>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone live, here in Las Vegas from VMworld 2017, I'm John Furrier of the Cube, live coverage of VMworld 2017 with my cohost Dave Vellante, next guest Dom Delfino, senior vice president of sales and systems engineering, Cube alum, great to see you, welcome back. >> Thanks guys, good to be here again. >> RAC are covering VMworld, the ecosystem has been a little tide goes out, tide comes in, real clarity this year, cloud, you want it on private cloud, public to private cloud or Amazon. >> Dom: Right. >> Any questions? >> Dom: Exactly. Clear. >> This is the vision coming to fruition. This is what you're seeing this year at VMworld. I think in particular when you talk to the customers, they're now in a state of cloud reality. There was sort of this big rush, I'm going to try to move as much to the public cloud as possible and then in terms of the scale they got there, they start to have then challenges on that side, they realize, I need to have a dual strategy. I need to have a private, a public, a hybrid strategy. I think you see all the announcements that we've made today, with DFC on AWS going live now, with more coming around the world in different zones as we progress throughout the rest of the year and into next year, as well as all the service offerings we just announced, Wave Run is a service, VRNI is a service, NSX is a service, app defense, which is our latest security strategy as well. Customers really see how it comes together now and they want to go down that journey with VMware. >> It's important too to clarify, I call the high level messaging, so it's got clarity, but also VMware and ecosystems has a lot under the hood and it can get very technical, so you got to balance the speeds and feeds to feed the red meat to all the practitioners and then the high level. I got to ask you the question because people that are sitting out there on this cloud reality that you mentioned, they don't have a lot of people sometimes. Someone's got to implement this stuff, automation's coming, okay I get that, but getting to the cloud is not easy. I still got to run my shop, what is that operational reality right now because cloud reality, okay I get it, but now I got to turn my on premise into a true private cloud with a new operating model, new practices, how are the VMware customers dealing with that? >> I think that's part of moving away from the legacy as fast as you can or at least where you have to keep it, you've got to sort of isolate it and put it in a corner because it's the legacy that's holding most of us back, right? Because I got to understand how to run the legacy, keep the lights on, that takes 20, 30, 40, 50% of my time, depending on the customer, depending on their infrastructure at the same time I've got to retool my skills, I've got to retool my tool kits that I use, my run books, my operational processes, but now they at least have a direction to build to. All the customer meetings we're having here today it's about software defined. How do I build this abstraction layer? Okay we've been doing this with VMware for years on the compute side, many of them have ventured down the journey with us on the NSX side, we see 10,000 customers roughly on the VSAN side as well and that's about putting together, putting the automation tool set around it and really building that same experience that they can get in the public cloud, which it's fast and it's easy on their on prem data centers as well. Sometimes there's many reasons to retain on the private side, data sovreignty, intellectual property, all of those things as well. I think that's where the customers are in the journey right now and it's now they feel comfortable with the direction and they're going to adopt quickly. >> I like this idea of cloud realities. We've been talking on the Cube today about configuring the cloud to the realities of your organization's data. You're talking about governance, security, data locality, etc. so it really comes back to a data challenge. You can't just take all your data and shove it up into the cloud. What are you seeing from customers in that regard? >> I think there's a regulatory component to that as well, particularly if you go overseas, to Europe and Asia, there's a lot more challenges around that as well. I think what you're seeing is that customers recognize the fact that not everything is going to go into the public cloud at this point, so they're really prioritizing, burstable work loads, temporary work loads, definitely a prime opportunity to put in the public cloud. New application development, definitely a primary opportunity to put in the cloud. If I'm in the health care business and I have to retain health care records for x number of years and I'm responsible for HIPPA compliance around them, maybe not something that I'm just going to shove up into the cloud today. It's use case specific depending on and application specific, depending on the vertical industry, the customer resides in and depending on where they are in their journey to the cloud as well. >> You've got a lot of momentum in your business right now. Basically you're on fire. We talked about the cloud realities, that's part of it. The AWS announcement last year, even though it was a year ahead of time, gave a lot of clarity to people. How much of the momentum is due to those factors? Again, the cloud reality, the fact that people are now more comfortable with your cloud strategy and saying okay, I'm willing to make maybe a multi-year commitment with VMware. Is that a factor? >> It is a factor, it is a factor and I think the two remaining components, accelerating and capturing momentum in the market of our SCDC strategy being VCN and NSX has also helped that reality come to fruition for customers as well. It is software defined, we've been talking about software defined data center for a long time, like everybody else in the industry, we talk about things sometimes a lot sooner than they come to fruition, but now that they put together VC ware with NSX with VSAN, and they say hey, I can actually build a private cloud that's fast and easy, which is the reason a lot of my IT people or my application developers were going around me, because the public cloud was faster and easier. Wasn't necessarily cheaper, but it was definitely faster and easier, now customers who've been on that journey with us for the last year realize they can offer the same thing on prem as well and take advantage of both. Does that make sense? >> Yeah. What's the biggest walk away for you right now, looking at VMware, if you had to talk to customers that are not here and looking at the online coverage, certainly Twitter you'll bump into a lot of Cube coverage and lot of pictures, lot of architectural slides. What's the big walk away so far, day one? >> I think tremendous innovation is the big walk away. In many different categories coming forward, you'll hear another big announcement tomorrow coming up in terms of what we'll be doing in conjunction with one of our sister companies in the application development world. But also about taking security to the next level with app defense, so microsegmentation has become fairly ubiquitously known within the industry now, how do I take that into the guest, into the operating system, into the application layer? How do I secure those things as well? You see a lot of customers getting hit with ransomware attacks this year, those are big reality checkers for you if you're the one sitting behind the keyboard that's got to defend your environment against that and rebuild it and I think they really see VMware continue to push the envelope to develop very innovative solutions to these approaches that are very cost effective and that are also very high performance. >> Personal question, as you're out in the field talking to customers, you've been in the industry for a while, you've seen the waves. What's the biggest thing that you notice, observe out there right now? What's happening? Share some color with the landscape in the marketplace. >> I think there's some good recognition from customers around the type of operational transformation that they're going to have to go through in this journey. It's not about the network independent from storage independent from security independent from computer anymore. Infrastructure is one entity, that's the way the application owners and the application developers view it and want to consume it, that's the way that infrastructure teams are going to have to deliver it. I think there's a lot of recognition of that. I think there's recognition that the security problem is bigger and badder and worse than ever and it's not going away any time soon and there's sort of no magic box. If there was, you'd pay a lot of money for it to make