>>With me now or Maneesh outer wall, senior director of product management for a HyperFlex. It's Cisco at flash for all. Number four. I love that on Twitter and Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco, Mr. HyperFlex at Mr. HyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and in HyperFlex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks David. >>Hi, Darren. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private adamant. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the, the whole benefit of the cloud model you build in, in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. High conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud in their building with hyper conversions in particular HyperFlex, Mexican bank, all that work. They need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SAS offering Nathan looks around simplified operations, give some optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days? W when it comes to implementing hyper-converged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >>So, so there's many things they're trying to achieve. My probably the most brutal, honest is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at, in terms of simplicity, how can they remove laser components they've had before in their infrastructure, we see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that class into a hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure, also about scalability. They don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper-conversion. It's very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads, they need that consistency all the way through. >>And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management to make it easier for their operations. And we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in that operations model, deploying flex also around the time-savings. They make massive time savings, which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces where you've seen as people move away from the three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper-converged, especially with edge edge is a major, key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data center at the edge without a big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and employment. >>And we've seen our analyst recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyper conversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key there, and again, not always, but obviously there's all case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people could make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Darren, uh, Monisha, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced. >>Yeah. Thanks Dave. Um, so there are several things that we are seeing today. The first one is a new offer, um, called HyperFlex express. This is, uh, you know, Cisco intersite lend and Cisco intersect managed it HyperFlex configurations that we feel are the fastest spot to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our service portfolio by adding support for each X on EMD rack, uh, UCS M D rack. And the code is a new capability that we're introducing that we calling, um, local and containerized witness and get, let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty, uh, capability to optimize for, for an edge environments. So, you know, this leverage is the Cisco's ubiquitous presence, uh, of the networking, um, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is, uh, configuration, which is primarily used in edge environments, think of a, you know, a backup woman or department store, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere on the blue for these two, not two configurations. >>There is always a need for a third entity that, uh, you know, industry down for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the infrastructure is going. Now, it basically breaks, um, sort of, uh arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster, but finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that test. We've converted it into a container or a form factor, and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR ESR, mixers, catalyst, industrial routers, uh, even, uh, even as we buy that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure are doing any, um, you know, Caden feeding or that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >>I want to ask you about HyperFlex express. You know, obviously the, the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can, can HyperFlex express help customers respond to some of these issues? >>Yeah, indeed. The, um, you know, the primary motivation for HyperFlex express was indeed, uh, an idea that, uh, you know, one of the folks on my team had, we was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time, but as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and, uh, make sure that, uh, you know, that is in it for something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. Uh, so for example, uh, you know, for customers, uh, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex express. These are still high-paced configurations, and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster, but the part to that cluster is much, much, uh, simplifying. Uh, second is that we've added an flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with, or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. >>Um, we've also added a, uh, attractive price point for these. And, uh, of course, uh, you know, these will have a better lead times because we made sure, uh, that, uh, you know, we are using components that are, um, that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a foster doughnut around time, uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a set of distinct friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stock. And with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for, uh, the disease as well. >>It's interesting Maneesh, I'm looking at some fresh survey data set more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed. This is ETR survey. Again, I mentioned them at the top more than the 70% said they had difficulty procuring a server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So, so that's encouraging. Um, what about ministry, uh, AMD that's new for HyperFlex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, Dave, so, uh, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS EMD direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a, it's a, it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it is, it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the masters compute together with the foster storage and this, we are logging that will, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, um, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads, uh, that were previously locked out from the hyper-converged experience. >>Yeah. Cool. Um, so Darren, can you, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >>Sure, absolutely. So I've made, Maneesha been involved right from the Stein before it was called hype and we we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking, where we've been with the $10 year. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. Um, the majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've, uh, approved for technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat by expanded capacity, putting more workloads on they use in different use cases on that. And from an age perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement, the technology, um, we get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical, uh, applications, as well as the, uh, traditional virtual server infrastructures, uh, and where the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers. >>They want example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audiences, uh, the super bowl. So, uh, the like, uh, stadium that house, the soup, well actually has Cisco HyperFlex, right? In all the management services through, from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's compete completely cashless. So if that were to break during the super bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution were able to collapse down nearly 200 service into a few nodes, across a few racks and at a hundred, 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run super bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with the high place where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases we're getting involved in very, very excited. >>He come on Darren Superbowl, NFL, that's, uh, that's international now. And you know, it's, it's dating London. Of course, I see the, the picture of the real football over your shoulder. But anyway, last question for minis. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for HyperFlex. >>Yeah, so, you know, as Dan said, what data and I have been involved with type of flicks since the beginning, uh, but, uh, I think the best is we have to come. Uh, there are three main pillars for, uh, for HyperFlex. Um, one is intersite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass, um, management, but we are going to date this beyond the lifecycle management, which is a for HyperFlex, which is integrated. You're going to say today and element management, we're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops, because intersect really provides us a ideal platform to gather slides from all the clusters across the globe, do AIML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer value, um, actionable insights. >>So that is one, uh, the second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms and newer, uh, UCS, several platforms as well. But the highlight, there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X, CDs, uh, extra users. And other thing that'd be able to, uh, you know, uh, uh, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. Uh, but each Axonics cities will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X of hosting, a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We were hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, uh, that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex need a platform. >>This is the heart of the offering today, and you'll see the hyperlinks data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, a unique architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, uh, they got bidding performance wrong. You'll see it get foster a more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for, uh, you know, containerized workloads, meaning it will get a granular container, a container, granular management capabilities and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we gotta leave it there. And, you know, Monisha was talking about the HX on X series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that. And it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with VKS Ratana and Jim leech, and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to this CUBE Unstoppable Domain Showcase. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've been showcasing all the great content about Web3 and what's going around the corner for Web4. Of course, Unstoppable Domains is one of the big growth stories in the business. Brad Kam, the Co-founder is here with me, of Unstoppable Domains, Brad, great to see you, thanks for coming on this showcase. >> Thanks, pleasure for having me. >> So you have a lot of history in the Web3. They're calling it now, but it's basically crypto and blockchain. You know, the white paper came out and then, you know how it developed was organically. We saw how that happened. Now you're the co-founder of Unstoppable Domains. You're seeing the mainstream, I would say mainstream scene, Superbowl commercials, okay? You're seeing it everywhere. So it is here. Stadiums are named after cryptos, companies. It's here. Hey, it's no longer a fringe, it is reality. You guys are in the middle of it. What's going on with the trend, and where does Unstoppable fit in and where do you guys tie in here? >> I mean, I think that what's been happening in general, this whole revolution around cryptocurrencies and then NFTs and what Unstoppable Domain is doing. It's all around creating this idea that people can own something that's digital. And this hasn't really been possible before Bitcoin. Bitcoin was the first case. You could own money. You don't need a bank, no one else. You know, you can completely control it. No one else can turn you off. Then there was this next phase of the revolution, which is, assets beyond just currencies. So NFTs, digital art. What we're working on is like a decentralized identity, like a username for Web3 and each individual domain name is an NFT. But yeah, it's been a crazy ride over the past 10 years. >> It's fun because, you know, on siliconangle.com, which we founded, we were covering early days of crypto. In fact, our first website, the developer want to be paid in crypto. It's interesting. Price of Bitcoin, I won't say that how low it was. But then you saw the ICO Wave, the token started coming in. You started seeing much more engineering focus, a lot of white papers coming out, a lot of cool ideas. And then now you got this mainstream of this. So I got to ask you, what are the coolest things you guys are working on, because Unstoppable has a solution that solves a problem today, and that people are facing at the same time, it is part of this new architecture. What problem do you guys solve right now that's in market that you're seeing the most traction on? >> Yeah, so it's really about, so whenever you interact with a blockchain, you wind up having to deal with one of these really, really crazy public keys, public addresses. And they're like anywhere from 20 to 40 characters long, they're random, they're impossible to memorize. And going back to even early days in crypto, I think people knew that this tech was not going to go mainstream if you have to copy and paste these things around. If I'm getting ready to send you like a million dollars, I'm going to copy and paste some random string of numbers and letters. I'm going to have no confirmations about who I'm sending it to, and I'm going to hope that it works out. It's just not practical. People have kind of always known there was going to be a solution. And one of the more popular ideas was, doing kind of like what DNS did, which is, instead of having to deal with these crazy IP addresses, this long random string of numbers to find a website, you have a name like a keyword, something that's easy to remember. You know, like a hotels.com or something like that. And so what NFT domains are, is basically the same thing, but for blockchain addresses. And yeah, it's just better and easier. There's this joke that everybody, you know, if you want to send me money, you're going to send me a test transaction of, you know, like a dollar first, just to make sure that I get it. Call me up and make sure that I get it before you go and send the big amount. Just not the way of moving billions of dollars of value is going to work in the future. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things you just point out, make it easier. When you have these new waves, these shifts, we saw it with the web pages. More and more web pages were coming on, more online users. They called it the online populations growing. Here, the same thing's happening. And if the focus is on ease of use, making things simpler to understand, and reducing the step it takes to do things, right? This is kind of what's going on and with the developer community, and what Ethereum has done really well is, brought in the developers. So that's the convergence of all the action. And so, when you (John chuckles) so that's where you're at right now. How do you go forward from here? Obviously, there's business development deals to do, you guys are partnering a lot. What's the strategy? What are some of the things that you can share about some of your business activity that points to how mainstream it is and where it's going? >> So I think the way to think about an NFT domain name is that it's meant to be like your identity on Web3. So, it's going to have a lot of different context. So it's kind of like your Venmo account, where you could send me money to brad.crypto, can be your decentralized website, where you can check out my content at brad.crypto. It can also be my like login kind of like a decentralized Facebook O oth, where I can log into DApps and share information about myself and bring my data along with me. So it's got all of these different things that it can do, but where it's starting is inside of crypto wallets and crypto apps, and they are adopting it for this identity idea. And it's the same form of identity across all your apps. That's the thing that's new here. So, yeah, that's the really big and profound shift that's happening. And the reason why this is going to be maybe even more important than a lot of, you know, your listeners think is that, everyone's going to have a crypto wallet. Every person in the world is going to have a crypto wallet. Every app, every consumer app that you use is going to build one in. Twitter just launched, just built one. Reddit is building one. You're seeing it across all the consumer finance apps. So it's not just the crypto companies that you're thinking of, every app's going to have a wallet. And it's going to really change the way that we use the internet. >> I think there's a couple things you pointed. I want to get your reaction to and thoughts more on this concept of DApps or decentralized applications, DApps or depending on what you call it. This is applications. And that take advantage of the architecture, and then this idea of users owning their own data. And this absolutely reverses the script today. Today, you see Facebook, you see LinkedIn, all these silos, they own the data that you are the product. Here, the users are in control. They have their data, but the apps are being built for it for the paradigm shift here, right? That's what's happening. Is that right? >> Totally, totally. And so, it all starts. I mean, DApp is just this crazy term. It feels like it's this, like really foreign, weird thing. All it means is that you sign in with your wallet instead of signing in with a username and password, where the data is stored inside of that app. Like inside of Facebook. So that's the only real, like, core underneath difference to keep in mind, signing in with the wallet. But that is like a complete sea change in the way the internet works. Because I have this key, this private key, it's on my phone or my device or whatever. And I'm the only one that has it. So, if somebody wanted to hack me, they need to go get access to my device. Two years ago, when Twitter got hacked, Barack Obama and Elon Musk were tweeting the same stuff. That's because Twitter had all the data. And so, you needed to hack Twitter instead of each individual person. It's a completely different security model. It's way better for users to have that. But, if you're thinking from the user perspective, what's going to happen is, is that instead of Facebook storing all of my data, and then me being trapped inside of Facebook, I'm going to store it, and I'm going to move around on the internet, logging in with my Web3 username, my NFT domain name, and I'm going to have all my data with me. And then I could use 100 different Facebooks all in one day. And it would be effortless for me to go and move from one to the other. So, the monopoly situation that we exist in as a society is because of the way data storage works and- >> So that's a huge point. So let's double down on that for one more second. This is a huge point. I want to get your thoughts. So I think people don't understand that in the mainstream having that horizontal traversal or ability to move around with your identity in this case, your Unstoppable Domain and your data allows the user to take it from place to place. It's like going to other apps that could be like Facebook, where the user's in charge. And they're either deciding whether to share their data or not, or they're certainly continuate their data. And this allows for more of a horizontal scalability for the user, not for a company. >> Yeah, and what's going to happen is, as users are building up their reputation. They're building up their identity in Web3. So you have your username and you have your profile and you have certain badges of activities that you've done. And you're building up this reputation. And now apps are looking at that, and they're starting to create social networks and other things to provide me services because it started with the user. And so, the user is starting to collect all this valuable data, and then apps are saying, well, hey, let me give you a special experience based on that. But the real thing, and this is like the core, I mean, this is just like a core capitalist idea, in general. If you have more competition, you get a better experience for users. We have not had competition in Web2 for decades because these companies have become monopolies. And what Web3 is really allowing is, this wide open competition. And that's the core thing. Like, it's not like, you know, it's going to take time for Web3 to get better than Web2. You know, it's very, very early days. But the reason why it's going to work is because of the competitive aspect here. Like it's just so much better for consumers when this happens. >> I would also add to that, first of all, great point, great insight. I would also add that the web presence technology based upon DNS specifically is, first of all, it's asking, so it's not foreign characters, it's not Unicode for the geeks out there. But that's limiting too, it limits you to be on a site. And so, I think the combination of kind of inadequate or antiquated DNS has limitations. So if... And that doesn't help communities, right? So when you're in the communities, you have potentially marketplaces that could be anywhere. So if you have ID, I'm just kind of thinking it forward here. But if you have your own data and your own ID, you can jump into a marketplace, two-sided marketplace anywhere. An app can provide that, if the community's robust, this is kind of where I see the use case going. How do you guys, do you guys agree with that statement and how do you see that ability for the user to take advantage of other competitive or new emerging communities or marketplaces? >> So I think it all comes down. So identity is just this huge problem in Web2. And part of the reason why it's very, very hard for new marketplaces and new communities to emerge is 'cause you need all kinds of trust and reputation. And it's very hard to get real information about the users that you're interacting with. If you're in the Web3 paradigm, then what happens is, is you can go and check certain things on the blockchain to see if they're true. And you can know that they're true 100%. You can know that I have used Uniswap in the past 30 days, and OpenSea in the past 30 days. You can know for sure that this wallet is mine. The same owner of this wallet also owns this other wallet, owns this asset. So having the ability to know certain things about a stranger is really what's going to change behavior. And one of the things that we're really excited about is being able to prove information about yourself without sharing it. So I can tell you, hey, I'm a unique person. I'm an American, I'm not an American, but I don't have to tell you who I am. And you can still know that it's true. And that concept is going to be what enables what you're talking about. I'm going to be able to show up in some new community that was created two hours ago, and we can all trust each other that a certain set of facts are true. And that's possible because- >> And exchange value with smart contracts and other with no middle men involved activities, which is the promise of the new decentralized web. All right, so let me ask you a question on that. Because I think this is key. The anonymous point is huge. If you look at any kind of abstraction layers or any evolution in technology over the years, it's always been about cleaning up the mess or extending capabilities of something that was inadequate. We mentioned DNS, now you got this. There's a lot of problems with Web2, 2.0, social bots. You mentioned bots. Bots are anonymous and they don't have a lot of time in market. So it's easy to start bots, and everyone who does either scraping bots, everyone knows this. What you just pointed out was, in an ops environment that was user choice, but has all the data that could be verified. So it's almost like a blue check mark on Twitter without having your name, kind of- >> It's going to be 100s of check marks, but exactly. 'Cause there's so many different things that you're going to want to communicate to strangers, but that's exactly the right mental model. It's going to be these check marks for all kinds of different contexts. And that's what's going to enable people to trust that they're, you know, you're talking to a real person or you're talking to the type of person you thought you were talking to, et cetera. But yeah, it's, you know, I think that the issues that we have with bots today are because Web2 has failed at solving identity. I think Facebook at one point was deleting half a billion fake accounts per quarter. Something like the entire number of user profiles they were deleting per year. So it's just a total- >> And they spring up like mushrooms. They just pop up, to think that's the problem. I mean, the data that you acquire in these siloed platforms is used by them, the company. So you don't own the data, so you become the product as the cliche goes. But what you guys are saying is, if you have an identity and you pop around to multiple sites, you also have your digital footprints and your exhaust that you own. Okay, that's time, that's reputation data. I mean, you can cut it any way you want, but the point is, it's your stuff over time, that's yours. And that's immutables on the blockchain, you can store it and then make that permanent and add to it. >> Exactly. >> That's a time based thing versus today, bots that are spreading misinformation can get popped up when they get killed. They just start another one. So time actually is a metric for quality here. >> Absolutely. And people already use it in the crypto world to say like, hey, this wallet was created greater than two years ago. This wallet has had transactions for at least three or four years. Like this is probably a real, you know, this is probably a legitimate user. And anybody can look that up. I mean, we can we go look it up together right now on Etherscan, it would take a minute. >> Yeah, (indistinct). Yeah, I'm a big fan, I can tell, I love this product. I think you guys are going to do really well. Congratulations, I'm a big fan. I think this is needed. What are some of the deals you've done? blockchain.com is one and Opera. Can you take us through those deals and why they're working with you? Let's start with blockchain.com. >> Yeah, so the whole thing here is that, this identity standard for Web3 apps need to choose to support it. So, you know, we spent several years as a company working to get as many crypto wallets and browsers and crypto exchanges to support this identity standard. Some of the largest and probably most popular companies to have done this are, blockchain.com, for example, blockchain.com, one of the largest crypto wallets in the world. And you can use your domain names instead of crypto addresses. And this is super cool because blockchain.com in particular focuses on onboarding new users. So they're very focused on how we're going to get the next 4 billion internet users to use this tech. And they said, usernames are going to be essential. Like, how can we onboard this next several billion people if we have to explain to them about all these crazy addresses. And it's not just one, like we want to give you 10, 40 character addresses for all these different contexts. Like, it's just no way people are going to be able to do that without having a user name. So, that's why we're really excited about what blockchain.com's doing. They want to train users that this is the way you should use the tech. >> Yeah, and certainly no one wants to remember. I remember how writing down all my... You know, I was never a big wallet fan 'cause of all the hacks I used to write it down and store it in my safe. But if the house burns down or I kick the can who's going to find it, right? So again, these are all important things. Your key storing it, securing it, super important. Talk about Opera. That's an interesting partnership because it's got a browser that people know what it is. What are they doing different? Almost imagine they're innovating around the identity and what people's experiences with what they touch. >> Yeah, so this is one of those things that's a little bit easier and I strongly encourage everybody to go and try DApps after this. 'Cause this is going to be one of those concepts, it can be a little easier if you try it than if you hear about it. But the concept of a wallet and a browser are kind of merging. So it makes sense to have a wallet inside of your browser. Because when you go to a website, the website's going to want you to sign in with your wallet. So having that be in one app is quite convenient for users. And so Opera was one of the trailblazers, a traditional browser that added a crypto wallet so that you can store money in there. And then also added support for domain names for payments and for websites. So, you can type in brad.crypto and you can send me money, or you can type in brad.crypto into the browser and you can check out my website. I've got a little NFT gallery. You can see my collection up there right now. So that's the idea is that, browsers have this kind of superpower in Web3. And what I think is going to happen, Opera and Brave have been kind of the trailblazers here. What I think is going to happen is that, these traditional browsers are going to wake up and they're going to see that integrating a wallet is critical for them to be able to provide services to consumers. >> I mean, it is an app. I mean, why not make it a DApps as well? Because why wouldn't I want to just send you crypto, like Venmo, you mentioned earlier, which people can understand that concept. Venmo, let me make my cash. Same concept here. But built in to the browser, which is not a browser anymore it's a reader, a DApp reader, basically with a wallet. All right, so what does this mean for you guys and the marketplace? You got Opera pushing the envelope on browsing, changing the experience, enabling the applications to be discovered and navigated and consumed. You got blockchain.com with the wallets and being embedded there. Good distribution. Who are you looking for for partners? How do people partner? Let's just say theCUBE wants to do NFTs, and we want to have a login for our communities, which are all open. How do we partner with you? Or do we? We have to wait or is there a... I mean, take us through the partnership strategy. How do people engage with Unstoppable Domains? >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think that if you're a wallet or a crypto exchange, it's super easy, we would love to have you support being able to send money using domains. We also have all sorts of different kind of marketing activities we can do together. We can give out free stuff to your communities. We have a bunch of education that we do. We're really trying to be this onboarding point to Web3. So there's, I think a lot of cool stuff we can do together on the commercial side and on the marketing side. And then the other category that we didn't talk about was DApps. And we now have this login with ensemble domains, which you kind of alluded to there. And so you can log in with your domain name and then you can give the app permission to get certain information about you or proof of information about you, not the actual information, if you don't want to share it, because it's your choice and you're in control. And so, that would be another thing. Like, if you all launch a DApps, we should absolutely have login with Unstoppable there. >> Yeah, there's so much headroom here. You got a short term solution with exchange. Get that distribution, I get that, that's early days of the foundation, push the distribution, get you guys everywhere. But the real success comes in for the login. I mean, the sign in single sign in concept. I think that's going to be powerful, great stuff. Okay, future, tell us something we don't know about Unstoppable Domains that people might be interested in. >> I think the thing that you're going to hear about a lot from us in the future is going to be around this idea of identity, of being able to prove that you're a human and be able to tell apps that. And apps are going to give you all kinds of special access and rewards and all kinds of other things, because you gave 'em that information. So that's probably, that's the hint I'm going to drop. >> You know, it's interesting, Brad. You bring trust, you bring quality verified data, choose intelligence software and machine learning, AI and access to distributed communities and distributed applications. Interesting to see what the software does with that. Cause it traditionally didn't have that before. I mean, just in mind blowing. I mean, it's pretty crazy. Great stuff. Brad, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing the insight. The Co-founder of Unstoppable Domains, Brad Kam. Thanks for stopping by theCUBE's Showcase with Unstoppable Domains. >> Thanks for having me. (bright upbeat music)

