the foundation but you really have to finish off the solution. And the other thing, going back full circle to your first question, unless the security team has the freedom and the mandate to do that, they'll actually never get there. >> So it's staffing and architecture-- >> That's right. >> Well they're both architectural. It's just one's organizational architecture and funding and one is more of a hard core virtual and physical touching and understanding. >> Yeah, and you know what I'd put in the middle? I'd say know your risks and then develop counter measures to them. Because if you go to that security team and you say you have to build a counter measure for every attack, that's not going to work either. A company has to be realistic is what is really important (laughs) and maybe it's the data of our customers. (laughs) >> So the answer to the first question then, obviously is yes. >> Yeah. >> A security do-over is needed but there's no silver bullet. You can't buy an application. It's an architectural framework, wholistically. >> That's right. >> That everyone has to do. Okay, cool. So the question I have on the Amazon, I want to get your thoughts on this because the debate we have all the time on theCUBE is, and certainly Amazon has competitors that say, "Oh, Amazon's really not winning in the enterprise." They got thousands of enterprise customers. They are winning in the enterprise so Oracle's catching up, barely in fourth place, but trying to get there. And they're actually making that transformation, looking pretty good, we'll have more analysis on that Oracle open role. But Amazon has won great GovCloud deals. >> Yes. >> So they've kind of convinced the government that they could do it. >> Yeah. >> To me that's... My argument is if the government's winning with Amazon, it should be a no brainer (laughs) for the enterprises. So this comes back down to the number one question that's been, quote, holding back cloud growth. Whoa, security, I don't want to put it in the cloud. How real is that objection now? 'Cause knee jerk reaction is, "You know what, "I got it OnPrem, I don't trust the cloud." But it seems like the cloud is getting more trust. What's your thoughts on that on changing? >> Yeah, actually, so one of the things is even though we use the word cloud kind of generically or Amazon generically, Amazon has evolved a lot in the last three to four years that I've been working on it. The number of embedded tools on Amazon is vast now. If we were having this conversation two years ago the notion that granular encryption modules would be there in Amazon as a part of an offering, it would've been science fiction. Or the fact that-- >> More than S3 and EC2. What else could they do? (laughs) >> That's right, or they have things like virtual HSM, they have embedded identity access control tools all there. So I think, first of all, all of the building blocks that you would want are there. Now unfortunately there's no short cuts. Amazon's not going to do the work for you. You still need a staff that knows how to use digital certificates. You still need your own identity based access control system to manage access of your employees and contractors and people in India to these assets in the cloud. But having said that, we now actually have a model that is much cheaper than the classic data center model that's basically usable. >> I'm smirking because some people think I'm an Amazon Web services fan boy but besides the fact that I love the company, they've done well and there's so many new services. >> Yeah. >> And they've literally been skating rings around the competition. >> Yeah. >> If you look at the complexity that they've been dealing with and the innovation, so I'll put that out there, a little bit biased because I think they're doing a great job, but now the game starts to shift. As Amazon continues to add more services welcome to the big leagues called the enterprise in government which they're doing some business in now. So the question is, besides Amazon, there's other guys. >> Yeah. >> Verizon, the Telco's have been really trying to figure out what to do with over the top for years. (laughs) Now they're also powering a lot of multi-tenant workloads as well including their own stuff. >> Yeah. >> So Telco and service providers out there, what are they doing because they're still critical infrastructure around the world? >> So actually I think if we just use Amazon as a reference point or example, Amazon initially didn't worry about security but then over the last few years, worked hard to integrate security into their offering. We're now in the early stages of seeing that from, for example carriers like Verizon, where in the past Verizon was saying first secure yourself then in the last two years, Verizon said, "Okay, here's "some products and services you can buy." Now where we're heading is what they're trying to make the network inherently secure. A lot of the basic components like device matching to identity matching, basically-- >> Yeah. >> Making that a part of the underlying fabric. So I think the good news is as-- >> So they're making advances there? >> Yeah. >> Well they have networks. >> Yeah. >> They know networking. >> Yeah, so the good news is as bleak as this all seems, we are making significant progress as an industry and as a country. Having said that, my only warning is you still need an executive team, a security team that knows how to leverage all of these components and pull them together. And that goes back to having a risk based approach and protecting the most important things. And I think if you can do that, I think the tool set that's come out now is actually pretty sophisticated. >> So final question, I want to get your thoughts and we can end this segment and then we'll talk a little bit about Vidder and your company. But I asked Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, at VMworld just recently about the security do-over. Because Dave Vellante asked him years ago. >> Yeah. >> He said, "Absolutely, there's going to be a do-over!" So Pat Gelsinger is right again. The guy's like Nostradamus when it comes to tech trends. He's a wave guy from Intel so he gets the waves. But I asked him about that question again this year and I'll send the clip on Twitter. I'll put it out on Twitter, I'll make a link to it. He said that 5G is going to be the big kahuna of the next 30 years and he thinks that 5G starts to get out it's going to deliver 10 X number of antennas, 100 extra bandwidth, new spectrum allocations, 100 X new devices, that are all going to be connected as well. As you mentioned we're a connected world. This brings up the edge of the network he says, "Next five years is going to... "Next 30 years is going to be a massive build out." >> Yeah. >> So okay, 5G is coming. Industrial IOT, IOT, the Internet of Things is happening. How is this going to change the security game? Because now you have networking and you see VMware doing NSX and Cisco's been trying to get to the enterprise figuring out the virtualization on a network level. Everything comes back down to the network. Is that where the action is because it seems to me that the network guys have to figure this out and that seems to be the point of reference of the terms of opportunity or is it a challenge or is it moving up the stack? How does all the networking changes happen? >> So for IOT we really need two things to happen. I think one is we actually don't have a security standard for IOT devices and specifically the issue is malware. IOT devices and their software is made worldwide. And I think one of the biggest policy weaknesses we have right now is there's no minimum standard. This needs to be solved otherwise we're in a lot problem. But in parallel to that, there is a lot of technical development. One of the things that's happening in the networking world is for the past 20 years we were driven by what's called a network VPN, or layer three VPN, it's your classic VPN that connects a device to a server. The problem with that is if you have malware on the device it gets through. So there's this new kind of VPN which is an application VPN, or we call it a layer four, which is basically a softer process in the device to a softer process in a server. So that's kind of the new model which is-- >> So make the network as dumb as possible and go up the stack and attack it? >> Yeah, well not so much-- >> Well I'm over simplifying-- >> Or reaction-- >> The network guys are going to roll in the-- >> I was going to use a different term. I was going to say make the-- >> The dumb pipes. >> Make the