your problems go away, but it's really something that has to be ubiquitous. Infosect policy has to be aligned with infrastructure security implementation. I could have the greatest policy in the world, if I can't actually implement it, I'm not going to get the benefit to that security there. I think those are some of the things as well. I think sort of the container world is going through a little bit of the post high upcycle, what's the reality check of that environment as well right now, we saw this with open flow and SDN five and six years ago. >> John: Saw it on big data with Hadoub. It's so expensive to run, why even do it? At some point, it can be total cost ownership and ease of use, old school topics. >> We're well into production ready phase of software defined networking. We're well into the production ready phase of software defined storage and hyperconverge infrastructure we need to take containers into that next phase as well. >> Bottom line, what does cloud ready mean to an enterprise these days? >> Cloud ready means that application, that work load is portable and I can deliver the same level of availability, service and agility, whether it's in the public cloud or whether it's in my private data center. Or I move it back and forth between both. We're certainly excited about the momentum we see with our customers, I think you can see and hear the buzz around VMware going on this year and I think it's the best it's been in a few years. >> You run the SE team as well right? >> Dom: Yes I do. >> How does that work? SE's are like the Navy SEALS John always talks about on the beach, they, >> I like to call them the conscience of the sales force. >> There you go, right. Customer trusts them, but at the same time, they understand the customer requirements at a very deep level. How are they organized? How do they fit into the partner ecosystem, maybe you could explain that a little bit. >> Yeah I think traditionally we've organized our SE's, aligned them with product categories, so I've got networking and security SE's, I've got cloud management, automation, orchestration SE's and software defined storage SE's, but I think that sort of is the base line and then you start to build their skill sets toward solution, towards a solution. What types of solution? Is it containers on open stack? Is it VMware's STDC stack? Is it around particular vertical solutions? If you're an SE on my health care team, you're probably very focused on electronic health records and EPIC and Medtronic and different applications like that. How do you solve those customers' problems at the higher level and be able to drill down at the same time with the domain experts from those customers when they want to understand how OSPF works and NSX or they want to understand how lund creation works in VSAN. It's sort of an evolution in terms of building skills. You've got to start at the deepest levels and then you got to build to how those products and those technologies integrate together to provide the customer with a solution. >> So as you move toward this multi cloud word, throwing another buzz word, but is this cloud architect like SE role emerging? >> We'll call them a solution architect. That solution may be a cloud solution, it may be a vertical solution targeted at a specific customer base and make sure that we do what's appropriate to serve our customers. >> John: What's the coolest thing you've worked on this year? >> I've got to think that app defense is the coolest thing that we've got out this year. I think that we've solved a lot of problems with microsegmentation from a network security perspective. I think now going up into the guest and into the application layer and providing an analogous functionality there is going to be really a very very prevalent way of preventing breaches, malware, malware propagation, ransomware in the future as well. I'm a little bit of a security geek, it's attractive to me. I really see that as just an ongoing, it's not even a battle anymore, it's a war now for our customers. We want to help them win that war. >> John: Ransomware has been so brutal. >> Ransomware's been brutal and I mean, see customers almost going out of business. >> Well it's become a board-level topic overnight. It is a serious board-level topic, not just lip service. You're seeing that right? >> You will see in some circumstances boards actually pulling the chief information security officer out of IT and having them report directly to the board. >> Well it makes a lot of sense. >> John: The pressure is unbelievable. >> The pressure is unbelievable right? >> In a lot of regards you would think that the CSO certainly should not report to the CIO, it's kind of like the fox watching the hen house dynamic. Maybe that's not the best analogy, but there should be an inherent tension there number one, but number two is what's the right regime? Why is it IT's problem? It shouldn't be. >> Yeah I think it goes back to information security policy versus actual implementation and the gap that's existed between those two for years for many reasons, networking being a flagrant issue in that context, where I could say oh, this application, this user needs to talk to this application, this application needs to this set of data. How do we implement that? That's not the easiest thing with the tool set that customers who run legacy networks have had historically. I think now that we have some of those things, you'll see the scenario I just described where a few organizations are pulling the CSO out of IT and reporting to the board or some, we've seen board level mandates for segmentation initiatives within the technology area as well so I think this is going to be an ongoing battle that we face moving forward. >> This is the biggest problem I would say at the Cube all day long because part of the value proposition of cloud and dev ops and apps is having data in real time. To be liberal with the data, you run the risk of opening it up so you can't do it the old way. >> Part of the cloud adoption and the new wave of applications about moving these businesses forward, the security is one of those things that will move you backwards from where you are today. I think it's important that we be able to tackle all these battles on all different fronts at the same time. >> If I may, I know we got to go, but there's another dynamic as well which is the recognition that we are going to get penetrated and yet I think it was the third leg of Pat's slide today was response. Boards are saying it's not if, it's when. How do we respond? That's a critical part of the implementation. >> I think it's, we talk about IOT. Think about the number of new entry points you create into your infrastructure, every device you connect to the network itself. Keeping them out is a huge challenge. The question is what can you do as the owner/operator once they are inside? How do you limit, how do you restrict the level of risk that you have and exposure you have to your data, to your applications to your customer information, so on and so forth and I think that's what we've brought to the table in a substantial way with microsegmentation with NSX and I think you'll see that continue to really raise the game with app defense as well. >> Dom Delfino, great to have you, great color, great commentary, you're like a pro. He's just like a anchor with us, SportsCenter >> If Pat fires me am I in? No? >> John: You're in. >> All right. >> Pat fire him so we can hire him. >> John: Don't fire me, Pat, I like my job. >> Dom, thanks so much, good coverage, always great. >> Dave: Thank you, pleasure. >> Bringing a great attitude to the Cube, great energy. More come, day one as we continue down, wind down day one and three days of wall to wall coverage with the Cube VMworld two sets, double barrel shotgun of content here at the Cube, we'll be back with more after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Hello everyone, welcome to our live coverage from SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We are here at Dell EMC World 2017 with Michael Dell, the chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, which is the company that owns Dell EMC, but this is the first year of the EMC World passing the baton formally to the Dell EMC World. There was an event in Austin, a small event one month after the close in September, eight months ago. Michael, great to see you and thanks for spending the time out of your valuable schedule to come on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Always great to be with you, John. >> This is like the SportsCenter of all the techs, so I'm going to go hard-hitting question first. You know I'm a big fan of entrepreneurship, and certainly a big fan of innovation, and the work that you've done. Saw on your Facebook page, 33 years, and you had that video when you were a kid. I forget how long in that was but you were still in your dorm room. 33 years ago last week, and a trillion dollars in sales. Really pretty amazing. I noticed Mark Zuckerberg also commented on your, probably built Facebook on a Dell laptop. Congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. It's been fun, it's been exciting, interesting, and thrill of a lifetime. But I actually think the next 33 years will be much, much more exciting, so I couldn't be more excited about the future. >> It's really good to see you kind of, we talked about years ago, when rumors of you going private. Certainly there's a spring in your step every year. You seem to get stronger with the private, not being the public company, but I got to ask you from an entrepreneurial standpoint. You're the founder-led CEO entrepreneur. You can't take that entrepreneur out of the kid. What's the management style? 