>>And welcome to this special cube conversation. I'm John for a, your host of the cube. We're here in Palo Alto, California, and I'm here with a very special guest coming down from Seattle remotely into the cube studios is the leader at AWS Amazon web services, the vice president of database analytics and machine learning Swami. Great to see you cube alumni recently taking over the database business at AWS as a leader. Congratulations. And thanks for coming on the cube. >>Hey, my pleasure to be here, John, very excited to talk to you. >>Yeah. We've had many conversations on the cube and also in person and also online around all the major mega trends. You've had your hand in all the action, going back to your days when you were in school learning and, and writing papers. And 10 years ago, Amazon web services launched AWS dynamo, DB, fast, flexible, no SQL database that everyone loves today, which has inspired a generation of what I would call database distributing cloud scale, single digit millisecond performance at scale. And again, the key scale. And again, this is 10 years ago, so it seems like yesterday, but you guys are celebrating and your name was on the original paper with CTO Verner. Vogel's your celebrity. Congratulations. >>Thank you. Not sure about the celebrating part, but I'm very excited. At least I played a hand in building such an amazing technology that has enabled so many amazing customers along the way as well. So >>Trivia on the, on the paper as you were an intern at AWS, so you're getting your PhD. And then since, since rising through the ranks and involved in a lot of products over the years, and then leading the machine learning and AI, which is now changing the game at the industry level, but I got to ask you getting back to the story here. A lot of customers have built amazing things on top of dynamo DB, not to mention lots of other AWS and Amazon tech riding on it. Can you share some of the highlights that came out of the original paper? And so with some examples, because I think this is a point in time, 10 years ago, where you start to, so the KickUp of cloud scale, not just, just for developers and building startups, you're really starting to see the scale rise. >>Yeah, I actually, I mean, as you probably know, based on what he read to explain the Genesis of dynamo DB itself had to explain the Genesis of how Amazon got into building the original dynamo, right? And this was during the time when miner, I joined Ron esteem as an intern and, and Amazon was one of the pioneers in pushing the boundary of scale. And a year over year, our Q4 holiday season tends to be really, really bad for all the right reasons. We all want our holiday shopping done during that time. And you want to be able to scale your website, arters fulfillment centers, all of them at that time. And those are the times around 2005. And the answer is when people think our database, they think of a single database server that actually runs on a box and has a certain characteristics and does a scale and availability and whatnot. >>And it's usually relational. And then when we had a major disruption during Q4 that's when yeah, ask ourselves the question, why are we actually using a relational database for some of these things when they really didn't need the data model complexity of relational database. And normally I would say most companies where to actually ask an intern or a few engineers who are early in the career saying like, what the hell are you suggesting? Just go away. But Amazon being enabling Buddhists to build what they want. And they actually let us start reimagining what a database or our scale could look like. And that led to dynamo. And since she unstained mine, then we migrated from an traditional relational database stair this one for some of the amazon.com services. And then I moved on to actually start building some butts off our storage service and then our managed relational database service, I explicitly remember. >>And one of our customer advisory board, we're just the set off some of our leading customers who actually give us feedback on roadmap. Another son, Don, who's the CEO and chief geek of spunk bargain faker. And him actually looking at the Trinity me, I was starting in the corner and saying like you all, both tomorrow and why do I need to keep shotting my, my sequel database and reshooting assigned scaling. And this is the time when the state of the art in most databases were around. Like, you start sharding your relational database and constantly reshaping. And this is when most websites are starting to experience the kind of scale which we consider a normal month. During those times it was mostly, most companies used to have a single relational database backend and start scaling that way. And that conversation led entirely under duress, unaided read, lot of AWS leaders and myself saying like, Hey, what is a cloud database reimagined without the hampering SQL look like? And that led us to start building dynamo DB, but just a key value database at that time. Now we support document might've too, but that single digit millisecond latency at any scale imagine. So >>I think about that time at that time, 10 years ago, when you were having this conversation and I know the smug mug and I, he said, he's in totally geek and he's, he's good to point that out. You also have Netflix as customers too. I'd like to hear how that's evolved, but, but I think back at the time, if you look back then I got to ask you most people we've talked about this before. No one database rules, a world that's now standard people now don't see one database back then it was a one database kind of mindset back then. Yeah. And then you had that big data movement happening with Hadoop. You had the object store developing. So you're in you're you're circling around that area. What was it like then? I mean, take, take us through that because there was obvious visibility that, Hey, let's just store this. Now you see data lakes and that's all happening. But back then object store was kind of new. Yeah. >>Ah, it's a great question. Now, one of the things I realized early on, especially when I was working with binary, when you're saying amazon.com itself as an example, that the access patterns for various applications and Amazon, but let alone AWS customers tend to be very, very, very, some of them really just needed an object store. Some of them needed a relational database. Some of them really wanted a key value store within a fast latency. Some of them really needed a durable cash. And, but it so happens when you have a giant hammer. You use that for everything looks like a map, which is essentially the story at that time. And so everyone kept using the same database, irrespective of what the problem was because nobody else, I mean, thought about like, what else can we build that is better? So this let us do, literally I remember writing a paper with Bernard internally that is widely used in Amazon explaining what are all the menu of booklets that access. >>And then how do we go about actually solving for each of these things so that they can actually grow and innovate faster. And, and this was led to actually the Genesis of not only building IDs and so forth, but also dynamo and various other non-relational data. There's a still let alone not so storage access patterns and what not. So, and this was one of the big revelations he had just that there is not a single database that is going to meet the customer, needs us. The diversity of workloads in the internet is growing. And this was a key pivotal moment because with cloud now applications can scale very more instantly than before now. Building an application for Superbowl is very easier than before. That means that on, I mean, everybody is pushing the boundaries of what scale means, and they are expecting more from their obligations. That's when you need technologies like dynamo, DB, and that's exactly what dynamo already be set out to do. And since then, we are continuing to innovate on behalf of our customers and the purpose of the database story as well. And this concept has resonated well across the board. If you see that the database industry has also embraced this method, >>It's natural that you obviously evolved into the machine learning side of it because that's data is big part of that. And you see back then you, you bringing up kind of like flashes for me where it's like those, the data conversations back then and the data movement was just beginning. So the idea that you can have diversity in access methods of the kind of databases was a use case driven by the application, not so much database saying, this is how you have to work, that the script was flipped. It it's changed from infrastructure dictating to the applications, what to do. Now, the applications are going to the infrastructure and saying, give me what I want. I want to access something here in an office store, something here in no SQL that became the Genesis of infrastructure as code at a, at a global level. And so your paper kind of set the, the, the wave, the influence for this, no SQL did big data movement. It's created tons of value, maybe a third Mongo might've been influenced by this other people have been influenced. Can you share some stories of how people adopted the concept of dynamo DB and how that's changed in the industry and how has that helped the industry evolve? >>I mean, plus file data. Most share our experience of building and dynamo style data store. Very, it is a non-relational API and showing what are some of the experiences that the Venter in building such an paper and these set out early on itself, that it is should not be just a design paper, but it should be something that we shared our experiences. So even now, when I talked to my friends and colleagues and various other companies, one thing they always tell me is they appreciated the openness with which we were sharing. Some of the examples and learnings that we learned to not optimizing for percentile latencies, and what are some of the scalability challenges, how we solved and some of the techniques around things like sloppy Cora or various other stuff. We invented a lot of towns along the way too, but people really appreciated several of some of our findings and as talking about it. >>And since then I met so many other innovations are happening in the industry and the AWS, but also across the entire academia and industry in this space, the databases I've been going through what I call as a period of Renaissance, where one of the things, if you see our own arc, when Roger and I started on the database, front Disney started over the promo saying like, if you were to build a database where cloud is the new normal, this is again in 2008, we asked ourselves that question and what the belt that led us to start building things like dynamo, DB, RDS star. I know that alone, we reimagined data viruses with Redshift and several, and then several other databases like time stream for time series workloads started running Neptune for graph and whatnot. But at the moment we started actually asking that question and working backwards from customers. Then you will start being able to innovate accordingly. And this has worked really well. Then more than a hundred thousand AWS customers have chosen dynamo DB for mobile gaming tech IOT. Many of these are fast growing businesses, such as ledge, Darryl BNB, red fan, as soon as enterprises like Samsung Toyota, capital one and so far. So these are like really some meaningful clouds, let alone amazon.com. I run this. >>We have an internal customer is always good to have that entire inside customer. You know, I really find this a really profound use case because you're just talking, you know, in Amazonian terms, I'll just translate for the audience working backwards from the customer, which is the customer obsession you guys have. So here's, what's going on off the way I see it. You got dynamo, DB, paper, you and Verner, and the team Paul was a great as a great video on your blog posts that goes into the, to the talk he gave at around that time, which is fun to watch if you look back, but you have a radical enabler here, that's disrupting and changing S3 RDS, Aurora. These are game-changing concepts inside the, the landscape of AWS at the same time, you're working backwards from the customer. So the question I have for you as a leader and as a builder, how did you balance the working backwards from the customer while bringing something brand new and radical at that time to the market? >>Yeah, this is one of the S I mean hardest things to be, as leaders need to balance on. If you see many times, then we actually worked backwards from customers. The literal later translated this, literally do what customers are asking for, which is true nine out of 10 times, but there is one or a 10 times, you got to read between the lines on what they are asking. Because many times customers when are articulate that they need to go fast. If in the right way, they might say, Hey, I wish my heart storage goes faster, but they're not going to tell you they need a car, but you need to know and be able to translate and read between the lines we call it under the bucket of innovate on behalf of customers. And that is exactly the kind of a mantra we had when we were thinking about concepts like dynamo DB, because essentially at that time, almost everybody would, if I asked, they would just say, I wish a relational database could actually be able to scale from not just like a hundred gigabyte to one terabyte are, it can take up to like 2 million transactions, a second and so forth and still be cheap and made in reality as relational databases, the way they were engineered at that time, those are not going to meet the scale needs. >>So this is fair. We hunted read between the lines on what are some of the key Mustang needs from customers and then work backwards and then innovate on behalf of these workloads, be enabled by the sun oh four, which are some of the reasons that led to us launching some of the initial sets on dynamo on a single digit millisecond latency and seamless scale. At that time, databases didn't have the elasticity to go from like 10 requests, a second to like a hundred thousand or 1 million requests a second, and then scaled right back in an hour. So that was not possible. And we kind of enabled that. And that was an, a pretty big game changer that showed the elasticity of the cloud to a database. Well, >>Yeah, I think also just to, not to nerd out on this, but it enables a lot of other kind of cool scaled concepts, like queuing storage. It's all kind of together. This database piece of that you guys are solving. And again, props to you guys on the team. Congratulations. I have to ask, you know, more generally, how has your thinking changed since the paper? I'll see, you've got more experience under your belt. You don't yet have the gray hairs yet, but we'll see those soon come in, but you know, you're, you got a lot more experience. You're running teams, you're launching a lot of products. How has your thinking changed in the industry since the paper what's happening now? What's the big evolution. What are those new things now that are in the innovate on behalf of the customer? What's between the lines now, how do you see this happening? >>I mean, now since wanting dynamo via a victim, I had the opportunity to work on various problems in the big data space. There we've worked on some are fire things that you might be aware of in the analytics all the way from Redshift to quick side, too. Then I moved on to start some of our efforts, having built systems that enabled customer to store process and credit, and then analyze them. One of the realizations, I had this, the in around 2015 or 2016, I kinda had that machine learning was hitting a critical point where now it is ready for being scaled at option. Their cloud has basically enabled limitless compute and limitless storage, which are the factors that are holding back machine learning technology. Then I realized that now we have a unique opportunity to bring machine learning BI to everybody, not just folks with PhD in machine learning. >>And that's when I moved on from database and analytics areas, they started machine learning. We're just a descent area because machine learning is powered by data and then started building capabilities like SageMaker, which is our end to end ML platform to build, train and deploy them on models. And this, what does the leading enterprise platform by several gaggled users and then also a bunch of our AI services since then, I view the reason I'm giving all this historical context is one of the biggest realization I had early on itself. And 2016 as first machine learning is one of the most disruptive technologies. She will then country in our generation. This is right after cloud. I think these still are the most amazing combination that is going to revolutionize how we build applications and how we actually reason about that. Now, the second thing is that at the end of the day, when you look at the ANC and journey, it is not just about one database or one data Varroa. >>So one data lake product, or even 1:00 AM out platform. It is about the end to end journey where a customer is storing their order database. And then they are actually building a data lake that test customer history and order history. And they want to be able to personalize. And for their viewer experience are actually forecast what products to staff in their fulfillment center, but then all these things need to work and to handle. And that view is one of the big things that struck me for the past five years. And I've been on this journey in addition to building this Emma building blocks to connect the dots so that customers can go on this modern end to end data strategy as I call it, right. It goes beyond a single database technology or data technology, but putting now all of these end to end together so that customers don't end up spending six months connecting the dots, which has been the state of the down for the last couple of years. And we are bringing it down to matter of the Sundays. Now >>He's incredible Swami. Thank you so much for spending the time with us here in the, >>Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks again, Sean. Thanks for having me.

(upbeat music) >> This is Dave Vellante, and I'd like to welcome you back to The Cube's coverage of Couchbase ConnectONLINE, where the theme of this event is Modernize Now. And one of the big announcements is Capella, which of course, as you all undoubtedly know, is the brightest star in the constellation Auriga, which is Latin for Charioteer. Yup, you can find that in the constellation, that constellation in the night sky in late Feb, early March, in the Northern hemisphere. So with that little tidbit, I'd like to welcome in Scott Anderson to The Cube, who's the Senior Vice President of Product Management and Business Operations at Couchbase. Scott, welcome. Good to see you. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. So, you've launched Couchbase Capella. If I understand correctly, it's built on Couchbase server 7, which you launched just a few months ago in the middle of the Summer. Can you give us an overview of Capella? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Couchbase Capella, is our fully managed databases service for enterprise applications. One of the goals of launching Capella and our database as a service offering that we just announced today is, about increasing the accessibility of Couchbase. So, it's about making it easy for a Developer or an Enterprise to get up and running in just a few clicks and a couple of minutes. And about making it more affordable and accessible through the development phase, through the test phase, the production phase. So really it's about ease of use, having the right offerings aligned to the phase of development that a customer's in, and eventually into the production of their enterprise application, leveraging Capella and Couchbase Server 7. >> So let me ask you, I went pretty deep with Ravi on the, the technical side, and I want to understand, what makes Capella different from some of the competitive offerings? Is it the, sort of the fundamentals that I learned from Ravi about how you guysbhave really done a awesome focus on SQL. But been able to maintain acid compliance, deal with distributed architectural challenges, and then bringing that over to database as a service? Is that the fundamental? What are some of the other differentiators? >> Yeah, that, that is the fundamental. We have an amazing platform that Ravi and our core engineering team have built. And we've talked about that, and I think Ravi mentioned that, the ease of SQL and applying that to a documented oriented database. and combining some of those capabilities with the ease of use. The ability that you can get up and running, signing up for our free trial. Couple of minutes later, you've got a database endpoint that is fully managed by Couchbase. And so we're doing the monitoring. We're doing alerting. We have calls to action based off what events are occurring within the database environment, ensuring it's always available, as well as doing kind of some of the mundane tasks of backup and recovery, scaling the environment upgrades and so forth. So it's really about ease of use making it, leveraging our incredibly robust broad platform, and then making that in different consumable model for our customers and developers and getting started really easily. The other thing that we've done, is really leveraged the best practices over the last 10 or 11 years, if some of the largest enterprises in the world using Couchbase for the mission critical applications. So we've codified those best practices. And that's how we keep that service high performant, always on, highly available. And that's one of the core value propositions that we're able to bring with Capella. It's really that management capability, global visibility of your clusters, coupled with what we believe is the best, no SQL database in the marketplace today. >> What about, what about costs total cost of ownership as you scale, a lot of times when you scale out and you get diseconomies of scale, it's kind of like, you know, you get that negative curve. What are you seeing? >> Yeah, we've done third party benchmark studies, which have proven out how we were able to linearly scale the environment and continue on that curve, as you add nodes, you're getting that incremental performance that you would expect. The other thing that we do that's really unique within in Couchbase is, our multi-dimensional scaling. And this allows you to place our services, things like data index query, full-text search, indexes and analytics. You can co-locate those on single nodes within the cluster, or you can have dedicated nodes for each one of those services. The reason that is important is, you get work-life isolation for those specific services within our cluster. The other thing that you can do is, you can match the compute infrastructure to the needs of each one of those services. So some services like query are much more core compute intensive, and that allows you to have a specific instance type that is optimized for that, reducing your cost. Indexes, where do you want very fast performance? You may want to have a higher amount of memory relative to the number, of course. So that ability to mix and match the infrastructure within the existing cluster, allows us to lower overall costs. That coupled with our blazing fast performance with our in-memory architecture, allows people to get incredible performance at scale. What we've proven out in the study that I mentioned earlier is we have that linear scalability, and you're able to do more for less, at the end of the day. You're getting more operations per second, per dollar, if you want to use that as a metric data. >> Thank you for that. What do customers need to think about when they want to get started with Capella? How difficult is it for people to jump in? >> It is incredibly simple. It's as simple as going to couchbase.com Clicking on start your free trial. You go into that free trial. You provide a minimal set of information for us, and it's literally a few clicks and you're going to have a database endpoint within three minutes. And that's really been a foundation of, of what we've been focused on over the last six to nine months is removing any friction we can in the process. Cause our goal is to give a firm a tremendous user experience and get people up and running as quickly as possible. So we're really, really proud of that. And then from a paid offering perspective, we have a number of offerings which are really aligned to the needs of each customer. Some individuals who want a larger cluster and they want to be able to pay for that, we've optimized service levels around that, in terms of level of support and the features that we think are appropriate for a dev cycle, a test cycle, and then inner production. And lastly, we'll be announcing a number of promotional starter pack bundles. Really trying to couple the overall service that we have with Capella, with some of our expertise. So helping new users get up and running in terms of things like index definitions, what's the best way to do document design and schema within Couchbase. Our end goal, is to match these services and bundles with the life cycle of application development. So in my development phase, what's the offering for me, as I move for production readiness, what services capabilities I need and then production and the ongoing, if I expand my use. So we've been really focused on how do we get people up and running as quickly as possible and how do we get them to production as quickly as possible at the lowest total cost. >> That's nice. That's a nice accelerant for, for customers. So as you heard upfront, I did a little research about the name, Capella. How did you choose it and why? >> Well, one thing I learned early in my career is naming is not a strong suit of mine. I leave that to John our Chief Marketing Officer in the overall team. We all have opinions, but I trust John. And we went through, I think it was over 60 names, seven rounds of debate to come up with Capella. But we wanted a name of strength. We liked the alliteration, Couchbase and Capella together. One of the little facts may have tipped it over is, I believe in Latin, it means little goats. So we kind of played, I'm from the bay area. So I was thinking to Jerry Rice, goat, greatest of all times. So that was nice play on that also. But I leave it to them and really happy with the overall name, love the, literation, love some of the hidden meanings within that. And we're really, really excited about getting it going. So you wouldn't want me to pick the name. I get a vote, but I would say my overall influence is a little bit lower than where John's is and, and Matt Cain, who I know you spoke with previously. >> I love it. Jerry Rice definitely is the little goat. I'm from New England. So of course, we think Tom Brady is the big goat. >> I know, I grew up in that Joe Montana era. So maybe you can take that offline after this interview, we're going to have around debate, but I guess a Superbowl trophies are the ultimate measure at the end of the day. >> Oh wait, I got a little stat for you. So, so Capella is also one of the 88 modern constellations as adopted by the international astronomical union. I.e not one of the ancient constellations. Pretty clever, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Scott, it's great to have you on the cube. Thanks so much, really appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. I really appreciate it All right. Thank you for watching. Our pleasure. Thank you for watching The Cubes coverage of Couchbase Connect 2021. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> This is Dave Vellante, and I'd like to welcome you back to The Cube's coverage of Couchbase ConnectONLINE, where the theme of this event is Modernize Now. And one of the big announcements is Capella, which of course, as you all undoubtedly know, is the brightest star in the constellation Auriga, which is Latin for Charioteer. Yup, you can find that in the constellation, that constellation in the night sky in late Feb, early March, in the Northern hemisphere. So with that little tidbit, I'd like to welcome in Scott Anderson to The Cube, who's the Senior Vice President of Product Management and Business Operations at Couchbase. Scott, welcome. Good to see you. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. So, you've launched Couchbase Capella. If I understand correctly, it's built on Couchbase server 7, which you launched just a few months ago in the middle of the Summer. Can you give us an overview of Capella? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Couchbase Capella, is our fully managed databases service for enterprise applications. One of the goals of launching Capella and our database as a service offering that we just announced today is, about increasing the accessibility of Couchbase. So, it's about making it easy for a Developer or an Enterprise to get up and running in just a few clicks and a couple of minutes. And about making it more affordable and accessible through the development phase, through the test phase, the production phase. So really it's about ease of use, having the right offerings aligned to the phase of development that a customer's in, and eventually into the production of their enterprise application, leveraging Capella and Couchbase Server 7. >> So let me ask you, I went pretty deep with Ravi on the, the technical side, and I want to understand, what makes Capella different from some of the competitive offerings? Is it the, sort of the fundamentals that I learned from Ravi about how you guysbhave really done a awesome focus on SQL. But been able to maintain acid compliance, deal with distributed architectural challenges, and then bringing that over to database as a service? Is that the fundamental? What are some of the other differentiators? >> Yeah, that, that is the fundamental. We have an amazing platform that Ravi and our core engineering team have built. And we've talked about that, and I think Ravi mentioned that, the ease of SQL and applying that to a documented oriented database. and combining some of those capabilities with the ease of use. The ability that you can get up and running, signing up for our free trial. Couple of minutes later, you've got a database endpoint that is fully managed by Couchbase. And so we're doing the monitoring. We're doing alerting. We have calls to action based off what events are occurring within the database environment, ensuring it's always available, as well as doing kind of some of the mundane tasks of backup and recovery, scaling the environment upgrades and so forth. So it's really about ease of use making it, leveraging our incredibly robust broad platform, and then making that in different consumable model for our customers and developers and getting started really easily. The other thing that we've done, is really leveraged the best practices over the last 10 or 11 years, if some of the largest enterprises in the world using Couchbase for the mission critical applications. So we've codified those best practices. And that's how we keep that service high performant, always on, highly available. And that's one of the core value propositions that we're able to bring with Capella. It's really that management capability, global visibility of your clusters, coupled with what we believe is the best, no SQL database in the marketplace today. >> What about, what about costs total cost of ownership as you scale, a lot of times when you scale out and you get diseconomies of scale, it's kind of like, you know, you get that negative curve. What are you seeing? >> Yeah, we've done third party benchmark studies, which have proven out how we were able to linearly scale the environment and continue on that curve, as you add nodes, you're getting that incremental performance that you would expect. The other thing that we do that's really unique within in Couchbase is, our multi-dimensional scaling. And this allows you to place our services, things like data index query, full-text search, indexes and analytics. You can co-locate those on single nodes within the cluster, or you can have dedicated nodes for each one of those services. The reason that is important is, you get work-life isolation for those specific services within our cluster. The other thing that you can do is, you can match the compute infrastructure to the needs of each one of those services. So some services like query are much more core compute intensive, and that allows you to have a specific instance type that is optimized for that, reducing your cost. Indexes, where do you want very fast performance? You may want to have a higher amount of memory relative to the number, of course. So that ability to mix and match the infrastructure within the existing cluster, allows us to lower overall costs. That coupled with our blazing fast performance with our in-memory architecture, allows people to get incredible performance at scale. What we've proven out in the study that I mentioned earlier is we have that linear scalability, and you're able to do more for less, at the end of the day. You're getting more operations per second, per dollar, if you want to use that as a metric data. >> Thank you for that. What do customers need to think about when they want to get started with Capella? How difficult is it for people to jump in? >> It is incredibly simple. It's as simple as going to couchbase.com Clicking on start your free trial. You go into that free trial. You provide a minimal set of information for us, and it's literally a few clicks and you're going to have a database endpoint within three minutes. And that's really been a foundation of, of what we've been focused on over the last six to nine months is removing any friction we can in the process. Cause our goal is to give a firm a tremendous user experience and get people up and running as quickly as possible. So we're really, really proud of that. And then from a paid offering perspective, we have a number of offerings which are really aligned to the needs of each customer. Some individuals who want a larger cluster and they want to be able to pay for that, we've optimized service levels around that, in terms of level of support and the features that we think are appropriate for a dev cycle, a test cycle, and then inner production. And lastly, we'll be announcing a number of promotional starter pack bundles. Really trying to couple the overall service that we have with Capella, with some of our expertise. So helping new users get up and running in terms of things like index definitions, what's the best way to do document design and schema within Couchbase. Our end goal, is to match these services and bundles with the life cycle of application development. So in my development phase, what's the offering for me, as I move for production readiness, what services capabilities I need and then production and the ongoing, if I expand my use. So we've been really focused on how do we get people up and running as quickly as possible and how do we get them to production as quickly as possible at the lowest total cost. >> That's nice. That's a nice accelerant for, for customers. So as you heard upfront, I did a little research about the name, Capella. How did you choose it and why? >> Well, one thing I learned early in my career is naming is not a strong suit of mine. I leave that to John our Chief Marketing Officer in the overall team. We all have opinions, but I trust John. And we went through, I think it was over 60 names, seven rounds of debate to come up with Capella. But we wanted a name of strength. We liked the alliteration, Couchbase and Capella together. One of the little facts may have tipped it over is, I believe in Latin, it means little goats. So we kind of played, I'm from the bay area. So I was thinking to Jerry Rice, goat, greatest of all times. So that was nice play on that also. But I leave it to them and really happy with the overall name, love the, literation, love some of the hidden meanings within that. And we're really, really excited about getting it going. So you wouldn't want me to pick the name. I get a vote, but I would say my overall influence is a little bit lower than where John's is and, and Matt Cain, who I know you spoke with previously. >> I love it. Jerry Rice definitely is the little goat. I'm from New England. So of course, we think Tom Brady is the big goat. >> I know, I grew up in that Joe Montana era. So maybe you can take that offline after this interview, we're going to have around debate, but I guess a Superbowl trophies are the ultimate measure at the end of the day. >> Oh wait, I got a little stat for you. So, so Capella is also one of the 88 modern constellations as adopted by the international astronomical union. I.e not one of the ancient constellations. Pretty clever, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Scott, it's great to have you on the cube. Thanks so much, really appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. I really appreciate it All right. Thank you for watching. Our pleasure. Thank you for watching The Cubes coverage of Couchbase Connect 2021. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