network application aware so that it only lets applications get through not any kind of connection. So I think that is something happening. >> Well the networks have to be smarter. >> Yeah, so-- >> That enable the smartness. >> So smarter networks are happening and it's an area that I work in, it's very excited. >> I don't mean to offend you by saying dumb network. >> Yeah, but the application... To be clear though, that's just one piece of the puzzle. The other piece of the puzzle, which unfortunately is a little bit lacking, is there's no standards for IOT software today. >> Yeah. >> And unless we have concepts like secure boot that is the software can't be tampered with, I think unfortunately there's a bit of risk. But I'm hopeful-- >> And then IOT, for the folks watching that might not be in the inside baseball know it's a surface area problem. There's more points of attack-- >> Yeah. >> Vectored. So we're talking about the compliance thing. >> Not only are there more attacks, by and large IOT devices are made outside the United States. Physically they're made in China and a lot of the software comes from India and there's nothing wrong with that but the global supply chain provides plenty of opportunities for cyber attackers to inject in their code. >> Yeah. >> And this is something we need to watch very carefully and then like I said-- >> So this is actually one of those weird derivative results of outsourcing. >> Yeah. >> That American companies have realized that it's a problem. >> Yeah. So it's-- >> Is that right? >> Yeah so it's something we need to watch carefully. >> Okay, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> We really appreciate you sharing your perspectives. Tell me what Vidder, your president and CTO, you guys are in the security business, obviously you're an expert. With great call we'll have you back on multiple times. We'd love to get your commentary as we follow all the security trends. We have a Cyber Connect Conference with Centrify-- >> Yeah. >> Coming up in New York. We're covering GovCloud, AWS, and all the other players out there. What's Vidder doing? What's the company do for products? How do you guys sell, who's your customers, and what are the cool things you're doing? >> We've developed a access control solution based on a new standard called Software Defined Perimeter. And there's two things that are unique about it. First with a name like, technology is like Software Defined Perimeter, we work in the cloud in the data center but more importantly we're able to stop existing attacks and emerging attacks. So things like password theft, credential theft, or server exploitation, we stop because we don't allow connections from unknown devices or people. But the other thing is say you're known and you connect to a server, we basically look inside your laptop and only allow the authorized process to connect to the server. So if there's malware on the device it can actually make it through. >> So it's just on the malware? >> That's right. >> If you want to sneak through-- >> That's right. >> You're going to shut that down. >> We can't stop the malware from getting on the device but we can make sure it doesn't get to the other side. >> So it doesn't cross-pollinate. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It doesn't go viral. >> That's right. So a lot of the stuff we do is very important. We work with a range of big-- >> You have government, obviously, contracts. >> Yeah, we-- >> I'm sure you have, that you can't talk about, but you do, right? >> We do a little bit of work with the government and we're just working with Verizon which is public, where they wish to create services where malware actually can't go through the connections. So we're doing exciting stuff and we're-- >> Enterprise customers at all? >> Yeah, yeah. We have banks-- >> People who are on high alert. >> That's right, yeah. >> You guys are the tier one. >> That's right. >> Where if the houses are burning down-- >> Yeah. >> You're there. >> So we do banks and we just started doing work at a hospital where, again, it's HIPAA compliant and they need to make sure that data doesn't leave the hospital. So what's the number one thing that you guys have? Is Ransomware something that you solve? What areas do you guys... Being called in? What's the big fire bell, if you will, they ring the bell, when do you come in? What's the thing? Just in general or? >> Our number one reason for existing is stopping attacks on application servers or servers that hold data. That's kind of our focus so if you have data or an application that someone is after, we will make sure that nobody gets to that data. In fact we'll even make sure if there's a spy or insider attacker who comes into your organization they'll only be able to do what they're allowed to do and won't be able to do anything else. >> So on the Equifax news that was big, would you guys help there if they were a customer or is that just a different thing? >> No, we could've helped because one of the things that happened is they used a server exploit to basically propagate through their data center. So we probably wouldn't have done much on the initial exploit but we would've kept it from going deeper into the system. >> And they hid for four months and they were poking around so you would've detected them as well. >> Yeah, we certainly would've stopped all the poking around because we basically... You can think of us as identity based access control mechanism so based on your identity you can only do very specific things. And in their case, they had the identity of the user. We wouldn't have let them do anything except maybe just go to one website. >> Yeah, you would shut them down manually. >> That's right. >> They should've been doing business with Vidder. Junaid thank you for coming on theCUBE here for the CUBEConversation. In Palo Alto, California I'm John Furrier with the CUBEConversation. Thanks for watching. (the Cube jingle)

(energetic music) >> Narrator: Live, from New York City, it's the CUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by Lenovo. Welcome back to the CUBE's coverage of Lenovo Transform. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Radhika Krishnan. She is the VP and GM of Software Defined Infrastructure at Lenovo. Thanks so much for joining us. You've been on before so, welcome back. >> Yes, I have and it's a pleasure to be back on again, thank you. >> So I want to start out by talking about something we've been hearing a lot about today, and that is Lenovo's lack of legacy and how that makes it easier for your company to innovate and to sell to customers. Can you talk a little bit about that from your vantage point? >> Absolutely, Rebecca. So if you look at our, and, you know, there are a lot of legacy vendors that have incumbent businesses that have been built on very customized, very proprietary offerings. I'll point to my own background. I spent a chunk of my career in storage, a chunk of my career in networking, and a chunk of my career in servers, and if you look across all of the offerings that come out from these vendors, these are usually high-margin; they're very rich offerings. And so, as the industry has moved toward software define, there is less of a motivation on the part of these vendors to really embrace software define entirely. Now, Lenovo does not have that baggage. We're not looking to protect any legacy businesses; there is no concern around cannibalizing an existing stream of revenue or profit. And so we are truly able to innovate from the ground up. >> Radhika, so, the software define really is the intersection of pulling some of those pieces into standard, typically x86, components. Can you bring us inside a little bit, the ThinkAgile, the new brand that's announced. Seems maybe you're going to get a new job title (laughter) to match that branding, but it feels like it all kind of pulls together to Lenovo's server as a core piece and then adding software on top of it. >> That is absolutely spot on, Stu. If you think about it, our code expertise is in building highly reliable, high performing servers and if you think about where software define is headed, it's all anchored around a core server platform or a platform that can deliver processing capabilities, which we're extremely capable. I mean, we've got the industry's best supply chain, as you heard. Highly reliable platforms, variety of benchmarks, and so forth. So we've got the basis, the foundation, for being able to innovate with software defined on top of it. >> Can you bring us inside the ThinkAgile family, as it