'Cause when I interview Andy Jassy, Jeff Bezos, they have that founder-led entrepreneurial culture, but it's transforming into a management practice now, from folks who are, through experience, and observing what's in front of them, have to take on the next 33 years. What is the key to success based on your experience and how are you executing the Dell technologies? Because you have that entrepreneurial spirit, you are executing, and you have to still grow off this base of a consolidating IT market. Go. >> You know we've been able to be bold, and being private allows us to take on some risks and make some investments, and certainly going private back in 2013, and then the combination with EMC, and Vmware, and Pivotal and the whole Dell Technologies family has created a different kind of company. Much stronger than Dell or EMC were by themselves. And customers reacted very positively to that. So when I step back and look at the future of our industry and what's happening with digital transformation, and then all the assets and capabilities we have now, again, couldn't be more excited about the opportunities ahead. >> Bezos said on his interview, I'll ask you the same question in the context of your world. He said you know Amazon started out driving his car around, and going, dropping stuff off at the post office, and then it became what it is today. And he said he still has the guiding principles that's timeless for his culture, which was lower prices and get stuff to the consumer fast. That's been the ethos of Amazon's culture and a lot of other things wrap around it, but that's been kind of the guiding principles. What is your guiding principles that have been timeless for you as an entrepreneur-led CEO? >> It's been customer focus. It's been big ears and listening. It's been understanding the customer's challenges and opportunities, and designing the company from the customer back. It's been understanding the technology and then finding the intersection between the customer's challenges and the technology to create the solution. And I think that's stood the test of time for us and worked really well, and wow, the opportunities ahead of us, again, are even much, much more exciting. >> Well congratulations. So let me ask you the question that's on everyone's mind here at the show. There's also the EMC, Dell EMC, culture still intact, we gave Howard some props on the combination, the merger of equals, but now you have obviously a strategy, I'm not going to deny it's a pretty good one, mature market, consolidating, win the game there. You see that happening, but the question that I have is the growth strategy. Okay, 'cause you now got to have a growth strategy in a hyper-flywheel market called the Cloud, Cloud computing, cloud-native, Kubernetes, machine learning, Pivotal. What is that growth strategy as you build off that existing market? >> Well certainly with Pivotal we've got kind of the tip of the spear of our Cloud strategy, as the platform to develop cloud-native apps, the operating system for the internet of things, and the digital transformation for many of the largest companies in the world. Then we Virtustream. We've got a mission-critical public Cloud for those super-high-performing intensive workloads, VMware driving the software-defined data center. Everybody wants to have a data center that is software-defined. And what VMware has done in virtualization, obviously, is unparalleled, taking that into the network and into storage, VMware's got incredible momentum. I know you're going to have Pat on tomorrow to talk more about that. When we put all this together with the consolidation that's going on in the existing several-hundred-billion-dollar client and data-center business, the combination together, we're very well-positioned to grow. >> I got a lot of heat for a few years ago when I said to Pat Gelsinger, Hybrid Cloud is a destination that most people go to, but I made a comment, I said the Cloud is not a product, Hybrid Cloud is not a product, and you can't get a skew on a Hybrid Cloud. You can't say "Give me a Hybrid Cloud." It's more of a mindset destination of the customers. You said on stage that Hybrid Cloud and Cloud is a way of doing IT. Explain specifically what you mean by that and how does that translate into growth for you? >> Well let me take you back to the internet, okay? Because if we were having this discussion 20 years ago, we wouldn't be talking about the Cloud, we'd be talking about the internet, and we'd be talking about our internet strategy and our internet prog division, and our Vice President of the internet, and where is all that today? It's everywhere. The internet is part of everything. Internet is a way of doing IT, and Cloud really is the same thing. If you look at these large public Cloud companies, what they've done is extrapolated the workload up to the application layer. And that's what we're doing with Pivotal. That's what we're doing with the software-defined data center. That's what we're doing with Converge and Hyper Converge infrastructure, and that's why all those things are white-hot in terms of growth and customer options. >> The internet was a bubble that burst and everyone had a website. Remember that, those days. But you mentioned the internet. Let's stay on that for a second because that's interesting. Software has changed, right? Shrink-wrap software, and for the internet, you download it. Okay, now you have the Cloud access. So we were just talking in our intro that the role of a software company isn't the business model of selling software, it's how software works within the business model of this new modern era of computing. What's your vision around that, because a lot of people will say, and I even said to you privately, where's the software play? And a lot of people jump to that, right? So what's your vision around software? You don't have to sell any. Facebook doesn't sell software. They have software DNA and they're open-source, but their business is an application. Can you explain your vision on software? >> Sure, well obviously you've got mission-critical apps. You've got some of the traditional Platform 2 kind of apps and you've got the cloud-native apps. And there's a right place and a right way to develop all those. And it's not a monolith. There are many, many different approaches within that. That's why we see it as a multi-cloud world. For cloud-native, Pivotal is clearly our platform, and a winning platform, and has tremendous momentum, and avoids this problem of lock-in that many customers are starting to experience with the public Cloud. You can leverage the public Cloud but also run them on-premise. In fact 80 percent of the Pivotal Cloud Foundry instances end up on-premise. Then for the traditional apps, the Platform 2 apps, VMware is continuing to do great. You'll see that in the growth of their business and all the success that VMware is enjoying as now part of Dell Technologies. And then for those mission-critical apps, like SAP, like Oracle, like Epic, you need a different level of performance and capability, and that's where Virtustream comes into play. >> So I asked you a question last year. What are you most excited about, what are you digging into? What's getting you stoked about the stuff in front of you? You mentioned Pivotal. Obviously you've seen that change and I think a much stronger strategic front row with Cloud Foundry. This year, what is that thing for you, is it NSX? What are you looking, what are you geeking out on right now? In terms of you look at the future, you're making some bets. What are you looking at? What is Michael Dell unpacking the most for you personally? Not so much for the business, for you personally. What are you learning, what are you understanding deeper? >> What's exciting is how all of our customers are engaged in this digital transformation. And