(soft music) >> Hi everyone. And welcome to this special cube conversation and kickoff preview of the Mobile World Congress Barcelona event. It's a physical event that's going to be taking place in person. It will probably be the first hybrid big event 68 days until the June 28th kickoff. You might've heard TelcoDr, Telco disruptor. Is on a mission to move the telco industry to the public cloud. And, and, and it's been taken of one of the biggest spaces this year from Erickson is the big story everyone's talking about. And of course the CUBE is excited to be there and broadcast and be a partner with TelcoDr. So I'm excited to bring on the founder and CEO of TelcoDr. Danielle Royston. Danielle great to see you. Thanks for coming on for this Mobile World Congress preview. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm psyched to talk to you about this, its going to be great. >> So Erickson always has the biggest booth 14 years. You're disrupting the Barcelona not people's shorts going to be on or off. It's officially on, it's happening. And there's going to be a physical event we're coming out of COVID still a risky move. It's going to be a big hybrid event. It's going to be in person. Tell us the story. How did you guys come out of nowhere a disruptor take the biggest real estate in the place and turn it into a community event. A news event, immediate event, everything tell us. >> Yeah, well, you know, I think it was March 9th a little over a month ago. Ericsson announced that they were pulling out of MWC and it's very analogous to what happened in 2020. They were one of the first vendors to bail as well. And it kind of started this like tidal wave of people saying, can't do it. And I think the distinction now is that, that was at the beginning of COVID. There was a lot of unknowns, you know, is it coming? Is it not? Is it safe? Is it not? We're now, you know, year 50 to three, four months into it. I think that when you look at where we are now cases are trending down. The vaccine is up. And I think the legacy players were sort of backward looking they're like, this is a repeat of 2020. We're going to, it's not safe to go. We're going to pull out. And I'm like with a hundred days to go. And the vaccine ramping, I think I see it a different way. I think there's a really big opportunity. John Hoffman, CEO of the GSMA had put out a two page missive on LinkedIn where he was personally responding to questions about how serious they were about making sure that the event was safe and could be held. And my, my view was this is going to happen. And with Ericsson pulling out, I mean this is hollowed ground. I mean, this is, you know, a, you know, massively successful company that has customers literally trained like Skinner's chickens to come to the same spot every year. And now I get to, you know, put out my shingle right there and say welcome and show them the future , right? And instead of the legacy past and all the normal rhetoric that you hear from those you know, sort of dinosaurs, Ericsson and Nokia now they're going to hear about the public cloud. And I'm really excited for this opportunity. I think the ROI on this event is instant. And so it was, it was a pretty easy decision. I think I thought about it for about 30 seconds. >> It's a real bold move. And it's, again, it's a risk that pays off if it happens, if it doesn't, you know, you didn't happen but you're like, it's like a, it's like the the startups that put a Superbowl commercial for the first time, it's a big hit and it's a big gamble that pays off huge. Take us through, I heard, how did it all happen? Did you just wake up and saw it was open? How do you know that it was open? Was it like, does the email go out, say hey I've got this huge space for >> Well, I mean, it was big news. It was big news in the industry that they were pulling out and all the journalists were like, Oh, here we go again. You know, everyone's going to bail, who who's next right? And, and everyone was sort of like building that sort of negative momentum energy. And I'm like, we got to squash this. So I put out a tweet on Twitter. I mean, I'm not the most followed person but I'm kind of known in telco. And I was like, hey GSMA, I'll take over the booth. And I don't think people even liked my tweet, right? Like no likes no retweets. I reached out to a couple of journalists. I'm like, let's do an interview. Let's do a story. Everyone's like, we'll have you on the podcast like in a month, I'm like what?! So, so when John Hoffman had put out that letter I had connected to him. And so I was like, Oh, I'm connected to the CEO of the GSMA. So I went out on LinkedIn and I referenced the story and I said, John Hoffman, I'll take over the booth. And I think about 30 minutes later he responded and said, let's do it. And I said, great, who do I talk to? And I was in touch with someone within a couple of hours. And I think we put the whole deal together in 48. And I think wrote the press release and announced it on Friday. So happened on Tuesday the ninth, announced by that Friday. And I really, I was like, GSMA, we've got to get this out. And we got to stop the negative momentum of the show and get people to realize it's going to be different in June. This is going to happen. Let's go do it. And so I think they are they're psyched that I stepped into the booth it's big booth it's 65,000 square feet, 6,000 square meters for for the rest of the World that use it, the metric system. And I mean, that's huge. I mean, that's the size of a professional pitch in a in a football field, a soccer field. That's a one and a half football fields. It's, it's a ton of space. It's a ton of space pull off. >> I think what's interesting is there's a points out that this new business model of being connected you were on LinkedIn, you connect to them you get a deal done so fast. This is how this is the direct to consumer as a start-up you're literally took over the primo space the best space in the area. So congratulations. And, and the other thing that's notable and why I'm excited to talk to you is that this kind of sets the table for the first global what I call hybrid event. This will probably be a cornerstone case study in and of itself because we're still kind of coming out of the pandemic. People are getting vaccinated. People want to fly. They want to get out of the house, were partnering with the CUBE and the CUBE 365 platform. And, you know, we'd love hybrid. We'd love doing events, theCUBE that's what we do with video. Now, we're going to do a partnership with you to create this hybrid experience. What can people and guests who come to Barcelona or watch remotely expect? >> Yeah, so I think there's a couple of experiences that we're trying to drive in the booth. I think obviously demonstrations, you know I can't fill 65,000 square feet on my own. I'm a startup small company. And so I am inviting like-minded forward thinking companies to join me in the booth. I'm, I'm paying for it providing a turnkey experience for those vendors. And so I think what we have in common is we're thinking about future technologies, like open ran on the network side and obviously public cloud which is a big part of my message. And so first and foremost, foremost, there's, you know come and see the companies that are driving the change the new technologies that are out there and what's available for, for carriers to start to adopt and think about. MWC is a meeting intensive event. Deals are done at this show. In 2019, I think the stat is $65 billion of deals were put together at the show. And so a big component of the booth will be a place for executives to come together and have private conversations. And so we're going to have that. So that's going to be a big piece of it. And I think the third part is driving education and thought leadership. And so there's going to be a whole, you know, talk track right? Tech topics, business topics customer case studies involve the hyperscalers and really start to educate the telco community around these new technologies. But there'll be shorter talks. They won't be like hour long keynotes. We're talking 15, 20 minutes. And I think one thing that we're going to do with you as you were just talking about with theCUBE is, you know MWC was the first big show to have to cancel with COVID I think in 2019, sorry, 2020, the the dates it's always the last Monday in February and and the rest of that week. And so that's like right at the beginning of that of the COVID stuff, Italy was just starting to take off. So it was one of the first shows that had to make a big call and decide to cancel, which they did. This is going to be one of the first shows that comes back online, post COVID right? And so I don't think things just snap back to the way that they used to be. I don't think we, as consumers are going to snap back to the way that we operating we're now used to being able to get curbside delivery from any restaurant in the city, right. I mean, it's just, it's just a sort of a different expectation. And so partnering with theCUBE, we really want to provide an experience that brings the virtual people into the booth. Typically in events like this you really have to be there to see it boosts are kind of like unveiled the day of the show. What's going on. One thing I'm trying to do is really educate people about what you can expect. What can you see? This is what it's going to look like. And so we're going to start to share some pictures of the booth of, of, you know, what it looks like. Number one, to drive excitement with the partners that are coming, right. Like you're going to be part of something really, really fabulous. I think number two attendees can wait, I don't know week of to make the decision to go. And so maybe if COVID continues to trend down and vaccines are, are picking up steam, maybe they're like it's safe for me to go and I want to go be a part of that. But I think from here on out we're going to have sort of that virtual experience. It's always going to be part of shows. And so we're going to experiment with you guys. We're going to have a live streaming event over the course of the, you know, all MWC. It's going to be a way for people who are unable to travel or, you know, can't afford it. COVID or whatever, see what's going on in the booth. And it's going to be everything from listen to a talk to watch what you guys are typically famous for, your awesome interviews. We're going to have a man on the street, you know, like you know, we're here at, at a demo station, take us through your little demo. We're going to have telepresence robots that people can reserve. And, you know, cruise to the booth, the robot can go to a talk. The robot can watch on this streaming thing the robot can go to a demo. The robot can go to a meeting and it's controlled by the the virtual attendees and so experimenting, right? Like how do we make this great for virtual people? How do we make the virtual people feel part of the physical? How do the physical people feel? The virtual people that are attending and really just make it feel like a community of both. So really excited >> That's super awesome. And I think one of the, first of all, thank you for having paying for everyone and including theCUBE in that but I think this speaks to the ecosystem of open you're bringing, you're creating an open ecosystem. And I think that is a huge thing. So for people who are at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this is going to be a nice, safe place to hang space as well as get deals done and to be comfortable doing media center, we'll get you on the digital TV, but also you're also designing the first what I call the first hybrid experience not just having people, having on-demand videos on their website, connecting Barcelona with other parts of the World, with meetings and stories and content. I think that to me is going to be a great experiment slash upgrade. We'll see, we'll get to see it. >> Well, it was really, I mean, we all lived through 2020. I mean, some of the shows went on AWS's re-invent happened. Google did like a crazy nine week program. It's very lonely to participate in those virtual events right. You know, you kind of log on by herself. No, one's really tweeting about it. You're watching, you know, an event the event is great, but it was really lonely. And so, you know, and I think what people love about the physical events is we're together and we're networking and we're meeting people. And so, you know, I think continue to evolve that experience so that virtual is not as lonely. So we'll see, we'll see how it goes. >> No, I've got to say your, your vision is really aligned with us and others that are in this open innovation World. Because if you look at like theCUBE physical went away, we had no events. We did Q virtual, a new brand. It wasn't a pivot. It was an extension, a line extension of theCUBE. Now theCUBES coming back to the physical. We're going to bring that cube virtual to connect everybody. So this is it. And it just amplifies the value of the physical event. So if done right, is so much cooler. So, so that's cool. And what I want to ask you though on the physical side to kind of bring it back to physical is there's still going to be keynotes. There's still going to be talks at Mobile World Congress. And so I saw that schedule and I just saw last week GSMA announced you're going to be doing a keynote speech. That's amazing. So how did that happen? So give us the lowdown on the keynote that you're doing. >> I'm sure the entire industry is like that happened. And it probably has something to do with the back that I have one of the biggest booths at the space. I always, you know, put in a request to speak. I feel that I have really exciting message to share with the industry. Over the last I guess it's been 9 or 10 months. I really been trying to amplify, amplify my voice. I have a podcast, I have a newsletter I'm talking to execs. I have a list that I literally go down one by one stalking each executive of like have I talked to them like how I told them about like the power of the public cloud. And so I am super thankful that I have this opportunity to spread that this message and I'm, I'm planning a really epic talk, just I really want to shake the industry. And this is, this is my opportunity, right? This is my opportunity to stand on the biggest stage in our industry. And command a presence and send out my message. And I'm absolutely thrilled to go do it. And I hope I crush it. I hope it's like a mic drop experience and can't wait to do it. >> Well, we're looking forward to covering it. And we love the open vision. We love the idea of public cloud and the enablement and the disruption, because just like you got the deal so fast, you can move fast with modern applications with the cloud moving at cloud scale, complete content, game changer, so great stuff. So totally applaud that looking forward to, and we're we're here to cheer you on and, and and ask the tough questions. I do want to get to on Twitter yesterday though, you put out on tweetstorm on Twitter, about the plans kind of teasing out the booth. How you going to plan to build the booth, are you worried that you're opening up too much of the kimono here and opened up putting too much on the table because it's usually a secret Mobile World Congress is supposed to be secret, not publicly out there. What, what's the, you know >> Well, I mean, I think this is just a little bit of a change has happened post COVID, right. You know, people usually build their booth in and don't reveal it until the first day of the show. And it's kind of like this excitement to go see what is there, what's their big message. And what's the big reveal. And there's always fun stuff. I think this year is a little bit different. So at first, like I said, at first big event back. I think I need to create a little bit of excitement for people who are going and maybe entice people that maybe you should think about coming. I realize this is a super personal decision, right? It depends on where you are and the country and your, your health and your status. But, but if you can do it I want people to know that you're going to miss out. It's going to be super fun. So, um, so yeah. >> Well, let's take it. Let's take a look at the booth though. And that's why my next question, I want to see I know we have guys, do we have that, rendering, let's pull that up and let's talk this through. Let's go look at the rendering. So you can see here on the screen, take us through this. >> Yeah. So what we want to do is give the sense of, of cloud city, right? And that's what we're calling this space in cloud cities. There's in a city there's outdoor space. Like you see here, and then there's in indoor space. And indoors is for you where you work, where you buy, where you meet. And so you can see here on the left, the demo stations that would have different vendors displaying you know, and it kind of, it goes way back. I mean, what we're feeling like I said is like a football field, an American football field and the half or a European football field a pitch it's pretty, it's pretty extensive. And so we think we're going to have, I don't know, 20 30 vendors showing their, their different software. I think we're, we're scheduling or planning for about 24 different meeting rooms that we can schedule all COVID safe with the, with the space requirements in there, but on the out in that outdoor space, it would be where you learn right. The education and then I think we're going to have this fabulous booth for the, for theCUBE. It's going to look, It's just so amazing with the backdrop of this amazing building. And, you know, I think I underappreciated or didn't really realize, you know, how devastated the both the event planning industry has been from COVID as well as construction. You know, obviously when events were shut down these companies had to lay off thousands of workers. Some of the big firms have laid off 50% of their workforce. And those people, you know they didn't just go home and sit around. They, they had to come up with a livelihood and this people have pivoted into another job. And they're not really, I mean events aren't really back yet. So some of these firms are shrunk. You know, the manpower is, is severely reduced. But then I think on the other side is and you can see this in just housing construction. There's a lumber shortage, there's a shortage of materials. And so everything that we source for the booth pretty much has to come from Spain. And so when we look at the booth, you know, we have, we have a pretty significant ceiling. Well, it looks like the roof of the building. It's an engineering feat to do. That we're still working through the sure. Someone with a protractor is doing lots of math. You know, the glass, we have those huge beautiful glass spans in the front getting a glass that spans that height. I think it's, I think it's 18 feet. It's six meters tall. That's going to be hard things like the flooring. I want to have like hardwood, laminate flooring. So it looks like hardwood floors. Don't know if we can find them right there. Like, why don't you do carpet? I'm like, can you just check one more vendor? I really want my floor. So, so we'll see how it goes. And yeah, I, I think that sharing this plan, the trials and tribulations, like how can this small startup, right? That usually, you know, take over a space that usually takes nine months to plan, right? Who is this girl? What is she doing? How are they going to pull this off? You know, I think it's like, grab your popcorn and watch the train wreck or, you know, hero's journey. We get it done. >> Well, people are on clubhouse. They're bored, they want to get out. I think this is a case study. Mobile World Congress has a huge economic impact for the, as a show it's got its own little economy built around it. Impacts the, the country of Spain in Barcelona, the city, a great city. People love it. And so it certainly is notable and newsworthy. We will be following that story. I have to ask you more of a, kind of a tactical question. If you don't mind, while I have you here, can you talk about some of the vendors that are coming and the kinds of talks you're going to have inside the booth and and how do people get involved? You mentioned it's open to people who love open ran and open public cloud, open technologies. I mean, that's pretty much everybody that's cool and relevant, which is like almost the whole World now. So like, is it going to be a space, is there a criteria? How do people get involved? What's the collaboration formula. >> Yeah, no. I had been working on putting together a list of potential vendors. You'd be surprised, not everyone is, is as bullish as I am on the public cloud. And so there was a little bit of a filtering criteria, but otherwise anyone can come right enterprise software vendors in telco where their primary customer is a communications service provider. That's their software runs on the public cloud come on in, right. People using open man. And it's still a little sort of small band of cohorts that are really trying to drive this new technology forward. And, and they're growing up, going up against some of the biggest companies in telco, right? They're going up against Huawei. They're going up against Ericcson. Both those guys are, are very anti and then not really pro open rank because it's hugely disruptive to their business. And so, you know I'm pretty sure those guys are not psyched to see open ran you know, you know, become a thing in telco. And so it's really sort of about disruptive technologies that are that are in the, in the booth. And so, yeah, I'm paying for the space. I'm paying for the, build-out bring your demos bring your people, come with your marketing message and and let's, and let's build a community. And so we're talking to open ran vendors like Mavenir. Which is a pretty big name in the open ran, open ran space. I've been talking with parallel wireless and LTO star. Those are also great players, software vendors like Totogi, which is a talk that I did a little over a month ago about this new startup that has a web-scale charger that they're trying to put out there. Aria is another company that I'm really familiar with that has some cloud for software and then little tiny startups like Zquence, and some other up-and-comers that no one's heard of. So we're really excited to invite them into the booth. I've been secretly stalking Elon, Elon Musk and Starlink and SpaceX to be a part of it. And we'll see, right. I'm kind of, you know, using Twitter and whatever I can to, to reach out and see if they want to be a part of it. But yeah, it's kind of really open arms, not really excluded. >> Oh, Elon, Elon is very disruptive and you know, he reached out on, you can reach out to him on Twitter. He's accessible. I mean, you've got to break through, but he is got this antenna up for innovators. People who think differently. They love people who break down walls and markets floor open wins. I mean, we, we know there's a history we've been covering it. I've been involved in my career. People who bet against open, always lose it's happened in every single wave of innovation. So Elons gettable, lets get him. >> Who doesn't love Elon Musk. I mean, I think some people don't, I love him, he's my hero. I model a lot of the things that I do around, around his, his approach, his vision, right, 20 years ago or close to 20 years ago, 2003 he said he was going to put people on Mars. And I think people laughed at him for being like the PayPal guy and this guy's crazy. But every year he makes progress against his goals, right. We have a real landable rocket. He's doing a manned mission this week, a second man mission or third man mission. And the guy makes progress. And I think I'm on the same, same mission here. My mission is to move telco to the public cloud. I think it's a, it's a long journey, right? I think people are like, who's this girl and she's like 12 people, and what's your story? And I'm like, I don't care. I have a singular mission is a quest. I am not going to stop until I moved the industry to the public cloud. And I it's my life's mission. And I'm psyched to do it. >> Well, we love the mojo. We'd love your style. We'd love Elon Musk, his mugshot. And again, just to bring the dots together you have that same mindset, which has, you know, as people you know, love her, love or like Elon, he's a builder. Okay, he builds things and he delivers. So as you said, so know I really appreciate the work you're doing. I love your philosophy. We're in total agreement, open, open building. Doing it together as a collective, being part of something. This is what the World needs. You got a lot of great ideas in the works and we can't wait to hear them. And what you got coming up over the next 68 days. This is the first of many conversations together. Thank you so much >> Yeah, yeah, no, it's going to be so awesome. Thank you so much for having me. Psyched to talk to you about it. >> Okay Mobile World Congress is happening in Barcelona on the June 28th. It's going to be in person and it's going to be probably the biggest hybrid event to date. Be there, check out telcoDR and theCUBE and the space that they took over 14 years at the helm there. Ericcson had it, now it's TelcoDR. Danielle Royston, founder and CEO here with me from TelcoDR. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation and kickoff preview of the Mobile World Congress, Barcelona event. It's a physical event that's going to be taking place in person. It will probably be the first hybrid big event, 68 days until the June 28th kickoff. You might've heard TelcoDR, Telco Disruptor is on a mission to move the Telco industry to the public cloud. And it's taken one of the biggest spaces this year from Ericsson, is the big story everyone's talking about. And of course theCUBE is excited to be there and broadcast and be a partner with TelcoDR. So I'm excited to bring on the founder and CEO of TelcoDR, Danielle Royston. Danielle great to see you. Thanks for coming on for this Mobile World Congress Preview. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm psyched to talk to you about this, it's going to be great. >> So Ericsson always has the biggest booth 14 years, you're disrupting Barcelona, people are not sure it's going to be on or off. It's officially on, it's happening and there's going to be a physical event, we're coming out of COVID still a risky move. It's going to be a big hybrid event, it's going to be in person. Tell us the story. How did you guys come out of nowhere, a disruptor take the biggest real estate in the place and turn it into a community event, a news event, a media event, everything, tell us. >> Yeah, well, I think it was March 9th, a little over a month ago. Ericsson announced that they were pulling out of MWC and it's very analogous to what happened in 2020. They were one of the first vendors to bail as well. And it kind of started this like tidal wave of people saying, can't do it. And I think the distinction now is that, that was at the beginning of COVID, there's a lot of unknowns. Is it coming, is it not, is it safe, is it not? We're now, year 50 to three, four months into it. I think that when you look at where we are now, cases are trending down, the vaccine is up. And I think the legacy players were sort of backward looking. They're like, this is a repeat of 2020 it's not safe to go, we're going to pull out. And I'm like with the a hundred days to go, in the vaccine ramping, I think I see the different way. I think there's a really big opportunity. John Hoffman, CEO of the GSMA had put out a two page missive on LinkedIn where he was personally responding to questions, about how serious they were about making sure that the event was safe and could be held. And my view was this is going to happen. And with Ericsson pulling out, I mean this is hollowed ground. I mean, this is massively successful company that has customers literally trained like Skinner's chickens to come to the same spot every year. And now I get to put out my shingle right there and say welcome and show them the future. And instead of the legacy past and all the normal rhetoric that you hear from those sort of dinosaurs, Ericsson and Nokia, now they're going to hear about the public cloud. And I'm really excited for this opportunity. I think the ROI on this event is instant. And so it was a pretty easy decision. I think I thought about it for about 30 seconds. >> It's a real bold move. And again it's a risk that pays off if it happens, if it doesn't, didn't happen, but it's like the startups that put a Superbowl commercial off for the first time. It's a big hit and it's a big gamble that pays off huge. Take us through, how did it all happen? Did you just wake up and saw it was open? How did you know that it was open? Was it like, does an email go out and say, hey I got this huge space for 55 years. >> Well, I mean, it was big news. It was big news in the industry that they were pulling out and all other journalists were like, oh, here we go again. Everyone's going to bail, who's next, right? And everyone was sort of like building that sort of negative momentum energy. And I'm like, we got to squash this. So I put out a tweet on Twitter. I mean, I'm not the most followed person but I'm kind of known in Telco. And I was like, hey, GSMA, I'll take over the booth. And I don't think people even liked my tweet, right? Like no likes no retweets. I reached out to a couple of journalists. I'm like, let's do an interview, let's do a story. Everyone's like, we'll have you on the podcast, like in a month, I'm like, what's? So when John Hoffman had put out that letter I had connected to him. And so I was like, oh, I'm connected to the CEO of the GSMA. So I went out on LinkedIn and I referenced the story and I said, John Hoffman, I'll take over the booth. And I think about 30 minutes later he responded and said, let's do it. And I said, great, who do I talk to? And I was in touch with someone within a couple of hours. And I think we put the whole deal together in 48. And I think wrote the press release and announced it on Friday. So happened on Tuesday the 9th, announced by that Friday. And I really, I was like, GSMA, we've got to get this out, and we got to stop the negative momentum of the show, and get people to realize it's going to be different in June. This is going to happen, let's go do it. And so I think they're psyched that I stepped into the booth. It's a big booth it's 65,000 square feet. 6,000 square meters for the rest of the world that use the metric system. And I mean, that's huge. I mean, that's the size of a professional pitch in a football field, a soccer field. That's a one and a half football fields. It's a ton of space, it's a ton of space to fill up. >> I think what's interesting, as this points out that this new business model of being connected you were on LinkedIn, you connect to them, you get a deal done so fast. This is the direct to consumer as a start up, you're literally took over the Primo space, the best face in the area, so congratulations. And the other thing that's notable and why I'm excited to talk to you is that this kind of sets the table for the first global, what I call hybrid event. This will probably be a cornerstone case study in and of itself, because we're still kind of coming out of the pandemic. People are getting vaccinated, people want to fly, they want to get out of the house. You're partnering with theCUBE, and the CUBE 365 platform. And we love hybrid, we love doing events, theCUBE, that's what we do with video. Now, we're going to do a partnership with you to create this hybrid experience. What can people and guests who come to Barcelona or watch remotely expect? >> Yeah so, I think there's a couple of experiences that we're trying to drive in the booth. I think obviously demonstrations, I can't fill 65,000 square feet on my own. I'm a startup small company. And so I am inviting like-minded, forward thinking companies to join me in the booth. I'm paying for it providing a turnkey experience for those vendors. And so I think what we have in common is we're thinking about future technologies, like open ran on the network side and obviously public cloud which is a big part of my message. And so first and foremost, come and see the companies that are driving the change, the new technologies that are out there, and what's available for carriers to start to adopt and think about. MWC is a meeting intensive event. Deals are done at this show. In 2019, I think the stat is $65 billion of deals were put together at the show. And so a big component of the booth will be a place for executives to come together and have private conversations. And so we're going to have that. So that's going to be a big piece of it. And I think the third part is driving education and thought leadership. And so there's going to be a whole talk track, right? Tech topics, business topics, customer case studies, involve the hyperscalers, and really start to educate the telco community around these new technologies. But there'll be shorter talks. They won't be like hour long keynotes. We're talking 15, 20 minutes. And I think one thing that we're going to do with you as you were just talking about with the CUBE is, you know, MWC was the first big show to have to cancel with COVID, I think in 2019, sorry, 2020, the dates, it's always the last Monday in February and the rest of that week. And so that's like right at the beginning of the COVID stuff, Italy was just starting to take off. And so it was one of the first shows that had to make a big call and decide to cancel, which they did. This is going to be one of the first shows that comes back online post COVID, right? And so I don't think things just snap back to the way that they used to be. I don't think we as consumers are going to snap back to the way that we were operating, we're now used to being able to get curbside delivery from any restaurant in the city. I mean, it's just a sort of a different expectation. And so partnering with the CUBE, we really want to provide an experience that brings the virtual people into the booth. Typically in events like this, you really have to be there to see it. Booths are kind of like unveiled the day of the show, what's going on. One thing I'm trying to do is really educate people about what you can expect. What can you see? This is what it's going to look like. And so we're going to start to share some pictures of the booth of what it looks like. Number one, to drive excitement with the partners that are coming, right? Like you're going to be part of something really, really fabulous. I think number two, attendees can wait, I don't know week off, to make the decision to go. And so maybe if COVID continues to trend down and vaccines are picking up steam, maybe they're like it's safe for me to go and I want to go be a part of that. But I think from here on now we're going to have sort of that virtual experience. It's always going to be part of shows. And so we're going to experiment with you guys. We're going to have a live streaming event, over the course of all MWC. It's going to be a way for people who are unable to travel or can't afford it, COVID or whatever, see what's going on in the booth. And it's going to be everything from listen to a talk, to watch what you guys are typically famous for, your awesome interviews. We're going to have man on the street, like we're here at at a demo station, take us through your little demo. We're going to have telepresence robots that people can reserve. And cruise through the booth the robot can go to a talk. The robot can watch on this streaming thing, the robot can go to a demo. The robot can go to a meeting and it's controlled by the the virtual attendees. And so experimenting, right? Like how do we make this great for virtual people? How do we make the virtual people feel part of the physical? How do the physical people feel the virtual people that are attending and really just make it feel like a community or both. So, we're excited. >> That's super awesome, and first of all, thank you for having paying for everyone and including theCUBE in there. But I think this speaks to the ecosystem of open, you're creating an open ecosystem. And I think that is a huge thing. So for people who are at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this is going to be a nice, safe place to hang space as well as get deals done. As we comfortable doing media center, we'll get you on the digital TV, but also you're also designing what I call the first hybrid experience, not just having people, having on-demand videos on their website, connecting Barcelona with other parts of the world, with media and stories and content. I think that to me is going to be a great experiment slash upgrade. We'll see, we'll get to see it how it goes. >> Well, it was really, I mean, we all lived through 2020. I mean, some of the shows went on, AWS's re-invent happened, Google did like a crazy nine week program. It's very lonely to participate in those virtual events. You kind of log on by ourselves. No one's really tweeting about it. You're watching an event, the event is great but it was really lonely. And so I think what people love about the physical events is we're together and we're networking and we're meeting people and so, I think continuing to evolve that experience so that virtual is not as lonely. So we'll see, we'll see how it goes. >> I got to say your vision is really aligned with us and others that are in this open innovation world. Because if you look at like theCUBE, physical went away, we had no events, we did CUBE Virtual, a new brand. It wasn't a pivot, it was an extension, a line extension of theCUBE. Now theCUBE's coming back to the physical, we're going to bring that CUBE Virtual to connect everybody. So this is it, and it just amplifies the value of the physical event. So if done right, it's so much cooler. So that's cool. And what I want to ask you on the physical side to kind of bring it back to physical is, there's still going to be keynotes, there's still going to be talks at Mobile World Congress, and so I saw that scheduled and I just saw last week, GSM may announced you're going to be doing a keynote speech. That's amazing, so, how did that happen? So give us the lowdown on the keynote that you're doing. >> I'm sure the entire industry is like that happened. And it probably has something to do with the fact that I have one of the biggest booths at the space. I always put in a request to speak. I feel that I have a really exciting message to share with the industry. Over the last, I guess it's been nine or 10 months, I really been trying to amplify my voice. I have a podcast, I have a newsletter, I'm talking to execs. I have a list that I literally go down one by one stalking each executive of like, have I talked to them? Like how I told them about like the power of the public cloud. And so I am super thankful that I have this opportunity to spread that this message and I'm planning a really epic talk. I really want to shake the industry And this is my opportunity, right? This is my opportunity to stand on the biggest stage in our industry and command a presence and send out my message. And I'm absolutely thrilled to go do it. And I hope I crush it, I hope it's like a mic drop experience. And can't wait to do it. >> Well, we're looking forward to covering it. And we love the open vision. We love the idea of public cloud and the enablement and the disruption. Because just like you got the deal so fast you can move fast with modern applications with the cloud, moving at cloud scale, complete content game changer, so great stuff. So totally applaud that looking forward to and we're here cheer you on and ask the tough questions. I do want to get to... On Twitter yesterday though, you put out on tweetstorm on Twitter about the plans kind of teasing out the booth, how are you going to plan to build the booth. Are you worried that you're opening up too much of the kimono here and putting too much on the table 'cause it's usually a secret. Mobile World Congress is supposed to be secret, not publicly out there. What's the-- >> Well, I mean, I think this is just a little bit of a change has happened post COVID, right. People usually build their booth at don't reveal it until the first day of the show and it's kind of like this excitement to go see what is their big message and what's the big reveal. And there's always fun stuff. I think this years will be different as a first, like I said, a first big event back. I think I need to create a little bit of excitement for people who are going and maybe entice people that maybe you should think about coming. I realized this is a super personal decision, right? It depends on where you are and the country and your health and your status. But if you can do it, I want people to know that you're going to miss out. It's going to be super fun. So, yeah. >> Let's take a look at the booth 'cause I'm sure my next question wants to see. I know we have guys, do we have that rendering... Let's pull that up and let's talk this through. Let's go look at the rendering. So you can see here on the screen... Take us through this. >> Yeah, so what we want to do is give the sense of of cloud city and that's what we're calling the space. In cloud city there's outdoor space, like you see here. And then there's an indoor space. And indoors is where you work, where you buy, where you meet. And so you can see here on the left, the demonstration that would have different vendors displaying and it goes way back. I mean, what we're feeling like I said is like a football field, an American football field and a half or a European football field, a pitch. It's pretty extensive. And so we think we're going to have, I don't know, 20, 30 vendors showing their different software. I think we're scheduling or planning for about 24 different meeting rooms that we can schedule. All COVID safe with the space requirements in there. But in that outdoor space, it would be where you learn, the education. And then I think we're going to have this fabulous booth for theCUBE. It's going to look just so amazing with the backdrop of this amazing building. And I think I underappreciated or didn't really realize how devastated the event planning industry has been from COVID as well as construction. Obviously when events were shut down, these companies had to lay off thousands of workers. Some of the big firms have laid off 50% of their workforce. And those people they didn't just go home and sit around, they had to come up with a livelihood and those people have pivoted into another job. And they're not really, I mean, events aren't really back yet. So some of these firms are shrunk. The manpower is severely reduced. But then I think on the other side is, and you can see this in just housing construction. There's a lumber shortage, there's a shortage of materials. And so everything that we source for the booth, pretty much has to come from Spain. And so when we look at the booth, we have a pretty significant ceiling, where it looks like the roof of the building. It's an engineering feat to do that we're still working through the... I'm sure someone with a protractor is doing lots of math. The glass, we have those huge beautiful glass spans in the front. Getting a glass that spans that height, I think it's 18 feet. It's six meters tall. That's going to be hard. Things like the flooring. I want to have like hardwood laminate flooring. So it looks like hardwood floors. Don't know if we can find them. There like, why don't you do carpet? I'm like, can you just check one more vendor. I really want my floor. So we'll see how it goes. And yeah, I think that sharing this plan, the trials and tribulations, like how can this small startup, take over a space that usually takes nine months to plan, right? Who is this girl? What is she doing? How are they going to pull this off? I think it's like, grab your popcorn and watch the train wreck or hero's journey. We get it done. And I'm obviously-- >> It's like keeping up with the Kardashians. It's the bachelor, it's theCUBE, reality TV show. We can keep track of everything. It's all the fun. >> No, totally. I don't know how many people would be interested in a reality TV show about how you build a booth but I find it absolutely fascinating. I think a lot of people have eyes on the GMA and MWC coming out of COVID and what does that look like, and what's the attendance like. And so I'm excited to share (murmurs) So, exact. >> Well, people are on clubhouse, they're bored, they want to get out. I think this is a case time. Mobile World Congress has a huge economic impact, as a show it's got its own little economy built around. It impacts the country of Spain in Barcelona, the city, a great city. People love it. And so it certainly is notable and newsworthy. We will be following that story. I have to ask you more kind of a tactical question if you don't mind, while I have you here. Can you talk about some of the vendors that are coming and the kinds of talks you're going to have inside the booth and how do people get involved? You mentioned it's open to people who love open ran and open public cloud, open technologies. I mean, that's pretty much everybody. That's cool and relevant, which is like almost the whole world now. Like, is it going to be a space as a criteria? How do people get involved? What's the collaboration formula? >> Yeah, no, I have been working on putting together a list of potential vendors. You'd be surprised, not everyone is as bullish as I am on the public cloud. And so there was a little bit of a filtering criteria but otherwise anyone can come. Enterprise software vendors in telco where their primary customer is communications service provider. That's their software runs on the public cloud, come on in. People using open ran. And it's still a little sort of small band of cohorts that are really trying to drive this new technology forward and they're going up against some of the biggest companies in telco, right? They're going up against Huawei, they're going up against Ericsson. Both those guys are very anti and they're not really pro open ran 'cause it's hugely disruptive to their business. And so I'm pretty sure those guys are not psyched to see open ran become a thing in telco. And so it's really sort of about disruptive technologies that are in the booth. And so yeah, I'm paying for the space, I'm paying for the build-out, bring your demos, bring your people, come with your marketing message and let's build a community. And so we're talking to open ran vendors like Mavenir which is a pretty big name in the open ran space. I've been talking with Parallel Wireless in LTO Star. Those are also great players. Software vendors like to Tutoki, which is a talk that I did a little over a month ago about this new startup that has a web-scale charger that they're trying to put out there. Auria is another company that I'm really familiar with that has some cloud for software. And in little tiny startups like Sequence and some other up-and-comers that no one's heard of. So we're really excited to invite them into the booth. I've been secretly stalking Elon Musk, and Starlink and Space X to be a part of it. And we'll see. I'm kind of using Twitter and whatever I can to reach out and see if they want to be a part of it. But yeah, it really open arms. Not really excluding-- >> Well, Elon is very disruptive and you can reach out to him on Twitter. He's accessible. I mean, you've got to break through and he's antenna up for innovators, people who think differently, they love people who break down walls and markets lower open wins. I mean, we know there's a history, we've been covering it. I've been involved in all my career. People who bet against open always lose. It's happened in every single wave of innovation. So Elon's gettable. Let's get him. >> Who doesn't love Elon Musk? I mean, I think some people don't, I love him. He's my hero. I model a lot of the things that I do around his approach, his vision. 20 years ago, or close to 20 years ago, 2003, he said he was going to put people on Mars. And I think people laughed at him for being like the PayPal guy and this guy is crazy, but every year he makes progress against his goals. We have a relandable rocket. He's doing a manned mission this week, the second man mission or third man mission. The guy makes progress. And I think I'm on the same mission here. My mission is to move Telco to the public cloud. I think it's a long journey, right? I think people are like, who is this girl? And she's like 12 people and what's her story. And I'm like, I don't care. I have a singular mission is a quest. I am not going to stop until I move the industry to the public cloud. And it's my life's mission and I'm psyched to do it. >> Well, we love the mojo, we love your style. We love Elon Musk's mojo. And again, just to bring the dots together you have that same mindset, which is, love like Elon, he's a builder. He builds things and he delivers. So as you said, so... Danielle, I really appreciate the work you're doing. I love your philosophy. We're in total agreement. Open building. Doing it together as a collective, being part of something? This is what the world needs. You got a lot of great ideas in the works and we can't wait to hear them. And what you got coming up over the next 68 days. This is the first of many conversations together. Thank you. >> Yeah, that's going to be so awesome. Thank you so much for having me. Psyched to talk to you about it. >> Okay. Mobile World Congress is happening in Barcelona on the June 28th. It's going to be in person and it's going to be probably the biggest hybrid event to date. Be there, check out TelcoDR and theCUBE and the space that they took over 14 years at the helm there. Ericson had it, now it's TelcoDR. Danielle Royston, founder and CEO here with me from TelcoDR. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a Cube conversation. I'm really excited to have our next guest on. You see them all over on social, a very active community member. And we have not heard from him for a little while, so I'm psyched to have him on. He's Bobby Allen. He is a tech and Cloud evangelist. Bobby, how you doing? >> I'm good, Jeff, how are you? >> Good, so, I'm just to have the obligatory check-in. So, you're getting through this madness of COVID, and family's good, everything's good? >> Yeah, everybody's good. I've got a teen and a twin. They haven't driven us crazy yet. So, so far, everybody's healthy and everybody's good. >> Good, good. So, let's jump into it, Bobby. You know, people talk about Cloud as being, there's a lot of great benefits to Cloud, you know, kind of, cost savings, and agility, and more importantly, really as a driver of innovation which I think most people are kind of late to the party there, they think really more on cost savings versus innovation, but now, it's been around, you know, AWS has been around kind of, broke open the door in terms of public Cloud, and then everything was a public Cloud and not because of public Cloud, and then we have hybrid Cloud and we have multicloud. And now, things are kind of, settling down. So, when you talk to people about Cloud, how should they think about the reality of it once they kind of, leave the trade show and they're getting back to their desk, and they actually have to start implementing some things? >> So, great question, Jeff, First of all, thank you for giving me that opportunity to answer that. This is how I think about Cloud. So, we often talk about Cloud in terms of gym memberships, right? Like going to the Cloud is like buying a gym membership. I actually argue that the Cloud is actually more like weights. If you apply weights to a good form you're going to get stronger, if you apply weights to a bad form you're going to hurt yourself. And what we found is that a lot of these companies, Jeff, are applying Cloud and automation to things that really didn't make a lot of sense. And so, they're wasting more money, they're getting more frustrated, and they're wondering why Cloud was not this magic bullet that just solved everything. It didn't fix world peace and global hunger, and now, they're worse off than they were before. There are a couple of reasons I can go into about that but hopefully, that answers the question at first. We're training the wrong way, Jeff. We're adding weight to things that don't make sense and we're hurting ourselves. >> So, it it just I picked the wrong application or are they operating it in a way as they operated it when it was on-prem? 'Cause the thing I always think of, which is interesting, right? Is everybody always talks about spinning up capacity, right? Spin up capacity. You're running a promotion on the Superbowl, and you're going to have a bunch of people hitting your coupon but they'd never talk about spinning it down. And I went to a really interesting presentation one time where a guy talked about their application. He's like, we like when you turn it off, when you turn off our application, we're not making any money, but it tells that you know, kind of how to operate this thing, which is turn it on, but don't forget to turn it off. And I think, you know, we had a situation on one of our little applications that we left open and let something run and ended up with a bill that we weren't necessarily anticipating, not because we did anything wrong, but we just didn't do the right thing, which was to turn off that particular service when we didn't need it. So, what's the wrong way, what's the wrong exercise? Why are people screwing this up? >> So, I think the problem, Jeff, is actually more upstream. So, my personal mantra for 2020 has been, tech is the easy part, data and behavior are the hard parts. And I think you nailed it, right? That Cloud is only about what you need to buy, not what you need to change, then you're going to be woefully disappointed with the results. And so, when I'm saying go upstream, what I'm finding is, missed expectations, Jeff, sink more projects than bad code broken APIs or large bills? The thing that we're missing is, we're thinking that technology replaces the need to have a conversation. So, for example, when we say we want to do something better in the Cloud, what does better actually mean? So, let's talk about food for a second. Hopefully, I don't make your people hungry 'cause it's around lunchtime. But if we think about Cloud application like a recipe, are we tryna make a mediocre recipe better or make a good recipe at scale, right? 'Cause if you take a nasty recipe and scale it out, you're just going to go broke faster. So, really the question is, which problem are we trying to solve? What is the issue that we're really wrestling with? And so, we need to have a better vocabulary, more descriptive conversations. And so, let me give you one that I often talk to customers about, right? We talk about technical debt a lot of times. And technical debt, Jeff, in my opinion, is being used as a misnomer. So, they're kind of, different sorts of debt that I see often in the C-suite. So, there's technical debt where I don't like what we're running, there's data debt where I don't know what we're running, and there's brain debt where I don't know what we want. And Jeff, I would argue that a lot of things that are masquerading as technical debt in the C-suite are really brain debt. I haven't figured out what we want to do, I haven't thought about what we're willing and able to change. And so, that's why the Cloud is a disappointment because we haven't figured out what we want for lunch. (laughs) >> So, it's a classic like people process technology program, you know, problem. And we hear about it all the time, right? And everyone loves to focus on the technology. I haven't heard it really explained that well, but that's what you're saying. It's like, we'll just jump to that part so we don't have to actually ask the hard questions, right? And the thing that makes me think of it when you talked about that is it's kind of like the whole data aggregation problem and all the big data adventures when half the time people don't know what data is where, so, even just going through the exercise of cataloging, finding, organizing, cleansing, all that kind of stuff before you really start to think about what can you do with the big data project? You got to get the baseline down before you can get into the fancy stuff. Sounds kind of like, what you're talking about. >> You nailed it, Jeff. And I'm actually going to piggyback on something you said. This is actually the problem that I think we're wrestling with in Cloud and in life. There it is, right? And we're got to put a fine point in it for the listeners. We are struggling, Jeff, with how to evaluate better versus different. And so, what Cloud has done more importantly, Cloud has shortened the amount of time that we're willing to spend on something before we just start over again. And so, the question that we wrestle with is, do I need to do the same thing a little bit differently? Do I need to tweak it or is there something better that's come along where I need to throw everything away, start all over again, and wipe the slate clean. And so, here's what ends up happening, right? The challenge that we have building on that is how we choose, Jeff, is more important than what we choose because a lot of us are making choices but we're not developing a framework to choose in a world where different things are pushed at us really every day and every night, right? Amazon and Azure are changing literally thousands of things every night. And if I feel like there's something new out there, I have to understand, is this noise, or is this something I pay attention to? Is this a size for a project or is this something that helps my value? If you don't have a way to choose, Jeff, every new option is going to just lead to more confusion and more decommitment. >> Right, well, I mean, you raised a really interesting point which is how do CIOs keep up with all this stuff? I mean, how do they possibly keep the lights on, you know, run digital transformation, kind of, keep up with the, Lord knows, how many changes like you said, get made at Amazon every single day I mean, the feature set when Andy stands on stage at re-invent and lists all the services. I think he's using like a two-and-a-half point font on a 200 foot video screen. I mean, there's so much there. So, how do you help people take a step back from, it's like driving, you know, a car with headlights through snow at night. You know, it's just like kuchu chu chu. How do you help people take a step back and be a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more intentional, a little bit more circumspect to lay a good foundation which is going to be what the rest of the house is built on. If you don't have it, it's just going to crumble, if you have it, then at least you have a chance of success. How do you help guide them and get out of that snow storm? >> So, I'm going to give you a new acronym, Jeff, but I think it starts with humility. It starts with us admitting that we don't have this all figured out yet. I often tell a lot of customers, Cloud is that best a teenager that just learned how to drive. And Cloud similar to teenagers, the ability of what it can do is, kind of, in conflict with what it can comprehend in terms of unintended consequences. And so, if Cloud is changing all the time, let's not talk about, we crushed it, we nailed it, we knocked it out of the park. Let's raise our hand and say, you know what? I humbly need some help, because here's what we do, Jeff. In this industry, we throw around acronyms and terms all the time. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BDaaS, DBaaS, whatever. I'm going to introduce the term CaaS, but that's not containers as a service job. I think what we're getting is confusion as a service. (laughs) There's so many things that are changing that people are overwhelmed but because we want to act so much like we're crushing it on social media, we really need to say, I need help, I can't do this in a spreadsheet anymore. Please are there solutions out there that can help me automate some of this stuff so that I'm not a victim of my own ignorance. So, humility, right? Embrace other people that have solved some of this problem before, somebody has solved this problem. There are companies out there that are taking in the data, that are automating the decision-making, and that can help you, right? Bring people in, bringing outside help. >> Right, well, the other piece you just talked on is automation, and it goes back to your earlier comment about, you know, scale, bad things at scale are not good. So, if you don't get things dialed in now, and you start applying automation, and you start applying machine speed, you know, then things can get really squirrely really quick. So, that's even another kind of, you know, danger zone coming ahead, start to plan and make sure you've got your stuff organized or now you're going to automate it at machine speed, IOT, 5G, and really run things ragged super quickly. >> Jeff, I agree a hundred percent with that. I want to go back to something you talked about before. People process technology. I want to tweak that. I think we really need to evolve into people, process, product, or people, process, problem. It's got to go back to what am I creating or what am I solving this helping someone? And the technology is something that I will use or not if that helps me meet that outcome. But as technologists, Jeff, a lot of us are getting lazy. I want to play with Kubernetes. I want to play with containers. I want to play with serverless. I want to play with IOT. Who is that actually solving a problem for? Is what we've got to come back to because if I'm not doing that, the less you submit that I'm playing with this, but I'm not really making something better for a customer or adding more value to the business. >> So, again, what are your tips and tricks? 'Cause things are not going to get less complicated, right? As we've talked about Amazon's rolling out new services all the time. Google is really starting, you know, Google Cloud is really starting to rage. Obviously, Satya has done an amazing job with Microsoft, and then there's Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud, and all these secondary Clouds, Equinix, and that acceleration is only going up. So, how do you, you know encourage people, coach people, tell people to make sure that they're taking a step back and being organized and thoughtful, and not just racing ahead at the next bright shiny object? >> So, great question again, Jeff. I think people have to have to be careful that just because you hear about something a lot doesn't mean it's proven to scale. Social media is dangerous in the sense that we think that we hear something a hundred times then a means that is polished. And I think that as enterprises and as businesses, you know, go with something that's proven, but dip a toe in the water, if you're not sure about it. So, maybe you are experimenting with some things in DevTests, but here's some practical tips that I'll give. Three things, right? I recommend that people typically start here with Cloud strategy, the three D's of data are what I recommend people begin with. Don't begin with the widgets, the shiny objects, begin with data storage, begin with data transport and begin with data organization. We know that data is the lifeblood of the enterprise, right? That's what all of us are focused on right now, right? Data is collected from watches, from websites, from things like self-driving cars, eventually. So, how is my data going to be stored? 'Cause that's the most important part of likely what we're doing as a corporation. How is it going to be transported? Am I okay with spending X amount of dollars on Egress? Do I have latency issues? And then when it comes to data organization, databases, data warehouses, data lakes, I would start with my philosophy, Jeff, on how I plan to leverage that information across any of the multi or hybrid providers that I plan to spin up, because if I start with the data that connects me better to the customer, how am I going to leverage this data then make something better for them? And then any venue honestly, Jeff, that I choose to execute in we'll have tools and utilities and packages that I can leverage to make something better for someone. >> The piece you didn't mention though, was the application. So, where's the application? Say you still start with the data foundationally, and then go to the application or? >> Yes. >> But most of the initiatives driven kind of, at the application level layer? >> They are, and I'm glad you mentioned that. So, practically speaking, let me go down a level to double-click on stuff. Well, people want to be Cloud native, right? 