were. There's some partnerships, there's OEM, there's some technology Lenovo has. What fits under this umbrella? What do we have today, and what's coming soon? >> Absolutely. So, the way we think about ThinkAgile is, we want to deliver to our customers the simplicity, the agility, and the cost economics that they may get in a public cloud in on-prem infrastructure. So, if you had to net it out, our vision really is to deliver on the benefits, and more and so, to that end, the way we have it architected is as two sets of offerings. So, we have appliances which essentially take capabilities, like software defined storage and hyper converge, blend them with our very capable platform, and deliver it as a turnkey offering. We're also bringing to market large scale solutions. Keeping in mind that there are customers that want to consume the entire infrastructure, end to end, in a single turnkey offering; we're bringing those to market as well. And we're seeing a very strong response for both of those types of flavors. >> When you're talking about innovation, and you're a tech veteran who has spent your career at various companies, large and small in the industry, how does Lenovo approach innovation? Especially because it is a large company, 43 billion in sales, 52,000 employees around the world. How do you stay in the start-up mindset, or do you? >> Well we absolutely do and that's actually one of the, as I mentioned earlier, Rebecca, we don't have the baggage of legacy and so if you look at how we're really approaching the software define space, you're exactly right; we're approaching it like an entrepreneur, very much in a start up mode. We're able to innovate from the ground up, which is exactly what we're doing. We're able to step back and look at it holistically from a standpoint of customer problems today. So there is no longer a, "Let's see if we can wedge in this other multi-million dollar business here, because that could then generate more revenue stream." It's really more around organically thinking through what customer problems are, applying a first principles-based approach, and then investing in it. So, from that standpoint, it is very exciting to be in an environment where you can truly operate in a start-up mode while you have the benefit of the very large sales teams that you alluded to, and the ability to invest in it as well. >> What is some of the managerial practices that enable that? I mean, one of the things that Rod was talking about in the very beginning, was there's no arrogance at Lenovo and that it really is part of the culture. Can you describe a little bit about how you do get customer feedback and how you do work with customers to solve these problems? >> Absolutely. So, I think a big part of it is the ability to listen. Humility starts with paying attention to your customers, paying attention to the stakeholders around you, so we definitely do a lot of that. The other thing I'll point to as well is there is a very distinct emphasis around agility. It's around the need to move quickly. As Stu and I were talking about prior to this session, this industry is going through a massive disruption. There's transformation happening everyday, as we speak, and therefore, it is very important to be tuned in to what is going on around you and to be able to deliver on what customers are truly seeking. So, yeah, I would stay humility is a big aspect of it. It's the agility, it's the hunger, the desire, to succeed as well. >> Radhika, specifically, what customers are asking for, I'm curious what you're hearing around hybrid cloud. I look at solutions that you're offering including, you've got the new Tenex solution, you've got the Microsoft Azure stack coming soon. What are you hearin' from customers? What do they look for in a hybrid cloud solution and how are you looking to deliver on that? >> Yeah, so that's a very interesting question, Stu, because over the years, many vendors in this space have talked about hybrid cloud but it's never really come of age, so to speak. And I think a large part of it is because there hasn't been enough of an understanding around how customers truly consume hybrid. One of the things we've done, in partnership with Microsoft, is to really profile how customers really want to consume this notion of hybrid. There are environments where you have a disconnected set of data centers, you have the edge and you have the central data center, and they need to be able to keep those two synchronized and aligned, and so on. There are use cases where ... You know, you truly want a hybrid nature. You want data sitting at both ends and you want to be able to execute test dev in your cloud environment and a primary workload running into your on-prem data center. And so, Microsoft Azure stack, in particular, I would point to as one hybrid cloud offering that we do have in the marketplace. A good partnering, very closely around, which truly addresses the problems that customers, or the desires that customers have in this space. >> When you're thinking about your customers, what keeps you up at night? You just were describing how customers aren't even sure themselves how hybrid they want to be and how they will use the cloud. What are your biggest concerns when you think about your customers and how they use Lenovo's offerings? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think at the core of it, you want to enable them to succeed. It's not so much about the IT infrastructure underneath, it's really about enabling them to drive their business as quickly as they can, to drive productivity, and so on. So, for us, it's very important that we stay aligned with their business objectives and eliminate the worry and concern that they typically have with IT infrastructure under their hood. Honestly, as we all in the industry tend to say, IT is a means to an end. And we truly want to enable that. We truly want to make this a non-issue for our customers. That's really what keeps us up at night, is ensuring that we have the right framework, the right portfolio, the right set of offerings, and more importantly, the right set of services to allow them to do that. >> Radhika, we all know that IT is typically spending way too much time with some of the basic blocking and tackling. The number I've heard the last 15 years is somewhere between 75% and 90% of your budget is spent on kind of keeping the lights on. What's holding us back? How are we actually moving the needle forward with some of these new solutions? >> I think a lot of it, interestingly, comes down to software define. I mean, if you think about it, software define enables a level of agility, simplicity, and cost economics as well that we weren't able to previously get from the more legacy hardware-centric offerings. So, I think your logic standard comes down to being able to deliver on the automation, the deep integration across hardware and software, which is really where we at Lenovo think we can add the most value because we've got the platforms, as we just talked about. So, we're really very keen on innovating on the software layer above it, such that customers can expect to get these highly verticalized offerings that they can then deploy for their workloads and various other business use cases. >> Alright, Radhika, we can't let you get out of here without talking about some of the networking pieces, with your background. Kirk talked about it a little bit, but, can you give us a little insight, what's Lenovo doing with the networking piece, some of the integrations that you're helping to deliver? >> Yeah, Stu, that's an area I feel incredibly proud of. I'll say that as I've spent the last couple of decades in the IT industry, it's becoming very evident there is simplicity that is continuing to grow. Obviously, we've come out with hyper converge, it solved the storage problem, it's made it a lot simpler to consume. Networking is really the next frontier. It's the frontier that hasn't been attacked yet. We're still talking about technologies that are in world that are like four decades old. And so this is ripe for a disruption. That's exactly what we're doing. As we go talk to our customers about deploying cloud data centers, scale out data centers, you know, they're telling us network traffic is flowing east, west and the equipment that they have has been architected for traffic that predominantly flows north, south. So, we're really helping simplify that challenge for them. We're coming out with tools, and we're announcing a couple of these today, we're coming out with tools that provide much better visibility with telemetry capabilities. We're providing them tools that allow them to apply policies, so, even as they deploy different types of workloads, they can specify quality of service and have that carried over to the network traffic as well. So, we're incredibly excited about what we're doing here in networking. >> So, what's the end for networking, in the sense of, as you said, it is an industry that is ripe for disruption. Where do you think we'll be 10 years from now, in terms of networking and in terms of visibility? >> Yeah, that's a very interesting question. I think networking has to evolve to where it is much, much, much more simplified. You don't need to have certifications that you have to gain over multiple years in order to qualify you to work in the data center. 