(upbeat music) >> Morning guys and girls, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Women in Data Science WIDS 2023 live at Stanford University. Lisa Martin here with my co-host for this segment, Tracy Zhang. We're really excited to be talking with a great female rockstar. You're going to learn a lot from her next, Jacqueline Kuo, solutions engineer at Dataiku. Welcome, Jacqueline. Great to have you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank for being here. >> I'm so excited to be here. >> So one of the things I have to start out with, 'cause my mom Kathy Dahlia is watching, she's a New Yorker. You are a born and raised New Yorker and I learned from my mom and others. If you're born in New York no matter how long you've moved away, you are a New Yorker. There's you guys have like a secret club. (group laughs) >> I am definitely very proud of being born and raised in New York. My family immigrated to New York, New Jersey from Taiwan. So very proud Taiwanese American as well. But I absolutely love New York and I can't imagine living anywhere else. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I love it. >> So you studied, I was doing some research on you you studied mechanical engineering at MIT. >> Yes. >> That's huge. And you discovered your passion for all things data-related. You worked at IBM as an analytics consultant. Talk to us a little bit about your career path. Were you always interested in engineering STEM-related subjects from the time you were a child? >> I feel like my interests were ranging in many different things and I ended up landing in engineering, 'cause I felt like I wanted to gain a toolkit like a toolset to make some sort of change with or use my career to make some sort of change in this world. And I landed on engineering and mechanical engineering specifically, because I felt like I got to, in my undergrad do a lot of hands-on projects, learn every part of the engineering and design process to build products which is super-transferable and transferable skills sort of is like the trend in my career so far. Where after undergrad I wanted to move back to New York and mechanical engineering jobs are kind of few and fall far in between in the city. And I ended up landing at IBM doing analytics consulting, because I wanted to understand how to use data. I knew that data was really powerful and I knew that working with it could allow me to tell better stories to influence people across different industries. And that's also how I kind of landed at Dataiku to my current role, because it really does allow me to work across different industries and work on different problems that are just interesting. >> Yeah, I like the way that, how you mentioned building a toolkit when doing your studies at school. Do you think a lot of skills are still very relevant to your job at Dataiku right now? >> I think that at the core of it is just problem solving and asking questions and continuing to be curious or trying to challenge what is is currently given to you. And I think in an engineering degree you get a lot of that. >> Yeah, I'm sure. >> But I think that we've actually seen that a lot in the panels today already, that you get that through all different types of work and research and that kind of thoughtfulness comes across in all different industries too. >> Talk a little bit about some of the challenges, that data science is solving, because every company these days, whether it's an enterprise in manufacturing or a small business in retail, everybody has to be data-driven, because the end user, the end customer, whoever that is whether it's a person, an individual, a company, a B2B, expects to have a personalized custom experience and that comes from data. But you have to be able to understand that data treated properly, responsibly. Talk about some of the interesting projects that you're doing at Dataiku or maybe some that you've done in the past that are really kind of transformative across things climate change or police violence, some of the things that data science really is impacting these days. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think that what I love about coming to these conferences is that you hear about those really impactful social impact projects that I think everybody who's in data science wants to be working on. And I think at Dataiku what's great is that we do have this program called Ikig.AI where we work with nonprofits and we support them in their data and analytics projects. And so, a project I worked on was with the Clean Water, oh my goodness, the Ocean Cleanup project, Ocean Cleanup organization, which was amazing, because it was sort of outside of my day-to-day and it allowed me to work with them and help them understand better where plastic is being aggregated across the world and where it appears, whether that's on beaches or in lakes and rivers. So using data to help them better understand that. I feel like from a day-to-day though, we, in terms of our customers, they're really looking at very basic problems with data. And I say basic, not to diminish it, but really just to kind of say that it's high impact, but basic problems around how do they forecast sales better? That's a really kind of, sort of basic problem, but it's actually super-complex and really impactful for people, for companies when it comes to forecasting how much headcount they need to have in the next year or how much inventory to have if they're retail. And all of those are going to, especially for smaller companies, make a huge impact on whether they make profit or not. And so, what's great about working at Dataiku is you get to work on these high-impact projects and oftentimes I think from my perspective, I work as a solutions engineer on the commercial team. So it's just, we work generally with smaller customers and sometimes talking to them, me talking to them is like their first introduction to what data science is and what they can do with that data. And sort of using our platform to show them what the possibilities are and help them build a strategy around how they can implement data in their day-to-day. >> What's the difference? You were a data scientist by title and function, now you're a solutions engineer. Talk about the ascendancy into that and also some of the things that you and Tracy will talk about as those transferable, those transportable skills that probably maybe you learned in engineering, you brought data science now you're bringing to solutions engineering. >> Yeah, absolutely. So data science, I love working with data. I love getting in the weeds of things and I love, oftentimes that means debugging things or looking line by line at your code and trying to make it better. I found that on in the data science role, while those things I really loved, sometimes it also meant that I didn't, couldn't see or didn't have visibility into the broader picture of well like, well why are we doing this project? And who is it impacting? And because oftentimes your day-to-day is very much in the weeds. And so, I moved into sales or solutions engineering at Dataiku to get that perspective, because what a sales engineer does is support the sale from a technical perspective. And so, you really truly understand well, what is the customer looking for and what is going to influence them to make a purchase? And how do you tell the story of the impact of data? Because oftentimes they need to quantify well, if I purchase a software like Dataiku then I'm able to build this project and make this X impact on the business. And that is really powerful. That's where the storytelling comes in and that I feel like a lot of what we've been hearing today about connecting data with people who can actually do something with that data. That's really the bridge that we as sales engineers are trying to connect in that sales process. >> It's all about connectivity, isn't it? >> Yeah, definitely. We were talking about this earlier that it's about making impact and it's about people who we are analyzing data is like influencing. And I saw that one of the keywords or one of the biggest thing at Dataiku is everyday AI, so I wanted to just ask, could you please talk more about how does that weave into the problem solving and then day-to-day making an impact process? >> Yes, so I started working on Dataiku around three years ago and I fell in love with the product itself. The product that we have is we allow for people with different backgrounds. If you're coming from a data analyst background, data science, data engineering, maybe you are more of like a business subject matter expert, to all work in one unified central platform, one user interface. And why that's powerful is that when you're working with data, it's not just that data scientist working on their own and their own computer coding. We've heard today that it's all about connecting the data scientists with those business people, with maybe the data engineers and IT people who are actually going to put that model into production or other folks. And so, they all use different languages. Data scientists might use Python and R, your business people are using PowerPoint and Excel, everyone's using different tools. How do we bring them all in one place so that you can have conversations faster? So the business people can understand exactly what you're building with the data and can get their hands on that data and that model prediction faster. So that's what Dataiku does. That's the product that we have. And I completely forgot your question, 'cause I got so invested in talking about this. Oh, everyday AI. Yeah, so the goal of of Dataiku is really to allow for those maybe less technical people with less traditional data science backgrounds. Maybe they're data experts and they understand the data really well and they've been working in SQL for all their career. Maybe they're just subject matter experts and want to get more into working with data. We allow those people to do that through our no and low-code tools within our platform. Platform is very visual as well. And so, I've seen a lot of people learn data science, learn machine learning by working in the tool itself. And that's sort of, that's where everyday AI comes in, 'cause we truly believe that there are a lot of, there's a lot of unutilized expertise out there that we can bring in. And if we did give them access to data, imagine what we could do in the kind of work that they can do and become empowered basically with that. >> Yeah, we're just scratching the surface. I find data science so fascinating, especially when you talk about some of the real world applications, police violence, health inequities, climate change. Here we are in California and I don't know if you know, we're experiencing an atmospheric river again tomorrow. Californians and the rain- >> Storm is coming. >> We are not good... And I'm a native Californian, but we all know about climate change. People probably don't associate all of the data that is helping us understand it, make decisions based on what's coming what's happened in the past. I just find that so fascinating. But I really think we're truly at the beginning of really understanding the impact that being data-driven can actually mean whether you are investigating climate change or police violence or health inequities or your a grocery store that needs to become data-driven, because your consumer is expecting a personalized relevant experience. I want you to offer me up things that I know I was doing online grocery shopping, yesterday, I just got back from Europe and I was so thankful that my grocer is data-driven, because they made the process so easy for me. And but we have that expectation as consumers that it's going to be that easy, it's going to be that personalized. And what a lot of folks don't understand is the data the democratization of data, the AI that's helping make that a possibility that makes our lives easier. >> Yeah, I love that point around data is everywhere and the more we have, the actually the more access we actually are providing. 'cause now compute is cheaper, data is literally everywhere, you can get access to it very easily. And so, I feel like more people are just getting themselves involved and that's, I mean this whole conference around just bringing more women into this industry and more people with different backgrounds from minority groups so that we get their thoughts, their opinions into the work is so important and it's becoming a lot easier with all of the technology and tools just being open source being easier to access, being cheaper. And that I feel really hopeful about in this field. >> That's good. Hope is good, isn't it? >> Yes, that's all we need. But yeah, I'm glad to see that we're working towards that direction. I'm excited to see what lies in the future. >> We've been talking about numbers of women, percentages of women in technical roles for years and we've seen it hover around 25%. I was looking at some, I need to AnitaB.org stats from 2022 was just looking at this yesterday and the numbers are going up. I think the number was 26, 27.6% of women in technical roles. So we're seeing a growth there especially over pre-pandemic levels. Definitely the biggest challenge that still seems to be one of the biggest that remains is attrition. I would love to get your advice on what would you tell your younger self or the previous prior generation in terms of having the confidence and the courage to pursue engineering, pursue data science, pursue a technical role, and also stay in that role so you can be one of those females on stage that we saw today? >> Yeah, that's the goal right there one day. I think it's really about finding other people to lift and mentor and support you. And I talked to a bunch of people today who just found this conference through Googling it, and the fact that organizations like this exist really do help, because those are the people who are going to understand the struggles you're going through as a woman in this industry, which can get tough, but it gets easier when you have a community to share that with and to support you. And I do want to definitely give a plug to the WIDS@Dataiku team. >> Talk to us about that. >> Yeah, I was so fortunate to be a WIDS ambassador last year and again this year with Dataiku and I was here last year as well with Dataiku, but we have grown the WIDS effort so much over the last few years. So the first year we had two events in New York and also in London. Our Dataiku's global. So this year we additionally have one in the west coast out here in SF and another one in Singapore which is incredible to involve that team. But what I love is that everyone is really passionate about just getting more women involved in this industry. But then also what I find fortunate too at Dataiku is that we have a strong female, just a lot of women. >> Good. >> Yeah. >> A lot of women working as data scientists, solutions engineer and sales and all across the company who even if they aren't doing data work in a day-to-day, they are super-involved and excited to get more women in the technical field. And so. that's like our Empower group internally that hosts events and I feel like it's a really nice safe space for all of us to speak about challenges that we encounter and feel like we're not alone in that we have a support system to make it better. So I think from a nutrition standpoint every organization should have a female ERG to just support one another. >> Absolutely. There's so much value in a network in the community. I was talking to somebody who I'm blanking on this may have been in Barcelona last week, talking about a stat that showed that a really high percentage, 78% of people couldn't identify a female role model in technology. Of course, Sheryl Sandberg's been one of our role models and I thought a lot of people know Sheryl who's leaving or has left. And then a whole, YouTube influencers that have no idea that the CEO of YouTube for years has been a woman, who has- >> And she came last year to speak at WIDS. >> Did she? >> Yeah. >> Oh, I missed that. It must have been, we were probably filming. But we need more, we need to be, and it sounds like Dataiku was doing a great job of this. Tracy, we've talked about this earlier today. We need to see what we can be. And it sounds like Dataiku was pioneering that with that ERG program that you talked about. And I completely agree with you. That should be a standard program everywhere and women should feel empowered to raise their hand ask a question, or really embrace, "I'm interested in engineering, I'm interested in data science." Then maybe there's not a lot of women in classes. That's okay. Be the pioneer, be that next Sheryl Sandberg or the CTO of ChatGPT, Mira Murati, who's a female. We need more people that we can see and lean into that and embrace it. I think you're going to be one of them. >> I think so too. Just so that young girls like me like other who's so in school, can see, can look up to you and be like, "She's my role model and I want to be like her. And I know that there's someone to listen to me and to support me if I have any questions in this field." So yeah. >> Yeah, I mean that's how I feel about literally everyone that I'm surrounded by here. I find that you find role models and people to look up to in every conversation whenever I'm speaking with another woman in tech, because there's a journey that has had happen for you to get to that place. So it's incredible, this community. >> It is incredible. WIDS is a movement we're so proud of at theCUBE to have been a part of it since the very beginning, since 2015, I've been covering it since 2017. It's always one of my favorite events. It's so inspiring and it just goes to show the power that data can have, the influence, but also just that we're at the beginning of uncovering so much. Jacqueline's been such a pleasure having you on theCUBE. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> For sharing your story, sharing with us what Dataiku was doing and keep going. More power to you girl. We're going to see you up on that stage one of these years. >> Thank you so much. Thank you guys. >> Our pleasure. >> Our pleasure. >> For our guests and Tracy Zhang, this is Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live at WIDS '23. #EmbraceEquity is this year's International Women's Day theme. Stick around, our next guest joins us in just a minute. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to our Cube special programming on "Securing Compute, Engineered for the Hybrid World." We got Cole Humphreys who's with HPE, global server security product manager, and Mike Ferron-Jones with Intel. He's the product manager for data security technology. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on this special presentation. >> All right, thanks for having us. >> So, securing compute, I mean, compute, everyone wants more compute. You can't have enough compute as far as we're concerned. You know, more bits are flying around the internet. Hardware's mattering more than ever. Performance markets hot right now for next-gen solutions. When you're talking about security, it's at the center of every single conversation. And Gen11 for the HPE has been big-time focus here. So let's get into the story. What's the market for Gen11, Cole, on the security piece? What's going on? How do you see this impacting the marketplace? >> Hey, you know, thanks. I think this is, again, just a moment in time where we're all working towards solving a problem that doesn't stop. You know, because we are looking at data protection. You know, in compute, you're looking out there, there's international impacts, there's federal impacts, there's state-level impacts, and even regulation to protect the data. So, you know, how do we do this stuff in an environment that keeps changing? >> And on the Intel side, you guys are a Tier 1 combination partner, Better Together. HPE has a deep bench on security, Intel, We know what your history is. You guys have a real root of trust with your code, down to the silicon level, continuing to be, and you're on the 4th Gen Xeon here. Mike, take us through the Intel's relationship with HPE. Super important. You guys have been working together for many, many years. Data security, chips, HPE, Gen11. Take us through the relationship. What's the update? >> Yeah, thanks and I mean, HPE and Intel have been partners in delivering technology and delivering security for decades. And when a customer invests in an HPE server, like at one of the new Gen11s, they're getting the benefit of the combined investment that these two great companies are putting into product security. On the Intel side, for example, we invest heavily in the way that we develop our products for security from the ground up, and also continue to support them once they're in the market. You know, launching a product isn't the end of our security investment. You know, our Intel Red Teams continue to hammer on Intel products looking for any kind of security vulnerability for a platform that's in the field. As well as we invest heavily in the external research community through our bug bounty programs to harness the entire creativity of the security community to find those vulnerabilities, because that allows us to patch them and make sure our customers are staying safe throughout that platform's deployed lifecycle. You know, in 2021, between Intel's internal red teams and our investments in external research, we found 93% of our own vulnerabilities. Only a small percentage were found by unaffiliated external entities. >> Cole, HPE has a great track record and long history serving customers around security, actually, with the solutions you guys had. With Gen11, it's more important than ever. Can you share your thoughts on the talent gap out there? People want to move faster, breaches are happening at a higher velocity. They need more protection now than ever before. Can you share your thoughts on why these breaches are happening, and what you guys are doing, and how you guys see this happening from a customer standpoint? What you guys fill in with Gen11 with solution? >> You bet, you know, because when you hear about the relentless pursuit of innovation from our partners, and we in our engineering organizations in India, and Taiwan, and the Americas all collaborating together years in advance, are about delivering solutions that help protect our customer's environments. But what you hear Mike talking about is it's also about keeping 'em safe. Because you look to the market, right? What you see in, at least from our data from 2021, we have that breaches are still happening, and lot of it has to do with the fact that there is just a lack of adequate security staff with the necessary skills to protect the customer's application and ultimately the workloads. And then that's how these breaches are happening. Because ultimately you need to see some sort of control and visibility of what's going on out there. And what we were talking about earlier is you see time. Time to seeing some incident happen, the blast radius can be tremendous in today's technical, advanced world. And so you have to identify it and then correct it quickly, and that's why this continued innovation and partnership is so important, to help work together to keep up. >> You guys have had a great track record with Intel-based platforms with HPE. Gen11's a really big part of the story. Where do you see that impacting customers? Can you explain the benefits of what's going on with Gen11? What's the key story? What's the most important thing we should be paying attention to here? >> I think there's probably three areas as we look into this generation. And again, this is a point in time, we will continue to evolve. But at this particular point it's about, you know, a fundamental approach to our security enablement, right? Partnering as a Tier 1 OEM with one of the best in the industry, right? We can deliver systems that help protect some of the most critical infrastructure on earth, right? I know of some things that are required to have a non-disclosure because it is some of the most important jobs that you would see out there. And working together with Intel to protect those specific compute workloads, that's a serious deal that protects not only state, and local, and federal interests, but, really, a global one. >> This is a really- >> And then there's another one- Oh sorry. >> No, go ahead. Finish your thought. >> And then there's another one that I would call our uncompromising focus. We work in the industry, we lead and partner with those in the, I would say, in the good side. And we want to focus on enablement through a specific capability set, let's call it our global operations, and that ability to protect our supply chain and deliver infrastructure that can be trusted and into an operating environment. You put all those together and you see very significant and meaningful solutions together. >> The operating benefits are significant. I just want to go back to something you just said before about the joint NDAs and kind of the relationship you kind of unpacked, that to me, you know, I heard you guys say from sand to server, I love that phrase, because, you know, silicone into the server. But this is a combination you guys have with HPE and Intel supply-chain security. I mean, it's not just like you're getting chips and sticking them into a machine. This is, like, there's an in-depth relationship on the supply chain that has a very intricate piece to it. Can you guys just double down on that and share that, how that works and why it's important? >> Sure, so why don't I go ahead and start on that one. So, you know, as you mentioned the, you know, the supply chain that ultimately results in an end user pulling, you know, a new Gen11 HPE server out of the box, you know, started, you know, way, way back in it. And we've been, you know, Intel, from our part are, you know, invest heavily in making sure that all of our entire supply chain to deliver all of the Intel components that are inside that HPE platform have been protected and monitored ever since, you know, their inception at one of any of our 14,000, you know, Intel vendors that we monitor as part of our supply-chain assurance program. I mean we, you know, Intel, you know, invests heavily in compliance with guidelines from places like NIST and ISO, as well as, you know, doing best practices under things like the Transported Asset Protection Alliance, TAPA. You know, we have been intensely invested in making sure that when a customer gets an Intel processor, or any other Intel silicone product, that it has not been tampered with or altered during its trip through the supply chain. HPE then is able to pick up that, those components that we deliver, and add onto that their own supply-chain assurance when it comes down to delivering, you know, the final product to the customer. >> Cole, do you want to- >> That's exactly right. Yeah, I feel like that integration point is a really good segue into why we're talking today, right? Because that then comes into a global operations network that is pulling together these servers and able to deploy 'em all over the world. And as part of the Gen11 launch, we have security services that allow 'em to be hardened from our factories to that next stage into that trusted partner ecosystem for system integration, or directly to customers, right? So that ability to have that chain of trust. And it's not only about attestation and knowing what, you know, came from whom, because, obviously, you want to trust and make sure you're get getting the parts from Intel to build your technical solutions. But it's also about some of the provisioning we're doing in our global operations where we're putting cryptographic identities and manifests of the server and its components and moving it through that supply chain. So you talked about this common challenge we have of assuring no tampering of that device through the supply chain, and that's why this partnering is so important. We deliver secure solutions, we move them, you're able to see and control that information to verify they've not been tampered with, and you move on to your next stage of this very complicated and necessary chain of trust to build, you know, what some people are calling zero-trust type ecosystems. >> Yeah, it's interesting. You know, a lot goes on under the covers. That's good though, right? You want to have greater security and platform integrity, if you can abstract the way the complexity, that's key. Now one of the things I like about this conversation is that you mentioned this idea of a hardware-root-of-trust set of technologies. Can you guys just quickly touch on that, because that's one of the major benefits we see from this combination of the partnership, is that it's not just one, each party doing something, it's the combination. But this notion of hardware-root-of-trust technologies, what is that? >> Yeah, well let me, why don't I go ahead and start on that, and then, you know, Cole can take it from there. Because we provide some of the foundational technologies that underlie a root of trust. Now the idea behind a root of trust, of course, is that you want your platform to, you know, from the moment that first electron hits it from the power supply, that it has a chain of trust that all of the software, firmware, BIOS is loading, to bring that platform up into an operational state is trusted. If you have a breach in one of those lower-level code bases, like in the BIOS or in the system firmware, that can be a huge problem. It can undermine every other software-based security protection that you may have implemented up the stack. So, you know, Intel and HPE work together to coordinate our trusted boot and root-of-trust technologies to make sure that when a customer, you know, boots that platform up, it boots up into a known good state so that it is ready for the customer's workload. So on the Intel side, we've got technologies like our trusted execution technology, or Intel Boot Guard, that then feed into the HPE iLO system to help, you know, create that chain of trust that's rooted in silicon to be able to deliver that known good state to the customer so it's ready for workloads. >> All right, Cole, I got to ask you, with Gen11 HPE platforms that has 4th Gen Intel Xeon, what are the customers really getting? >> So, you know, what a great setup. I'm smiling because it's, like, it has a good answer, because one, this, you know, to be clear, this isn't the first time we've worked on this root-of-trust problem. You know, we have a construct that we call the HPE Silicon Root of Trust. You know, there are, it's an industry standard construct, it's not a proprietary solution to HPE, but it does follow some differentiated steps that we like to say make a little difference in how it's best implemented. And where you see that is that tight, you know, Intel Trusted Execution exchange. The Intel Trusted Execution exchange is a very important step to assuring that route of trust in that HPE Silicon Root of Trust construct, right? So they're not different things, right? We just have an umbrella that we pull under our ProLiant, because there's ILO, our BIOS team, CPLDs, firmware, but I'll tell you this, Gen11, you know, while all that, keeping that moving forward would be good enough, we are not holding to that. We are moving forward. Our uncompromising focus, we want to drive more visibility into that Gen11 server, specifically into the PCIE lanes. And now you're going to be able to see, and measure, and make policies to have control and visibility of the PCI devices, like storage controllers, NICs, direct connect, NVME drives, et cetera. You know, if you follow the trends of where the industry would like to go, all the components in a server would be able to be seen and attested for full infrastructure integrity, right? So, but this is a meaningful step forward between not only the greatness we do together, but, I would say, a little uncompromising focus on this problem and doing a little bit more to make Gen11 Intel's server just a little better for the challenges of the future. >> Yeah, the Tier 1 partnership is really kind of highlighted there. Great, great point. I got to ask you, Mike, on the 4th Gen Xeon Scalable capabilities, what does it do for the customer with Gen11 now that they have these breaches? Does it eliminate stuff? What's in it for the customer? What are some of the new things coming out with the Xeon? You're at Gen4, Gen11 for HP, but you guys have new stuff. What does it do for the customer? Does it help eliminate breaches? Are there things that are inherent in the product that HP is jointly working with you on or you were contributing in to the relationship that we should know about? What's new? >> Yeah, well there's so much great new stuff in our new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processor. This is the one that was codenamed Sapphire Rapids. I mean, you know, more cores, more performance, AI acceleration, crypto acceleration, it's all in there. But one of my favorite security features, and it is one that's called Intel Control-Flow Enforcement Technology, or Intel CET. And why I like CET is because I find the attack that it is designed to mitigate is just evil genius. This type of attack, which is called a return, a jump, or a call-oriented programming attack, is designed to not bring a whole bunch of new identifiable malware into the system, you know, which could be picked up by security software. What it is designed to do is to look for little bits of existing, little bits of existing code already on the server. So if you're running, say, a web server, it's looking for little bits of that web-server code that it can then execute in a particular order to achieve a malicious outcome, something like open a command prompt, or escalate its privileges. Now in order to get those little code bits to execute in an order, it has a control mechanism. And there are different, each of the different types of attacks uses a different control mechanism. But what CET does is it gets in there and it disrupts those control mechanisms, uses hardware to prevent those particular techniques from being able to dig in and take effect. So CET can, you know, disrupt it and make sure that software behaves safely and as the programmer