'Cause we don't want to run servers. We don't want to run boxes, we don't even really want to do VMS anymore. One thing that I recommend, that I believe is high reward and low risk is that people strongly consider adopting database as a service, and this is the reason why. It gives us a format to go to something that's Cloud native that doesn't have to be totally rewritten. So, the juice is worth the squeeze there because I'm reducing labor, I'm reducing maintenance, I'm reducing cycles, the DBaaS that people like that have to do, but I'm not paying to refactor an application. Where we struggle, Jeff, and maybe this is another topic, we really struggle with the value of applications, and because we don't know the value of an app, we're using the cost of an app as a proxy. And so, if you don't know the value of something, you're always going to be at risk of over or under improving it. This is why I like database as a service. I can be more nimble, I can reduce labor, and I'm not rewriting an application and spending more to rewrite it than the app is worth. If I totally refactor, or if I totally replatform, the cost may outstrip the value. DBaaS is almost always a slam dunk, 'cause I'm going to reduce manual things that my people are doing that freeze them up, to focus more on customers and evolve in the end. That's what I see pretty consistently in the enterprise. >> That is really scary. That statement that you said that people don't necessarily know the value of the app and using cost as a proxy is not good. You know, I had Butch Rizzo on recently, and he did a study on, you know, trying to figure out the value of data, versus the the value of an app. And he did some research of that UCSF, and what they did is they basically said the value of the data is dependent on the business process that you can improve, or the business project that you want to do. You make an estimate as to what the ROI in that process is, and then you basically see if it's worthwhile to do. And that case and point was, you know, running a promotion at Chipola 'cause bill loves Chipola, but he had a real concrete way that, you know, if we can increase sales at the target stores by, you know, 10%, or we can increase the average ticket by 20 cents or we can increase the average number of items ordered by 0.5 or whatever. So, you know, real far metrics that tie back to real numbers, that tie back to value that you can make an assessment of that project, and that project is enabled by data. So, I hope people are doing that far applications 'cause cost is not the way to figure out value >> The challenge that we have, Jeff, when we look at a lot of the things in the Cloud, there's a big difference between if I have "big C" customers, someone who's literally pulling out a wallet or a credit card to pay for my service or product versus "little C" customers like internally. If I'm paying for a streaming service, and the cost of the streaming service goes up the value of that's likely also going up because I'm serving more big C customers. If the cost of a password reset manager goes up and internal application that nobody was likely paying for, and that's really the dilemma that a lot of folks have in the enterprise, Jeff. Am I going to take something that has limited value like a password application, and put it in a place that can have unlimited spend. Now, if I'm a Netflix or Disney plus, if my spend is going up, my value is going up because I'm serving more big C people that are going to pull out their credit card and give me money. So, a lot of the struggle is when we drill down into this in the enterprise is the people that have the little C customers that don't have anybody paying them 'cause they're tryna understand this is like funny money in our houses job. My kids are teenagers. If I was to charge them, right? For room and board or for dinner, they don't have any money. So, the value of what they think about my cooking on the weekend, right? It's hard to put a value on that because they're not paying me, but if I had a food truck, it's easy to put a value on that, are people buying it or not? So, again, the challenges between internal or external customers and asked me to get any things I charged back and show back, we need a model to understand, is this something that you're tolerating or something that you're actually choosing and are you willing to spend money on it? >> Yeah, and it's a complicated issue, right? Because the other thing is you'd say, you take this conversation over to the security space, which I always find fascinating 'cause investigating security is kind of like investing in insurance and you can't use all your money to insure everything a hundred percent or else you just, why would you even do it? But you have to have some, and it's not a real clear ROI, but the potential downside is pretty huge. So, it's this kind of, balancing act, as you said, it's not really clean as to what the true value of that is unless you tie it back to some specific event, a breach, you know, some type of pins getting stolen, et cetera. So, these are not hard questions, but it's funny 'cause they're not technology questions, right? They're business value questions, and they're priority questions, and they're trade off questions. That's the other thing, right? You don't have infinite resources. So, even if you solve the model here you need to solve it within a portfolio of challenges, opportunities to then, as you said, you know, kind of rank order, where do you spend that next version of dollar? 'Cause it really can have a very a huge difference on the return. >> Okay, I think if I was going to give a, maybe a final piece of advice to the audience, Jeff, it would be to not confuse planning and analysis. That's something that I've talked about before. There's a big difference between those two things, and I often use the analogy of tax planning versus tax preparation. Jeff, when we collect our receipts, and our W-2s and 1099s, and go to our CPA at the beginning of the next year, we can't call that tax planning. That's tax preparation. It's already kind of done and dusted as long as you don't mess it up, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion. And the enterprise is doing a lot of analysis and a lot of preparation, but really we need to do more planning. We need to look at the tools and the companies that are helping us simulate and plan for the future that's coming because then when we're talking about it, right? When you're sitting with your CPA and you're saying, what if I do this with my retirement or 401k, or real estate assets, when they can talk to you about what might happen, right? You're not in crisis, it's not a fire drill, it's not a dumpster fire, you can have a very easy conversation around the pros and cons of that. So, I think that's one thing we really have to embrace is press ahead, talk to those consultants and those solution providers, is this really planning or is this just analysis? Is this looking backwards or is it really looking forward and giving me some insight into the things that are coming so that I feel smarter going into the next season? >> And the opportunity to make a change before you hit December 31st. I mean, I think that's a really great analogy. Well, Bobby, a lot of great stuff squeezed in in a few short minutes, it's super fun to catch up, and I just love all your analogies and your stories because at the end of the day, it is about people, and it's about priorities, and it's about business, it's not about the technology. So, thank you so much for sharing your insight. >> Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for having me. >> Oh, absolutely, all right. He's Bobby Allen, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto studio. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. This is Dave Volante and with me is Dennis Hoffman. He's a senior vice president and general manager for telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. Good to see you Dennis. Welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> So let's talk a little bit about corporate strategy, which is your wheelhouse. I'm curious, has the pandemic at all altered your thinking on Dell strategy? >> Interestingly enough it hasn't. I suppose it would be standard for me to say that, but if anything, it's just given us both a sense of the challenge of what we had to do as a company to keep doing business. But also it's been really illuminating because it's given us a glimpse of the future. And fortunately, I think we've been pretty well prepared for what's happening. >> Well, I think in a way there's a bias inside of Dell because you guys were probably more work from home than the average company and you, in a way, might've been more prepared for this and maybe your thinking was already headed in that direction. What do you think about that? >> No, I think it's a reasonable thesis. The company is very much a work-from-home oriented or mobile in terms of where we work, an overall, I guess, hypothesis that work's something you do, it's not a place. But we also had a portfolio that benefited from the pandemic and an overarching strategy that was really to help our customers transform digitally. And if anything, the pandemic's accelerated all of that. So again, not without its challenges. And I certainly feel for the folks who get an awful lot of their energy from working with people every day because that's what's missing for an awful lot of folks who are doing an awful lot of what you and I are doing here. But otherwise I think we were biased toward it and it worked out pretty well so far. >> Okay. So it hasn't changed your strategy, but I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. I mean, obviously more people are going to be working from home now, probably at least double. If it was 15 to 20% pre-COVID, it's going to be, let's call it 30, 35, maybe even 40% post-COVID. Maybe it's going to take a while, six, nine months to get there. But I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah, I think ours and the industries at large. Most companies' business continuity plans really centered around natural disasters. In most of those plans, 30% of the population working remotely was the high watermark. Right now, we're seeing whole industries redoing their business continuity plans, factoring in 60, 70% bogeys for how many people or what percentage of their population would work from home. As we surveyed our employees, 90% of people said we be either some form of hybrid work experience or completely remote. So, again, if we're for a bit of a leading edge on this, we're probably going to be tilted even more toward it, but there's been a big change in assumption about what remote work looks like and what you've got to do to make it productive. >> So we're a decade and a half into the cloud or at least the modern cloud era. What's your take on where the industry is today and how it affects your business and your cloud strategy broadly? >> Yeah, it's a fascinating. We're in the midst of an ever accelerating set of cycles or pendulum swings from centralized computing to decentralized computing back to centralized. We went from the mainframe era to the client server era and then even quicker to the cloud era. And now we're seeing the emergence of the edge. The one thing that's constant through all of this is workloads are like water. They seek their ground. Workloads have characteristics. They need performance, economics, security, data gravity. And so we've been firm believers through this whole time that a certain amount of workload's going to end up in a very centralized model. Some is going to end up very decentralized and our job is just to enable our customers to put the workloads where they need to run best. So as you point out, we're quite a ways into the cloud era now. It looks like the edge era is emerging. I like to think of it as really three legs of a stool. You've got work can run in a private data center, it can run in a public data center or it can run everywhere else. And increasingly, everywhere else is being called the Edge, all of it by the way, in a cloud operating model. So big distinction between cloud, the model and cloud, the place. And so in many ways, we talked specifically to certain vertical markets, the cloud era is already beginning to give way to the beginning of the Edge era. >> Well, and at the same time too, you're seeing the hyperscalers recognizing the need for whatever it is, for economics, for legal reasons, for preference or latency moving on-prem. >> Right. >> And so I was having an interesting discussion with the CIO the other day and I asked them, "Well, what what do you look at as cloud? "Cloud is everywhere. "I got my cloud on-prem. "I got my multiple clouds, which is clear. "Everybody's going multicloud." And then he happened to have 17,000 stores that he was looking after. He goes, that's Edge to me. That's all part of my cloud. And now of course, part of your role is telco. So let's talk about that space. You've got the over-the-top providers. They're sucking off the infrastructure that have been built out by the telcos. Cost per bid is coming down. Data uses is exploding. And the telco industry really has to transform its infrastructure. They're not agile enough and they can't wait to get to this new era of 5G. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that, how you see Dell helping. >> Well, as I'll tell you, you characterize it right on. I've in the last several months, spend a lot of time with telecom executives all over the world because of how easy it is to do this sort of thing. And they need to transform. The digital transformation sweeping the rest of the world has caught up with telecom and for a whole bunch of reasons. And some of those you pointed out, right, agility, cost, economics. They're in a funny place. Never has the demand for communication services been greater. And yet never have their financial positions been more challenged. Because they're stuck between an old, fairly proprietary, closed architecture and a handful of vendors and on the other hand, embracing this cloud computing data era where there's thousands of vendors. And they somehow all need to be cobbled together into an open software-defined system that runs on industry standard hardware. And yet most telecoms aren't prepared to do that integration themselves. So for us, we see immense opportunity. It's literally as if a massive 100 billion dollar plus addressable market has effectively decided they need to start buying the kinds of things we've been making for years. And moreover, they are by definition, fundamentally a distributed model. The big difference, I think, between Dell Technologies and a hyperscaler is we as a company we're built in and for a distributed computing world. We deal with very mundane topics like how do you get a person onsite within an hour? And how many spares depots do you have? And all of those sorts of things. Whereas hyperscalers were built for the exact opposite. A world in which they said, "Hey, give me your data, "give me your workloads. "I'll think hard about it. "And I'll give you a very flexible economic model." The Edge puts all of that up in the air and telcos's the leading part of this Edge, right? They're the ones that own a great deal of the Edge. And as you pointed out, 5G is really the thing that's got everybody excited. >> Well, you bring up a good point about the hyperscalers. I mean, their challenge now is they go on-premise. Okay. How do you service and support those customers at scale 'cause everything they do is at scale, it's all highly automated. So that's interesting. At the same time, I wonder you're a strategy guy. You look at what Amazon retail does. They're putting up warehouses everywhere. They're putting points of presence. I wonder if there are analogs to the technology business. It's probably more complicated, right, 'cause you're not servicing, you're just delivering. >> But I think you're right on. There's analogs. Look, we all are what we are as vendors. We all have our business models. Ours is to sell equipment and software and services to somebody. Amazon, since its founding, has really been about how do I insert myself in a transaction and ease that transaction and take a slice? Google's been about democratizing and monetizing the world's data. So Amazon needs access to transactions. Google needs access to the world's data, all the hyperscalers want into telco because they want onto the Edge. The same point you made about on-premises, right, like Outpost or Azure Stack. It's fundamentally admission by a hyperscaler that, "Yeah, I guess all workload doesn't belong "in the public cloud. "It's not all going to end up here." And I think they've got the same challenge when it comes to the Edge. And so people are trying to build their way out 'cause they need connectivity to the Edge. For us, we know that telecoms have to become multi clouds. You've referenced earlier the over-the-top profit problem. Well, they lost the profits from the consumer. B2C, they built the networks, they ran the networks and everybody else took the profit. So now here comes 5G with the promise of business services, real B2B revenue opportunities for telecom. And once again, they're faced with a choice. Either they become the cloud operator and allow the hyperscalers in as part of their multi-cloud or they give up the cloud to the hyperscalers and there go the over-the-top profits again. So it really, I found, a fascinating set of dynamics and an industry that can really use the help of somebody like Dell Technologies. >> Well, that's interesting 'cause as is many markets, consumer leads and then B2B markets open up. Well, how do you think this plays out? I mean, the telcos have very specialized hardware. They got this hardened and fossilized infrastructure. So where do you guys fit in that transformation and how do you see it evolving? >> Well, it's already started in a way, it's from the inside out. So telecommunications companies, as I look at them, as we look at them, they're almost like three companies in one. They have conventional IT organizations that in many ways look no different than a bank. They have their businesses, of course, the network where they spend the vast majority of their money, but it's not homogenous. There's a network core, there's a network Edge and then there's an access network. And then most of them, of course, sell services, business services. So they have lines of business. So we look at them as an IT organization, through the CIO, as a massive network operator through the CTO and then as a business partner, some of whom are even in our channel program and their cloud, their cloud services partners. And that's all through their line of business. So they're starting to open up from the inside out. Data center's going through transformation. It's begun in the network core. Now, the Edge is the next thing. And the RAN, in case of mobile operator, the radio access network, will ultimately come. And so you're right. There's a fossilized infrastructure in some places, but we've already seen the core start to desegregate and it will now ripple all the way out to their Edge and I think frankly through it and right onto the enterprise premise with private mobility. >> And so do you see them taking that infrastructure model all the way out to the Edge and trying to replicate essentially their what would've been monopolies for years or do you see them... It sounds like it's going to be a mix. Some of them are actually maybe going to lean on the hyperscalers and try to become more over-the-top content providers. >> Well, I think two challenges in business right? I guess they say there's three great motivators in business in life, make money, save money, stay out of jail, like revenue, cost and risk. They got a cost problem. They've got to get off the monolithic closed infrastructure architectures. They've got a revenue problem that a lot of the additional revenues and services went to somebody else, the OTT, the over-the-top folks. And so I think you will absolutely see a mix, but nobody can afford. No telecom communications company can afford to simply hand their network over. Unless they've reconciled, I'm just going to be a dumb pipe again, right? And none of them want that. >> Right. = But I think in many ways, they're waiting for somebody to walk in and say, "But here's the answer." And I can tell you that at Dell Technologies, and by that, I mean both within Dell and certainly within VMware, we're very strong proponents of the notion of an open software-defined network architecture built on industry standard hardware. And we're pretty well positioned, I think, to provide it or certainly that's the hope and the thesis behind our business. >> Yeah. So that then allows them to compete much more effectively, to provide, like you say, new B2B services, but it really is their infrastructure has been the big blocker up until recently. And you're right. I mean, network function virtualization has started to see through. We've seen some of the benefits of that and then now they've got to take it to the next level, your point about the Edge. >> Well in the 5G standard or 5G, the next cellular technology generation is actually defined by the three GPP standards. Release 15 was the first one that came out and it specified both standalone 5G networks where you can get all of these benefits and non-standalone where you basically have to mix 5G into the core, rely on the 4G Edge. And that's the only thing that's been deployed so far. So as in many things, the hype leads the reality by a little bit. So we've been talking 5G for a while, but the release 16 that would get you some of the really hyped up features of 5G just released this year. So it's coming and there's a lot of talk about it right now. There's a race to have the largest 5G network in America and the largest 5G network in the UK and so on and so forth. But this isn't really the true power of 5G. That window is still open and it's coming. >> You do a lot of strategy work. You obviously see the opportunity Edge, the term is just enormous. So you got to be wetting your chops at that. At the same time, the requirements are totally different. So I'm curious as to how you, as a strategy expert, dovetail into the architectural decisions that have to be made and the connective tissue between strategy and architecture and actually the whole go-to market, that whole value chain that you think about, how are you thinking about that in the world of Edge? >> Well there's, at the end of the day, two strategy decisions you got to make, where do I play and if I decide to play there, how do I win? So where do you play on the Edge is a very interesting question. Anytime there's a new computing paradigm shift, you go from something that's been pretty stable and frankly pretty horizontal and it becomes pretty verticalized. So the Edge is thousands of things right now. And it's many highly verticalized use cases, manufacturing, mining, retail, even something as simple as campus wifi replacement. So you've got to pick your spot. And for a company of our size, that really comes down to thinking about which of these Edge use cases are going to pop first, which one's going to teach you the most, which one's going to have the right level of scale. And this is where telco and Edge intersect because it turns out one big and easily reachable use case for Edge is to partner strongly with the telecommunications industry where something like 30 companies in the world make up 80% of the capital spending. I mean, you don't have to run a Superbowl ad. You can get all of your customers in a bus, right. So that's why I think there's really this somewhat silent, somewhat subtle and somewhat not so subtle competition for the architecture of the telecom industry as it refreshes, both because of 5G as an inflection point, but also just because of the stuff we talked about earlier, the economics, the need to modernize and embrace open-software defined industry standard architecture. >> And do have visibility at this point as to how portable the race to the telcos identify that sort of new standards? Do you have a sense as to how portable that would be to some of these other use cases or is it really like the software industry of when that started to grow, it was just so fragmented. Now, granted it's consolidated now, but do you have visibility on that yet? >> A little, but I mean the basic building blocks are quite portable. There's radio technology, 5G radio technology and there's a distinction between what might be required say to replace wifi at the Dell Round Rock Campus versus what AT&T needs for Manhattan, right? >> Yeah. >> But basically there's radio technology, which is increasingly becoming software running on industry standard hardware. And then the same sort of virtualization layer that is helpful in basically pulling all of this together, plays there as does the underlying hardware where Edge servers can be built for telco spec and easily modified to be an Edge enterprise use case. That's the base. On top of that however, is often a vertical solution. Like in retail's very timely, temperature sensing and mask detection and distance determination, right? So somebody's going to want to take that capability. And that's not something you're going to bounce off of some public cloud. You're going to want to actually understand in real time, as people walk in and out of the place, are they being compliant with whatever policies I have? So on top of some of this compute and virtualization and to some extent sometimes storage on the Edge, what else goes on that? Is it a video surveillance solution? Is it an automated mining RFID solution? And so we've got a little bit of insight and we know which verticals appear to be largest right now and which ones are going to pop first. And that's where a lot of people are putting their attention. >> Well, it's going to be interesting 'cause it sounds like there's a real long tale there. And you mentioned industry standard hardware and software, but maybe a new industry standard emerges for some of those use cases that you just mentioned where you need very low latency. Maybe that's where ARM gets in and maybe get some massive volume because while it's a long tail, it's also huge. >> It is. I mean, some people are estimating the Edge economy to be four times the internet economy because we get stuff that's going to be written that we don't even... It's no different than we went from... At one point, the only software in the world was mainframe software. And then some knucklehead wrote client server software and it was considered a niche. Fast forward 15 years later, mainframe is a subsegment of the computer industry and it's all client server software. And then we go cloud native. And at first it's a couple of cloud native apps and pretty soon it's a bunch. And this thing just goes back and forth. The difference is or I think the interesting thing is the cycle times are really compressing. I don't know if you've read Tom Friedman's latest book, "Thank You For Being Late", but it's all about how do we thrive as humans in the age of accelerations? Because the theory is we're not getting enough time to catch our breath now between pendulum swings. It's interesting. Same thing happened in cellular technology. I didn't know until I started doing this job, but 1G was real for about... It was the dominant form of networking for 17 years for mobile networking. Then 2G was for around 11. 3G was seven-ish. 4G looks like it's going to be six. So technology just keeps quickening. And it makes the amount of time we get to be horizontal and catch our breath as the industry is stable, there's always an inflection of some sort going on in our industry. And so change is absolutely the new normal. >> Yeah. And some of these things are really hard to predict. I mean, remember TCP/IP used to be this old, reliable protocol that runs the world. >> Exactly right. >> I want to ask you about... Last question is as a service initiative of Project Apex or Apex it's called. And that's obviously not just some kind of gimmick. I mean, that affects the strategy of the entire organization, the way in which customers want to consume the product or platform strategies now. How does that as a service pricing model affect the business that we've been talking about for the last 10 or 15 minutes? >> Well, the good news for us, those of us at the company working on Edge and telecom and all of that sort of stuff is we're actually building the business under the Apex philosophy, right? So our design center out of the gate is as a service. Michael made the observation a long time ago within our leadership team that, back to my comment, that workloads are like water. They seek their ground. There's a difference between where a workload belongs and the interest in a particular operating model or excuse me, a particular consumption model. And get they've been combined for a long time, right? The only way to get the, as a service consumption model, was through public cloud infrastructure. But it turns out that the right place for workload may well be on-premises not in a private data center or it may well be on the Edge not in a public cloud, but people still want to take advantage of the consumption model, right? The economics are the economics. And so for me, doing the telecom stuff, it's, as a service, the heart of the design center from a consumption model right out of the gate, which is frankly easier than trying to retrofit everything else. >> Right. >> But nonetheless, for us as a company, it's just an opportunity to give our customers the choice that they want in terms of not only what they acquire, but how they acquire it. >> Well Dennis, I always love talking to you. You're such a clear thinker and you've obviously gone deep into some of these topics. And good luck in the role in the telco world. It's obviously a huge opportunity. Everybody's really excited about it. And thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Nice chatting with you. >> Alright. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2020, the virtual cube. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxed music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. This is Dave Volante and with me is Dennis Hoffman. He's a senior vice president and general manager for telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. Good to see you Dennis. Welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> So let's talk a little bit about corporate strategy, which is your wheelhouse. I'm curious, has the pandemic at all altered your thinking on Dell strategy? >> Interestingly enough it hasn't. I suppose it would be standard for me to say that, but if anything, it's just given us both a sense of the challenge of what we had to do as a company to keep doing business. But also it's been really illuminating because it's given us a glimpse of the future. And fortunately, I think we've been pretty well prepared for what's happening. >> Well, I think in a way there's a bias inside of Dell because you guys were probably more work from home than the average company and you, in a way, might've been more prepared for this and maybe your thinking was already headed in that direction. What do you think about that? >> No, I think it's a reasonable thesis. The company is very much a work-from-home oriented or mobile in terms of where we work, an overall, I guess, hypothesis that work's something you do, it's not a place. But we also had a portfolio that benefited from the pandemic and an overarching strategy that was really to help our customers transform digitally. And if anything, the pandemic's accelerated all of that. So again, not without its challenges. And I certainly feel for the folks who get an awful lot of their energy from working with people every day because that's what's missing for an awful lot of folks who are doing an awful lot of what you and I are doing here. But otherwise I think we were biased toward it and it worked out pretty well so far. >> Okay. So it hasn't changed your strategy, but I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. I mean, obviously more people are going to be working from home now, probably at least double. If it was 15 to 20% pre-COVID, it's going to be, let's call it 30, 35, maybe even 40% post-COVID. Maybe it's going to take a while, six, nine months to get there. But I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah, I think ours and the industries at large. Most companies' business continuity plans really centered around natural disasters. In most of those plans, 30% of the population working remotely was the high watermark. Right now, we're seeing whole industries redoing their business continuity plans, factoring in 60, 70% bogeys for how many people or what percentage of their population would work from home. As we surveyed our employees, 90% of people said we be either some form of hybrid work experience or completely remote. So, again, if we're for a bit of a leading edge on this, we're probably going to be tilted even more toward it, but there's been a big change in assumption about what remote work looks like and what you've got to do to make it productive. >> So we're a decade and a half into the cloud or at least the modern cloud era. What's your take on where the industry is today and how it affects your business and your cloud strategy broadly? >> Yeah, it's a fascinating. We're in the midst of an ever accelerating set of cycles or pendulum swings from centralized computing to decentralized computing back to centralized. We went from the mainframe era to the client server era and then even quicker to the cloud era. And now we're seeing the emergence of the edge. The one thing that's constant through all of this is workloads are like water. They seek their ground. Workloads have characteristics. They need performance, economics, security, data gravity. And so we've been firm believers through this whole time that a certain amount of workload's going to end up in a very centralized model. Some is going to end up very decentralized and our job is just to enable our customers to put the workloads where they need to run best. So as you point out, we're quite a ways into the cloud era now. It looks like the edge era is emerging. I like to think of it as really three legs of a stool. You've got work can run in a private data center, it can run in a public data center or it can run everywhere else. And increasingly, everywhere else is being called the Edge, all of it by the way, in a cloud operating model. So big distinction between cloud, the model and cloud, the place. And so in many ways, we talked specifically to certain vertical markets, the cloud era is already beginning to give way to the beginning of the Edge era. >> Well, and at the same time too, you're seeing the hyperscalers recognizing the need for whatever it is, for economics, for legal reasons, for preference or latency moving on-prem. >> Right. >> And so I was having an interesting discussion with the CIO the other day and I asked them, "Well, what what do you look at as cloud? "Cloud is everywhere. "I got my cloud on-prem. "I got my multiple clouds, which is clear. "Everybody's going multicloud." And then he happened to have 17,000 stores that he was looking after. He goes, that's Edge to me. That's all part of my cloud. And now of course, part of your role is telco. So let's talk about that space. You've got the over-the-top providers. They're sucking off the infrastructure that have been built out by the telcos. Cost per bid is coming down. Data uses is exploding. And the telco industry really has to transform its infrastructure. They're not agile enough and they can't wait to get to this new era of 5G. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that, how you see Dell helping. >> Well, as I'll tell you, you characterize it right on. I've in the last several months, spend a lot of time with telecom executives all over the world because of how easy it is to do this sort of thing. And they need to transform. The digital transformation sweeping the rest of the world has caught up with telecom and for a whole bunch of reasons. And some of those you pointed out, right, agility, cost, economics. They're in a funny place. Never has the demand for communication services been greater. And yet never have their financial positions been more challenged. Because they're stuck between an old, fairly proprietary, closed architecture and a handful of vendors and on the other hand, embracing this cloud computing data era where there's thousands of vendors. And they somehow all need to be cobbled together into an open software-defined system that runs on industry standard hardware. And yet most telecoms aren't prepared to do that integration themselves. So for us, we see immense opportunity. It's literally as if a massive 100 billion dollar plus addressable market has effectively decided they need to start buying the kinds of things we've been making for years. And moreover, they are by definition, fundamentally a distributed model. The big difference, I think, between Dell Technologies and a hyperscaler is we as a company we're built in and for a distributed computing world. We deal with very mundane topics like how do you get a person onsite within an hour? And how many spares depots do you have? And all of those sorts of things. Whereas hyperscalers were built for the exact opposite. A world in which they said, "Hey, give me your data, "give me your workloads. "I'll think hard about it. "And I'll give you a very flexible economic model." The Edge puts all of that up in the air and telcos's the leading part of this Edge, right? They're the ones that own a great deal of the Edge. And as you pointed out, 5G is really the thing that's got everybody excited. >> Well, you bring up a good point about the hyperscalers. I mean, their challenge now is they go on-premise. Okay. How do you service and support those customers at scale 'cause everything they do is at scale, it's all highly automated. So that's interesting. At the same time, I wonder you're a strategy guy. You look at what Amazon retail does. They're putting up warehouses everywhere. They're putting points of presence. I wonder if there are analogs to the technology business. It's probably more complicated, right, 'cause you're not servicing, you're just delivering. >> But I think you're right on. There's analogs. Look, we all are what we are as vendors. We all have our business models. Ours is to sell equipment and software and services to somebody. Amazon, since its founding, has really been about how do I insert myself in a transaction and ease that transaction and take a slice? Google's been about democratizing and monetizing the world's data. So Amazon needs access to transactions. Google needs access to the world's data, all the hyperscalers want into telco because they want onto the Edge. The same point you made about on-premises, right, like Outpost or Azure Stack. It's fundamentally admission by a hyperscaler that, "Yeah, I guess all workload doesn't belong "in the public cloud. "It's not all going to end up here." And I think they've got the same challenge when it comes to the Edge. And so people are trying to build their way out 'cause they need connectivity to the Edge. For us, we know that telecoms have to become multi clouds. You've referenced earlier the over-the-top profit problem. Well, they lost the profits from the consumer. B2C, they built the networks, they ran the networks and everybody else took the profit. So now here comes 5G with the promise of business services, real B2B revenue opportunities for telecom. And once again, they're faced with a choice. Either they become the cloud operator and allow the hyperscalers in as part of their multi-cloud or they give up the cloud to the hyperscalers and there go the over-the-top profits again. So it really, I found, a fascinating set of dynamics and an industry that can really use the help of somebody like Dell Technologies. >> Well, that's interesting 'cause as is many markets, consumer leads and then B2B markets open up. Well, how do you think this plays out? I mean, the telcos have very specialized hardware. They got this hardened and fossilized infrastructure. So where do you guys fit in that transformation and how do you see it evolving? >> Well, it's already started in a way, it's from the inside out. So telecommunications companies, as I look at them, as we look at them, they're almost like three companies in one. They have conventional IT organizations that in many ways look no different than a bank. They have their businesses, of course, the network where they spend the vast majority of their money, but it's not homogenous. There's a network core, there's a network Edge and then there's an access network. And then most of them, of course, sell services, business services. So they have lines of business. So we look at them as an IT organization, through the CIO, as a massive network operator through the CTO and then as a business partner, some of whom are even in our channel program and their cloud, their cloud services partners. And that's all through their line of business. So they're starting to open up from the inside out. Data center's going through transformation. It's begun in the network core. Now, the Edge is the next thing. And the RAN, in case of mobile operator, the radio access network, will ultimately come. And so you're right. There's a fossilized infrastructure in some places, but we've already seen the core start to desegregate and it will now ripple all the way out to their Edge and I think frankly through it and right onto the enterprise premise with private mobility. >> And so do you see them taking that infrastructure model all the way out to the Edge and trying to replicate essentially their what would've been monopolies for years or do you see them... It sounds like it's going to be a mix. Some of them are actually maybe going to lean on the hyperscalers and try to become more over-the-top content providers. >> Well, I think two challenges in business right? I guess they say there's three great motivators in business in life, make money, save money, stay out of jail, like revenue, cost and risk. They got a cost problem. They've got to get off the monolithic closed infrastructure architectures. They've got a revenue problem that a lot of the additional revenues and services went to somebody else, the OTT, the over-the-top folks. And so I think you will absolutely see a mix, but nobody can afford. No telecom communications company can afford to simply hand their network over. Unless they've reconciled, I'm just going to be a dumb pipe again, right? And none of them want that. >> Right. = But I think in many ways, they're waiting for somebody to walk in and say, "But here's the answer." And I can tell you that at Dell Technologies, and by that, I mean both within Dell and certainly within VMware, we're very strong proponents of the notion of an open software-defined network architecture built on industry standard hardware. And we're pretty well positioned, I think, to provide it or certainly that's the hope and the thesis behind our business. >> Yeah. So that then allows them to compete much more effectively, to provide, like you say, new B2B services, but it really is their infrastructure has been the big blocker up until recently. And you're right. I mean, network function virtualization has started to see through. We've seen some of the benefits of that and then now they've got to take it to the next level, your point about the Edge. >> Well in the 5G standard or 5G, the next cellular technology generation is actually defined by the three GPP standards. Release 15 was the first one that came out and it specified both standalone 5G networks where you can get all of these benefits and non-standalone where you basically have to mix 5G into the core, rely on the 4G Edge. And that's the only thing that's been deployed so far. So as in many things, the hype leads the reality by a little bit. So we've been talking 5G for a while, but the release 16 that would get you some of the really hyped up features of 5G just released this year. So it's coming and there's a lot of talk about it right now. There's a race to have the largest 5G network in America and the largest 5G network in the UK and so on and so forth. But this isn't really the true power of 5G. That window is still open and it's coming. >> You do a lot of strategy work. You obviously see the opportunity Edge, the term is just enormous. So you got to be wetting your chops at that. At the same time, the requirements are totally different. So I'm curious as to how you, as a strategy expert, dovetail into the architectural decisions that have to be made and the connective tissue between strategy and architecture and actually the whole go-to market, that whole value chain that you think about, how are you thinking about that in the world of Edge? >> Well there's, at the end of the day, two strategy decisions you got to make, where do I play and if I decide to play there, how do I win? So where do you play on the Edge is a very interesting question. Anytime there's a new computing paradigm shift, you go from something that's been pretty stable and frankly pretty horizontal and it becomes pretty verticalized. So the Edge is thousands of things right now. And it's many highly verticalized use cases, manufacturing, mining, retail, even something as simple as campus wifi replacement. So you've got to pick your spot. And for a company of our size, that really comes down to thinking about which of these Edge use cases are going to pop first, which one's going to teach you the most, which one's going to have the right level of scale. And this is where telco and Edge intersect because it turns out one big and easily reachable use case for Edge is to partner strongly with the telecommunications industry where something like 30 companies in the world make up 80% of the capital spending. I mean, you don't have to run a Superbowl ad. You can get all of your customers in a bus, right. So that's why I think there's really this somewhat silent, somewhat subtle and somewhat not so subtle competition for the architecture of the telecom industry as it refreshes, both because of 5G as an inflection point, but also just because of the stuff we talked about earlier, the economics, the need to modernize and embrace open-software defined industry standard architecture. >> And do have visibility at this point as to how portable the race to the telcos identify that sort of new standards? Do you have a sense as to how portable that would be to some of these other use cases or is it really like the software industry of when that started to grow, it was just so fragmented. Now, granted it's consolidated now, but do you have visibility on that yet? >> A little, but I mean the basic building blocks are quite portable. There's radio technology, 5G radio technology and there's a distinction between what might be required say to replace wifi at the Dell Round Rock Campus versus what AT&T needs for Manhattan, right? >> Yeah. >> But basically there's radio technology, which is increasingly becoming software running on industry standard hardware. And then the same sort of virtualization layer that is helpful in basically pulling all of this together, plays there as does the underlying hardware where Edge servers can be built for telco spec and easily modified to be an Edge enterprise use case. That's the base. On top of that however, is often a vertical solution. Like in retail's very timely, temperature sensing and mask detection and distance determination, right? So somebody's going to want to take that capability. And that's not something you're going to bounce off of some public cloud. You're going to want to actually understand in real time, as people walk in and out of the place, are they being compliant with whatever policies I have? So on top of some of this compute and virtualization and to some extent sometimes storage on the Edge, what else goes on that? Is it a video surveillance solution? Is it an automated mining RFID solution? And so we've got a little bit of insight and we know which verticals appear to be largest right now and which ones are going to pop first. And that's where a lot of people are putting their attention. >> Well, it's going to be interesting 'cause it sounds like there's a real long tale there. And you mentioned industry standard hardware and software, but maybe a new industry standard emerges for some of those use cases that you just mentioned where you need very low latency. Maybe that's where ARM gets in and maybe get some massive volume because while it's a long tail, it's also huge. >> It is. I mean, some people are estimating the Edge economy to be four times the internet economy because we get stuff that's going to be written that we don't even... It's no different than we went from... At one point, the only software in the world was mainframe software. And then some knucklehead wrote client server software and it was considered a niche. Fast forward 15 years later, mainframe is a subsegment of the computer industry and it's all client server software. And then we go cloud native. And at first it's a couple of cloud native apps and pretty soon it's a bunch. And this thing just goes back and forth. The difference is or I think the interesting thing is the cycle times are really compressing. I don't know if you've read Tom Friedman's latest book, "Thank You For Being Late", but it's all about how do we thrive as humans in the age of accelerations? Because the theory is we're not getting enough time to catch our breath now between pendulum swings. It's interesting. Same thing happened in cellular technology. I didn't know until I started doing this job, but 1G was real for about... It was the dominant form of networking for 17 years for mobile networking. Then 2G was for around 11. 3G was seven-ish. 4G looks like it's going to be six. So technology just keeps quickening. And it makes the amount of time we get to be horizontal and catch our breath as the industry is stable, there's always an inflection of some sort going on in our industry. And so change is absolutely the new normal. >> Yeah. And some of these things are really hard to predict. I mean, remember TCP/IP used to be this old, reliable protocol that runs the world. >> Exactly right. >> I want to ask you about... Last question is as a service initiative of Project Apex or Apex it's called. And that's obviously not just some kind of gimmick. I mean, that affects the strategy of the entire organization, the way in which customers want to consume the product or platform strategies now. How does that as a service pricing model affect the business that we've been talking about for the last 10 or 15 minutes? >> Well, the good news for us, those of us at the company working on Edge and telecom and all of that sort of stuff is we're actually building the business under the Apex philosophy, right? So our design center out of the gate is as a service. Michael made the observation a long time ago within our leadership team that, back to my comment, that workloads are like water. They seek their ground. There's a difference between where a workload belongs and the interest in a particular operating model or excuse me, a particular consumption model. And get they've been combined for a long time, right? The only way to get the, as a service consumption model, was through public cloud infrastructure. But it turns out that the right place for workload may well be on-premises not in a private data center or it may well be on the Edge not in a public cloud, but people still want to take advantage of the consumption model, right? The economics are the economics. And so for me, doing the telecom stuff, it's, as a service, the heart of the design center from a consumption model right out of the gate, which is frankly easier than trying to retrofit everything else. >> Right. >> But nonetheless, for us as a company, it's just an opportunity to give our customers the choice that they want in terms of not only what they acquire, but how they acquire it. >> Well Dennis, I always love talking to you. You're such a clear thinker and you've obviously gone deep into some of these topics. And good luck in the role in the telco world. It's obviously a huge opportunity. Everybody's really excited about it. And thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Nice chatting with you. >> Alright. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2020, the virtual cube. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxed music)

>> Introducer: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Volante. Welcome to the special CUBE Conversation. I'm really excited to invite in my mentor and friend. We go way back. Fred Moore is here. He's the president of Horizon Information Strategies. We going to talk about managing data in the zettabyte era. Fred, I think when we first met, we were talking about like the megabyte era. >> Right, exactly. I think back then we had, you know, maybe 10 bytes in our telephone and one on the wristwatch, you know, but now you can put a whole data center in a single cartridge of tape and take off. Things that really changed. >> It's pretty amazing. And of course, for those who don't know Fred, he was the first a systems engineer at Storage Tech. And as I said, somebody who taught me a lot in my early days, of course he's very famous for the term that everybody uses today. Backup is one thing, recovery is everything. And Fred just wrote, you know, this fantastic paper. He's done this year after year after year. He's just dug in, he's a clear thinker, strategic planner with a technical bent in a business bent. You're like one of those five tool baseball players, Fred. But tell me about this paper. Why, did you write it? >> Well, the reason I wrote that is there's been so much focus in the last year or so on the archive component of the storage hierarchy. And the thing that's happening, we're generating data lots faster than we're analyzing it. So it's piling up being unanalyzed and sitting basically untapped for years at a time. So that has posed a big challenge for people. The other thing that got me deeper into this last year was the Hyperscale market. They are, those people are so big in terms of footprint and infrastructure that they can no longer keep everything on disk. It's just economically not possible. The energy consumption per disk, the infrastructure costs, the frequency of, you know, taking a disc out every three, four or five years for just for replacement, has made it very difficult to do that. So Hyperscale has gone to tape in a big way, and it's kind of where most of the tape business in the future is going to wind up in these Hyperscale businesses. >> Right. >> We know tape doesn't exist in the home. It doesn't exist in a small data center. It's only a large scale data center technology, but that whole cosmos led me into the archive space and in a need for a new archive technology beyond tape. >> So, I want to set up the premise here. Just going to pull this out of your paper. It says a 60% of all data is archival, and could reach 80% or more by 2024, making archival data by far the largest storage class. And given this trajectory, the traditional storage hierarchy paradigm is going to to need to disrupt itself. And quickly we're going to talk about that. That really is the premise of your paper here, isn't it? >> It is, you know, to do all this with traditional technologies is going to get very painful for a variety of reasons. So the stage is set for a new tier and a new technology to appear in the next five years. Fortunately, I'm actually working with somebody who is after this in a big way, and in a different way than what you and I know. So I think there is some hope here that we can redefine and really add a new tier down at the bottom. You see it kind of emerging on that picture of the deep archive tier it's. Beginning to show up now and it's, you know, infinite storage. I mean, if you look at major league sports, the world series and Superbowl, you know, that data will never be deleted. It'll be here forever. It'll be used periodically based on circumstances. >> Yeah, well, we've got that pyramid chart up here. I mean, you invented this chart, essentially. At least you were the first person that ever showed it to me. I honestly think that you first created this concept where you had a high performance tier, and a high cost per bit, and then an archive tier. Maybe it wasn't this granular, you know, back in the '70s and '80s? But it's constantly been changing with different media types and different use cases. >> You know, you're right. I mean, and you all know this because you know, when storage deck introduced the nearline architecture, nearline set in between online and offline storage, we called it nearline, and trademarked that term. So that was the tape library concept to move data from offline status to online status, with a robotic library. So that brought up that third tier online, nearline, and offline, but you're right. This pyramid has evolved and morphed into several things. And, you know, I keep it alive. Somebody said, I'll have a pyramid on my tombstone instead of my name when I go down. (both chuckles) But it's really the heart and soul of the infrastructure for data. And then out of this comes all the management and security, the deletion, the immutable storage concepts, the whole thing starts here. So it's like your house, you got to have a foundation, then you can build everything on top of it. >> Well, and as you pointed out in your paper, a minute ago, it always comes down to economics. So I want to bring up the sort of 10 year expected cost of ownership the TCO for the three levels you got all disk, you got all cloud and you got LTO and you got the different aspects of the cost. The purple is always the biggest piece of cost. It's the labor costs. But of course, you know, in cloud, you've got the big media cost because they've done so much automation. I wonder if you could take us through this slide, what are the key takeaways there? >> Well, you know the thing that hurts here with all these technologies is, as you can see up on top up there, what the key issues are with this and the staff and personnel. So the less people you have to manage data, the better off you are. And then, you know, it's pretty high for disk compared to a lot of things to do on desk, but lack of manage a lot of, you know, sadly what you and I had to deal with years ago and provision kind of, I mean, a lot of this stuff is just labor intensive. The further you get, the further down the pyramid and you also get less labor intensive storage. And that helps then you get a lower cost for energy and cost of ownership. The TCO thing is kind of taking on a new meaning. I hate to put up a TCO chart in some regards, because it's all based on what your input variables are. So you can decide something different, but we've tried to normalize all kinds of pricing and come up with everything. And the cloud is a big question for most people as to how does it stack up. And if you don't ever touch the data in the cloud, you know, the price comes way down. If you want to start moving data in and out of the cloud, you're going to have to ante up in a big way like that. But, you know we're going to see dollar a terabyte storage prices down at the bottom of this pyramid here in the next five years. But hey, you can get down to four or five terabyte with drives media in libraries tape, just entire flash and certainly higher than that. But you know, we're going to have the race to a dollar a terabyte, total TCO cost here in 2025. >> So when Amazon announced, they just announced a glacier. Everybody said, okay, what is that? Is that tape is that, you know, this spun down disk, cause it took a while to get it back. But you're kind of seeing that tape technology as you said, really move into the Hyperscale space and that's going to accommodate this massive, you know, lower part of the pyramid, isn't it? >> Exactly. Yeah. And we don't have a spin down disk solution today. I was actually on the board of a company that started that called Copay and years ago, right up here near Boulder. >> You watch him (both chuckles) You absolutely right. And a few other people that, you know also, but the spin down disk never made it. And you know, you can spin up and down on a desk on your desktop computer, but doing that in a data center, then on a fiber channel drive never made it. So we don't have a spin down disk to do that. The archive space is kind of dominated by very high capacity disc and then tape. And most of the archive data in the world today, unfortunately sits on display. It's not used and spinning seven by 24, three 65 and not touch much. So that's a bad economic move, but customers just found that easier to handle by doing that then going back to tape. So we've got a lot of data stored in the wrong place from a total economics point of view. >> But the Hyperscalers are solving this problem, or they're not through automation. And, you know, you referenced storage, tiering, really trying to take the labor cost out. How are they doing? Are they doing a good job? >> They've done really well taking the labor costs down, I mean, they have optimized every screw, nut and bolt in the 42 chassis that you could imagine to make it as clean as possible to do that. So they've done a whole lot to bring that cost down, but still the magnitude of these data centers, we're going to finish the year 2020 with about 570 Hyperscale data centers. So it's going right now around the world. You know, each one of these things is 350 400,000 square feet, and up of race wars space. And the economics just don't allow you to keep putting inactive data on spinning disk. We don't have to spin down disk, tape You know, I feel like the only guy in the industry that says this sometimes, but, you know, tapes had a, you know, a renaissance. That people don't appreciate in terms of reliability, throughput, you know, tapes three orders of reliability higher than disc right now. And most people don't know this. So tape's viable, the Hyperscalers see that. And read one Hyperscalers or you know, by over a million pieces of LTO tape last year alone. Just to handle this, you know, be the pressure valve to take all of this inactive stuff off of the gigantic disc farms that they have. >> Well, so let's talk about that a little bit. So you just try to keep it simple. You've got, you know, flash disk and tape. It feels like disc is getting squeezed. We know what flash has done in terms of eating into disc. And you see in that, in the storage market generally, it's soft right now. And I've posited that a lot of that is the headroom that data centers have with flash, is they don't have to buy spindles anymore for performance reasons. And the market is soft. Only pure is showing consistent growth, and ends up a little bit, cause because of mainframe, you've got Dell popping back and forth, but generally speaking, the primary storage market is not a great place to be right now, all the actions and sort of secondary storage and data protection. And so just going to get squeezed, and you mentioned tape, you said that if your only person talking about it, but you said in your paper, you know, it's sequential. So time to first bite is, is sometimes problematic, but you can front end a tape with cash. You can use algorithms and, you know, smart scans and to really address that problem. And dramatically lower the cost. Plus you could do things like you tell me Fred, you're the technologists here, but you're going to have multiple heads things that you can't necessarily do in a hermetically sealed disc drive. >> (chuckles) You can. And what you just described is called the active archive layer in the pyramid. So when you front end a tape library with a disk array for a cash buffer, you create an active archive and that data will sit in there three or four or five days before it gets demoted based on inactivity. So, you know for repetitive use and you're going to get dislike performance for tape data, and that's the same cash in concept that deserve systems had 30 years ago. So that does work and the active archive has got a lot of momentum right now. There's right here near me, where I live in Boulder. We have the Active Archive Alliances headquarters, and I get to do their annual report every year. And this whole active archives thing is a big way to make and overcome that time, the first bike problem that we've had in tape. And we'll have for quite a while. >> In your paper, you've talked about some of the use cases and workloads and you laid out, you know basically taking the pyramid and saying, okay based on the workload, some certain percentage should be up at the top of the pyramid for the high performance stuff. And of course lower for the, you know, the less, you know, important traditional workloads, et cetera. And it was striking to see the Delta between annual, the highest performance we had 70% , I think was up in the top of the pyramid versus, you know the last use case. So in you're talking about what it costs to store a zettabyte in services is that if I talk about 108 million at the high end versus a about 11 or 12 million, so huge Delta 10 X Delta between the top and the bottom based on those, you know allocations based on the workload. >> Yeah, I tried to get at the value of tiered storage based on your individual workload in your business. So I looked at five different workloads, the top one that you referenced. That was in there at 108 million, you know, is the HPC market. I mean, when I visited a few of the HPC people, you know, their DOD agencies in many cases, you know that and I threw the pyramid up. The first thing they would say our permanents inverted. You know (chuckles), all of our archive data is about 10%. You know, we were all flash as much as we can. And we have a little bit archived, we're in constant. Simulation and compute mode and producing results like crazy from the data. So we do an IO, bring in maybe a whole file at a time and compute for minutes before we come up with an answer. So just the reverse. And then I got to look into all the different workloads talking to people, and that's how we develop these profiles. >> So let's pull up this future of the storage hierarchy, was again kind of of talks to the premise of your paper. Walk us through this like, what changes should we be expecting, and you got air gap in here. We're going to, I'm going to ask you about remastering and lifespan, but take us through this. >> Yeah, you know, the traditional chart that you had up on the first big year had four tiers, you know, two disturbs and solid state at the top. And then the big archive tier, which is kind of everything falling down into tape at this point. But you know again, tape has some challenges. You know time to first bite and sequential access on. And then when we couple using tape or disc as an archive, most of that data that's archival is captured as unstructured data. So we don't have, we don't have tags, we don't have metadata, we don't have indices, and that has led to the movement for object storage, to be a primary, maybe in the next five years, the primary format in store archived data, because it's got all that information inside of it. So now we have a way to search things and we can get to objects, but in the interim, you know, it's hard to find and search out things that are unstructured and, you know, most estimates would say 80% of the world's data is at least that much is unstructured. So archives are hard to find once you store it, there's one storing is one thing, retrieving it is another thing. And that's led to the formation of another layer in the story tier. It's