'Cause it's, ultimately this is plumber, and as we go to scale out data centers, it's going to be incredibly important that nodes are able to talk to each other and data is fluid and is able to move around very quickly and networking is what enables it. So, the ultimate vision for networking is really making it invisible. Make it invisible to the point that you don't have to worry about it. >> Radhika, thank you so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure to have you on. >> Thank you, it's been my pleasure as well, appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more of the CUBE's coverage of Lenovo Transform after this. (energetic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE Media's, theCUBE's exclusive coverage for three days for HPE Discover 2017. We're on day three, down to the wire here. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE with my co-host Dave Vellante, my partner in crime with Wikibon. Our next guest, Ric Lewis. Software Defined Cloud Senior Vice President, President and GM of HPE, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And Kate Swanborg, Senior Vice-President Tech Communications and Strategic Alliances, DreamWorks Animation. Welcome back as well. >> Thank you. >> John: Great to have you guys back. >> It's good to be here. >> So obviously DreamWorks, you guys are a big customer, Ric you are now leading up the team for Software Defined infrastructure, as we call it programmable infrastructure, a lot of great things. >> Ric: Yeah. >> Synergy we talked heavily about last year. >> Ric: Yeah. >> I kind of was geeking out with you on that in terms of all that programming ability and automation. Meg story this week was simplifying hybrid IT, which is the key part of where Software's coming in. >> That's exactly right. >> And so we got DreamWorks here, what's your vision in how that's going to happen? How do you take that simple message and put it into practice? >> Yeah so, we're completely about making hybrid IT simple, and we have three primary vectors that we're driving in order to make that happen. The first is our hyperconverged appliances that we deliver, and the second is HPE Synergy, our composable, and the third is our hybrid IT management stacked software that we have. And we've got momentum across all of those. In Hyper Converged, you guys know we acquired SimpliVity, it closed in February. Got a lot of customers on that. We had Red Bull on-stage here at Discover talking about their use case of that in their racing. It was a packed house, people completely interested in all the things we're doing in hybrid IT. That's SimpliVity. Synergy, we now have almost 400 customers that have adopted Synergy. We started shipping in volume in December, and DreamWorks Animation is one of those customers, and real excited for you to hear a little bit about how they're using it, but we had, I think we had around 10 customers from Synergy across all kinds of verticals and use cases, including service providers that were on-stage here. And the final thing is our hybrid IT management stack, a program that we introduced here at Discover called Project New Stack. So, that's what's going on in Software Defined & Cloud, it's a lot right now. >> And we had a SimpliVity customer on by the way, they were really glowing. >> Yeah. >> Great to see that happen. >> That was a great story. >> Great story, Kate, so DreamWorks, you guys have a business, you've got to put a product out there and so you got to look at technology, make it work for you, and sometimes you got to get in the weeds, there's pieces and pieces, at the end of the day you got a product to deliver. How are you guys taking some of the things that are coming out at HPE and putting them into action? What are some of the things you're doing? >> Well, I think one of the things that is often surprising to people is just how much technology we consume to make a CG feature animated film. These films take 80 million compute hours to render the images, petabytes of storage and we're typically working on five or six active films in production because they take us four or five years to make. And so we want to be able to have the capability of releasing two or three films a year, we must have simultaneous production. But of course, not all of the productions are exactly the same, and we've also got other media opportunities, whether it's television or theme park. And so, what's critical to us is that we're actually able to provision the right amount of digital resource to the right project quickly and easily so that as those creative inspirations are growing and burgeoning at the studio, we've got the resource behind it in an effortless fashion. >> And how are you making that happen with the Synergy for example, because last year we were looking at thinking well this has got a lot of potential. I mean you can do it through the orchestration, making the management work kind of takes that, abstracts away a lot of the complexity. How are you guys dealing with that, I mean how have you put that into action? >> Well, we've been working within a hybrid environment for years now, so the idea of a hybrid environment isn't new to us. The key however, is that it's labor intensive. It's time-consuming. In order to get all of the right configurations of the networking and the storage, the compute to actually work in a realtime environment for our artists, that has taken us an enormous amount of effort over the years. What we're looking for in the Synergy deployment is to reduce those weeks down to days and those days down to hours. Once we're able to do that, our engineers can go off and focus on the niche technology solutions that actually matter to the artists. And that's where we want to get the business benefit. >> And with Synergy, compute, storage and fabric all managed under the same management domain. >> That's right. >> Single API that you can get access to all those resources, so it makes it super easy. It's the world's easiest way to do infrastructure as a service, it's built into the platform natively. >> That's right, and one of the things that's been so impressive to us is that we've been working with the Pointnext team to come in and actually configure this for our environment. Everybody uses a high-performance compute environment, but nobody's is exactly the same. The configure ability of this and the customability of this to our environment has been critical, and we've seen incredible benefits from that. >> So Ric, we kind of pushed you in theCUBE last year, cause you were saying "there's nothing like this in the marketplace". We said, okay define what's different. (John laughs) One of the things you touched on was the fluid pools of infrastructure. >> Yes. >> And Kate, what you just described is bringing technology to different digital teams. >> The dynamicism if you will. >> Absolutely. >> Being able to dynamically configure the thing, yes. >> So, let's test it. I mean, it sounds like that's exactly what you're doing, and how is this different than the infrastructure that you used to have? >> So, the reason that it's different is that we've got, we've got a simply said, a single infrastructure. We've got a compute farm, we've got storage, and historically what we had to do was actually partition off certain pieces of that for certain productions in order to protect their resources. The problem with that is that any given day, particularly in a creative environment, maybe they're using all of it, maybe they need more, maybe they need less. The challenge is is that historically if they needed less we can't reprovision that to another production in order to take advantage of their inspiration and their business motivations. Now we can. Now we have the opportunity to actually have the infrastructure be as dynamic as our creative