we're just in the beginning of this. And we're all trying to figure out, hey, how do I use all this data to make my product and service better? And they're all on this digital transformation journey. So again you put together what we're doing with VMware, with the software-defined data center, with NSX, with Pivotal, with Converge and Hyper Converge, the amount of growth in the data, and then all the new computer science. The machine intelligence that's being reasoned over that data. Super exciting time, and if you're not excited now, you're totally asleep or you're dead. >> That's super. If you're a computer science major right now, best time to be coding and building stuff. Okay, Pat Gelsinger. What's the conversation with Pat like these days? Because VMware's market cap is greater than HPE right now. That's one of your companies. It's not even part of the, not even the holistic view of everything you got. One piece is bigger than HPE. You've competed with HPE over the years. So you got to go to Pat and say, "You've got to watch what you're doing here. "You've got a tiger by the tail with VMware." What are some of the conversations you have with Pat? Share some color around how you guys interact, what is he thinking? Obviously he's got some new things with the Amazon relationship. What's the conversation like? >> Well I've known Pat for almost 30 years. We met a long time ago back when he was at Intel, and VMware's doing great, and the team there continues to innovate in virtualization, now with the whole software-defined data center. I am particularly excited about NSX because what you can do when the network is delivering its code by virtualizing the network, and virtualizing all the functions in the network, all the layer four through seven functions, and then run that on top of our open switching. It's a huge opportunity, and you combine that with everything else we're doing, VMware's incredibly well-positioned, and certainly for us, when we think about how do you modernize and automate the data center, VMware's at the very center of that. >> So you have conversations with Pat. Are they like, hey, let's take that beachhead, let's conquer that hill? What are some of those conversations when you take him to the ranch, or you guys have your meetings. What's the strategy? Take us to the war room. What are some of the conversations strategically? >> We work together quite closely, as well as ensuring that the open ecosystem that VMware has continues to thrive. Because VMware also works with the rest of the industry, and that's been an important part of their strategy and an important part of their growth for a long time. What you're seeing now is a much tighter collaboration across Dell Technologies. So Boomi and Pivotal working together. Pivotal and VMware, NSX working together. Dell EMC and VMware working together, and bringing together combined innovations in the form of new products and new solutions, like the kinds we're introducing here at Dell EMC World. >> So you got 33 years under your belt with Dell, your company, Michael Dell's company, Dell Technologies now, a whole new future ahead of you. What's your reaction to EMC World now converted into Dell EMC World? Again, you had a little event in Austin. It wasn't really the real big EMC World event. This is the Dell EMC. We spoke last year. I think we walked back from the party chatting. What's it like this year, what's different, what's your perspective, what's your reaction? Share some color on what you think is happening here. >> We've been really thrilled with the reaction from customers and partners. I'll tell you I think initially there was a bit of a wait-and-see. Customers were like, oh, how's this going to work? I think we're past that, and now customers are seeing that we really are one company, and they're seeing the new products and innovations. And the theory that we had that customers would want to buy more of everything from one company is absolutely playing itself out in the wins in the business that we're seeing. >> And the internet's a great example. I use that analogy, because internet was over-hyped, it popped, it all delivered the same. It was pet foods online, everything happened that everyone said was going to happen, just didn't happen the way they thought. Do you see the Cloud the same way? Because in a way you're taking a very cautious pragmatic approach by saying we're going to integrate our customers and have this operating environment called multi-cloud, or whatever the customers want. Do you see that internet analogy happening the same now with Cloud? >> Yeah I think, as I said, Cloud is not a place, it's a way of doing IT, and having sold billions of dollars of equipment to the public Cloud providers for years and years, what we see, the big difference there, is that these companies have, again, moved up to the application layer. They've moved to the software-defined data center. Everybody wants that. And as we can bring those efficiencies, and now with our Cloud flex pricing, we see lots of opportunity. >> As an entrepreneur, now CEO, go back to the entrepreneur, final question for you. Is there always the hustle in the entrepreneur, I mean that in a good way, Mark Cuban talked about it like the same way, in a way, you still got to have that agile mindset, never settle for complacency. Bezos' shareholder letter kind of points out the same thing. Common thread amongst entrepreneurs. What is the Michael Dell zeal right now that you have that you're pushing through your organization that really is more of a, not an order, but more of a mindset to be an entrepreneur, because it is moving very fast, this transformation. It's business, it's technical, it's supply chain, it's everything across the board, software. What do you tell your troops to keep their eye on the prize? What is that entrepreneurial ethos? >> We call it pleased but never satisfied. We are relentless about innovating and improving on behalf of customers, and designing our business with the two billion interactions we have a year with customers, and taking that input and feedback, and making our products, our systems, our services, everything we do better on behalf of our customers to enable them. >> What's the coolest thing that you saw last year with customers in the transformation of Dell and EMC coming together? What is the coolest customer example you could point to? >> I saw some customers that used Pivotal to fundamentally change the way they develop applications inside their own businesses. One particular customer showed us that they had 1,500 developers developing a thousand applications with only four operations people. And the way they did that was that they, again, extrapolated up to the platform level using Pivotal Cloud Foundry. That is the nirvana state that many of our customers seek to obtain, and we certainly want to help them get there. >> Dave Vellante wanted me to ask you a question. He says, "Michael, with all that money you spent "to buy EMC, sixty billion, all the piece parts, "do you have any money left for M&A?" And if you do, I saw a little venture announcement, it looks like the Dell EMC venture's kind of coming together, saw that release. So it's good to get the hands in the water, you invest personally through your capital company, but M&A, there's a lot of activity going on. Do you have any dry powder left for M&A? >> We sure do, and we've already made some acquisitions, both in the Dell EMC level and at the VMware level, and of course Dell Technologies' capital, we're now having a bit of a coming-out party explaining what we're doing with the portfolio and the new investments, and lots of new investments in machine learning, deep learning, security, and Cloud, and all the next-generation business models that are imported to us. >> Are you going to be involved in some of those decisions? Are you going to see 'em all, or does that all roll up to you, or are they going to be autonomous? >> I'm involved in 'em, but we got a fantastic team with Scott Darling, and team running the show there, and I'm there to support them. >> Well great keynote, final final question. You mentioned A.I. a little bit, some machine learning, you brought that up. Good to see you not really hyping up the A.I. and not having anything to back it up, not promoting A.I. Everyone's coming out and saying A.I. So I want to ask you, what's your take on A.I. these days, because obviously augmented intelligence is here today, but A.I.'s been around for a while. Neural networks has been around for years. What's your view on A.I., and how do you see that impacting Dell EMC short, medium, long-term? >> I think the potential here is really tremendous. It takes time though. You know, DARPA had this contest to see, could you drive a car through the desert, a vehicle through the desert, 150 miles back in 2004. The first year, I think the farthest they got was eight miles. By 2005, they had lots of cars completing the entire 150 mile journey. Now we still don't have self-driving cars, that was 12 years ago. So it does take time for these things to evolve, but the level of improvement and advancement in the processing power, and the learning that's going on in these systems is tremendous. And, again, when you have hundreds of billions of nodes, and all this data, and an increase in processing power, it is really a Cambrian explosion, we do think of it as the fourth Industrial Revolution. To me that is incredibly exciting. >> Michael Dell here inside theCUBE. Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, and this is the Dell EMC World 2017, the first of the Dell EMC World. Congratulations. Great to see you on theCUBE. >> Michael: Thank you John. >> More live coverage here at Dell EMC World 2017 after this short break. Stay with us, be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Hello everyone, welcome to our live coverage from SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We are here at Dell EMC World 2017 with Michael Dell, the chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, which is the company that owns Dell EMC, but this is the first year of the EMC World passing the baton formally to the Dell EMC World. There was an event in Austin, a small event one month after the close in September, eight months ago. Michael, great to see you and thanks for spending the time out of your valuable schedule to come on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Always great to be with you, John. >> This is like the SportsCenter of all the techs, so I'm going to go hard-hitting question first. You know I'm a big fan of entrepreneurship, and certainly a big fan of innovation, and the work that you've done. Saw on your Facebook page, 33 years, and you had that video when you were a kid. I forget how long in that was but you were still in your dorm room. 33 years ago last week, and a trillion dollars in sales. Really pretty amazing. I noticed Mark Zuckerberg also commented on your, probably built Facebook on a Dell laptop. Congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. It's been fun, it's been exciting, interesting, and thrill of a lifetime. But I actually think the next 33 years will be much, much more exciting, so I couldn't be more excited about the future. >> It's really good to see you kind of, we talked about years ago, when rumors of you going private. Certainly there's a spring in your step every year. You seem to get stronger with the private, not being the public company, but I got to ask you from an entrepreneurial standpoint. You're the founder-led CEO entrepreneur. You can't take that entrepreneur out of the kid. What's the management style? 'Cause when I interview Andy Jassy, Jeff Bezos, they have that founder-led entrepreneurial culture, but it's transforming into a management practice now, from folks who are, through experience, and observing what's in front of them, have to take on the next 33 years. What is the key to success based on your experience and how are you executing the Dell technologies? Because you have that entrepreneurial spirit, you are executing, and you have to still grow off this base of a consolidating IT market. Go. >> You know we've been able to be bold, and being private allows us to take on some risks and make some investments, and certainly going private back in 2013, and then the combination with EMC, and Vmware, and Pivotal and the whole Dell Technologies family has created a different kind of company. Much stronger than Dell or EMC were by themselves. And customers reacted very positively to that. So when I step back and look at the future of our industry and what's happening with digital transformation, and then all the assets and capabilities we have now, again, couldn't be more excited about the opportunities ahead. >> Bezos said on his interview, I'll ask you the same question in the context of your world. He said you know Amazon started out driving his car around, and going, dropping stuff off at the post office, and then it became what it is today. And he said he still has the guiding principles that's timeless for his culture, which was lower prices and get stuff to the consumer fast. That's been the ethos of Amazon's culture and a lot of other things wrap around it, but that's been kind of the guiding principles. What is your guiding principles that have been timeless for you as an entrepreneur-led CEO? >> It's been customer focus. It's been big ears and listening. It's been understanding the customer's challenges and opportunities, and designing the company from the customer back. It's been understanding the technology and then finding the intersection between the customer's challenges and the technology to create the solution. And I think that's stood the test of time for us and worked really well, and wow, the opportunities ahead of us, again, are even much, much more exciting. >> Well congratulations. So let me ask you the question that's on everyone's mind here at the show. There's also the EMC, Dell EMC, culture still intact, we gave Howard some props on the combination, the merger of equals, but now you have obviously a strategy, I'm not going to deny it's a pretty good one, mature market, consolidating, win the game there. You see that happening, but the question that I have is the growth strategy. Okay, 'cause you now got to have a growth strategy in a hyper-flywheel market called the Cloud, Cloud computing, cloud-native, Kubernetes, machine learning, Pivotal. What is that growth strategy as you build off that existing market? >> Well certainly with Pivotal we've got kind of the tip of the spear of our Cloud strategy, as the platform to develop cloud-native apps, the operating system for the internet of things, and the digital transformation for many of the largest companies in the world. Then we Virtustream. We've got a mission-critical public Cloud for those super-high-performing intensive workloads, VMware driving the software-defined data center. Everybody wants to have a data center that is software-defined. And what VMware has done in virtualization, obviously, is unparalleled, taking that into the network and into storage, VMware's got incredible momentum. I know you're going to have Pat on tomorrow to talk more about that. When we put all this together with the consolidation that's going on in the existing several-hundred-billion-dollar client and data-center business, the combination together, we're very well-positioned to grow. >> I got a lot of heat for a few years ago when I said to Pat Gelsinger, Hybrid Cloud is a destination that most people go to, but I made a comment, I said the Cloud is not a product, Hybrid Cloud is not a product, and you can't get a skew on a Hybrid Cloud. You can't say "Give me a Hybrid Cloud." It's more of a mindset destination of the customers. You said on stage that Hybrid Cloud and Cloud is a way of doing IT. Explain specifically what you mean by that and how does that translate into growth for you? >> Well let me take you back to the internet, okay? Because if we were having this discussion 20 years ago, we wouldn't be talking about the Cloud, we'd be talking about the internet, and we'd be talking about our internet strategy and our internet prog division, and our Vice President of the internet, and where is all that today? It's everywhere. The internet is part of everything. Internet is a way of doing IT, and Cloud really is the same thing. If you look at these large public Cloud companies, what they've done is extrapolated the workload up to the application layer. And that's what we're doing with Pivotal. That's what we're doing with the software-defined data center. That's what we're doing with Converge and Hyper Converge infrastructure, and that's why all those things are white-hot in terms of growth and customer options. >> The internet was a bubble that burst and everyone had a website. Remember that, those days. But you mentioned the internet. Let's stay on that for a second because that's interesting. Software has changed, right? Shrink-wrap software, and for the internet, you download it. Okay, now you have the Cloud access. So we were just talking in our intro that the role of a software company isn't the business model of selling software, it's how software works within the business model of this new modern era of computing. What's your vision around that, because a lot of people will say, and I even said to you privately, where's the software play? And a lot of people jump to that, right? So what's your vision around software? You don't have to sell any. Facebook doesn't sell software. They have software