going to be data that doesn't have to be remastered or converted to a new technology. in the case of the disc, every three, four or five years or tape drive every eight, maybe 10 years take large lost. Kate Media can go 30 years, but with all new modern tape media, but unfortunately, you know, the underlying drive doesn't go back that far, you can't support that many different versions. So the media life is actually longer than it needs to be. So the stage is set for a new technology to appear down here to deal with this archives. So it'll have faster access will not need to be remastered every five or 10 years, but you'll have, you know, a 50 year life in here. And I believe me, I've been looking for a long time to be able find something like this. And, you know we have a shot at this now, and I'm actually working with the technology that could pull this off. >> Well, it's interesting also as well, you calling out the air gap and the chart we go back to our mainframe guesses, is not a lot we haven't seen before, you know, maybe data D duplication, but you know, the adversary has become a lot more sophisticated. And so air gaps and, you know, ransomware on everybody's mind today, but you've sort of highlighted three layers of the pyramid that are actually candidates for that air gapping. >> Yeah. The active archive up there, of course, you know, with the disk and tape combined, then just pure tape. And then this new technology, which can be removable. You know, when you have removability you create an air gap. little did we know when you and I met that removability would be important to take. We thought we were trying to get rid of the Chevy truck access method, and now without electricity with a terrorist attack and pandemic or whatever. The fastest way to move data is put it on a truck and get it out of town. So that has got renewed life right now. Removability much to my shock from where we started. >> You talked about remastering and you said it's a costly labor intensive process that typically migrates previously archived data to new media every five to 10 years. First of all, explain why you have to do that and how a data center operators can solve that problem. >> Yeah. And let's start with data where most of it sits today on described, you know it describes useful life is four to five years before it either fails or is replaced. That's pretty much common now. So then they have to start replacing these things. And that means you have to copy, you know, read the data off the disk and write it somewhere else, big data move. And as the years go by that amount of data to revamp or gets bigger and bigger. So, I mean, you can do the math as you well know, you want to move, you know, 50 petabytes of data. It's going to take several weeks to do that electronically. So this gets to be a real time consuming effort. So most data centers that I've seen will keep about one fifth of their disposal every year migrating to a new technology, just kind of rolling forward as they go like that rather than do the whole thing every five years. So that's the new build in the disc world. And then for tape the drive stay in there longer, you know the LTO family drives a good read. You know two generations back from the current one that's been there. They cut that off a year ago. They'll go back to something like this soon. But you know, you can go into 10 years on a tape drive. The media life because of very unfair right media, which was already oxidized the last 30 years or more. The old media metal particle was not oxidized. So, you know, the oxidized flake, the particles would fall off people will say shit. I've had this in here eight years, you know, and it's kind flake it I put it back in. So that didn't work well. But now that we had various Verite Media, it was all oxidized, the media lives skyrocket. So that was the whole trick with tape to get into something that was preoxidized before time could cause it to decay. So the remastering is a lot, is less on tape by two to one to three to one, but still when you've got petabytes, maybe an exabyte sitting on tape in the future, that's going to take a long time to do that. >> Right. >> So remastering you'd love a way to scale capacity without having to continue to move the data to something new ever so often. >> So my last question is you've , you know, you went from a technical role into a strategic planning role, which of course the more technical you are in that role, the better off you're going to be. You don't understand that the guardrails, but you've always had a sort of telescope in the industry and you close the paper and it's kind of where I want to end here on, you know, what's ahead. And you talk about some of the technologies that obviously have legs, like three D NAND and obviously magnetic storage. You got optical in here, but then you've got all these other ones that you even mentioned, you know, don't hold your breath waiting for these multilayer photonics and dedic DNA. What class media, holographic storage, quantum storage we do a lot about quantum. What should we be thinking about and expecting as observers as to, you know, new technologies that might drive some innovation in the storage business? >> Well, I've listed the ones that are in the lab that have any life at all, right on this paper. So, you know can kind of take your pick at what goes on there. I mean, optical disk has not made it in the data center. We talked about it for 35 years. We invested in it in storage deck and never saw the light of day. You know, optical disk has remained an entertainment technology throughout the last 35 years. And the bigger rate is very low compared to data center technology. So, you know optical would have to take a huge step going forward. We got a lot of legs left in the solid state business. That's really active SSB, the whole nonvolatile memory spaces. Probably not 45% of the total disc shipments in terms of units, from what it was at it's high and in 2010. Unbelievable though. You know, in disc shipment 650 million drives a year announced just under 400, 35,400. So flashes has taken this stuff away, like crazy. Tape shouldn't be taking just away, but the tape industry doesn't do a very effective job of marketing itself. Most people still don't know what's going on with tape. They're still looking out of the roof, still looking out of the rear view mirror at a tape, as opposed to the front windshield. We see all the new things that have happened. So, you know they have bad memories of taping the past load stretch, edge damage tape, wouldn't work a tear or anything like that. It was a problem. Oh, that's pretty well gone away now. In a moderate tape is a whole different ball game, but most people don't know that. So, you know tapes going to have to struggle with access time and sequential reality. They've done a few things to come over excess time and the order request now to take the optimizer based on physical movement on the tape that can take out 50% of your access time for multiple requests on a cartridge. The one on here that's got the most promise right now would be a version of a multilayer photonic storage, which is. I would say sort like optical, but, you know, with data center, class characteristics, multi-layer recording capability on that random access, which tape doesn't have. And, you know, I would say that's probably the one that you would want to take some look at going forward like this. The others are highly specular. You know, we've been talking about DNA since we were kids. So we don't have a DNA product out here yet. You know, it's access times eight hours. It's probably not going to work for us. That's your, that's not your deep archive anymore. That's your time capsule storage. >> Yeah, right. >> Lock the earth. So, I mean, I think you kind of see what's here. I mean, the chances are it's still going to be the magnetic technologies tape disc, and then the solid state number and stuff. >> Right. >> But these are the ones that I'm tracking and looking at, trying to have worked with a few of the companies that are in this. Future list and I'd love to see something breakthrough out there, but it's like, we've always said about a holographic storage. For example, you know, there's been more written about it than there's ever been written on it. (both chuckles) >> Well, the paper's called Reinventing Archival Storage. You can get it on your website I presume Fredhorizon.com >> Yep, absolutely. >> Awesome. >> Fred Moore, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. >> My pleasure, Dave. Thanks a lot. Great job. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the CUBE. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Locke from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Well, welcome back to the cube live here in Las Vegas for AWS reinvent 2019 it's the cubes seventh year, eighth year of reinvent. We've been there almost from the beginning. I'm John ferry with Dave Volante extracting the signal from the noise. The two great guests here chew senior leaders, VMware, auntie that were Sanjay Poonan, COO of VMware cube alumni, Mike Clayville, vice president of worldwide commercial sales and business development for AWS guys. You're the senior leaders out on the field making things happen. I got to say the AWS VMware relationship, which we covered a couple of years ago when Gelsinger and Jassy were doing the little love Fest, they're in San Francisco. A lot of people were skeptical. This show here, we're hearing things like, that's my Superbowl moment. Things are working great. Cloud is scaling, so congratulations and welcome to the cube. Good to see you. Thank you. Yeah. All right, so let's get to the relationship. >>Talk about you guys' relationship and how it's morphed into such a success. We're hearing great feedback. The numbers on the research at day's been digging into shows. Customer spend is up. Is that the wave of cloud? Is that the integration? Sanjay, what's going on? Give us, gives you up to, Oh, I think we're delighted. You know Mike obviously and I have been friends for years. He's had some connections with VMware in his past that certainly helped in setting up this partnerships. So we're grateful to Mike and Andy and the team for that and it's, you know, two and a half to three years now since we announced it. Tremendous amount of customer interest. Listen, you know we said at the beginning of this, when you take sort of the King of the public cloud and the King, the private cloud together and don't force customers to say these have to be separate doors, you're going to do them both together. >>Customers liked that message and what we've been really doing over the course of the last 1218 months is perfecting use cases for this platform. I think to us, the key word is migrations. Cloud migrations. When people are moving their workloads off an app off VMware vSphere or cloud foundation, we want this to be the best place for it to land. We are McCloud in AWS for migration opportunity and anything short of that refactoring app would we, you know, not something that would be a good use of people's time and money because they should be then modernizing with all the wonderful services that Amazon's built, one they've migrated. So we've really perfected our message in the course of the last six, 12 months to two M's, migrate and modernize, migrate and modernize. So we could migrate you into this Avenue and then modernize with a set of container and other services. So that messes working. We put on stage at VMworld and there are many of them here, two big Amazon customers, VMware cloud, Amazon, Freddie Mac and IHS market. And they were telling our tens of thousands customers at those shows and similarly many of them here, that that's the best option to be able to do things. >>Yeah, it's great. It's great by the way, because it's a frictionless migration, right? So you've got a platform that same code base working on pram, same cloud based and cloud creating a seamless integration between the two platforms. We're finding customers very in enthralled by that. I say they say they love that because it's less disruptive for them. Yeah. But at the same time they say, but eventually I want to change my operating model to really drive profits to my bottom line. So could you talk a little bit about what that journey looks like? And I'm really interested in longer term Sanjay, how you play in that. I look Mike, sorry. So the first thing I'd say that one of the real reasons I love it is because they've got a big investment today and that investment is in skills. That investment is in operational processes. That investment is in licensing and all of that comes along with them on their journey. Whether it's a migration journey or a migration to modernize journey, it's working. So when you're talking about the bottom line, like you are, this is a great play for that bottom line. >>Yeah, I know. And I'd say, listen, from our perspective, we want to take a Freddie Mac. When they spoke at VMworld, they have I think 800 applications, 50 of whom are SAS and the other 750 are custom built, deep Lee virtualized and they're going to move all of them over the course of the next 12 months. I fell off my chair when I, when I heard how fast they planned to do it. IHS market has very a variety of very spread accounts and Amazon. Now we're going to help them move a lot of their workloads there. Once they're there, we want them to then use the tools that Amazon's bill. I'll give you two examples, maybe some of their backup tools into S3 CloudWatch some of their analytical monitoring types of tools. So there's going to be, and then of course AI database services and the best place once you've moved it there is to make sure that that migrated stack is stable. >>You have the best of the VMware tools, V center, V motion, all you know and the best of the Amazon tools. So when people start to see this, I think the myth of Sarah's saying refactor and replatform that application, which is in essence like taking a home. Okay. And having to destroy the home and completely rebuild it. Right? And that's just a meal, a waste of money and time when you could migrate it and then modernize it. So we just need to get that story well understood. Get our, you know, I, I mean Amazon probably has a few million customers. We have a half a million customers. If all of those customers can hear the story and beginning their journey with us, I think we will tip this in a way. Starting >>to tip, to get the, back to the point of your question as well. Look, our two companies have been engineering these solutions together deeply. So this just isn't a paper arbiters. Yeah. This is an engineering partnership that started years ago and what that means is as customers migrate to a beam ware on AWS, now they have access to over 175 AWS services, can it, right. Significant native access to a broad range of services that they can continue to innovate, identify new business models and it all seamlessly integrates back into a single platform. >>Yeah. One of the things I always said when I talked to Andy and Amazon folks is that the competitive advantage of the businesses scale and also the new announcements that come in. So one of the things we heard yesterday from a customer, uh, one of your joint customers was, you know, I asked him about outpost, which you guys now are going to ship in 2020, which was announced you already got native outpost, general availability. He goes, look it, we'd love VMware. We could probably look at VMware and kind of poke at things, maybe do things differently. But frankly I don't want to have to rearchitect my stack because I want the data science stuff from studio a Sage maker studio because the demand for the business results is coming in from the new capabilities. So this seems to be the trend where the migration is just lift and shifts, keep the operational flow going, foundation and the business value over the top is whatever you guys can bring in from an NSX and then the apps. Is this something that you're hearing more of? Because this points to all of us, the discussion around the platform is irrelevant because the business value is coming in from the data. Yeah. What, how do you guys react to that? Is that something that you're hearing? >>Well, the first thing I would say is the, you know, the pundents will tell you that by 2020 90% of customers will be in a hybrid model. So you know, the migration is, you talk about is in play and, and arguably 2020 will be the year of the most migrations in history if those pendants are correct. Right. And so that gets a lot of customers in the mode of being able to leverage a BMC and then be able to take advantage of all the, you know, the extensive amount of data services we have available. But if you ask me, where do you know, what are the, what are the big reasons driving the migration? It's traditional economics, right? It's, I'm, I don't need to be a capital expense heavy organization anymore. Why do I have to build data centers? Why do I have to extend data centers? Why am I building, why am I buying air conditioning that's not differentiating my business? Right? All of those things are creating drivers for this migration. Now as you begin the migration, that's when you begin to see, wow, imagine the simplicity of the same code base, same operational processes. I don't have to retrain a bunch of people just moving it right onto the cloud and now let me really dig in to the new services available from AWS. Look for those new business. >>I suppose having that focus of differentiation and VMware and saying, let's keep it and expand it to the edge and do things like that. And yeah, absolutely. I mean, listen, I think they had Cerner yesterday on stage and I think it was interesting to hear the CEO, they're talking about three verbs, migrated, modernize, and innovate. I mean that's the thing thing. So I think when you, when you start to see that becoming a very active dialogue, not just from CEOs but from CEOs and boards that are saying, listen, you know, part of the reason we want to move to the cloud is an increase our bruiser agility. It's not just a cost reduction. Yeah. I mean I don't need to have 80 data centers have, I could have half a zero a one or two so that I get, but beyond cost, if we can kind of get agility going faster. >>And for many of these folks, I think when I sit down in their customer advisory councils, when I, when we are advising them, they're all trying to serve their customers better, get data to become sort of the oil of their ability to make decisions better and AI and analytics sort of help in that area. And then of course, getting more efficient in lowering costs and risks. And I think when you're doing it, the scale that both of us have experienced doing, we understand data centers really well. We've software defined them for 20 years. These guys understand cloud probably better than anybody else. When we bring that sort of scale together and as Mike pointed out, a deeply engineered solution, we have a, we have a significant R and D investment in this and we're doing that jointly with them. When I often sit down in our joint QPRs, I joke about it with Mike and Andy and others, I sometimes forget, is that a VMware person speaking or an Amazon person because there's finishing each other's sentences. So there's a lot of that joint trust they've built and we just now have to keep showing that this is a solution that's innovating every three months because you're running on monthly and quarterly cycles and get large customers. I mean to us now, it's less so about the noise of getting everybody on stage. It's much more of a showing customer attraction. >>So I wonder if we could talk about one of the other big problems in the industry. Mikey talked about deep engineering and you guys are, you know, you're never done right, but you've solved that problem or solving that problem of making it easy for customers, VM-ware customers to run in the cloud. There's another big problem it could be concerned about customers is security and there seems to be somewhat of a dissonance. And I wonder if you could share with us maybe some of the thinking around this. So Steven Schmidt for instance, who is Amazon CSO says, Hey, the state of security in the cloud is, is great. And it is, it's, you know, you don't have a lot of technical debt coming in to the game. Pat Gelsinger is saying, Hey, you know, security, the state of security in my world is broken. So what's the conversation with you guys in terms of addressing that big concern on the minds of CEOs? And >>yeah, I'll start and they might feel free to add them. Thomas, I mean we've talked to Steve, we're like Steve, he's a very, he's a, he's an innovator and a thought leader in security. We're coming at it from a place that's complimentary to some of the point of views of, of Amazon. Um, and I shared this at our last VM world discussion. When we look at the, the, the control points of security where traditional security spent network, endpoint, identity, cloud and analytics, those are five, four control points where a lot of security is spent inside the $50 billion security market. We picked two that we're going to do really well. The network and endpoint NSX has been doing really well there. Now granted a bunch of that is on prem. It's replacing or complimenting Cisco, Palo Alto, checkpoint fire, a flash for a railroad bed, F five NetScaler spent. >>And now that business 13,000 customers in has become a 40, 50% of its security use cases. The network we just acquired, carbon black aide runs on the Amazon platform. It runs, uh, a next gen endpoint security. That's, you know, an evolution from the old world of Symantec, McAfee, you know, and there were only two vendors doing this at scale carbon black and CrowdStrike, we built, we built, we bought the better one. So when you put those together and collect a significant amount of telemetry from that, we think we could do something highly differentiated and security. So VMware, his goal and to the extent that Amazon or others are doing things in security that compliment our view of it, we'll build on it, right? Whether it's identity and access tools, whether it's load balancers, whether it's security, event management capabilities. >>Well we're in, we're integrating those two into the security in the cloud, which makes it seamless security, which is critical. >>Goal would be, listen, when we go and when we talked about this is what we're doing, security, we go to Mike and Andy and Steve and said, listen, this is our ambitions and security. We don't view Amazon as a competitor. And that's why he's very much complimented. They'll will be on the fringes. They have a load balancer. We now have a cloud. But that's okay. But that's the bigger part. If they were going off for endpoint security, as we be competitive there, if they were going up in network secure, but they're not. So I think when we share our intents, which we do very openly, we have open kimono sessions. He, this is where we are, this is where we're going. That's what we, and we go deep in that >>trust luck, but this is a historic partnership. This is not a partnership that I've seen anywhere in the industry in my 35 years. This is something that's at the next level and I think you'll look back, history will look back at this partnership and and recognize that its impact on cloud is going to be substantial. >>You hope you guys deserve a lot of credit and again, the critics were critical of the announcement. We were obviously favor, we saw the vision, but I think what surprised me most is that the spend numbers reflect is you guys clarified your cloud play with this move. The customers saluted it 100% they were on board and the numbers are showing it, but as Andy and you guys go to the next level, I got to get your thoughts on this trend of transformation. We have two means. We started in the cube this week. One was if you take the T out of cloud native, it's cloud naive. And the other one is what I said in my post about being reborn in the cloud. So you've got born in the cloud, startups and growth and enterprises were becoming reborn, okay? In the cloud, which means they're transforming. >>So as that trillions of dollars that are coming into the migration, you look at the numbers, there's only 20% of it spend in cloud. Roughly give or take. You're talking about trillions of dollars of new money. You guys are the commercial guys. Hey look, it's still day one for the cloud. It's still day one. I agree. You have a lot of people who might not make the migration, might die of starvation. Okay? As they move to the new model, you guys are out there have to take and you're going to go get that cash. What are you guys seeing? Cause this is a big trillions and trillions of dollars are on the table. You started Mike off. Well look. So, >>you know, uh, Sanjay talked about you see these customers and how enthusiastic they are about the opportunity here, right? And, and Freddie Mac's a great example of 100 million lines of code, and I've got to get out of three data centers in 24 months. Bam, they're out in 10, 10 months, 10 months, right? Um, 100 million lines of code over hundreds of, of applications done in 10 months. Now imagine the rest that the company can do now that they got that behind him, right? And that's what we're seeing is this partnership enables our customers to get a bunch done very economically, much faster, and now they can get onto the other things that they need to do. >>Yeah. And I'd build on that. Listen, you know, we track about a trillion dollars of it spend. And if you add up all of the cloud spend today, it's probably a, I mean, Amazon and Salesforce are probably the biggest in infrastructure and apps. It's probably 150 billion in total cloud spend, maybe 200 billion. So that's 15 to 20% of the total it spend, which is massive, but it's still as, as my points, that's early innings is that 20% it's probably going to become 50% at some point soon, right? If you look at the pace at which the cloud companies are growing, so the key question is, is going to go as 150 billion, the 1 trillion total number is going to grow, but probably a little bit faster and GDP most every 5% max, who's going to go grab that 150 Boone as it goes from 150 billion to 500 billion and the on premise spend slows down. >>Right? Um, I think that, you know, I think Amazon is very well positioned and from our perspective at VMware, we have a, you know, 10 $11 billion business. We're trying to tilt this increasingly more cloud. We announced our earnings call, 13% of it now is hybrid cloud and SAS, that 13% should become 2025 50. They are a pure cloud company. 100% of their businesses is cloud. We're in that transition. But why are we in that transition? Because we see that 150 billion of it spend likely becoming 500 billion. And if we don't get it somebody else's well hybrids, are we a tailwind for you guys? Because outpost is actually a statement that says hybrid at the edge. Now the data centers an edge, you've got edge. What is an edge? So cloud operations is now the standard and we, I mean, we actually coined the term hybrid six years ago and everyone could five, six years ago and everyone really laughed at us and now I think it's being validated. So it's, it's very gratifying now that Amazon has a similar vision to hybrid as us. Uh, we believe both the VMware cloud on Amazon outpost and BMR cloud running on outpost, we're very committed to that joint vision. >>Yeah. You're talking about the spending data and you know, VMware yet another revenue hit. I was pretty consistent in that and that standpoint. But if you look at the spending data, virtually every sort of traditional company with very few exceptions is you're seeing a share shift to the cloud. VMware is an exception. It didn't use to be that way a couple of years ago, but you're embracing the cloud really changed and became, you may cloud a tailwind right now to headwind. >>I think this partnership helped in that area and you put it right, right. Everything in life is either an opportunity or a threat. I think, and I've talked about it in your show before, cloud and containers were a significant threat. When I joined Amazon, sorry, when I was partners with Amazon, I joined VMware six years ago. I asked Pat and I said, listen, I think the threats to VMR, Amazon and Docker in 2013 now Docker is a whole different story. Kubernetes took their head out. Uh, but to our credit we joined credit, we partnered here and I think from our perspective, see, we at VMware aren't able to do a complete pivot like Adobe did to say burn the boats on, on premise and completely shift everything. SAS. Why? Because customers still want NSX on prem. Customers still want our HCI product on prem. People are still buying vSphere on prem. >>So we've got this more delicate balance of starting to shift and on-prem business. The aircraft carrier, you know at the time, 5,000,000,005, six years ago now, 11 billion to something that's a blend of on prem and cloud. While the cloud part grows a lot faster, that 13% of revenue we announced our earnings call is growing 40% yeah. So we can keep that growing foster and foster while the on-prem business is not decaying, it's still growing but not growing at the same pace, plus changing its end, make that transition a few years from now to being a lot more of a cloud company. >>The other thing you're seeing in the spending data, I wonder if you could comment is, you know, digital initiatives really started in earnest, let's say 2016 and people were doing a lot of experimentation. They were throwing everything for the new stuff against the wall. And what we're seeing now is they're narrowing the new and they were keeping the legacy stuff around because they were sort of running in parallel to hedge their bets. What we're seeing now is less experimentation in the new, and they're starting to unplug some of the older stuff. What they're not unplugging is cloud and they're hanging on to VMware and we're seeing, you know, spending levels revert to pre 2018 levels. I wonder what you guys are seeing at the macro. >>Well, the first thing I would say is I see experimentation continuing to accelerate, right? All of the new functionality that we bring out every day. Everybody's excuse, you're the sandbox for us. It's very invigorating because we love people to experiment and, uh, and we, you know, a lot of those experiments turned into amazing new startups as an example. And, or a bunch of those experiments turned into major new project projects in our, in our big, uh, enterprises. So we're continuing to see a real push towards experimentation and driving agility into the business. I don't know. Yeah, >>no, I, well, Mike, I'd agree. I mean, listen, we in some senses, uh, we have a very good strong, you know, on-premise business and when we see a really innovative company that's in the order of 33 35%, that's already 35 three 35 billion growing in the forties 30 to 40% I mean that's incredible. When we see companies like Salesforce and Adobe that are giant SAS companies approaching, you know, 10 1115 20 billion growing 2020 5% I think that infrastructure is a service and SAS business for us are trailblazers of where this cloud is headed now, these, the biggest companies in infrastructure and in SAS and we follow that. Now we have to then navigate to say, listen, the growth rates and the spending is going to be reflected by cloud spend that's heavily spending on there. And the way in which the on premise world is what spending, we have a bunch of hardware companies, we work very closely. >>We're watching how that spending is, is playing OD, whether it's Cisco, whether it's HP, whether it's Lenovo, Dell and others. And then of course we've got VM. We're sitting right in between and I think what we're trying to manage as you got a whole world of on-prem driven primarily by hardware companies. You've got a bunch of these cloud new companies, Amazon, Salesforce, Adobe, and we have a right in the middle saying, okay, listen, we want to be dragged by both while many of our customers still want some on prem. It's a delicate balance, but there's no, um, I mean we are very clear within VMware. We want to be led by a cloud first policy wherever we can. I'll give you an example. Workspace one, manage these devices. We want a company five years ago named AirWatch, why did we buy them versus somebody else? >>It was cloud. It was cloud-first that business now and use a computing has stilted itself to be primarily cloud-based, very subscription-based. It was on premise VDI at the time Mike was at the company six, seven years ago. It's become now completely cloud based on the back of a workspace one, you know, kind of thing. So that's how we're thinking about it. The new acquisitions we've done, whether it's carbon black, whether it's Velo club, it's CloudHealth. They're all cloud-based. Well, you guys made a good bet on cloud operations. That's the real shift. The cloud operation model is right in your wheelhouse. You guys have operators, VMware, you guys have cloud operations everywhere now edge with outpost. Congratulations. I want to say, Sanjay, it's been a great journey with you. You've been with the cube all 10 years. All seven years. We've been actually the 10 year anniversary. >>We've been documenting the history. Wow. The historic moments like you guys together writing AWS, really appreciate it. and of course that was good to see more action coming. Cloud 2.0 next gen. Cloud competition controversies. I mean what? You can't ask for a better movie here. John. Dave, I'm going to, we're going to bring mugs next time. Okay. We're going to have mugs.. I'm John for Dave a lot. They saw Jay Poon and Mike Clayville, the leaders, senior leaders of AWS and VMware out with their customers here on the queue. This is our AWS Intel set in the middle of the floor here at reinvent 2019 our seventh year. Thanks for watching more coverage day two of the queue. We'll be right back.