environment, and that's saying a lot. >> And you can reconfigure those resources three clicks, five minutes, you literally can deprovision -- >> Kate: That's it. >> So the old way they're like bitchin and moanin, where's the servers? >> Absolutely. >> Right. >> And running around scrambling. >> They're on order. (all laugh) >> Six weeks. No this what we're talking about. >> Yeah. >> This is about speed, right? I mean this is -- >> It absolutely is. >> Alright, so I want to ask you a question about the HPE event. You mentioned you're here. So, a lot of people go to these events and they try and extract all the action. You've heard a lot of firsts, last year was Synergy first, big claim there. We're hearing some security stuff with servers here. >> Ric: Yeah. >> As a practitioner that comes to these shows, what's your strategy when you come to an event like HPE Discover, and obviously the schmooze is going on and getting wined and dined by HP, a big customer, but like when you go in there, what are you looking for, how do you connect the dots, what tea leaves do you read, what's your strategy? >> Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that really interests me about Discover is we've got a deep partnership with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. We're talking to Hewlett-Packard Enterprise all the time. So we might actually think that we know what's going on. It's not true, there's so much innovation happening that when we bring our team to this show, we learn things that could really help our business. I'll give you a great example, so we learned this week about SimpliVity. Now, we had sort of heard about it, but we had not taken our time out of our schedules to really understand how that could help our VM environment. Our team's sitting in one of the panels this week, and he's texting other engineers on our team going "We have got to look at this next week at DreamWorks Animation". That's the kind of environment this is. I'll tell you something else, New Stack, we're going to lean heavy into New Stack because we believe that the innovation that we're seeing in that space is really, finally going to deliver on this promise of cloud that's been out there. >> What specifically about New Stack do you like? I want to just double down on that. Is it the rule of your own, is it the flexibility, what's the big thing there? >> Well, again this is one of those things where our team today is actually writing code and creating architectures that are sort of New Stack-like, but we're having to do it, we're having to invest our own time. It's trial and error, some of the things work some of the things don't, and that time is not being spent focused on our animation productions. The fact of the matter is, here's Hewlett-Packard actually doubling down and making sure that there is going to be a robust solution that works, that we can bring into our environment. >> We're in enterprises across the world every day. We're having these conversations, and most enterprises are doing kind of a roll-your-own cloud kind've thing. >> That's right. >> They're playing with OpenStack, they're playing with Kubernetes, they're playing with all these tools, they got a bunch of custom code, but we're really what we're trying to do with New Stack is take the best of what they're all trying to do, constrain that down, take our standard Software Defined infrastructure as the base, put a stack on top of that that they can count on to do a private cloud with bridge-to-hybrid capabilities, that's standard, that ships, that delivers and has updates, so that they're not messing around with it. Their developers don't want to spend time doing that, they just want to have a private cloud installation that has hybrid capabilites and have it installed. >> This is super relevant, this is super relevant, and we call you a tech athlete because you want to go out there and deliver value to your group and actually build products, right? >> That's right. >> The film. But Dave's team just put out the True Private Cloud Report which shows on PRAM, cloud-like environment, $260 billion dollar TAM, but the notable thing is that the labor costs were non-differentiated spend is going up by a $150 billion shifting in 10 years. >> Yeah. >> That's exactly the point here that you're talking about, is my guy's aren't working on the product that they need to be building. They're doing the R&D, so the OpenStack and all these things you're talking about, they're doing the R&D. Here, you're doing the R&D, delivering the product to the customer. >> Well and when we deliver that, we're still going to leverage all of those technologies. OpenStack is a key part of New Stack. Kubernetes is a key part of New Stack, but what we're doing is pulling that together so that they don't have to curate their own private cloud. >> Kate: That's right. >> We create that, deliver it in a way that's an appliance-like way, just like we deliver Hyper Converged today, in a controlled plane that manages that hybrid IT estate and gives them visibility into public cloud uses and private cloud, and it's really going to help them a lot, and it's going to help a whole lot of other customers cause we're making it standard and easily deployable. >> Well, we've seen this story unfold over this decade, where the corner office has said I don't want to spend money on that caching and provisioning. Okay, so go to the cloud. And then IT said, well, eh, we can't do that. (laughs) Okay, and so they get in with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and others say what's the answer? Okay, but what you've described is this horizontal infrastructure capability that you can throw any workload at. >> That's right. >> And so my question is, what does it mean for the business? Does it mean you can do things faster, you have happier animators, you can do more movies, what does it mean? >> I think it means a couple of things. First of all, opportunity cost. In our business, a new opportunity for a creative endeavor, that comes up all the time, and the key is is that you want to be able to explore that as quickly as possible. Creative ideas work out sometimes, sometimes they don't, but they key is is that if takes you time and effort and money to just explore it, you've got an opportunity cost you don't want. >> Yeah, yep. >> Something like Synergy will allow us to provision resources to new ideas and new potentials quickly enough, easily enough, and at a cost-effective measure, so that we can actually determine which creative endeavors are going to work more quickly in our environment. That's a huge deal. >> So you were missing opportunities because of the infrastructure limitations, is that right? >> That's -- >> The mockups and everything have to get done. >> That's right! >> All the CG work. >> Again, when our filmmakers have a new idea for a new sequence, a new character, those types of characters, they take tremendous amounts of resources. I often talk about the dragon in Shrek. Back in 2001 we released Shrek, and it had this beautiful, huge pink dragon in it. And she was fantastic, but frankly she was so complex and so computationally heavy, we actually had to cut her out of parts of the film because we couldn't produce the shots she was in. Fast forward a few years, and we decide to make a movie called How to Train Your Dragon that's nothing but dragons. The key is is that we never want to be in a position again where we're tabling a great creative idea because we can't resource for it. And solutions like SimpliVity and Synergy and particularly where we're going with New Stack and the ability to actually harness the cloud without having to do all the work ourselves, that's going to bring that potential to reality. >> John: And then you know, your application in this opportunity cost is for your business. Other companies have apps, right? So their opportunity costs are very similar. >> That's right. >> John: This is the classic how shadow IT was born. >> Oh, yes! >> And people want to experiment, show proof of concept. Not a PowerPoint, an actual demo of real working product. It may not have the scale there, but you get to that point of where it's workable. >> Look, every business is facing some element of this right now, and I will tell you the other reason of the two reasons that I think that this is going to make a difference. It's future-proofing our environment. >> Ric: Yeah. >> The world is so dynamic right now, things are changing so quickly. Even in our environment with media and entertainment, the world of what people want to consume and how they want to