DNA and they're open-source, but their business is an application. Can you explain your vision on software? >> Sure, well obviously you've got mission-critical apps. You've got some of the traditional Platform 2 kind of apps and you've got the cloud-native apps. And there's a right place and a right way to develop all those. And it's not a monolith. There are many, many different approaches within that. That's why we see it as a multi-cloud world. For cloud-native, Pivotal is clearly our platform, and a winning platform, and has tremendous momentum, and avoids this problem of lock-in that many customers are starting to experience with the public Cloud. You can leverage the public Cloud but also run them on-premise. In fact 80 percent of the Pivotal Cloud Foundry instances end up on-premise. Then for the traditional apps, the Platform 2 apps, VMware is continuing to do great. You'll see that in the growth of their business and all the success that VMware is enjoying as now part of Dell Technologies. And then for those mission-critical apps, like SAP, like Oracle, like Epic, you need a different level of performance and capability, and that's where Virtustream comes into play. >> So I asked you a question last year. What are you most excited about, what are you digging into? What's getting you stoked about the stuff in front of you? You mentioned Pivotal. Obviously you've seen that change and I think a much stronger strategic front row with Cloud Foundry. This year, what is that thing for you, is it NSX? What are you looking, what are you geeking out on right now? In terms of you look at the future, you're making some bets. What are you looking at? What is Michael Dell unpacking the most for you personally? Not so much for the business, for you personally. What are you learning, what are you understanding deeper? >> What's exciting is how all of our customers are engaged in this digital transformation. And we're just in the beginning of this. And we're all trying to figure out, hey, how do I use all this data to make my product and service better? And they're all on this digital transformation journey. So again you put together what we're doing with VMware, with the software-defined data center, with NSX, with Pivotal, with Converge and Hyper Converge, the amount of growth in the data, and then all the new computer science. The machine intelligence that's being reasoned over that data. Super exciting time, and if you're not excited now, you're totally asleep or you're dead. >> That's super. If you're a computer science major right now, best time to be coding and building stuff. Okay, Pat Gelsinger. What's the conversation with Pat like these days? Because VMware's market cap is greater than HPE right now. That's one of your companies. It's not even part of the, not even the holistic view of everything you got. One piece is bigger than HPE. You've competed with HPE over the years. So you got to go to Pat and say, "You've got to watch what you're doing here. "You've got a tiger by the tail with VMware." What are some of the conversations you have with Pat? Share some color around how you guys interact, what is he thinking? Obviously he's got some new things with the Amazon relationship. What's the conversation like? >> Well I've known Pat for almost 30 years. We met a long time ago back when he was at Intel, and VMware's doing great, and the team there continues to innovate in virtualization, now with the whole software-defined data center. I am particularly excited about NSX because what you can do when the network is delivering its code by virtualizing the network, and virtualizing all the functions in the network, all the layer four through seven functions, and then run that on top of our open switching. It's a huge opportunity, and you combine that with everything else we're doing, VMware's incredibly well-positioned, and certainly for us, when we think about how do you modernize and automate the data center, VMware's at the very center of that. >> So you have conversations with Pat. Are they like, hey, let's take that beachhead, let's conquer that hill? What are some of those conversations when you take him to the ranch, or you guys have your meetings. What's the strategy? Take us to the war room. What are some of the conversations strategically? >> We work together quite closely, as well as ensuring that the open ecosystem that VMware has continues to thrive. Because VMware also works with the rest of the industry, and that's been an important part of their strategy and an important part of their growth for a long time. What you're seeing now is a much tighter collaboration across Dell Technologies. So Boomi and Pivotal working together. Pivotal and VMware, NSX working together. Dell EMC and VMware working together, and bringing together combined innovations in the form of new products and new solutions, like the kinds we're introducing here at Dell EMC World. >> So you got 33 years under your belt with Dell, your company, Michael Dell's company, Dell Technologies now, a whole new future ahead of you. What's your reaction to EMC World now converted into Dell EMC World? Again, you had a little event in Austin. It wasn't really the real big EMC World event. This is the Dell EMC. We spoke last year. I think we walked back from the party chatting. What's it like this year, what's different, what's your perspective, what's your reaction? Share some color on what you think is happening here. >> We've been really thrilled with the reaction from customers and partners. I'll tell you I think initially there was a bit of a wait-and-see. Customers were like, oh, how's this going to work? I think we're past that, and now customers are seeing that we really are one company, and they're seeing the new products and innovations. And the theory that we had that customers would want to buy more of everything from one company is absolutely playing itself out in the wins in the business that we're seeing. >> And the internet's a great example. I use that analogy, because internet was over-hyped, it popped, it all delivered the same. It was pet foods online, everything happened that everyone said was going to happen, just didn't happen the way they thought. Do you see the Cloud the same way? Because in a way you're taking a very cautious pragmatic approach by saying we're going to integrate our customers and have this operating environment called multi-cloud, or whatever the customers want. Do you see that internet analogy happening the same now with Cloud? >> Yeah I think, as I said, Cloud is not a place, it's a way of doing IT, and having sold billions of dollars of equipment to the public Cloud providers for years and years, what we see, the big difference there, is that these companies have, again, moved up to the application layer. They've moved to the software-defined data center. Everybody wants that. And as we can bring those efficiencies, and now with our Cloud flex pricing, we see lots of opportunity. >> As an entrepreneur, now CEO, go back to the entrepreneur, final question for you. Is there always the hustle in the entrepreneur, I mean that in a good way, Mark Cuban talked about it like the same way, in a way, you still got to have that agile mindset, never settle for complacency. Bezos' shareholder letter kind of points out the same thing. Common thread amongst entrepreneurs. What is the Michael Dell zeal right now that you have that you're pushing through your organization that really is more of a, not an order, but more of a mindset to be an entrepreneur, because it is moving very fast, this transformation. It's business, it's technical, it's supply chain, it's everything across the board, software. What do you tell your troops to keep their eye on the prize? What is that entrepreneurial ethos? >> We call it pleased but never satisfied. We are relentless about innovating and improving on behalf of customers, and designing our business with the two billion interactions we have a year with customers, and taking that input and feedback, and making our products, our systems, our services, everything we do better on behalf of our customers to enable them. >> What's the coolest thing that you saw last year with customers in the transformation of Dell and EMC coming together? What is the coolest customer example you could point to? >> I saw some customers that used Pivotal to fundamentally change the way they develop applications inside their own businesses. One particular customer showed us that they had 1,500 developers developing a thousand applications with only four operations people. And the way they did that was that they, again, extrapolated up to the platform level using Pivotal Cloud Foundry. That is the nirvana state that many of our customers seek to obtain, and we certainly want to help them get