intended, rather than picking off these little arbitrary bits in one of these return, or jump, or call-oriented programming attacks. Now it is a technology that is included in every single one of the new 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors. And so it's going to be an inherent characteristic the customers can benefit from when they buy a new Gen11 HPE server. >> Cole, more goodness from Intel there impacting Gen11 on the HPE side. What's your reaction to that? >> I mean, I feel like this is exactly why you do business with the big Tier 1 partners, because you can put, you know, trust in from where it comes from, through the global operations, literally, having it hardened from the factory it's finished in, moving into your operating environment, and then now protecting against attacks in your web hosting services, right? I mean, this is great. I mean, you'll always have an attack on data, you know, as you're seeing in the data. But the more contained, the more information, and the more control and trust we can give to our customers, it's going to make their job a little easier in protecting whatever job they're trying to do. >> Yeah, and enterprise customers, as you know, they're always trying to keep up to date on the skills and battle the threats. Having that built in under the covers is a real good way to kind of help them free up their time, and also protect them is really killer. This is a big, big part of the Gen11 story here. Securing the data, securing compute, that's the topic here for this special cube conversation, engineering for a hybrid world. Cole, I'll give you the final word. What should people pay attention to, Gen11 from HPE, bottom line, what's the story? >> You know, it's, you know, it's not the first time, it's not the last time, but it's our fundamental security approach to just helping customers through their digital transformation defend in an uncompromising focus to help protect our infrastructure in these technical solutions. >> Cole Humphreys is the global server security product manager at HPE. He's got his finger on the pulse and keeping everyone secure in the platform integrity there. Mike Ferron-Jones is the Intel product manager for data security technology. Gentlemen, thank you for this great conversation, getting into the weeds a little bit with Gen11, which is great. Love the hardware route-of-trust technologies, Better Together. Congratulations on Gen11 and your 4th Gen Xeon Scalable. Thanks for coming on. >> All right, thanks, John. >> Thank you very much, guys, appreciate it. Okay, you're watching "theCube's" special presentation, "Securing Compute, Engineered for the Hybrid World." I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. The cube is live at the Venetian Expo Center for AWS Reinvent 2022. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people here joining myself, Lisa Martin at Dave Valante. David, it's great to see the energy of day one alone. People are back, they're ready to be back. They're ready to hear from AWS and what it's gonna announce to. >>Yeah, all through the pandemic. Of course, we've talked about digital transformation, but the conversation is evolving beyond that to business transformation now, deeper integration of the cloud to really transform fundamental business operations and And that's a new era. >>It is a new era. It's exciting. We've got a couple of guests that we're gonna unpack that with. Anan. Beji joins us, the President Digital Business Services at HCL Tech and Prar, SVP and Global head of AWS business unit. Also from HCL Tech. Guys, welcome. Thank >>You. Thank you, >>Thank you. >>Let's talk about some of the latest trends anon. We'll start with you. What are some of the latest trends in digitalization, especially as it relates to cloud adoption? What are you hearing out in the marketplace? >>Yeah, I think you said it right. The post pandemic, every industry, every enterprise and every industry realize that for resilience, for their ability to change and adapt change and their ability to increase, you know, velocity of change so that they can move fast and keep up the expectations of their consumers, their partners, their employees, they need to have composability at the core and resilience at the core. And so, digital transformation became all about the ability to change, an ability to pivot faster. Now, it's easier said than done, right? Larger enterprises, especially as you move into complex regulated industries, you know, oil and gas, manufacturing, life sciences, healthcare, utilities, these are industries that are not easy to change. They're not adaptable to change, and yet they had to really become more adaptable. And they saw cloud as an enabler to, to all of that, right? So they started looking at every area of their business, business processes that make up their value chains and really look at how can they increase the adaptability and the ability to change these value chains so that they can engage with their customers better, their partners, better their employees better, and also build some of the composability. >>And what might mean that is that just kind of like Lego blocks, they don't have to make changes that are sweeping and big that are difficult to make, but make them in parts so that they can make them again and again. So velocity of change becomes important. Clouds become an enabler to all of this. And so if I look at the last four years, every industry, whether regulated or not b2c, B2B to C, B2B is adopting cloud for digital acceleration. >>I'm curious to what you're seeing on the front lines, given the macro headwinds. You mentioned business resilience and during the pandemic, it was a lot of CIOs told us, wow, we were, we were kind of focused on disaster recovery, but our business wasn't resilient. We were really optimizing for efficiency. And then they started to okay, build in that business resilience. But now you got the economic headwinds. Yes. People are tapping their brakes a little bit. There's some uncertainty, a longer sales cycle, even the cloud's not immune. Yeah. Even though it's still growing at 30% plus per year. What are you guys seeing in the field with the AWS partnership? How are customers, you know, dealing with some of those more strategic transformation projects? Yeah, >>Yeah. So you know, first off, one thing that's changed and is different is every industry realizes that there is no choice. They don't have a choice to not be resilient. They don't have a choice to not be adaptable. The pandemic has taught them that the markets and the macros are increasingly changing supply chains. It's changing customer behavior for their own industries. It's changing their pricing and their cost models. And for all of that, they need to continue on their digital journeys. Now, what's different though is they wanna prioritize. They wanna prioritize and do more with less. They want to adapt faster, but also make sure that they don't, they don't just try to do everything together. And so there's a lot of focus on what do we prioritize? How do we leverage cloud to move faster, you know, and cheaper in terms of our change. >>And also to decide where do we consume and where do we compose? We'll talk a little bit more about that. There are certain things that you don't want to invent yourself. You can consume from cloud providers, whether it's business features, whether it is cloud capabilities. And so it's, there is a shift from adopting cloud just for cost takeout and just for resilience, but also for composability, which means let's consume what I can consume from the cloud and really build those features faster. So squeeze the go to market time, squeeze the time to market and squeeze the price to market, right? So that's the >>Change and really driving those business outcomes. As we talked about Absolut ard, talk to us about how hcl tech and AWS are working together. How are you enabling customers to achieve what an was talking about? >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, our partnership has started almost 10 years back, but over the last one year, we have created what we call as AWS dedicated business unit to look at end to end stock from an AWS perspective. So what we see in the market as a explained is more drive from clients for optimization, driving, app modernization, driving consolidation, looking at the cost, sustainability angles, looking at the IOT angle, manufacturing platforms, the industry adoption. All this is actually igniting the way the industry would look at AWS and as well as the partnership. So from an HCL tech and AWS partnership, we're actually accelerating most of these conversations by building bespoke accelerated industry solutions. So what I mean is, for example, there is an issue with a manufacturing plant and take Covid situation, people can't get into a a manufacturing plant. So how can AWS help put it in the cloud, accelerate those conversations. So we are building those industry specific solutions so that it can be everybody from a manufacturing sector can adopt and actually go to market. As well as you can access all this applications once it is in the cloud from anywhere, any device with a scalable options. That's where our partnership is actually igniting lot of cloud conversations and playing conversations in the market. So we see a lot of traction there. Lisa, on >>That, incredibly important during the last couple of years alone. >>Absolutely. I mean, last couple of years have been groundbreaking, right? Especially with the covid, for example, Amazon Connect, we use, we used Amazon Connect to roll out, you know, call center at the cloud, right? So you don't have to walk into an office, for example. People are working in the banking sector, especially in the trading platform. They were, they were not able to get there. So, but they need to make calls. How do you do the customer service? So Amazon Connect came right at the junction, so call center in the cloud and you can access, dial the number so the customer don't feel the pain of, you know, somebody not answering. It's accessible. That's where the partnership or the HCL tech partnership and AWS comes into play because we bring the scale, the skill set capability with the services of, you know, aws, Amazon, and that forms a concrete story for the client, right? That's one such example. And you know, many such examples are in the market that we are accelerating in the, in the discussions. >>And connect is a good example. Lisa, we were talking earlier about Amazon doubling down on the primitives, but also moving up up market as well, up chain up the value chain. And it needs partners like HCL to be able to go into various industries and apply that effectively. Absolutely. And that's where business transformation comes >>In. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think some of the aspects that we are looking at is, you know, while we do most of this cloud transformation initiatives from an tech perspective, what we are doing is we are encompassing them into a story, which we call it as cloud smart, right? So we are calling it as cloud smart, which is a go-to market offering from Atcl Tech, where the client doesn't have to look at each of these services from various vendors. So it's a one stop shop, right? From strategy consulting, look, implementation, underpinned by app modernization, consolidation, and the operational. So we do that as end to end service with our offerings, which is why helping us actually accelerate conversations on the crowd. What happen is the clients are also building these capabilities more and more often. You see a lot of new services are being added to aws, so not many clients are aware of it. So it is the responsibility of system integrator like us to make them aware and bring it into a shape where the client can consume in a low cost option, in an optimized way. That's where I think it's, it's, it's working out very well for us. With the partnership of, so >>You curate those services that you know will fit the customer's business. You, you know, the ingredients that you could put together, the, the dinner. >>Absolutely. You're preparing a dish, right? So you're preparing a dish, you know where the ingredients are. So the ingredients are supplied by aws. So you need to prepare a pasta dish, right? So you, you how spicy you want to make it howland, you want to make it, you know what source you want to use. How do you bring all those elements together? That's what, you know, tech has been focusing on. >>And you use the word curation, right? Curation is really industry process down, depending on your industry, every industry, every enterprise, there are things that are differentiating them. There's a business processes that differentiate you and there are business processes that don't necessarily differentiate you but are core to you. For example, if you're a retailer, you know, you're retailing, you're merchandising, how you price your products, how you market your products, your supply chains, those differentiate you. How you run your general ledger, your accounting, your payables. HR is core to your business but doesn't differentiate you. And the choices you make in the cloud for each of these areas are different. What differentiates you? You compose what doesn't differentiate you consume because you don't want to try and compose what >>Telco Exactly. Oh my gosh. >>Our biggest examples are in Telco, right? Right. Their omnichannel marketing, you know, how they connect with their consumers, how they do their billing systems, how they do their pricing systems. Those are their differentiations and things that don't they want to consume. And that's where cloud adoption needs to come with really a curation framework. We call it the Phoenix framework, which defines what differentiates you versus not. And based on that, what are the architectural choices you make at the applications layer, the integration layer, the data layer, and the infrastructure layer all from aws and how do you make those choices? >>Talk about a customer example anon that really articulates that value. >>Yeah, I'll give you an example that sort of, everybody can relate to a very large tools company that manufactures tools that we all use at home for, you know, remodeling our houses, building stuff, building furniture. Their business post pandemic dramatically shifted in every way possible. Nobody was going anymore to Home Depot and Lowe's to buy their tools, their online business surge by 200%. Their supply chains were changing because their manufacturers originally were in China and Malaysia. They were shifting a lot of that base to Taiwan and Germany and Latin America. Their pricing model was changing. Their last mile deliveries were changing cuz they were not used to delivering you and me last mile deliveries. So every aspect of their business was changing. They hadn't thought of their business in the same way, but guess what? That business was growing, but the needs were changing and they needed to rethink every value chain in their business. >>And so they had to adopt cloud. They leverage AWS at their core to rethink every part of their business. Rebuilding their supply chain applications, modernizing their warehouse management systems, modernizing their pricing systems, modernizing their sales and marketing platforms, every aspect you can think of and all of that within 24 months. Cuz otherwise they would lose market share, you know, in any given market. And all of this, while they were, you know, delivering their day to day business, they were manufacturing the goods and they were shipping products. So that was quite a lot to achieve in 24 months. And that's not just one example is across industries, examples like that that we have. That's >>One of the best business transformation examples I think I've heard. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. And so cloud does need to start with a business transformation objective. And that's what's happening to the cloud. It's changing away from an infrastructure consolidation discussion to business task. >>Because I know you guys have a theater session tomorrow on, on continuous modern, it was experiencing cloud transformation and continuous modernization. That's the theme. Pre-cloud. It was just a, you'd, you'd live, you'd rip and replace your infrastructure and it was a big application portfolio assessment and rationalization. It was just, it just became this years long, you know, like an SAP installation. Yes. How has cloud changed that and what's, tell us more about that session and that continuous modernization. Yeah, >>So, so we are doing a John session with a client on how HCL Tech helped the client in terms of transforming the landscape and adopting cloud much faster, you know, into the ecosystem. So what we are currently doing is, so it's a continuous process. So when we talk about cloud adoption transformation, it doesn't stop there. So it, it needs to keep evolving. So what we came up with a framework for the all such clients who are on the cloud transformation part need to look at which we call it a smart waste cloud, cloud smart. Where once it is in the clouds, smart waste to cloud for cloud and in the cloud. So what happens is, when it is to cloud, what do you do? What are the accelerators? What are the frameworks? Smart waste for clouds? How do you look at the governance of it? >>Okay? Consolidation activities of it, once it is in the cloud, how do we optimize, what do you look at? Security aspects, et cetera. So the client doesn't have to go to multiple ecosystem partners to look at it. So he is looking at one such service provider who can actually encompass and give all this onto the plate in a much more granular fashion with accelerated approach. So we build accelerated solutions frameworks, which helps the client to actually pick and choose in a much lower cost, I think. And it has to be a continuous modernization for the client. So why we are calling it as a continuous modernization is we are also also creating what we call cloud foundries and factories. What happens is the client can look at not only in a transformation journey, but also futuristic when there are new services are adapted, how this transformation and factories helping them in a lower cost option and driving that a acceleration story. So we are addressing it in multiple ways. One on the transformation front, one on the TCO front, one on the AX accelerated front, one on the operational front. So all this combined into one single framework, which is what is a continuous modernization of clouded option from xgl tech. >>When you apply this framework with customers, how do you deal with technical debt? Can you avoid technical debt? Can you hide technical debt? Or is it like debt and taxes? We're always gonna have technical debt because Amazon, you know, they'll talk about, they don't ever deprecate anything. Yeah. You know, are they gonna, are we gonna see Amazon take on tech? How do you avoid that? Or at least shield the customer for that technical debt. >>So every cio, right? Key ambitions are digital cloud, TCO optimization, sustainability. So we have a framework for that. So every CIO will look at, okay, I wanna spend, but I want to be optimized. My TCO should not go up. So that's where a system integrator like us comes. We have AOP story where, which does the complete financial analysis of your cloud adoption as to what estate and what technical client already has. How can we optimize that and how can we, how can we overlay on top of that our own services to make it much more optimized solution for the client? And there are several frameworks that we have defined for the CIO organizations where the CIO can actually look at some of these elements and adopt it internally within the system. You wanna pick it from there? >>Yeah, I think, I think it's, it's, it's a great question. First of all, there's a generational shift in the last three years where nobody's doing lift and shift of traditional applications or traditional data systems to the cloud. As you said, nobody's taking their technical debt to the cloud anymore. >>Business value's not there. >>There's no business value, right? The value is really being cloud native, which means you want to continuously modernize your value chains, which means your applications, your integration, your data to leverage the cloud and continuously modernize. Now you will still make priority decisions, right? Things that really differentiate you. You will modernize them through composition things that don't, you'll rather consume them, but in both factors, you're modernizing, I use the word surround and drown enterprises are surrounding their traditional, you know, environments and drowning them over a period of time. So over the next five years, you'll see more and more irrelevant legacy because the relevance is being built in the cloud, cloud for the future. That's the way I see it. >>Speaking of, take us out here, speaking of business value and on, we're almost outta time here. If there's a billboard on 1 0 1 in Palo Alto regarding HCL tech, what's the value prop? What does it say? >>It's a simple billboard. We say we are super charging our customers, our partners, our employees. We are super charging progress. And we believe that the strength that we bring from learnings of over 200,000 professionals that work at hcl working with over half of, you know, 500 of the, the largest Fortune thousands in the world is, is really bringing those learnings that we continuously look at every day that we live with, every day across all kind of regulations, all kind of industries, in adopting new technologies, in modernizing their business strategies and achieving their business transformation goals with the velocity they want. That's kind of the supercharging progress mantra, >>Super charging progress. Love it. Guys, thank you so much for joining. David, me on the program talking about, thank you for having a conversation. Our pleasure. What's going on with HCL Tech, aws, the value that you're delivering for customers. Thank you so much for your time. Thank >>You. Thank you. Thanks. Have a great time. >>Take care for our guests. I'm Lisa Martin, he's Dave Valante. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Good afternoon friends, and welcome back to Supercomputing. We're live here at the Cube in Dallas. I'm joined by my co-host, David. My name is Savannah Peterson and our a fabulous guest. I feel like this is almost his show to a degree, given his role at Dell. He is the Vice President of HPC over at Dell. Raja Phan, thank you so much for being on the show with us. How you doing? >>Thank you guys. I'm doing okay. Good to be back in person. This is a great show. It's really filled in nicely today and, and you know, a lot of great stuff happening. >>It's great to be around all of our fellow hardware nerds. The Dell portfolio grew by three products. It it did, I believe. Can you give us a bit of an intro on >>That? Sure. Well, yesterday afternoon and yesterday evening, we had a series of events that announced our new AI portfolio, artificial intelligence portfolio, you know, which will really help scale where I think the world is going in the future with, with the creation of, of all this data and what we can do with it. So yeah, it was an exciting day for us. Yesterday we had a, a session over in a ballroom where we did a product announce and then in the evening had an unveil in our booth here at the SUPERCOMPUTE conference, which was pretty eventful cupcakes, you know, champagne drinks and, and most importantly, Yeah, I know. Good time. Did >>You get the invite? >>No, I, most importantly, some really cool new servers for our customers. >>Well, tell us about them. Yeah, so what's, what's new? What's in the news? >>Well, you know, as you think about artificial intelligence and what customers are, are needing to do and the way artificial intelligence is gonna change how, you know, frankly, the world works. We have now developed and designed new purpose-built hardware, new purpose-built servers for a variety of AI and artificial intelligence needs. We launched our first eight way, you know, Invidia H 100 a a 100 s XM product. Yesterday we launched a four u four way H 100 product yesterday and a two u fully liquid cooled intel data center, Max GPU server yesterday as well. So, you know, a full range of portfolio for a variety of customer needs, depending on their use cases, what they're trying to do, their infrastructure, we're able to now provide, you know, servers to and hardware that help, you know, meet those needs in those use cases. >>So I wanna double click, you just said something interesting, water cooled. >>Yeah. So >>Where does, at what point do you need to move in the direction of water cooling and, you know, I know you mentioned, you know, GPU centric, but, but, but talk about that, that balance between, you know, a density and what you can achieve with the power that's going into the system. Well, you system, >>It all depends on what the customers are trying to accommodate, right? I, I think that there's a dichotomy that's existing now between customers who have already or are planning liquid cooled infrastructures and power distribution to the rack. So you take those two together and if you have the power distribution to the rack, you wanna take advantage of the density to take advantage of the density you need to be able to cool the servers and therefore liquid cooling comes into play. Now you have other customers that either don't have the power to the rack or aren't ready for liquid cooling, and at that point, you know, they're not gonna want to take advantage. They can't take advantage of the density. So there's this dichotomy in products, and that's why we've got our XE 96 40, which is in two U dense liquid cooled, but we also have our XE 86 40, which is a four U air cold, right? Or liquid assisted air cold, right? So depending on where you are on your journey, whether it's power infrastructure, liquid cooling, infrastructure, we've got the right solution for you that, you know, meets your needs. You don't have to take advantage of the density, the expense of liquid cooling, unless you're ready to do that. Otherwise we've got this other option for you. And so that's really what dichotomy is beginning to exist in our customers infrastructures today. >>I was curious about that. So do you see, is there a category or a vertical that is more in the liquid cooling zone because that's a priority in terms of the density or >>Yeah, yeah. I mean, you've got your, your large HTC installations, right? Your large clusters that not only have the power have, you know, the liquid cooling density that they've built in, you've got, you know, federal government installations, you've got financial tech installations, you've got colos that are built for sustainability and density and space that, that can also take advantage of it. Then you've got others that are, you know, more enterprises, more in the mainstream of what they do, where, you know, they're not ready for that. So it just, it just depends on the scale of the customer that we're talking about and what they're trying to do and, and where they're, and where they're doing it. >>So we hear, you know, we hear at Supercomputing conference and HPC is sort of the kind of trailing mini version of supercomputing in a way where maybe you have someone who they don't need 2 million CPU cores, but maybe they need a hundred thousand CPU cores. So it's all a matter of scale. What is, can you identify kind of an HPC sweet spot right now as, as Dell customers are adopting the kinds of things that you just just announced? >>You know, I think >>How big are these clusters at this >>Point? Well, let, let me, let me hit something else first. Yeah, I think people talk about HPC as, as something really specific and what we're seeing now with the, you know, vast amount of data creation, the need for computational analytics, the need for artificial intelligence, the HPC is kind of morphing right into, into, you know, more and more general customer use cases. And so where before you used to think about HPC is research and academics and computational dynamics. Now, you know, there's a significant Venn diagram overlap with just regular artificial intelligence, right? And, and so that is beginning to change the nature of how we think about hpc. You think about the vast data that's being created. You've got data driven HPC where you're running computational analytics on this data that's giving you insights or outcomes or information. It's not just, Hey, I'm running, you know, physics calculations or astronomical how, you know, calculations. It is now expanding in a variety of ways where it's democratizing into, you know, customers who wouldn't actually talk about themselves as HVC customers. And when you meet with them, it's like, well, yeah, but your compute needs are actually looking like HPC customers. So let's talk to you about these products. Let's talk to you about these solutions, whether it's software solutions, hardware solutions, or even purpose-built hardware. Like we're, like we talked about that now becomes the new norm. >>Customer feedback and community engagement is big for you. I know this portfolio of products that was developed based on customer feedback, correct? Yep. >>So everything we do at Dell is customer driven, right? We want to be, we want to drive, you know, customer driven innovation, customer driven value to meet our customer's needs. So yeah, we spent a while, right, researching these products, researching these needs, understanding is this one product? Is it two products? Is it three products? Talking to our partners, right? Driving our own innovation in IP and then where they're going with their roadmaps to be able to deliver kind of a harmonized solution to customers. So yeah, it was a good amount of customer engagement. I know I was on the road quite a bit talking to customers, you know, one of our products was, you know, we almost named after one of our customers, right? I'm like, Hey, this, we've talked about this. This is what you said you wanted. Now he, he was representative of a group of customers and we validated that with other customers and it's also a way of me making sure he buys it. But great, great. Yeah, >>Sharing sales there, >>That was good. But you know, it's heavily customer driven and that's where understanding those use cases and where they fit drove the various products. And, you know, in terms of, in terms of capability, in terms of size, in terms of liquid versus air cooling, in terms of things like number of P C I E lanes, right? What the networking infrastructure was gonna look like. All customer driven, all designed to meet where customers are going in their artificial intelligence journey, in their AI journey. >>It feels really collaborative. I mean, you've got both the intel and the Nvidia GPU on your new product. There's a lot of CoLab between academics and the private sector. What has you most excited today about supercomputing? >>What it's going to enable? If you think about what artificial intelligence is gonna enable, it's gonna enable faster medical research, right? Genomics the next pandemic. Hopefully not anytime soon. We'll be able to diagnose, we'll be able to track it so much faster through artificial intelligence, right? That the data that was created in this last one is gonna be an amazing source of research to, to go address stuff like that in the future and get to the heart of the problem faster. If you think about a manufacturing and, and process improvement, you can now simulate your entire manufacturing process. You don't have to run physical pilots, right? You can simulate it all, get 90% of the way there, which means your, your either factory process will get reinvented factor faster, or a new factory can get up and running faster. Think about retail, how retail products are laid out. >>You can use media analytics to track how customers go through the store, what they're buying. You can lay things out differently. You're not gonna have in the future people going, you know, to test cell phone reception. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me? Now you can simulate where customers are patterns to ensure that the 5G infrastructure is set up, you know, to the maximum advantage. All of that through digital simulation, through digital twins, through media analytics, through natural language processing. Customer experience is gonna be better, communication's gonna be better. All of this stuff with, you know, using this data, training it, and then applying it is probably what excites me the most about super computing and, and really compute in the future. >>So on the hardware front, kind of digging down below the, the covers, you know, the surface a little more, Dell has been well known for democratizing things in it, making them available to, at a variety of levels. Never a one size fits all right? Company, these latest announcements would be fair to say. They represent sort of the tip of the spear in terms of high performance. What about, what about rpc regular performance computing? Where's, where's the overlap? Cause you know, we're in this season where we've got AMD and Intel leapfrogging one another, new bus architectures. The, the, you know, the, the connectivity that's plugged into these things are getting faster and faster and faster. So from a Dell perspective, where does my term rpc regular performance computing and, and HPC begin? Are you seeing people build stuff on kind of general purpose clusters also? >>Well, sure, I mean, you can run a, a good amount of artificial acceleration on, you know, high core count CPUs without acceleration, and you can do it with P C I E accelerators and then, then you can do it with some of the, the, the very specific high performance accelerators like that, the intel, you know, data center, Max GPUs or NVIDIAs a 100 or H 100. So there are these scale up opportunities. I mean, if you think about, >>You know, >>Our mission to democratize compute, not just hpc, but general compute is about making it easier for customers to implement, to get the value out of what they're trying to do. So we focus on that with, you know, reference designs or validated designs that take out a good amount of time that customers would have to do it on their own, right? We can cut by six to 12 months the ability for customers in, in, I'm gonna use an HPC example and then I'll come back to your, your regular performance compute by us doing the work us, you know, setting, you know, determining the configuration, determining the software packages, testing it, tuning it so that by the time it gets to the customer, they get to take advantage of the expertise of Dell Engineers Dell Scale and they are ready to go in a much faster point of view. >>The challenge with AI is, and you talk to customers, is they all know what it can lead to and the benefits of it. Sometimes they just dunno how to start. We are trying to make it easier for customers to start, whether it is using regular RPC or you know, non optimized, non specialized compute, or as you move up the value stack into compute capability, our goal is to make it easier for customers to start to get on their journey and to get to what they're trying to do faster. So where do I see, you know, regular performance compute, you know, it's, it's, you know, they go hand in hand, right? As you think about what customers are trying to do. And I think a lot of customers, like we talked about, don't actually think about what they're trying to do as high performance computing. They don't think of themselves as one of those specialized institutions as their hpc, but they're on this glide path to greater and greater compute needs and greater and greater compute attributes that that merge kind of regular performance computing and high performance computing to where it's hard to really draw the line, especially when you get to data driven HPC data's everywhere >>And so much data. And it sounds like a lot people are very early in this journey. From our conversation with Travis, I mean five AI programs per very large company or less at this point for 75% of customers, that's pretty wild. I mean you're, you're an educational coach, you're teachers, you're innovating on the hardware front, you're doing everything at Dell. Last question for you. You've been at 24 years, >>25 in this coming march. >>What has a company like that done to retain talent like you for more than two and a half decades? >>You know, for me and I, I, and I'd like to say I had an atypical journey, but I don't think I have right there, there has always been opportunity for me, right? You know, I started off as a quality engineer. A couple years later I'm living in Singapore running or you know, running services for Enterprise and apj. I come back couple years in Austin, then I'm in our Bangalore development center helping set that up. Then I come back, then I'm in our Taiwan development center helping with some of the work out there. And then I come back. There has always been the next opportunity before I could even think about am I ready for the next opportunity? Oh. And so for me, why would I leave? Right? Why would I do anything different given that there's always been the next opportunity? The other thing is jobs are what you make of it and Dell embraces that. So if there's something that needs to be done or there was an opportunity, or even in the case of our AI ML portfolio, we saw an opportunity, we reviewed it, we talked about it, and then we went all in. So that innovation, that opportunity, and then most of all the people at Dell, right? I can't ask to work with a better set of set of folks from from the top on down. >>That's fantastic. Yeah. So it's culture. >>It is culture B really, at the end of the day, it is culture. >>That's fantastic. Raja, thank you so much for being here with us. >>Thank you guys, the >>Show. >>Really appreciate it. >>Questions? Yeah, this was such a pleasure. And thank you for tuning into the Cube Live from Dallas here at Supercomputing. My name is Savannah Peterson, and we'll see y'all in just a little bit.

>> We're back at the ARIA Las Vegas. We're covering CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 22. First one since 2019. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson on theCUBE. Adam Meyers is here, he is the Senior Vice President of Intelligence at CrowdStrike. Adam, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Interesting times, isn't it? You're very welcome. Senior Vice President of Intelligence, tell us what your role is. >> So I run all of our intelligence offerings. All of our analysts, we have a couple hundred analysts that work at CrowdStrike tracking threat actors. There's 185 threat actors that we track today. We're constantly adding more of them and it requires us to really have that visibility and understand how they operate so that we can inform our other products: our XDR, our Cloud Workload Protections and really integrate all of this around the threat actor. >> So it's that threat hunting capability that CrowdStrike has. That's what you're sort of... >> Well, so think of it this way. When we launched the company 11 years ago yesterday, what we wanted to do was to tell customers, to tell people that, well, you don't have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem. There are humans that are out there conducting these attacks, and if you know who they are what they're up to, how they operate then you're better positioned to defend against them. And so that's really at the core, what CrowdStrike started with and all of our products are powered by intelligence. All of our services are our OverWatch and our Falcon complete, all powered by intelligence because we want to know who the threat actors are and what they're doing so we can stop them. >> So for instance like you can stop known malware. A lot of companies can stop known malware, but you also can stop unknown malware. And I infer that the intelligence is part of that equation, is that right? >> Absolutely. That that's the outcome. That's the output of the intelligence but I could also tell you who these threat actors are, where they're operating out of, show you pictures of some of them, that's the threat intel. We are tracking down to the individual persona in many cases, these various threats whether they be Chinese nation state, Russian threat actors, Iran, North Korea, we track as I said, quite a few of these threats. And over time, we develop a really robust deep knowledge about who they are and how they operate. >> Okay. And we're going to get into some of that, the big four and cyber. But before we do, I want to ask you about the eCrime index stats, the ECX you guys call it a little side joke for all your nerds out there. Maybe you could explain that Adam >> Assembly humor. >> Yeah right, right. So, but, what is that index? You guys, how often do you publish it? What are you learning from that? >> Yeah, so it was modeled off of the Dow Jones industrial average. So if you look at the Dow Jones it's a composite index that was started in the late 1800s. And they took a couple of different companies that were the industrial component of the economy back then, right. Textiles and railroads and coal and steel and things like that. And they use that to approximate the overall health of the economy. So if you take these different stocks together, swizzle 'em together, and figure out some sort of number you could say, look, it's up. The economy's doing good. It's down, not doing so good. So after World War II, everybody was exuberant and positive about the end of the war. The DGI goes up, the oil crisis in the seventies goes down, COVID hits goes up, sorry, goes down. And then everybody realizes that they can use Amazon still and they can still get the things they need goes back up with the eCrime index. We took that approach to say what is the health of the underground economy? When you read about any of these ransomware attacks or data extortion attacks there are criminal groups that are working together in order to get things spammed out or to buy credentials and things like that. And so what the eCrime index does is it takes 24 different observables, right? The price of a ransom, the number of ransom attacks, the fluctuation in cryptocurrency, how much stolen material is being sold for on the underground. And we're constantly computing this number to understand is the eCrime ecosystem healthy? Is it thriving or is it under pressure? And that lets us understand what's going on in the world and kind of contextualize it. Give an example, Microsoft on patch Tuesday releases 56 vulnerabilities. 11 of them are critical. Well guess what? After hack Tuesday. So after patch Tuesday is hack Wednesday. And so all of those 11 vulnerabilities are exploitable. And now you have threat actors that have a whole new array of weapons that they can deploy and bring to bear against their victims after that patch Tuesday. So that's hack Wednesday. Conversely we'll get something like the colonial pipeline. Colonial pipeline attack May of 21, I think it was, comes out and all of the various underground forums where these ransomware operators are doing their business. They freak out because they don't want law enforcement. President Biden is talking about them and he's putting pressure on them. They don't want this ransomware component of what they're doing to bring law enforcement, bring heat on them. So they deplatform them. They kick 'em off. And when they do that, the ransomware stops being as much of a factor at that point in time. And the eCrime index goes down. So we can look at holidays, and right around Thanksgiving, which is coming up pretty soon, it's going to go up because there's so much online commerce with cyber Monday and such, right? You're going to see this increase in online activity; eCrime actors want to take advantage of that. When Christmas comes, they take vacation too; they're going to spend time with their families, so it goes back down and it stays down till around the end of the Russian Orthodox Christmas, which you can probably extrapolate why that is. And then it goes back up. So as it's fluctuating, it gives us the ability to really just start tracking what that economy looks like. >> Realtime indicator of that crypto. >> I mean, you talked about, talked about hack Wednesday, and before that you mentioned, you know, the big four, and I think you said 185 threat actors that you're tracking, is 180, is number 185 on that list? Somebody living in their basement in their mom's basement or are the resources necessary to get on that list? Such that it's like, no, no, no, no. this is very, very organized, large groups of people. Hollywood would have you believe that it's guy with a laptop, hack Wednesday, (Dave Nicholson mimics keyboard clacking noises) and everything done. >> Right. >> Are there individuals who are doing things like that or are these typically very well organized? >> That's a great question. And I think it's an important one to ask and it's both it tends to be more, the bigger groups. There are some one-off ones where it's one or two people. Sometimes they get big. Sometimes they get small. One of the big challenges. Have you heard of ransomware as a service? >> Of course. Oh my God. Any knucklehead can be a ransomwarist. >> Exactly. So we don't track those knuckleheads as much unless they get onto our radar somehow, they're conducting a lot of operations against our customers or something like that. But what we do track is that ransomware as a service platform because the affiliates, the people that are using it they come, they go and, you know, it could be they're only there for a period of time. Sometimes they move between different ransomware services, right? They'll use the one that's most useful for them that that week or that month, they're getting the best rate because it's rev sharing. They get a percentage that platform gets percentage of the ransom. So, you know, they negotiate a better deal. They might move to a different ransomware platform. So that's really hard to track. And it's also, you know, I think more important for us to understand the platform and the technology that is being used than the individual that's doing it. >> Yeah. Makes sense. Alright, let's talk about the big four. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Tell us about, you know, how you monitor these folks. Are there different signatures for each? Can you actually tell, you know based on the hack who's behind it? >> So yeah, it starts off, you know motivation is a huge factor. China conducts espionage, they do it for diplomatic purposes. They do it for military and political purposes. And they do it for economic espionage. All of these things map to known policies that they put out, the Five Year Plan, the Made in China 2025, the Belt and Road Initiative, it's all part of their efforts to become a regional and ultimately a global hegemon. >> They're not stealing nickels and dimes. >> No they're stealing intellectual property. They're stealing trade secrets. They're stealing negotiation points. When there's, you know a high speed rail or something like that. And they use a set of tools and they have a set of behaviors and they have a set of infrastructure and a set of targets that as we look at all of these things together we can derive who they are by motivation and the longer we observe them, the more data we get, the more we can get that attribution. I could tell you that there's X number of Chinese threat groups that we track under Panda, right? And they're associated with the Ministry of State Security. There's a whole other set. That's too associated with the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. So, I mean, these are big operations. They're intelligence agencies that are operating out of China. Iran has a different set of targets. They have a different set of motives. They go after North American and Israeli businesses right now that's kind of their main operation. And they're doing something called hack and lock and leak. With a lock and leak, what they're doing is they're deploying ransomware. They don't care about getting a ransom payment. They're just doing it to disrupt the target. And then they're leaking information that they steal during that operation that brings embarrassment. It brings compliance, regulatory, legal impact for that particular entity. So it's disruptive >> The chaos creators that's.. >> Well, you know I think they're trying to create a they're trying to really impact the legitimacy of some of these targets and the trust that their customers and their partners and people have in them. And that is psychological warfare in a certain way. And it, you know is really part of their broader initiative. Look at some of the other things that they've done they've hacked into like the missile defense system in Israel, and they've turned on the sirens, right? Those are all things that they're doing for a specific purpose, and that's not China, right? Like as you start to look at this stuff, you can start to really understand what they're up to. Russia very much been busy targeting NATO and NATO countries and Ukraine. Obviously the conflict that started in February has been a huge focus for these threat actors. And then as we look at North Korea, totally different. They're doing, there was a major crypto attack today. They're going after these crypto platforms, they're going after DeFi platforms. They're going after all of this stuff that most people don't even understand and they're stealing the crypto currency and they're using it for revenue generation. These nuclear weapons don't pay for themselves, their research and development don't pay for themselves. And so they're using that cyber operation to either steal money or steal intelligence. >> They need the cash. Yeah. >> Yeah. And they also do economic targeting because Kim Jong Un had said back in 2016 that they need to improve the lives of North Koreans. They have this national economic development strategy. And that means that they need, you know, I think only 30% of North Korea has access to reliable power. So having access to clean energy sources and renewable energy sources, that's important to keep the people happy and stop them from rising up against the regime. So that's the type of economic espionage that they're conducting. >> Well, those are the big four. If there were big five or six, I would presume US and some Western European countries would be on there. Do you track, I mean, where United States obviously has you know, people that are capable of this we're out doing our thing, and- >> So I think- >> That defense or offense, where do we sit in this matrix? >> Well, I think the big five would probably include eCrime. We also track India, Pakistan. We track actors out of Columbia, out of Turkey, out of Syria. So there's a whole, you know this problem is getting worse over time. It's proliferating. And I think COVID was also, you know a driver there because so many of these countries couldn't move human assets around because everything was getting locked down. As machine learning and artificial intelligence and all of this makes its way into the cameras at border and transfer points, it's hard to get a human asset through there. And so cyber is a very attractive, cheap and deniable form of espionage and gives them operational capabilities, not, you know and to your