consume it and the nature of how we're looking at innovation in both filmmaking techniques, as well as new media opportunities, the key in all of that is is that we have to be dynamic in order to be future-proofed. These types of solutions give us the confidence that we're actually putting the money in the right place. It's an investment in our future. >> Earlier you mentioned Pointnext services, and the narrative from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is my inference is it's more cloud-like. Do different types of business models. Are you seeing that? I mean, is it more than just a new name, a new brand, are you starting to see an evolution of the way in which you engage with Hewlett-Packard services? >> We absolutely are, and it's one thing to talk about strategy, but at the end of the day, you don't call up your technology and have a conversation with it, you call up people. And what we're seeing is that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is investing in a level of expertise within the Pointnext services organization that is unparalleled. That is a massive change over the course of the last five, six, 10 years. These folks are coming into our environment now and we're finding that we are inspired by their strategies. We're not having to teach them about our business, they're actually coming in with all of these other learnings that they've gotten from all of these corporations and they're looking at our ambitions and going hey, we think we've got some ideas here. I'll tell you, our engineers are hard to impress. >> That's the truth. >> They are used to, what was your phrase, rolling it on their own. >> Yeah. >> They are used to being responsible, and they have very little tolerance for actually giving other people time within our organization. Pointnext has blown them away. We could not be doing the work that we're doing on Synergy as quickly and as effectively, installation and strategy around that without the Pointnext team. >> Well, that's the proof, that is the proof in the pudding in my opinion when your people who are, I won't say cocky, but they're kind of, sounds like they're pretty cocky. (laughs) >> Ric: Confident. >> But that you're in a, you're in media entertainment. It is one of the most disruptive, being disrupted markets right now. Smart Cities, IoT, media entertainment it's, you're the leading trend in IT right now, media entertainment. >> And in our team, there's simply no tolerance at DreamWorks Animation for technology getting in the way of the business. The fact of the matter is technology always has to be enabling the storytellers, enabling the filmmakers, enabling the business and ambition. And the key is is that our engineering team, they feel responsible to that. One of the things that we're finding with the new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, the Pointnext team, Ric's team with the Synergy deployments, is that we actually feel like we've got a partner that can up our own game. >> John: Good. >> And we do deep beta programs with them on everything that we're doing to make sure that we're meeting that next generation of what they need. It's a fantastic partnership. >> Well Ric, congratulations on the success, and Kate thanks for sharing all the great stories and your experience DreamWorks Animation. Great to see that trend, again media entertainment, you guys are doing great stuff. We're doing our share with digital TV here, we're not a, we live on the edge of the network with theCUBE here at HP Discover. With DreamWorks Animation, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, stay with us for more day three coverage here in Las Vegas at HP Discover. We'll be right back. (tech music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Jay Jamison, he is the Vice President for Strategy Software Defined and Cloud Division at HPE. Thanks so much for joining us Jay. >> Oh thanks for having me. >> So I was just in your keynote session and you talked about making hybrid IT simpler. You talked about the imperative that you heard from customers to bring solutions not silos. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about the specific feedback you were hearing from customers that really made you want to tighten your focus? >> Yeah, I think that, so, first off thanks for having me, and I would say that, absolutely, customers have been very clear at the excitement and the opportunity that they see ahead of them in terms of digital transformation and moving to cloud and taking advantage of all these new capabilities and technologies that seem to be showing up all the time. Whether it's containers, whether it's Kubernetes, whether it's internet of things, all that stuff's super exciting, but at the same time customers are saying, "You know, look, I've got thousands of applications "in a traditional estate, or a virtualized estate "that aren't going to be moving to anything "like a cloud any time soon. "And what I need is a way to start thinking about "how do I manage that whole estate "so that I can get my existing footprint optimized, "I can keep that running smoothly, "make sure it's secure, make sure it's reliable, "make sure it's low cost? "While I want to continue to reduce budget "where possible there and I want to start spinning up "more of my new efforts and more of my new investment "onto these new things so that I can be more responsive "to the business that I'm trying to run. "I can get new products and services out to my customers, "I can engage partners and my existing customer base "in ways that they want to be engaged. "I can enter new businesses." And so that challenge of how do I manage that hybrid estate, whether it's a mix of on-prem or off-prem, whether it's a mix of traditional and virtualized applications and workloads with new cloud native or containerized, or even server-less now, those kinds of things, that is really what I see as the problem of hybrid IT today. And our customers tell us that, "Geez, it's complicated "and getting more so each and every day." And that presents a tremendous opportunity for HPE, and partners like Red Hat, to be able to come forward and say, "Look, we can start helping you with solutions "that start bringing together a comprehensive approach "to trying to solve for making that entire estate simpler, "make it more solution oriented, "and less a set of different silos and people "that are all kind of sort of stuck "in whatever technology stack they might be running with." >> Jay, very interesting point. One of the messages we heard from Red Hat is that application spectrum you talked about. I've got most enterprises hundreds if not thousands of applications. They have the new ones that they're modernizing and building but even the old ones we need to at least re-platform them. The term, we used to call it lift and shift, re-platform seems to be the cool new way to kind of talk about it. But, you know, really modernizing the platform that I'm on, being more software driven, being ready to take that, if I'm breaking it down, and componentizing, containerizing it, starting to build micro services, but how are you working with Red Hat? How does HPE cloud offerings and infrastructure pieces playing in that re-platforming and then moving up the spectrum? >> Yeah, so I think really across the board, I think there are a couple of pieces. I think first of all you're absolutely right that customers will say, "Look, I have "an existing estate of applications and workloads "that I absolutely have to use." So for example I often think about if you think about a mobile application that you might use a lot from a mainstream customer. Like think of your, like getting your flight reservation on your mobile phone. Of course there are parts of that mobile application that are going to be very modern. Like I can order an Uber from the mobile app that I use on my airline often, and that's, of course, very modern, I'm using APIs, I'm using all this nice stuff to plug in what Uber offers that airline vendor to be able to say, "You can have that transaction "flow through a partner flow." But things like what time's the flight taking off, whether it's delayed, those are existing systems that aren't newfangled if you will. And so what customers are telling me is, "Look, I've got a corpus of data, "a corpus of application logic "that I absolutely need to be able to access "and use and deliver in new ways." And so in many senses I think that resonates very strongly, this notion of, re-platforming it's going on and it's a reality of, again, how do I make this mix of data application tools