there. >> Dave Vellante wanted me to ask you a question. He says, "Michael, with all that money you spent "to buy EMC, sixty billion, all the piece parts, "do you have any money left for M&A?" And if you do, I saw a little venture announcement, it looks like the Dell EMC venture's kind of coming together, saw that release. So it's good to get the hands in the water, you invest personally through your capital company, but M&A, there's a lot of activity going on. Do you have any dry powder left for M&A? >> We sure do, and we've already made some acquisitions, both in the Dell EMC level and at the VMware level, and of course Dell Technologies' capital, we're now having a bit of a coming-out party explaining what we're doing with the portfolio and the new investments, and lots of new investments in machine learning, deep learning, security, and Cloud, and all the next-generation business models that are imported to us. >> Are you going to be involved in some of those decisions? Are you going to see 'em all, or does that all roll up to you, or are they going to be autonomous? >> I'm involved in 'em, but we got a fantastic team with Scott Darling, and team running the show there, and I'm there to support them. >> Well great keynote, final final question. You mentioned A.I. a little bit, some machine learning, you brought that up. Good to see you not really hyping up the A.I. and not having anything to back it up, not promoting A.I. Everyone's coming out and saying A.I. So I want to ask you, what's your take on A.I. these days, because obviously augmented intelligence is here today, but A.I.'s been around for a while. Neural networks has been around for years. What's your view on A.I., and how do you see that impacting Dell EMC short, medium, long-term? >> I think the potential here is really tremendous. It takes time though. You know, DARPA had this contest to see, could you drive a car through the desert, a vehicle through the desert, 150 miles back in 2004. The first year, I think the farthest they got was eight miles. By 2005, they had lots of cars completing the entire 150 mile journey. Now we still don't have self-driving cars, that was 12 years ago. So it does take time for these things to evolve, but the level of improvement and advancement in the processing power, and the learning that's going on in these systems is tremendous. And, again, when you have hundreds of billions of nodes, and all this data, and an increase in processing power, it is really a Cambrian explosion, we do think of it as the fourth Industrial Revolution. To me that is incredibly exciting. >> Michael Dell here inside theCUBE. Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, and this is the Dell EMC World 2017, the first of the Dell EMC World. Congratulations. Great to see you on theCUBE. >> Michael: Thank you John. >> More live coverage here at Dell EMC World 2017 after this short break. Stay with us, be right back.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. (lively music) >> Good morning, welcome to The Cube I'm Lisa Martin, and we are live at day three of the NAB Show in Las Vegas. Very excited to introduce you to our first guest this morning, Michael Harbin, the VP of Pac-12 Networks. Good morning Michael, welcome to the cube. >> Good morning, how are you today? >> Very good, very energized. >> Oh good (laughter) >> Day three. So Michael, tell us about Pac-12 Networks, The content arm of the Pac-12 Conference. >> Sure, we have a six regional sports networks in the western US, and then one national feed, we also have digital properties and some over-the-top services on Twitter and Facebook Live, so we're involved as we can be in all forms of distribution. We're located in San Francisco, the conference itself is over 100 years old; it was 100 last year. The networks launched four years ago, this will be our fifth season coming up in August. We're very proud, very happy of our distribution, and our student athletes, and our partnership schools, and it's a great place. >> So you are the first and only sports media company that is owned by its 12 universities. >> That's right, so the SEC is partnered with ESPN, and the Big 10 Networks are partnered with Fox, so we're on our own, we stand on our own, and we do the best we can with what we have. >> Give us an idea of the genesis of the network. >> It started with the new commissioner, Larry Scott on the Pac-12 side, he came in and had a vision for helping the Pac-12 realize what it could be, as opposed to... Being on the West Coast has its disadvantages; our audience size isn't that big, our games start when the East Coast is going to sleep sometimes, so he wanted to get rid of an East Coast bias that existed in collegiate sports, and really make Pac-12 what it should be. We have the best geography, we have the best schools, we have land in... Tech and entrainment, so we have a lot going for us, and I think he brought those things to the forefront, and helped position Pac-12 in a much stronger position than it had been. In the world of liscencing content, we leapfrogged at the time the rest of the conferences in our deal with ESPN and Fox for our football and basketball games. With the games that weren't sold to Fox and ESPN, commissioner Scott thought to create a media company that we would own and control, and that would distribute the rest of our collegiate and athletic events that we have that are controlled by the Pac-12. >> So you mentioned basketball, football, you do big events, but you also do small events. Give us an idea of what it's like to produce a big event in the fall; a big football event, versus some of the smaller Olympic sports like field hockey? >> Sure. We have our three seasons; fall, winter, and spring, so obviously winter, the mostly indoor sports, but in the fall we kickoff big with our football season, and there's 12 or 13 weeks, and we have a championship game in early December which is a big event. That's one of the reasons the Pac-10 went to the Pac-12; the NCA says if you have 12 football teams, you can have a championship game. >> Okay. >> If you have less than 12, whoever has the best record is the winner, so we added two schools, and we have a champ game; those media rights were sold to Fox and ESPN, so it was a nice deal for us. So we start off with football; those are more traditional productions that everybody's used to. Big 53-foot truck pulls up, we do our production compliment with seven, eight or nine cameras depending on the game, depending on the market, depending on the week, the time of broadcast. We usually get- we choose our games after Fox and ESPN chooses theirs, so sometimes we get good games, sometimes we don't. They're all good; they're all Pac-12 games, so they're all good. But those are very traditional productions that are done in very traditional methodologies that everyone would see. As we start getting into basketball, those two are typical productions, but the volume of basketball games is such that we found a new way to do those games a little bit less expensively than the others. >> So less resources? >> Yeah. And then of course the spring sports where you're into baseball and softball, track and field. Track and field is a very expensive sport to produce because there's a lot going on at any one time. In that way, we've gotten away from video as a means of transmission and done IP transmission, which saved us a lot of money, and as we've got that IP path between our schools and ourselves, we've learned to do new things with it. We're doing content sharing back and forth, advanced production techniques, multiple camera paths that we normally wouldn't have on a production of that size. All of our shows, no matter where they are or what sport they are are produced in surround sound 5.0, so we think we lend a lot to the smaller sports that get smaller audiences, but we think we put a lot of production value to them to do the athletes and the sport justice. >> Talk to us about the underlying technologies that are necessary to support going from video to IP so that you can really open up the types of content and where it's distributed. >> Right, so one of the difficulties- we have around 100 venues in the 12 schools that we have to be able to broadcast from. Depends on the university; at Standford, those soccer and lacrosse fields could be way out. They call the campus 'the farm' for a reason. There's a lot of acreage there to cover. And some of our venues aren't even on campus. UCLA football is at the Rose Bowl, USC is at the Coliseum, so we had to find a way to get away from video which is just a single path and costs a lot. We needed more bidirectional service, we needed something that was secure and had really low latency so that when we did our productions we did the coaches interviews afterwards, it's