question about US and other kind of five I friendly type countries we have not seen them targeting our customers. So we focus on the threats that target our customers. >> Right. >> And so, you know, if we were to find them at a customer environment sure. But you know, when you look at some of the public reporting that's out there, the malware that's associated with them is focused on, you know, real bad people, and it's, it's physically like crypted to their hard drive. So unless you have sensor on, you know, an Iranian or some other laptop that might be target or something like that. >> Well, like Stuxnet did. >> Yeah. >> Right so. >> You won't see it. Right. See, so yeah. >> Well Symantec saw it but way back when right? Back in the day. >> Well, I mean, if you want to go down that route I think it actually came from a company in the region that was doing the IR and they were working with Symantec. >> Oh, okay. So, okay. So it was a local >> Yeah. I think Crisis, I think was the company that first identified it. And then they worked with Symantec. >> It Was, they found it, I guess, a logic controller. I forget what it was. >> It was a long time ago, so I might not have that completely right. >> But it was a seminal moment in the industry. >> Oh. And it was a seminal moment for Iran because you know, that I think caused them to get into cyber operations. Right. When they realized that something like that could happen that bolstered, you know there was a lot of underground hacking forums in Iran. And, you know, after Stuxnet, we started seeing that those hackers were dropping their hacker names and they were starting businesses. They were starting to try to go after government contracts. And they were starting to build training offensive programs, things like that because, you know they realized that this is an opportunity there. >> Yeah. We were talking earlier about this with Shawn and, you know, in the nuclear war, you know the Cold War days, you had the mutually assured destruction. It's not as black and white in the cyber world. Right. Cause as, as Robert Gates told me, you know a few years ago, we have a lot more to lose. So we have to be somewhat, as the United States, careful as to how much of an offensive posture we take. >> Well here's a secret. So I have a background on political science. So mutually assured destruction, I think is a deterrent strategy where you have two kind of two, two entities that like they will destroy each other if they so they're disinclined to go down that route. >> Right. >> With cyber I really don't like that mutually assured destruction >> That doesn't fit right. >> I think it's deterrents by denial. Right? So raising the cost, if they were to conduct a cyber operation, raising that cost that they don't want to do it, they don't want to incur the impact of that. Right. And think about this in terms of a lot of people are asking about would China invade Taiwan. And so as you look at the cost that that would have on the Chinese military, the POA, the POA Navy et cetera, you know, that's that deterrents by denial, trying to, trying to make the costs so high that they don't want to do it. And I think that's a better fit for cyber to try to figure out how can we raise the cost to the adversary if they operate against our customers against our enterprises and that they'll go someplace else and do something else. >> Well, that's a retaliatory strike, isn't it? I mean, is that what you're saying? >> No, definitely not. >> It's more of reducing their return on investment essentially. >> Yeah. >> And incenting them- disincening them to do X and sending them off somewhere else. >> Right. And threat actors, whether they be criminals or nation states, you know, Bruce Lee had this great quote that was "be like water", right? Like take the path of least resistance, like water will. Threat actors do that too. So, I mean, unless you're super high value target that they absolutely have to get into by any means necessary, then if you become too hard of a target, they're going to move on to somebody that's a little easier. >> Makes sense. Awesome. Really appreciate your, I could, we'd love to have you back. >> Anytime. >> Go deeper. Adam Myers. We're here at Fal.Con 22, Dave Vellante, Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy music plays)

[digital Music] >> Okay, welcome back to "theCUBE," Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." We got a very special distinguished CUBE alumni here, Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO of Nutanix. Great to see you. Thanks for coming by the show. >> Good to be here, John. >> We've had many conversations in the past about what you guys have done. Again, the perfect storm is coming, innovation. You guys are in an interesting position and the Supercloud kind of points this out. We've been discussing about how multi-cloud is coming. Everyone has multiple clouds, but there's real structural change happening right now in customers. Now there's been change that's happened, cloud computing, cloud operations, developers are doing great, but now something magical's happening in the industry. We wanted to get your thoughts on that, that's called Supercloud. >> Indeed. >> How do you see this shift? I mean, devs are doing great. Ops and security are trying to get cloud native. What's happening in your opinion? >> Yeah, in fact, we've been talking about something very, very similar. I like the term supercloud. We've been calling it hybrid multicloud essentially, but the point being, companies are running their applications and managing their data. This is lifeblood for them. And where do they sit? Of course, some of these will sit in the public cloud. Some of these are going to sit inside their data centers and some of these applications increasingly are going to run in edges. And now what most companies struggle with is every cloud is different, their on-prem is different, their edge is different and they then have a scarcity of staff. Operating models are different. Security is different. Everything about it is different. So to your point, people are using multiple clouds and multiple locations. But you need to think about cloud as an operating model and what the supercloud or hyper multicloud delivers is really a consistent model, consistent operating model. One way for IT teams to operate across all of these environments and deliver an agile infrastructure as a service model to their developers. So that from a company's managed point of view, they can run their stuff wherever they want to, completely with consistency, and the IT teams can help support that easily. >> You know, it's interesting. You see a lot of transformation, certainly from customers, they were paying a lot of operating costs for IT. Now CapEx is covered by, I mean, CapEx now is covered by the cloud, so it's OpEx. They're getting core competencies and they're becoming very fluent in cloud technologies. And at the same time the vendors are saying, "Hey, you know, buy our stuff." And so you have the change over, how people relate to each other, vendors and customers, where there's a shared model where, okay, you got use cases for the cloud and use cases on-premise, both CapEx, both technology. You mentioned that operating model, Where's the gap? 'Cause nobody wants complexity, and you know, the enterprise, people love to add, solve complexity with more complexity. >> That's exactly the problem. You just hit the nail on the head, which is enterprise software tends to be very complex. And fundamentally complexity has been a friend for vendors, but the point being, it's not a friend for a company that's trying to manage their IT infrastructure. It's an an enemy because complexity means you need to train your staff, you need very specialized teams, and guess what? Talent is perhaps the most scarce thing out there, right? People talk about, you know, in IT, they always talk about people, process, technology. There's plenty of technology out there, but right now there's a big scarcity of people, and I think that talent is a major issue. And not only that, you know, it's not that we have as many specialized people who know storage, who know compute, who know networking. Instead, what you're getting is a bunch of new college grads coming in, who have generalized skill sets, who are used to having a consumer like experience with their experience with software and applications, and they want to see that from their enterprise software vendors. >> You know, it's just so you mentioned that when the hyper converged, we saw that movie that was bringing things together. Now you're seeing the commoditization of compute storage and networking, but yet the advancement of higher level services and things like Kubernetes for orchestration, that's an operating opportunity for people to get more orchestration, but that's a trade off. So we're seeing a new trend in the supercloud where it's not all Kubernetes all the time. It's not all AWS all the time. It's the new architecture, where there's trade offs. How do you see some of these key trade offs? I know you talked to a lot of your customers, they're kind of bringing things together, putting things together, kind of a day zero mentality. What are some of those key trade offs and architectural decision points? >> So there's a couple of points there, I think. First is that most customers are on a journey of thoughts and their journey is, well, they want to have a modern infrastructure. Many of them have on-prem footprints, and they're looking to modernize that infrastructure. They're looking to adopt cloud operating models. They're looking to figure out how they can extend and leverage these public clouds appropriately. The problem is when they start doing this, they find that everything is different. Every little piece, every cloud is different, their on-prem is different, and this results in a lot of complexity. In some ways, we at Nutanix solved this problem within data centers by converging separate silos of high computer storage and network. That's what we did with HCI. And now this notion of supercloud is just simply about converging different clouds and different data. >> Kind of the same thing. >> And on-prem and edges, right? Trying to bring all of these together rather than having separate teams, separate processes, separate technologies for every one of these, try to create consistency, and it makes life a lot simpler and easier. >> Yeah, I wanted to connect those dots because I think this is kind of interesting with the supercloud was, you get good at something in one cloud, then you bring that best practice and figure out how to make that work across edge and on-premise, which is, I mean, basically cloud operations. >> Exactly. It's cloud operations, which is why we say it's a cloud is an operating model. It's a way you operate your environment, but that environment could be anywhere. You're not restricted to it being in the public cloud. It's in your data center, that's in the edges. >> Okay, so when I hear about substrates, abstraction layers, I think two things, innovation cause you extract away complexity, then I also think about from the customer's perspective, maybe, lock-in. >> Yes. >> Whoa, oh, promises, promises. Lock in is a fear and ops teams and security teams, they know the downside of lock-in. >> Yes. >> Choice is obviously important. Devs don't care. I mean, like, whatever runs the software, go faster, but ops and security teams, they want choice, but they want functionality. So, what's that trade off? Talk about this lock-in dynamic, and how to get around. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's been some of the fundamental tenants of what we do. I mean, of course, people don't like lock-in, but they also want simplicity. And we provide both. Our philosophy is we want to make things as simple as possible. And that's one of the big differentiators that we have compared to other players. Our whole mission inside the company is to make things simple. But at the same time, we also want to provide customers with that flexibility and every layer in the stack, you don't want to lock to your point. So, if at the very bottom hardware, choice of hardware. Choice of hardware could be any of the vendors you work with or public cloud, Bare Metal. When you look at hypervisor, lots of choices. You got VMware, you got our own Ahv, which is KBM-based open source hypervisor, no lock-in there, provide complete flexibility. Then we have a storage stack, a distributor storage stack, which we provide. And then of course layers about that. Kubernetes, pick your Kubernetes, runtime of choice. Pick your Kubernetes, orchestrator and management of choice. So our whole goal is to provide that flexibility at every layer in the stack, allowing the customer to make the choice. They can decide how much they want to go with the full stack or how much they want to go piecemeal it, and there's a trade off there. And they get more flexibility, but at the cost of a little bit more complexity, and that, I think, is the trade off that each customer has to weigh. >> Okay, you guys have been transforming for many, many years. We've been covering on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE to software. >> Yes. >> I know you have hardware as well, but also software services. And you've been on the cloud bandwagon years ago, and now you made a lot of progress. What's the current strategy for you guys? How do you fit in? 'Cause public cloud has great use cases, great examples of success there, but that's not the only game in town. You've got on-premise and edge. What are you guys doing? What specifically are customers leaning on you for? How are you providing that value? What's the innovation strategy? >> Very simply, we provide a cloud software platform today. We don't actually sell anymore hardware. They're not on our books anymore. We're a pure software company. So we sell a cloud soft platform on top of which our customers can run all their applications, including the most mission critical applications. And they can use our platform wherever, to your point, on the supercloud. I keep coming back to that. We started out with our on-prem genes. That's where we started. We've extended that to Azure and AWS. And we are extending, of course, we've always been very strong when it came to the edge and extending that out to the edge. And so today we have a cloud platform that allows our customers to run these apps, whatever the apps may be, and manage all their data because we provide structured and unstructured data, blocks, files, objects, are all part of the platform. And we provide that in a consistent way across all of these locations, and we deliver the cloud operating model. >> So on the hardware thing, you guys don't have hardware anymore. >> We don't sell hardware anymore. We work with a whole range of hardware partners, HP, Dell, Supermicro, name it, Lenovo. >> Okay, so if I'm like a Telco and I want to build a data center at my tower, which could be only a few boxes, who do I buy that from? >> So you buy the software from us and you can buy the hardware from your choice of hardware partners. >> So yeah, whoever's selling the servers at that point. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so you send on the server. >> Yeah, we send on the server. >> Yeah, sound's good. So no hardware, so back to software that could transfer. How's that going, good? >> It's gone very well because, you know, we made two transformations. One is of course we were selling appliances when we started out, and then we started selling software, and now it's all fully subscription. So we're 100% subscription company. So our customers are buying subscriptions. They have the flexibility to get whatever duration they want. Again, to your philosophy, there's no lock-in. There is no long term lock-in here. We are happy if a customer chooses us for a year versus three years, whatever they like. >> I know that you've been on the road with customers this summer. It's been great to get out and see people in person. What are you learning? What are they viewing? What's their new Instagram picture of Nutanix? How do they see you? And how do you want them to see you? >> What they've seen us in the past has been, we created this whole category of HCI, Hyperconverged Infrastructure. They see us as a leader there and they see us as running some of their applications, not necessarily all their applications, especially at the very big customers. In the smaller customers, they run everything on us, but in the bigger customers, they run some workload, some applications on us. And now what they see is that we are now, if taking them on the journey, not only to run all their applications, whatever, they may be, including the most mission critical database workloads or analytics workloads on our platform, but also help them extend that journey into the public cloud. And so that's the journey we are on, modernized infrastructure. And this is what most of our customers are on. Modernizing the infrastructure, which we help and then creating a cloud operating model, and making that available everywhere. >> Yeah, and I think one, that's a great, and again, that's a great segue to supercloud, which I want to get your thoughts on because AWS, for example, spent all that CapEx, they're called the hyperscaler. They got H in there and that's a hyperscale in there. And now you can leverage that CapEx by bringing Nutanix in, you're a hyperscale-like solution on-premise and edge. So you take advantage of both. >> Absolutely. >> The success. >> Exactly. >> And a trajectory of cloud, so your customers, if I get this right, have all the economies of scale of cloud, plus the benefits of the HCI software kind of vibe. >> Absolutely. And I'll give you some examples how this plays out in the real world based on all my travels here. >> Yeah, please do. So we just put out a case study on a customer called FSP. They're a betting company, online betting company based out of the UK. And they run on our platform on-prem, but what they saw was they had to expand their operations to Asia and they went to Taiwan. And the problem for them was, they were told they had to get in business in Taiwan within a matter of a month, and they didn't know how to do it. And then they realized that they could just take the exact same software that they were running on our platform, and run it in an AWS region sitting in Taiwan. And they were up in business in less than a month, and they had now operations ready to go in Asia. I mean, that's a compelling business value. >> That's agile, that's agile. >> Agile. >> That's agile and a great... >> Versus the alternative would be weeks, months. >> Months, first of all, I mean, just think about, they have to open a data center, which probably takes them, they have to buy the hardware, which, you know, with supply chain deliveries, >> Supply chain. and God knows how long that takes. >> Oh God, yeah. >> So compared to all that here, they were up and running within a matter of a month. It's a, just one example of a very compelling value proposition. >> So you feel good about where you guys are right now relative to these big waves coming? >> Yeah, I think so. Well, I mean, you know, there's a lot of big waves coming and. >> What are the biggest ones that you see? >> Well, I mean, I think there's clearly one of the big ones, of course, out there is Broadcom buying VMware or potentially buying VMware and great company. I used to work there for many years and I have a lot of respect for what VMware has done for the industry in terms of virtualization of servers and creating their entire portfolio. >> Is it true you're hiring a lot of VMware folks? >> Yes, I mean a lot of them coming over now in anticipation, we've been hiring our fair share, but they're going other places too. >> A lot of VMware alumni at Nutanix now. >> Yes, there are certainly, we have our share of VMware alumni. We also have a share of alumni from others. >> We call the V mafia, by the way. (laughs) >> I dunno about the V mafia, but. But it's a great company, but I think right now a lot of customers are wondering what's going to happen, and therefore, they are looking at potentially what are the other alternatives? And we are very much front and center in that discussions. >> Well, Dave Alante and I, and the team have been very bullish on on-premise cloud operations. You guys are doing there. How would you describe the supercloud concept to a customer when they say, "Hey, what's the supercloud? "It's becoming a thing. "How would you describe what it is and the benefits?" >> Yeah, and I think the first thing is to tell them, what problem are you looking to solve? And the problem for them is, they have applications everywhere. They have data everywhere. How do their teams run and deal with all of this? And what they find is the way they're doing it today is different operating platform for every one of these. If you're on Amazon, it's one platform. If you're an Azure, it's another. If you're on-prim, it's a third. If you want to go to the edge, probably fourth, and it's a messy, complex thing for their IT teams. What a supercloud does is essentially unify all of these into a consistent operating model. You get a cloud operating model, you get the agility and the benefits, but with one way of handling your compute storage network needs, one way of handling your security policies, and security constructs, and giving you that, so such a dramatic simplification on the one side, and it's a dramatic enabler because it now enables you to run these applications wherever you want completely free. >> Yeah. It really bridges the cloud native. It kind of the interplay on the cloud between SAS and IAS, solves a lot of problems, highly integrated, that takes that model to the complexity of multiple environments. >> Exactly. >> That's a super cool environment. >> (John speaks over Rajiv) Across any environment, wherever. It's changing this thing from cloud being associated with the public cloud to cloud being available everywhere in a consistent way. >> And that's essentially the goodness of cloud, going everywhere. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, but that extension is what you call a supercloud. >> Rajiv, thank you so much for your time. I know you're super valuable, and you got a company to run. One final question for you. The edge is exploding. >> Yes. >> It's super dynamic. We kind of all know it's there. The industrial edge. You got the IOT edge and just the edge in general. On-premise, I think, is hybrid, it's the steady state, looking good. Everything's good. It's getting better, of course, things with cloud native and all that good stuff. What's your view of the edge? It's super dynamic, a lot of shifting, OT, IT, that's actually transformed. >> Yes, absolutely. >> Huge industrial thing. Amazon is buying, you know, industrial robots now. >> Yes. >> Space is around the corner, a lot of industrial advance with machine learning and the software side of things, so the edge is exploding. >> Yeah, you know, and I think one of the interesting things about that exploding edge is that it tends to be both compute and data heavy. It's not this notion of very thin edges. Yes, you've got thin edges too, of course, which may just be sensors on the one hand, but you're seeing an increased need for compute and storage at the edges, because a lot of these are crunching, crunching applications that require a crunch and generate a lot of data, crunch a lot of data. There's latency requirements that require you and there's even people deploying GPUs at the edges for image recognition and so forth, right? So this is. >> The edge is the data center now. >> Exactly. Think of the edge starting to look at the edge of the mini data center, but one that needs to be highly automated. You're not going to be able to put people at every one of these locations. You've got to be able to do all your services, lifecycle management, everything completely remove. >> Self-healing, all this good stuffs. >> Exactly. It has to be completely automated and self-healing and upgradeable and you know, life cycle managed from the cloud, so to speak. And so there's going to be this interlinkage between the edge and the cloud, and you're going to actually, essentially what you need is a cloud managed edge. >> Yeah, and this is where the super cloud extends, where you can extend the value of what you're building to these dynamically new emerging, and it's just the beginning. There'll be more. >> Oh, there's a ton of new applications emerging there. And I think that's going to be, I mean, there's people out there who code that half of data is going to be generated at the edge in a couple of years. >> Well, Rajiv, I am excited that you can bring the depth of technical architectural knowledge to the table on supercloud, as well as run a company. Congratulations on your success, and thanks for sharing with us and being part of our community. >> No, thank you, John, for having me on your show. >> Okay. Supercloud 22, we're continuing to open up the conversation. There is structural change happening. We're going to watch it. We're going to make it an open conversation. We're not going to make a decision. We're going to just let everyone discuss it and see how it evolves and on the best in the business discussing it, and we're going to keep it going. Thanks for watching. (digital music)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Hello. Welcome to the cube here at Dell tech world. I'm John furry host of the cube with Dave Alon here with Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell technologies cube alumni comes on every year. We have the cube here. It's been two years. Michael, welcome to the cube. Get to see you. >>Hey, John, Dave, great to be with you guys. Thanks for being here. Wonderful to be back here in Vegas with >>You. Well, great to be in person two years ago, we had the cue with the pandemic a lot's happened. We were talking end to end solutions here at Dell tech world in person two years ago, pandemic hits. Thank God you had all that supply for the, for the people having the remote remote end to work now back in person. What's it look like now with, with Dell tech end to end, the edge is important. What's the story, >>You know, edge is, is the physical world. And if you, if you step back from clouds and, you know, multi-cloud, you sort of think about what is the purpose of a cloud or a data center? Well, it's to take data out of the physical world and move it to this place, to somehow enhance it or do something with it and create business value and hopefully create better outcomes. Well, it turns out that, you know, increasingly a lot of that data is gonna stay in the physical world and all of those nodes are gonna be connected. They're gonna be intelligent and we're seeing it in manufacturing and retail and healthcare, transportation, logistics. We're seeing this rapidly intelligent edge being formed. And then of course, with the new networks, the 5g we're seeing, you know, all, all this develop. And so here on the show floor, we're showing a lot of those solutions, but our customers are, are highly engaged. And certainly we think that's a, a big, a big growth factor for the next decade. >>And it's been ING to watch the transformation of the it world and cloudification and the as service, uh, consumption model, which you guys are putting out there has been very successful, but cloud operations is more prominent now on premises and edge and cloud. So the combination of cloud on-premise and edge hardware matters more now than ever before Silicon advances, um, abstraction layers from modern cloud native applications are what people are focused on. What's the story that you cite to the CIOs saying, we're here to help you with that new architecture cloud multi-cloud on premise and edge. What's the main story for you guys with the customers? >>Well, you know, customers want to go faster, right? And they want to accelerate their transformation. And so they wanna shift more resources over to developers, to applications, to access their data, to create competitive advantage. And so we talk a lot about the value line and what are those things below the value line, where we can provide that as a service on a consumption based model and accelerate their transformation, kind of, you know, do for them what we've done inside our own business. And, you know, it's absolutely resonating. We're seeing great growth there. People continue to, to need the solutions, but as we can automate the management and deployment of infrastructure and make it super easy, it gives them a lot of cycles back. >>You know, Michael, my, the favorite part, my favorite part of your book was you were in, I think you were in his, in his home court, in his dining room at Carl Icahn's house. And you said, well, why don't you just buy the company? And then you'll do what you're doing. I I'll buy it back for cheaper. Now, thankfully, you didn't have to do that. Cuz you had an environment of low interest rates and you obviously took it into the other direction, added tremendous value, 101 billion in revenue last year, 17% revenue growth, which was out astounding. When you think about that, um, now we're entering a new chapter with VMware untethered of course you're the chairman of both companies. So how should we think about the new Dell what's next? >>Well, so look, we, we have some unbelievable core businesses, right? We have our client system business and we've all learned during these last two years, how incredibly important it is to enable and empower your workforce with the right tools in the remote and high hybrid work. And we're showing off all kinds of new innovations here. That's a huge business force continues to grow, continues to be super important. Then we have our ISG, the cloud data center, the network of the future, the edge, you know, the, the sort of epicenter of where we're embracing, consumption based business models. That's absolutely huge. Then we have these new, new businesses that we're building with telco with edge, put it all together. It's a 1.3 trillion Tam that we operate in, as you said, more than a hundred billion dollars last year. So there's plenty of room for us to continue to grow and, and expand. And you know, as we make this shift to outcomes, it's obviously more valuable for customers and that, you know, increases our opportunity, increases the, the value we can create for all our stakeholders. >>And number one, number one, share in PCs, by the way, congratulations, again, hit that milestone. All of our gamer, uh, fans in our discord want to know what's the hottest chips coming. What's the fastest machines. What, how's the monitors coming? They want faster, cheaper. What's the coolest, uh, monitors out there right now and, and machines. >>Well, uh, you know, what what's, what's amazing is the, the pace of innovation continues to improve. So whether it's in the GPU, the CPU, the, the resolution, I I'm pretty partial to our 41, uh, display 11 million pixels of fun. And look, I mean, we, we it's, it's, it's clear that people are more productive when they have large screens and all the performance is enabling photo realistic, uh, you know, uh, gaming and photo realistic, everything. And these are immersive experiences. And, you know, again, uh, what companies have figured out to bring it back to, to, to a little bit of business here, John, is that when you, uh, give people the right tools, they're more productive, they're more engaged and look, people are smart. They know what tools are available. And, you know, uh, the thing that actually is most representative of how a person thinks about the tools they have at their organization is actually the thing that's right in front of 'em. And so, you know, this ability for us to provide a pool set of solutions for organizations to keep their workforce productive, to run their applications and infrastructure securely anywhere they want. That's, that's a winning proposition. >>Michael trust was a big theme of your keynote yesterday. And when you acquired EMC and got VMware, it really changed the dynamic with regard to your ability to, into new parts of organizations. You became a much more strategic supplier. I, I would argue. And now with VMware as a separate company, do you feel like you have built up over the, you know, five or whatever years that muscle memory you kinda earn that trust. So how do you see the customer relationship with that regard to that integration that they, they loved the eco. So system competitors might not have loved it so much, but the customers really did love. In fact, the, the U S a, a gentleman yesterday kind of mentioned that, how do you see it? >>You know, customers, uh, are not as interested in the balance sheet and what you know, where different holdings are, what they, they want things to work together, right? And they want partnerships in ecosystems. And certainly, you know, with VMware, even before the combination, we had a powerful partnership. It obviously solidified in a super special way. And now we have this first and best relationship and I've remained the chairman of VMware and super excited about their future. But our ecosystem is incredibly broad. And you see that here in this show floor, and again, making things work together better and more effectively building these engineered solutions that allow people to very quickly deploy the kind of capabilities they want, whether it's, you know, snowflake now working with the on premise and the edge data and more of these, you know, multi-cloud, uh, eco of systems that are being built. It's not gonna be just one company >>You called the edge a couple years ago. You're really prominent in your, in your speeches. And your keynotes data also is a big theme. You mentioned data now, data engineering seems to be the hottest track of, of, of students graduating with data engineering skills, not data science, data engineering, large scale data as code concepts. So what's your vision now with data, how's that fitting into the solutions and the role of data, obviously data protection with cybersecurity data as code is becoming really part of that next big thing. >>Yeah. I mean, if, if you look at anything that is interesting in the world today, uh, at the center of it is