that may exist, and the desires I have to do new stuff. How do I bring it together in a way that lands effectively for a customer so that they have a delightful experience? Now what we're doing with Red Hat I think is really exciting in terms of providing opportunities for, in manners, where together we're sort of taking the best of both worlds. So a great example that I talked about in my keynote is saying, "Look, we're trying to take", we're working very closely with Red Hat, and specifically their Ansible team, to say, "Look, what customers, what users of Ansible love "is building playbooks that enable them "to automate infrastructure using Ansible playbooks", that's what's it all about. And what Ansible has been great with those playbooks is setting up and running and automating virtual machines, well what we're doing, because HPE tends to have infrastructure and great infrastructure management tools that say, "Look, down at the hardware level "we want to make it easier and more fungible "for IT shops to be able "to manage that physical infrastructure." And so what we've done is we've partnered up with Ansible to say, "Look, we want your users of Ansible "to just have their playbooks and we will "connect our OneView APIs", which is our infrastructure management software that sits on top of hardware. Say, "It connects, and so when your users "build an Ansible playbook that wants "to change how the infrastructure works "we'll take care of it all in OneView. "It's not something that your users have "to change or learn anything new "it's just all of a sudden Ansible gets more powerful "because it's connecting to HPE hardware and providing "a richer more flexible infrastructure experience." And so that's some of the stuff that we're doing now to make our hardware more flexible and more modern in the context of an Ansible developer, or Ansible user, but over time that's going to get even better. So the stuff, the things that we're doing with Synergy, which is our new brand that is focused on building hardware infrastructure that has composability, which basically says, "Look". It looks like hardware device but from an operators point of view it's very fungible, you can refactor and make your blend of compute, or storage, or networking, kind of shift on the fly. So a very cloud-like experience with on-premises infrastructure. And what we're doing is we want to work with great technologies that are very cloud-centric such as OpenShift from Red Hat to say, "Look, we want to be able to enable customers "to using APIs spin up bear metal instances of OpenShift." Very powerful in terms of time to value message for a cloud native customer that says, "Look, I need to run cloud native applications, "I want to have containers but I want to do it on-premise" This solution will be something that we think is a really powerful message for, particularly our Red Hat OpenShift style customer looking to build applications. >> Jay, and I'm familiar with the Synergy platform and composable infrastructure, like the ideas, you can break that down into smaller components. What we hear all the time is, "I need to build distributed architectures", and, as they talked in the keynote, predicting and forecasting where that's going to go is tough. So big challenge customers always have is like, "I buy these boxes and three years "into it I'm only using 40% of it." The utilization inside of data centers is horrible. Even with server virtualization it helped a little bit but not as much as what you see server founders in clouds and the like. So where are we with the rollout with Synergy? Do you have any proof points of customers that are saying, "Oh, I'm getting better utilization, "my OP-X is much better"? >> Yeah, what I would say is, so first of all I would strongly agree with you in the sense that if you talk to most mainstream enterprise customers today about their data center utilization rates it's often very poor. And I think one of the big draws that customers have when they look at public cloud opportunities is they'll say, "Well a nice thing about a public cloud is "I feel as though I'm getting much higher utilization rates "because of the way the payment structures work and so on." Now that may not always be true, you'll have, at times people will say, "Well these things are sitting dormant." But that's the instinct, right? >> We had server sprawl, we have VM sprawl, and now we have cloud sprawl. >> Now you have cloud sprawl, exactly right. >> And server less will fix it all too right? >> Exactly right, but you absolutely have the challenge of under-utilized data centers. And so it's imperative for HPE, and I think really the industry, to say, "Look, the solutions that we're putting forward, "whenever we talk about hybrid cloud solutions, "or hybrid IT solutions, or private cloud solutions or whatever to me it comes down to look, am I able to show you in concrete terms how am I increasing the utilization of your data center and how am I helping you lower your costs? And Synergy will, over time, become a great solution and platform in that manner because, for a couple of reasons. One, you've described, the fungibility and the composability of resources makes that something that is very much simpler from a technology standpoint. But then at the same time when you couple it with pay as you go style business models, that HPE makes available to its customers through our financial services, you start to then say, "Look, you're not "just sort of writing us a big check in CAPEX "and waiting three years and then being disappointed." "What you're doing is you're going to start getting the notion "that says, "Look this is going to show up, "you'll have a small amount of POD, "you're paying as you use." And we're able to then work together to forecast when will capacity requirements get to a place where you absolutely need to add more capability and refresh that hardware, or extend that hardware, excuse me. On the customer adoption, it's a new platform, and it's just coming out and we're getting great early adoption, and I think particularly from users that were in the beta. We had very satisfied beta users and we're starting to see, I think, really strong early adoption of the product. We actually had someone at our most recent Discover talk where I was talking with them later and they were, I think it was Hudson Alpha, which is a biotech researching style institute that often tries many of our things. And what they were saying that I thought was really interesting point which I'd not heard of in the context of, "Hey, what does composability do and how does "this drive up utilization rates and many of these things?" One of the things that he was saying that I thought was really interesting is he was starting to use Synergy to deliver what he called spot instant style on-premise infrastructure where someone could run a workload for a period of time and then if someone else needed the infrastructure more badly and he had a way to sort of basically just blast away the old thing and put in the new thing there. And he said, "This is great because during the day "there's a certain set of workloads we have to do. "At night there are a different set of workloads "I want to do and Synergy gives me the capability "to do all of that very simply." And so I think that those kinds of capabilities, while still early, will be very powerful value propositions for customers that are looking to solve the problem you're describing of, "How do I get out of a data center "that's under 20% utilized? "I need to get more efficiency here in order "to lower the cost and be responsive "to what my customers need." >> Jay before you were at HPE you worked as a venture capitalist at Blue Run Ventures, in particular looking at opportunities in mobile and consumer internet enterprise software. If you could put on your investor hat here and talk a little bit about the cloud market and the cloud industry, what excites you and what gives you pause in terms of where you see the market heading and where companies are putting their money? >> Oh that's a really good question. I think that, well I would say that putting an investor hat on, I think that particularly in the enterprise space, I think it's a really exciting time, particularly for, and not to be super self serving for what HPE is doing, but I think there is a set of problems that are out there that are big and broad where there will be large companies that get created. One area that we're very interested in at HPE that I think is an area of investor interest, whether it's HPE making the investment or