basically like a phone call. We also provided internet services to the production, which everybody needs internet connectivity. The Chyron people, whomever. The crew itself, just for checking in and their report times and things like that, and we also provide four-digit extension dialing for our in-house phone systems. It's a very efficient and cost-effective way for us to do our production out there, and provide this suite of services that if I was just using a video circuit, I wouldn't have access to unless I paid extra for it. >> So presumably, creating a ton of content, how do you maintain all this content and be able to retrieve things, be able to livestream, have things on demand, that's that underlying archival storage strategy? >> So we produce 850 events throughout a year, and that's just to give you an idea, I think Big 10 and SCC are around 400, 450. We have a lot of volume going on, and we do a very good job, I think, of archiving that, logging those games, adding metadata, as much metadata as we possibly can to it. Including repurposing the closed caption files, we attach that as data, we get articles, stills, whatever we can gather about that particular game, we add it as metadata, and then we archive that. We keep it on very fast, short-term storage in our building on spinning disk, and after it ages, after about the second season, we push it into Amazon Cloud. It goes right into Glacier if it's that old, but immediately when we do a game, we push it up to S3 in Amazon, where we share and monetize our content at that point, and then from there it just goes to Glacier, so we have, we think, a very efficient workflow, it's highly automated, we have a great media management department that does a terrific job with very few people, very scarce resources, they do what I think is one of the best jobs in the industry in terms of saving that content in an effort to monetize it in the future. So if you can find it and search through it and get clips from it, it's going to be that much more valuable for us. >> So one of the prevailing things that we've been hearing all week, and not just here, is the democratization of content. The audience, we're very much empowered, right? As a viewer of anything we want; we're binge-watching, we're streaming, we're time-shifting, we're sharing it on social media. What is the process that Pac-12 Networks goes through to understand your audience as well as you can to deliver them the experience that you think they want? >> We have the data that comes back from our TV Everywhere product, there are OTT platforms that we can gather up and sift through. We've undertaken a fan engagement project to work with our universities about the type of people and who attend their football games, or their sporting events, and a way of better understanding who our audience is and tailoring our program to that. Understanding who they are, what their preferences are, it will help us, I think, to fine-tune the kind of content we put in front of them. Everybody loves a winning team, and you have no problem filling seats or getting an audience when your team is winning, so we understand that; we just want to be better during those times where the team might not be undefeated, so we'd like to get people in there anyway. It's a challenge for us, it really is. >> What about this concept of original content? You're now producing original content. There are three shows? >> Yes. We have some anthology shows; The Drive, and All Access during football and basketball season that give a behind-the-scenes look akin to the HBO shows on the professional side that look at professional sports. We go behind the scenes, and the stories for some of our athletes and some of our teams are quite compelling, and it makes good television. That gets also supported by our shoulder programming for our live events; pre and post-game SportsCenter-type shows that we do, and we try to do live halftimes that are topical for every one of our sports events that are played, so that's a lot of volume, a lot of churn that goes through a small studio in a small facility. We think it helps the live events look better, I mean, live events are what people are tuning in to watch. You can't fast-forward through a sporting event which advertisers just love, you kind of have to consume it in the moment, unless you can keep yourself away from the internet or your phone for a few hours until you get a chance to watch the game. We think being in live sports is a really special place to be, because you can't fast-forward through it. Any support that we give those live events, that's really what the other original content is geared to, is to build interest in those teams and those events, and attract people to them. >> So you have this concept of TV everywhere. Original content, traditional content, how is the cloud helping the Pac-12 Network to really collaborate across all the content, all of the connected fans and wherever they are? >> Sure. Just to make a distinction, we have the TV Everywhere which is the authenticated platforms that our cable providers use, and we have our own digital properties as well that still need to be authenticated, and then there's the over the top platforms like Facebook Live that are everything but the 850 events that go on the air. So behind the scenes, sideline reporters in the locker rooms, whatever else we could produce, pep rallies, that we think could be compelling content for Facebook Live we do. On Twitter, we've licensed out the 851st event and beyond, so we do some very limited productions, but still quality, that gets distributed on Twitter. So that's kind of this thing. TV Everywhere is basically the high-end product, and then these kind of ancillary second-screen experience, whatever you want to call them that don't need to be authenticated, that anybody can pick up and watch. That's how we make that distinction. I'm sorry, what was the second part of that question? >> How does cloud help collaboration? >> So we were really early adopters of producing those streams ourselves, so with Elemental Technologies who is a wonderful vendor and partner of ours, they're now owned by AWS, I point over there, they're somewhere in the building. >> (laughs) >> We're a big early adopter of their technology, we've really tried to strive for a business partnership with our vendors, rather than just a check-writer, check-casher relationship, which doesn't do us well, we don't think. We developed this relationship with them, and they helped us deliver our mezzanine streams to Occami and distribute from there, but we do that encoding in-house on their equipment. Eventually I think we'll move that to the cloud and get it all virtualized, but for right now we run their servers in our house, and they understand that we would like to get it out as quickly as we can as some point, but we're working on emptying our CER as fast we can; I don't want any blinking lights in my CER if I could get there someday, but that's a dream. >> So last question, we just have about thirty seconds left, you're in San Fancisco, >> Yep. >> With a really cool opportunity; sports entertainment technology. When you're looking for young talent who could potentially be swayed by the big Googles of the world and Facebook, what is really unique and cool about working with Pac-12 Network? >> For us, it's a two-edged sword. We love being in San Francisco; it gives us access to young people, a new way of thinking, different technology companies that are more IP/IT centric than TV centric. So we think that gives us a real advantage. The other edge of the sword is that we lose a lot of network engineering especially, systems engineers to the tech companies; they would prefer to work at Uber or LinkedIn, something like that. TV's kind of a dying tech, you have to jazz it up a little bit to gain their interest. >> But it's evolving based on what you're talking about-- It is. It's very much that skillset for being an old-time TV engineer is becoming less and less important than network engineering or systems engineering skillsets; that's what we really look for. If somebody has a Cisco certification, he gets our- or she gets our interest, rather than just 'I've worked in television for 20 years,' because we know which direction we're going in. >> One of the things that you articulate as we wrap things up here is that every company this day and age is a tech company, so we wish you the best of luck. You've said you've been at this show for 30 years >> 30 years. >> I can't even imaging all the things that you've seen. Michael Harbin, thank you so much for joining us on The Cube. >> Thank you very much, it was a pleasure being here. >> We want to thank you for watching, we are live from NAB in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)