>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the queue from Las Vegas. We are live at AWS reinvent 19 Lisa Martin with John furrier. We've been having lots of great conversations. John, we're about to have another one cause we always love to talk about customer proof in the putting. Please welcome a couple of guests. We have Rafael, director of analytics and data management from triple a life. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Our pleasure. And from Burkle anchor Jane, the SVP of cloud platforms. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. So here we are in this, I can't see of people around us as, as growing exponential a by the hour here, but awkward. Let's start with you give her audience an understanding of Merkel, who you are and what you do. >>Yeah, absolutely. So Marco is a global performance marketing agency. We are part of a dental agent network and a, it's almost about 9,000 to 10,000 people worldwide. It's a global agency. What differentiates Merkel from rest of the other marketing agencies is our deep roots and data driven approach. We embrace technology. It's embedded in all our, all our solutions that we take to market. Um, and that's what we pride ourselves with. So, um, that's basically a high level pitch about Merkel. What differentiates us, my role, uh, I lead the cloud transformation for Merkel. Um, uh, basically think of my team as the think tanks who bring in the new technology, come up with a new way of rolling out solutions product I solutions, uh, disruptive solutions, which helps our clients and big fortune brands such as triple life insurance, uh, to transform their marketing ecosystem. >>So let's go ahead and dig. A lot of folks probably know AAA life, but, but Raphael, give us a little bit of an overview. This is a 50 year old organization. >>So we celebrate our 50th 50 year anniversary this year. Actually, we're founded in 1969. So everybody life insurance, we endeavor to be the provider of choice for a AAA member. Tell them to protect what matters most to them. And we offer a diverse set of insurance products across just about every channel. Um, and um, we engage with Merkel, uh, earlier, the, um, in 2018 actually to, to, uh, to build a nice solution that allows us to even better serve the needs of the members. Uh, my role, I am the, I lead our analytics and data management work. So helping us collect data and manage better and better leverage it to support the needs of members. >>So a trip, I can't even imagine the volumes of data that you're dealing with, but it's also, this is people's data, right? This is about insurance, life insurance, the volume of it. How have you, what were some of the things that you said? All right guys, we need to change how we're managing the data because we know there's probably a lot more business value, maybe new services that we can get our on it or eyes >>on it. >>So, so that was, that was it. So as an organization, uh, I want to underscore what you said. We make no compromises when it comes to the safety of our, of our members data. And we take every step possible to ensure that it is managed in a responsible and safe way. But we knew that on, on the platform that we had prior to this, we weren't, we weren't as italics. We wanted to be. We would find that threaten processes would take spans of weeks in order to operate or to run. And that just didn't allow us to provide the member experience that we wanted. So we built this new solution and this solution updates every day, right? There's no longer multi-week cycle times and tumbler processes happen in real time, which allows us to go to market with more accurate and more responsive programs to our members. >>Can you guys talk about the Amazon and AWS solution? How you guys using Amazon's at red shift? Can he says, you guys losing multiple databases, give us a peek into the Amazon services that you guys are taking advantage of that anchor. >>Yeah, please. Um, so basically when we were approached by AAA life to kind of come in and you know, present ourselves our credentials, one thing that differentiated there in that solution page was uh, bringing Amazon to the forefront because cloud, you know, one of the issue that Ravel and his team were facing were scalability aspect. You know, the performance was, was not up to the par, I believe you guys were um, on a two week cycle. That data was a definition every two weeks. And how can we turn that around and know can only be possible to, in our disruptive technologies that Amazon brings to the forefront. So what we built was basically it's a complete Amazon based cloud native architecture. Uh, we leveraged AWS with our chip as the data warehouse platform to integrate basically billions and billions of rows from a hundred plus sources that we are bringing in on a daily basis. >>In fact, actually some of the sources are the fresh on a real time basis. We are catching real time interactions of users on the website and then letting Kimberly the life make real time decisions on how we actually personalize their experience. So AWS, Redshift, you know, definitely the center's centerpiece. Then we are also leveraging a cloud native ELT technology extract load and transform technology called. It's a third party tool, but again, a very cloud native technology. So the whole solution leverage is Python to some extent. And then our veil can talk about AI and machine learning that how they are leveraging AWS ecosystem there. >>Yeah. So that was um, so, uh, I anchor said it right. One thing that differentiated Merkel was that cloud first approach, right? Uh, we looked at it what a, all of the analysts were saying. We went to all the key vendors in this space. We saw the, we saw the architecture is, and when Merkel walked in and presented that, um, that AWS architecture, it was great for me because if nausea immediately made sense, there was no wizardry around, I hope this database scales. I was confident that Redshift and Lambda and dynamo would this go to our use cases. So it became a lot more about are we solving the right business problem and less about do we have the right technologies. So in addition to what Ankur mentioned, we're leveraging our sort of living RNR studio, um, in AWS as well as top low frat for our machine learning models and for business intelligence. >>And more recently we've started transition from R to a Python as a practitioner on the keynote today. Slew a new thing, Sage maker studio, an IDE for machine learning framework. I mean this is like a common set. Like finally, I couldn't have been more excited right? That, that was my Superbowl moment. Um, I was, I was as I was, we were actually at dinner yesterday and I was mentioning Tonker, this is my wishlist, right? I want AWS to make a greater investment in that end user data scientists experience in auto ML and they knocked it out of the park. Everything they announced today, I was just, I was texting frat. Wow, this is amazing. I can't wait to go home. There's a lot of nuances to, and a lot of these announcements, auto ML for instance. Yeah. Really big deal the way they did it. >>And again, the ID who would've thought, I mean this is duh, why didn't we think about this sooner? Yeah. With auto ML that that focus on transparency. Right. And then I think about a year ago we went to market and we ended up not choosing any solutions because they hadn't solved for once you've got a model built, how do you effectively migrated from let's say an analyst who might not have the, the ML expertise to a data science team and the fact that AWS understood out of the gate that you need that transparent all for it. I'm really excited for that. What do you think the impacts are going to be more uptake on the data science side? What do you think the impact of this and the, so I think for, I think we're going to see, um, that a lot of our use cases are going to part a lot less effort to spin up. >>So we're going to see much more, much faster pilots. We're going to have a much clearer sense of is this worth it? Is this something we should continue to invest in and to me we should drive and I expect that a lot, much larger percentage of my team, the analysts are going to be involved in data and data science and machine learning. So I'm really excited about that. And also the ability to inquire, to integrate best practices into what we're doing out of the gate. Right? So software engineers figured out profiling, they figured out the bugging and these are things that machine learners are picking up. Now the fact that you're front and center is really excited. Superbowl moment. You can be like the new England Patriots, 17 straight AFC championship games. Boston. Gosh, I could resist. Uh, they're all Seattle. They're all Seattle here and Amazon. I don't even bring Seattle Patriots up here and Amazon, >>we are the ESPN of tech news that we have to get in as far as conversation. But I want to kind of talk a little bit, Raphael about the transformation because presumably in, in every industry, especially in insurance, there are so many born in the cloud companies that are a lot, they're a lot more agile and they are chasing what AAA life and your competitors and your peers are doing. What your S establishing with the help of anchor and Merkel, how does this allow you to actually take the data that you had, expand it, but also extract insights from maybe competitive advantages that you couldn't think about before? >>Yeah, so I think, uh, so as an organization, even though we're 50 years old, one of the things that drew me to the company and it's really exciting is it's unrelated to thrusting on its laurels, right? I think there's tremendous hunger and appetite within our executive group to better serve our members and to serve more members. And what this technology is allowed is the technology is not a limiting factor. It's an enabling factors. We're able to produce more models, more performant models, process more of IO data, build more features. Um, we've managed to do away with a lot of the, you know, if you take it and you look at it this way and squeeze it and maybe it'll work and systematize more aspects of our reporting and our campaign development and our model development and the observability, the visibility of just the ability to be agile and have our data be a partner to what we're trying to accomplish. That's been really great. >>You talked about the significant reduction in cycle times. If we go back up to the executive suite from a business differentiation perspective, is the senior leadership at AAA understanding what this cloud infrastructure is going to enable their business to achieve? >>Absolutely. So, so our successes here I think have been instrumental in encouraging our organization to continue to invest in cloud. And uh, we're an active, we're actively considering and discussing additional cloud initiatives, especially around the areas of machine learning and AI. >>And the auger question for you in terms of, of your expertise, in your experience as we look at how cloud is changing, John, you know, educate us on cloud cloud, Tuto, AI machine learning. What are, as, as these, as businesses, as industries have the opportunity to for next gen cloud, what are some of the next industries that you think are really prime to be completely transformed? >>Um, I'm in that are so many different business models. If you look around, one thing I would like to actually touch upon what we are seeing from Merkel standpoint is the digital transformation and how customers in today's world they are, you know, how brands are engaging with their customers and how customers are engaging with the brands. Especially that expectations customer is at the center stage here they are the ones who are driving the whole customer engagement journey, right? How all I am browsing a catalog of a particular brand on my cell phone and then I actually purchased right then and there and if I have an issue I can call them or I can go to social media and log a complaint. So that's whole multi channel, you know, aspect of this marketing ecosystem these days. I think cloud is the platform which is enabling that, right? >>This cannot happen without cloud. I'm going to look at, Raphael was just describing, you know, real time interaction, real time understanding the behavior of the customer in real time and engaging with them based on their need at that point of time. If you have technologies like Sage maker, if you have technologies like AWS Redship you have technologies like glue, Kinesis, which lets you bring in data from all these disparate sources and give you the ability to derive some insights from that data in that particular moment and then interact with the customer right then and there. That's exactly what we are talking about. And this can only happen through cloud so, so that's my 2 cents are where they are, what we from Merkel standpoint, we are looking into the market. That's what we are helping our brands through to >>client. I completely agree. I think that the change from capital and operation, right to no longer house to know these are all the sources and all the use cases and everything that needs to happen before you start the project and the ability to say, Hey, let's get going. Let's deliver value in the way that we've had and continue to have conversations and deliver new features, new stores, a new functionality, and at the same time, having AWS as a partner who's, who's building an incremental value. I think just last week I was really excited with the changes they've made to integrate Sage maker with their databases so you can score from the directly from the database. So it feels like all these things were coming together to allow us as a company to better off on push our aims and exciting time. >>It is exciting. Well guys, I wish we had more time, but we are out of time. Thank you Raphael and anchor for sharing with Merkel and AAA. Pleasure. All right. Take care. Or John furrier. I am Lisa Martin and you're watching the cube from Vegas re-invent 19 we'll be right back.

>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to the cube at Lisa Martin with Dave Volante. This is our first day of covering AWS reinvent 2019 Dave, we have a jam packed three days here. The seventh time the cube has been at reinvent the super Superbowl. Here it is. I, I co I stole that from you but you just send it back to me. It is like the super bowl here. We're very pleased to welcome a couple of guests from refitted refinished tips, first time on the cube as well as our guest. Please welcome Hannah. We've got Hannah Helen, Helen's, our VP of cloud propositions and James Turk, the head of architecture and cloud from refinish. Guys, welcome to the cube. You. Thank you for having us. So here we are in the expo hall with thousands and thousands of folks, but I'd love for you guys to start a Hannibal. Start with you. Tell our audience about refinish if you're a data company, but really what is it that you guys do? What do you deliver to the community? Absolutely >>what we are, as I said, we are a data company, so we serve the global financial community. So we're looking at banks, asset managers, hedge funds, corporations with financial and risk data. That's a very powerful combination in these clouds. Environmental or we say without data flower is empty. So that's where we come in. >>And what type of data are we talking about? You know data as from a thematic perspective it is. There's, we know when every company knows on some level there's tremendous value in the data. The challenge is being able to access it and unlock the value. Give us a slice of and capital markets for example. What are some of the types of data services that you provide to your customers? >>So we have all sorts of data. So we obviously source the data from lots of different sources where it's coming from, from exchanges or from the, from the market data sources. And then our customers use that to analyze the data and really running the back testing for, for those data facts. They also commingled our data with alternative data sets as well, as well as they own internal data. So it's all about that, that analytical layer that they can add on top of our day. >>Okay. And estate as a service essentially. Is that right? We do have some data as a service. We also deliver the data to the client. People are interested in accessing data in all sorts of different ways, including increasingly on the cloud. So talk more about your cloud offering, your, your cloud and your title. Cloud architecture. >> So one of the things that we're doing is we have a combination, we're an interesting company in that we both have our own pieces of cloud infrastructure for our own purposes, but also increasingly we need to build and deliver solutions for our customers to be asked to consume data in the cloud. So that means being able to work with them to put it into the cloud that they want it to be going into, to be able to work out how we can keep that data up to date and to do it in a cost effective manner for our clients to be able to get the most out of it. >> How do you deal with the problems >>of data quality? You're getting data from different sources. How do you take care of that? >>So anyways, that's, that's really all our core strength and expertise that we have. We have been doing that for years and years. So again, coming from it from defense sources, we normalize the data on our side, we clean it up. And then so for our customers in a you our own information model, and we have created this app Poona permanent and unique, identify a post per ID. So we map all the datasets so it's very easy for our customers to consume that and then also map it back to they own data and third party data sets. Where does the global security come into play? Because that's a topic and thing that we talk about at every event when you're talking about all these different external data sources, quality. But security is, I imagine fundamental. How do you help deliver that? Absolutely. Obviously from that, from the cloud perspective, that has been a big theme in the, in the public cloud environment and I think we are seeing more and more feedback from our customers that as it comes down to public cloud, I think they are very comfortable actually now with uh, with the privacy and security of, of public cloud. >>So that has been, I think, big change past couple of years. I haven't personally seen those sponsors anymore coming, coming from customers the way that we saw a couple of years ago. >>Oh, one of the interesting things that we're seeing is an increasing move is that our clients want to be able to mix their data with that data. And so increasingly you're seeing interesting solutions coming to market, which allowed them to keep their data where their data is held on their cloud or even on their own premises and mix that with our data. And so we're trying to bring together those solutions where a customer doesn't have to put all of our data with theirs but all of their data with us. But keep that segregation as you say, because that PII data and all of those sorts of things are much more important these days for us to be able to be able to show that is how the data is being segregated and that things are being kept apart in an appropriate way. >>Who's responsible for that? Is that you guys, is it the cloud provider? Is it on customers? So it's a shared responsibility model. Where does, where do you leave off and where does the customer pick up? What do you advise customers in terms of, Hey, here's what we're going to do for you and now you have to be responsible for X. What does that line? >>Well, I quite often defining that service boundary is something that we continue to work on. So historically we've delivered data to clients and so we've had lines going into a client. It's a, um, premises. And then there's an obvious point at the end of that where this was us and that's you. As we get more into the cloud space, we have to define much more clearly what that service boundary is. So again, as we're developing out some of our cloud propositions, that's a key thing that we're working through as to what is it that the client wants to control and what is it that we need to control. >>It's very true, Hannah, I mean 10 years ago you talk to financial services companies and he said, we will never be in the cloud and now they're much more comfortable. Now you guys do this cloud survey each year. W w what are you seeing? I'll share some of our data. I wonder if it matches what, what do you, what are the big trends? >>Sure. Yeah. So we are doing this, it's almost becoming tradition for us to do this quota. They are on a yearly basis. So it's quite interesting to kind of compare the previous service and where we are today. So what we have found out on the survey this year is that the IOT, uh, investment is very much going to public cloud. So I think when we started the cloud survey a couple of years ago, we saw that about 32% of the ID investment went to public cloud. But then for next year that is increasing almost to two 50% so obviously public cloud is definitely here to stay. I think another, another key trend that we saw from the surveys that I think the testing that the companies have been doing, like they are learning more and more and they are really seeing the benefit from Papa now and I will highlight that especially our hedge fund customers, they were highlighting a face or so of course benefits with that, with the cloud. >>So about 92% so that actually when they moved to the cloud and do the project in the cloud environment, it really saves money for them, which is quite interesting. Payers also then at the same time to work many of the customer discussions. Like it can be also a challenge for, especially for large organizations as they move to the cloud environment, that how do you kind of manage that a traditional technology stack and when you move to the public cloud. So it's kind of two sided way there, but I think the general consensus as it comes down to out survey was that many of the organizations, they really saw that big transition that organizations are going for one that it can be very, very big impact for they own own business. So very, very positive message on that part. >>Let's dig into that a little bit more from a transition or we'll use Andy, Jesse's or a transformation. James, I'd love to get your perspective on what has changed in the last few years to see the numbers that Helen talked about. Um, really Hannah, excuse me, going up so significantly as we know that, you know, cloud one compute and storage and um, networking and maybe some data services. But what do you think has fundamentally changed across industries such that public cloud now is much more strategic? >>I think for a lot of firms and particularly in financial services, we spend a lot of time looking at analytics and being able to run those large analytical jobs and be able to scale them. I think that as people have become more comfortable about the data that they can put into the cloud and being able to get access to more data through companies like definitive, being able to run those machine learning jobs. And it was really interesting to see the keynote this morning to see Amazon really putting a lot of effort into democratizing the use of machine learning through Sage maker thought it was very exciting. Um, we think that that is going to be an increasing thing. So as you see in financial services, people are looking for those large workloads. They have really large data sets and so the only way that they can do that and it kind of realistic manner is being able to use public cloud. And then you see them taking a lot of the old traditional systems. And as we're seeing the risk appetite to be able to get onto cloud becoming more, they're going through the same of transformation, which we see many firms having gone through. You know, the developers are insisting that they're getting the best tools so that it can be, have the agility to deliver what their clients want. And again, one of the best ways of doing that is moving onto a public cloud infrastructure that really delivers those tools to >>what are, if you could talk about what you're seeing in terms of adoption of new tech. So I said we share some of our data at the macro, you know, spending slowing down, it's, it's reverting to pre 2018 levels. It's not falling off a cliff, but, but when you look at the spending data from ETR and others, it's slowing down. Financial services is a bellwether. You're seeing less experimentation and sort of more narrowing of their bets to the placing bets on things that they know are going to work. They've been experimenting with digital transformation for the last couple of years and now they're saying, Hey, we're now going to double down on the things that work. We're going to unplug the things, the legacy stuff so we can get rid of some of our technical debt. What are you seeing in terms of the trends of technology adoption for particularly for emerging tech within Fs? >>Yeah, and I think you've touched on this briefly, but I think what we are seeing is that the, when the, when we started co did the discussions with our customers, they all started with the kind of the backend technology I take on rotation at that time. But I in that trend as you say as well, so it's moving very much to the end users and end users. For example, data scientists speaking the analytical tools if they want to go into them. And I think that's a, that's a very big trend that we are seeing. So again, AI, ML analytics in general that you can add on top of the cloud environment and on top of the data, that will be the big thing happening. >>One of the things that Andy Jassy said this morning, James is in sort of these four kind of essentials for transformation to happen and he said the first one is you've got to get senior executive alignment and the second thing he said is has to be this, and I use the word aggressive, aggressive, top down approach. What are some of the changes that you're seeing with respect to, you know, where it comes to maybe what, what, what you said, Hannah, about the emerging technologies and the end users really in the data scientists needing to be able to get their hands wet with all this, but what are you seeing in terms of organizations that you work with? Where is that senior leadership really getting onboard where public cloud is a strategy that is driven top-down? >>Absolutely. I mean increasingly you're seeing that happen is that it really is going to be the top down strategy. There are a number of very large capital markets firms who have come out and said that they're going to adopt varying cloud providers. And increasingly that's because the level of trust has gone up and the level of maturity of the cloud providers. There's also increased. So a few years ago you would speak to the cloud providers and they really wouldn't understand the need to engage with the regulators. Now companies have large teams of people who go out and engage with the regulators and they will partner with the financial institutions to make sure that we're getting the right sort of level of engagement and the right level of permission to do these things. So that means that the senior management are there. And I think that also the senior management, you know, finally are starting to see some of the benefits flow through in terms of a combination of the agility, the different sort of cost controls and the elasticity. >>And if you think about some of the nature of the workloads that financial institution run, you've got a lot of this overnight processing, which still goes on for creating risk reports and all those sorts of things really well suited for elasticity. And in the last few years you've seen trust this massive increase in the regulatory requirement for those things. And certainly the institutions that I've worked with, you end up in a situation where you're saying, well, in order to be able to accommodate just working out what I need to do there, I'd need to build three different data centers clean. Nobody is doing that anymore. You're going to go out, you're going to partner with your cloud provider and they're going to provide you with that capability. That may not be something that you need in the longterm, but it'll be something that will help you work out what it is that you do need. And then you can turn that into a normal world. >>So AWS, AWS obviously is a cloud provider for you. There may be others as well, but you saw some of the announcements today. You mentioned some of the machine learning and AI stuff, Sage maker, you also saw a lot of activity around the data store, you know red shift and separating computer storage. Is that something that you care about is that your customers have to worry about that? Sometimes they ask you for the solution. >>We super care about this. In fact, one of the big things that we're looking at at the moment, and I was really interested in the announcements today, but exactly that is how do we get our data into people's data lakes? As I said, how do we do that in a way where we're making sure that the commitments that we have on digital rights management are being honored and how do we work with cloud providers like Amazon about how we do that. So we have very strong relationships with Amazon. We have very strong relationships with other providers as well. And so we are trying hard to work out what the best solution is because to be honest with you, we have to deliver where our clients want the data to be. So we're working with lots of different providers on this, but these are all really interesting times and this focus on the data and how you get the data into people's data lakes is really interesting to us and something where we're pushing very hard. >>Yeah. And then, and then how you act on it. It's a whole new layer of compute being driven and new workloads that are emerging as a result of that data. It's not just throw it in the data Lake anymore. It's I have to extract insights. Absolutely. Yeah. >>Talk to us about how on that front, how are you helping him? We'll start with you. How are you helping customers, maybe a large enterprise legacy organization actually start to use data for competitive advantage in business differentiation, especially where the enterprise is concerned, where they most likely have competitors that are born in the cloud, that have the agility and the speed and the appetite to take risks. How are you helping customers unlock this data and go, wow, this is a huge advantage in our business. Absolutely. So obviously as, as I said earlier though, because we are a data company, so our customers know know us from that perspective. So they come to us for, for both financial and risk data. That's kind of one >>go to place to get everything. And then we are obviously working very closely with our customers to also offer them new additional datasets. So things like alternative data obviously being one that you again want to go mingle your own data with a third party data with alternative data sets as well. So we, for example, formed a partnership with a company called Patal Finn earlier this year, which has this very nice technology to onboard different alternative data sets. And then we are onboarding those data sets for our customers. Again, combining that with our overall information model. But it's really, again, coming back to that flexible a question that we want to make sure that all our days are, can be served in the environment where our customers are. So whether they are in public cloud, private cloud, where they have their own prem solution, stale, obviously with, especially with a larger institution, they still have those, uh, as well as we, we hosting the offering for them as well as, or it's all about the flexibility that we will be offering. Excellent. >>Well, Hannah, James, thank you for joining David Mead, sharing with our audience who were fitted. It is what you do and really kind of this importance of data as we're in this new NextGen of cloud. We appreciate your time. Thank you so much for day. Volante I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the queue from day one of our coverage of AWS reinvent 19. Thanks for watching.