whether it's venture capitalists or what have you. It's really in the notion of what I describe as hybrid management. And what that basically means is, "Look, I'm a user that's going to have some VMware. "I'm going to have some cloud stuff running on AWS, "I'm going to have a desire to use Kubernetes, "and containers and so on." "Help me get one pane of glass that gives "me a way to think about seeing "those different applications, understanding how they're running. "I want one way to do things like firmware updates "for the stuff that needs firmware updates. "I want one way to do application firewalls, "I want one way to do this." And I think that's going to be a very interesting and sticky market to go off an win. So if I were in the investment space that would be an area that I would be looking at very deeply. Another area that I think is going to be really interesting and important, we talk a lot about AI and machine learning in the context of everything in the world of enterprise, seems to have this label of, "Hey, we're using AI and machine learning." But I think what you really have to get back to is what about artificial intelligence and machine learning is actually going to help you solve a problem? How is it going to make your business actually better? And I think that often we're, I think right now at a place where we're a little bit too over our skis in terms of saying, "Look, these are really interesting technologies, "AI's going to do everything and drive out cars "and basically make us little house pets in the corners "'cause they're doing so much in our lives." But I think that there tends to be, one customer was saying to me, "You know what's really interesting is "dozens of startups will come and tell me "about how AI's going to solve "a hundred problems I didn't know I have. "What I'd really like someone to come "and talk to me about is about, "I want them to talk to me about "one of the problems I know I have. "'Cause I've got a hundred problems "I know I've got that I want solutions to." And so I think a big opportunity is really to try and figure out how do these new technologies particularly in that space and around big data and so on, how do those become things that are really truly impactful to making a mainstream business that may have a hybrid estate, how does it make them more effective? And that can have an impact in terms of how to make their IT ops more efficient, how to predict outages, how to be more secure, all that sort of stuff, all the way to "How do I do a better job delighting my customers "and predicting where the next new markets are going to be?" So those are some of the areas that I'd be most interested in as an investor and really as an operator and a strategist at HPE. >> And yet you remain a little skeptical of what you're hearing about the AI and machine learning in terms of where it really truly is at right now and the opportunities that? >> Yeah, what I would says is, I think it's if it's, the technology's really exciting and developing very very quickly. That I have no question about. What I often have questions about and I hear customers questioning is is this a technology in search of a solution or is it just kind of, we're saying, "Hey this is a really cool new thing "that it can go solve everything "but I haven't thought specifically about how "to actually solve this specific problem "that exists at hand." And that's the challenge. It's ultimately, I think of it, to dig in a little deeper, it's really a product management question or problem of "Hey, do I really understand what problem "my customer's trying to solve "and am I using this tactic to do a great job?" As a quick example machine learning, those kinds of things are great for what computers do well. One thing a computer does really well is the same repetitive task thousands and thousands of times. So things like email marketing automation, or thinking about how you use a business development manager to reach, do outbound selling. That you can have a computer do a lot that imitates a human being to say, "Hey I'm going to send you an email "and try and sell you something "and get you interested in a call." I don't need to have a human being do a lot of that stuff. That to me is really straight down the fairway, really clear business problem that AI and machine learning can do a great job, bots, all that sort of stuff, can do a great job starting to have an impact on. But to think it's just going to do everything out of the box is something that you have to think about. Okay where does this tool and technology really provide the value that customers are going to see. >> Jay. We've had HPE on theCUBE lots of time. You were at Discover in London, so I think we're pretty close to where you cloud strategy is but I look at next week's Open Stack Summit, some in the industry was like, "Oh, HPE pulled out completely of Open Stack." You've got HPE Discover coming up in Vegas, soon after that, and we'll have theCUBE there also. I know John and Dave are really looking forward to it. Give our audience a little bit of an update as to where HPE is and isn't when it comes to Open Stack, specifically and just kind of cloud positioning in general. >> Yeah, right, so what I would say is I think that it's a really good question because I think there's been a lot of transition and I think that customers are still, and the market, are still trying to figure out, "Okay, what and where does, is HPE playing?" And I think that what I was talking about today in the keynote and what I think represents where we're going and what we are doing is we're really focused in on this notion of saying, "Look we want to build a set of solutions that make a customer's hybrid estate simpler" and that hybrid estate, as I describe it, cuts across proprietary virtualization technologies like VMware of like Hyper view with Microsoft, it's going to cut across openstack, it's going to cut across doctor, it's going to cut across public clouds, et cetera. And I would say that where HPE is most focused, short of, when we look at how do we help customers get better leverage and value across that whole mix of estate, what we would talk about is, we think we're moving a little bit more up stack into this sort of notion of saying we want to invest and be really great at managing across that estate, so when I was talking about areas that I'd be interested in as an adventure investor, you know, it wouldn't surprise you that HPE were really, we talked a little bit about this concept of new stack and it really is this notion of saying, we want to be great at managing a hybrid estate across public and private, across proprietary and open source. So what that generally means, what that means then, as it pertains to, okay, what are we doing with openstack what are we doing with respect to cloud founder in this case or redhat, open ship, it means we're a lot more partner centric, because our assertion is that we believe the customers love a mix of, it's not going to be an all openstack world within a data center, we think it's going to be a mix openstack's going to be part of the estate, we also think doctor is going to be part of the estate, we think VMware is going to be part of the estate, we think that's where things are going, and so if you've seen us do in terms of the work we're doing with, whether it's red hat, at some levels, whether it's SUSA, whether it's even VMware, whether it's Microsoft, whether it's doctor, we've done, worked in partnership with all of them, and I think you'll see that partner centric approach continue. We certainly are interested in helping support customers that are existing and we'll move forward with respect to openstack with cloud founder in terms of what we're doing there, but I think that, increasingly over time, there's going to be a deep alliance on partners as we look at those infrastructures, service paz layers, because we look at that and say, there's a tremendous amount of world class talent, that's off building off those distributions in the openstack communities and other big opensource communities and those areas where we can most likely partner and have those take advantage of things like our infrastructure management layer of one view, can be very well leveraged within our new stack product and project that we're working on and so on, so that's really where we're heading and how we're approaching it. >> Jay Jameson, thank you so much for joining us, it's been great. >> It's been a pleasure thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman and we will return with more of theCUBE after this.