data, right? Whether it's the blockchain or the defi or the AI drug discovery, or the autonomous vehicles or whatever you wanna do, there's data in, in, in the middle of that. And of course with that data, well, you've gotta manage it. You, you need compute engines, right? You need to be able to protect it, secure it. And, you know, that's kind of what we do, and we're not going to create all those solutions, but we are gonna be an enabling layer to allow that data to be accessed no matter, you know, where, where it is. And, and, and of course, you know, leading in storage continues to be a super important part of our business. Number one, larger than number two than number three, number four, combined, and, and most of number five as well, and, and growing share. And, and you saw today, the software defined innovations, allowing that, you know, data layer to exist across the edge, the colos, the OnPrem, and the public clouds >>Throughout a stat yesterday. I can't remember if it was a keynote of the analyst round table, but it was 9 million cell towers. And if I heard, right, you kinda look at those as potential data centers talk about that's >>Right. It it's actually 7 million, but, but probably will be 9 million and not, not too long, I don't have the update, but so yeah, the public clouds all together is about 600 data centers. They're about 7 million cellular base stations in the world. Every single one of those is becoming a, you know, multi access, edge compute node. And what are they putting in there? They're putting many data centers of compute and GPS and storage. And, you know, 5g is not about, uh, connecting people that was 4g and before 5g is about connecting things. And there are way more things than there are people, right? And, uh, you know, this, this, this edge is, is rapidly developing. You'll also have private 5g and you'll have, you know, again, embedded intelligence I believe is gonna be in everything this next decade is going to be about that intelligent, connected future, taking that data, turning it into useful outsides in insights and outcomes. And, you know, lots of new businesses will be existing. Businesses will be transformed and also disrupted. >>Yeah. I mean, I think that's so right on and not to pat ourselves on the back day, but we called that edge distributed computing a couple years ago on the cube. And that's, what's turning into the home with COVID you saw that become a workplace, basically compute center, these compute nodes, tying it together as we, what everyone's talking about right now. So as customers say, okay, I want to keep my operations steady, steady, and secure. How do I glue it together? How do I bring these compute node together? That seems to be the top question on, on top of people's minds. And they want it to be cloud native, which means they want it to run cloud-like and they want to connect these compute node together. That's a big discussion point. What's your view on, >>Well, you know, if you, if you sort of have a, a cloud here, a cloud there cloud everywhere, and you, you know, have lots of different Kubernetes frameworks, uh, and you've got, you know, everything is, is spread out, it's a disaster, right? And, and, and it's, it's a, it's a, it's a real challenge to manage all that. So what people are trying to do is create ruthless standardization. It's like, how do you drive cost out and get speed? It's ruthless standardization create consistent environments where you can operate the across all the different domains that, that you want. And so, uh, you know, this is what we're bringing together in, in, in the capabilities that we're delivering. >>And that chaos is great opportunity for you. Um, how are you feeling about VMware these days, new team, uh, give us the update there. >>Yeah. The team is doing well. You know, I think the tons message is resonating. You know, people want Kubernetes and, and, and container based apps, for sure. That's the main, you know, growth in, in, in, in, in new, in new workloads. Uh, but they also want it to work with what they have. Yeah. And they don't want it to be locked into one particular infrastructure. So software finding everything, making it run in all the public clouds, you know, we've had a great success with VxRail, you know, that, that absolutely continues. We have, uh, 200,000 plus nodes, 15,000 customers and growing, we have edge satellite nodes and we continue to work together in SD wan in software defined networking in VMware cloud foundation, uh, you know, expressed, uh, in, in, in all locations. >>You know, one of the things that we've been seeing with the trend towards, um, future of work, which is a big theme, here is a lot of managed services are popping up where the complexity is so ha high that customers want to manage services. Uh, and also the workforce of it's kind of changing. You got a younger generation coming in, how do you see that future of the workforce? The next level? It's not gonna be like, yesterday's it, it's gonna be distributed computing dashboard based. And then you've got these managed services, you know, need to have the training and expertise maybe to run something at scale. How do, how do you see that connecting? Cuz that seems to be another big trend people are talking about, Hey, it's complex someone manage it for me. And I want ease of views. I want the easy button in it. >>Yeah. Well we we've all been at this a while. So we can remember, you know, the beginnings of converged infrastructure and then hyperconverged, which wasn't that long go. And now we have consumption based business models. These are all along the trajectory of the easy button that you're talking about and customers really thinking about the value line, where are the things that really differentiate and add value for their business. And it's not below the value line in those infrastructure areas are creating that easy button with appliances, with consumption based models and allowing them to deploy the scarce resources. They have to the things that really drive their unique differe. And you know, if you look at our managed services flex on demand, all the sort of ancestors and predecessors of apex, those have been great businesses for us. And now with apex, we're kind of industrializing this and, and making it, you know, at scale for all >>Customers, you know, the three of us, we go back, we, we, our first interactions with you separately, we're in the nine. And then we reconnected in the 2012. I think it was Tarkin Mayer had a little breakout session with CIOs. You brought us to early on a Dell tech world in Austin. And of course it was, >>It was just Dell world. Then Dell >>Four, we had Dell tech, you and then EMC world in 2010 was our first cube. And now that's all come together here in Las Vegas. So, you know, it's been great. Uh, the three of us come together and so really appreciate that. Yeah. >>Awesome. Absolutely awesome. >>Well, you know, really appreciate you guys being here, the wonderful work you do in thank you in, you know, bringing out the, the, the stories and, and showing off and helping us show off the innovations that, you know, our team has been working on. You know, during the past year >>It's been great in conversations and, and on a personal note, it's been great to have, uh, chat with all the top people and your company. Appreciate it. Um, someone told me to ask you this question, I want to ask you, you, we've all seen waves of innovation cycles up and down. We're kind of on one. Now you're seeing an inflection point, this next gen, uh, computing and, and web three cultural shit F with workforces and distributed computing decentralization. You mentioned that DFI earlier, how do you see this wave coming? Cause we've seen cycles come and go.com. Bubble kind of looks the same as the web three NFTs and stuff. Now it seems to be Look different, but how do you see this next wave? Cuz looking back on all the other ones that you you have lived through and you rode >>Well. So, you know, the, the way I see it is is, uh, to some extent, these are like foundational layers that have to be built for the next phase to occur. And if you look at the sort of new companies that are being founded today, and we see a lot of those, you, you, you, you see'em, we invest in a bunch of 'em, you know, they're, they're not going and, and kind of redoing the old foundational layers, they're going deeply into vertical businesses and, and disrupting and adding value on top of those. And I think that's, that's really the, the point of, of technology, right? It's enabling human progress us in, in all fields, it's making us healthier. It's making us safer. It's making us more successful in everything that, that we as humans do. And so all these layers of technology are enabling further progress and I think it's absolutely gonna continue. It's all been super exciting. Yeah. You know, so far for the first several decades, but as I, as I believe it, it's, it's just a pre-game show. >>And it's clear your strategy is, is, is really building that foundation of a layer, hardening it, but making it flexible enough, anybody read your book, you're a technology, visionary. A lot of people put you in a, you know, finance bucket, but you can, you can see that you can connect the dots. And that's what you're doing with your foundation of layers. You that's where you're making the bets, isn't it? Uh, you don't can't predict the future. You've said that many times, but you can sort of see where it's going and be prepared for >>It. Well, you, you, you know, you think about any company in, in the industry or any public sector organization, right? Uh, they're, they're, they're wanting to evolve more quickly and transform more quick, more quickly. Right. And we can give them an infrastructure or set of tools, a set of capabilities to help them go faster. >>Yeah. And the other one thing in the eighties, when you started Dell and we were in college, there was no open source really then if look at the growth of open source, talk about those layers, open source, better Silicon GPS, faster, cheap >>More now and now we even have, uh, open source instruction sets for processors. So I mean the whole world's changing. It's exciting. You have people around the world working together. I mean, when you see our development teams, uh, whether they're in Israel or Ireland or Bangalore or Singapore, Hopton Austin, Silicon valley, you know, Taiwan, they're, they're all, they're all collaborating together and, you know, driving, driving innovation and, and, and our business is not that dissimilar from our customers >>Like great to have you in the queue. Great. To have a physical event. People are excited. I'm talking to people, Hey, haven't been back in Vegas in two years. Thanks for having this event. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Absolutely. Thank you guys. >>Michael Dell here in the cube CEO of Dell technologies. I'm John far, Dave Volante. We'll be right back, more live coverage here at Dell tech world.

>> From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from "theCUBE" and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> There are very few political issues that get bipartisan support these days, nevermind consensus spanning geopolitical boundaries. But whether we're talking across the aisle or over the pond, there seems to be common agreement that the power of big tech firms should be regulated. But the government's track record when it comes to antitrust aimed at big tech is actually really mixed, mixed at best. History has shown that market forces rather than public policy have been much more effective at curbing monopoly power in the technology industry. Hello, and welcome to this week's "Wikibon CUBE" insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in frequent "CUBE" contributor Dave Moschella, author and senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Dave, welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks Dave, good to be here. >> So you just recently published an article, we're going to bring it up here and I'll read the title, "Theory Aside, Antitrust Advocates Should Keep Their "Big Tech" Ambitions Narrow". And in this post you argue that big sweeping changes like breaking apart companies to moderate monopoly power in the tech industry have been ineffective compared to market forces, but you're not saying government shouldn't be involved rather you're suggesting that more targeted measures combined with market forces are the right answer. Can you maybe explain a little bit more the premise behind your research and some of your conclusions? >> Sure, and first let's go back to that title, when I said, theory aside, that is referring to a huge debate that's going on in global antitrust circles these days about whether antitrust should follow the traditional path of being invoked when there's real harm, demonstrable harm to consumers or a new theory that says that any sort of vast monopoly power inevitably will be bad for competition and consumers at some point, so your best to intervene now to avoid harms later. And that school, which was a very minor part of the antitrust world for many, many years is now quite ascendant and the debate goes on doesn't matter which side of that you're on the questions sort of there well, all right, well, if you're going to do something to take on big tech and clearly many politicians, regulators are sort of issuing to do something, what would you actually do? And what are the odds that that'll do more good than harm? And that was really the origins of the piece and trying to take a historical view of that. >> Yeah, I learned a new word, thank you. Neo-brandzian had to look it up, but basically you're saying that traditionally it was proving consumer harm versus being proactive about the possibility or likelihood of consumer harm. >> Correct, and that's a really big shift that a lot of traditional antitrust people strongly object to, but is now sort of the trendy and more send and view. >> Got it, okay, let's look a little deeper into the history of tech monopolies and government action and see what we can learn from that. We put together this slide that we can reference. It shows the three historical targets in the tech business and now the new ones. In 1969, the DOJ went after IBM, Big Blue and it's 13 years later, dropped its suit. And then in 1984 the government broke Ma Bell apart and in the late 1990s, went after Microsoft, I think it was 1998 in the Wintel monopoly. And recently in an interview with tech journalist, Kara Swisher, the FTC chair Lena Khan claimed that the government played a major role in moderating the power of tech giants historically. And I think she even specifically referenced Microsoft or maybe Kara did and basically said the industry and consumers from the dominance of companies like Microsoft. So Dave, let's briefly talk about and Kara by the way, didn't really challenge that, she kind of let it slide. But let's talk about each of these and test this concept a bit. Were the government actions in these instances necessary? What were the outcomes and the consequences? Maybe you could start with IBM and AT&T. >> Yeah, it's a big topic and there's a lot there and a lot of history, but I might just sort of introduce by saying for whatever reasons antitrust has been part of the entire information technology industry history from mainframe to the current period and that slide sort of gives you that. And the reasons for that are I think once that we sort of know the economies of scale, network effects, lock in safe choices, lot of things that explain it, but the good bit about that is we actually have so much history of this and we can at least see what's happened in the past and when you look at IBM and AT&T they both were massive antitrust cases. The one against IBM was dropped and it was dropped in as you say, in 1980. Well, what was going on in at that time, IBM was sort of considered invincible and unbeatable, but it was 1981 that the personal computer came around and within just a couple of years the world could see that the computing paradigm had change from main frames and minis to PCs lines client server and what have you. So IBM in just a couple of years went from being unbeatable, you can't compete with them, we have to break up with them to being incredibly vulnerable and in trouble and never fully recovered and is sort of a shell of what it once was. And so the market took care of that and no action was really necessary just by everybody thinking there was. The case of AT&T, they did act and they broke up the company and I would say, first question is, was that necessary? Well, lots of countries didn't do that and the reality is 1980 breaking it up into long distance and regional may have made some sense, but by the 1990 it was pretty clear that the telecom world was going to change dramatically from long distance and fixed wires services to internet services, data services, wireless services and all of these things that we're going to restructure the industry anyways. But AT& T one to me is very interesting because of the unintended consequences. And I would say that the main unintended consequence of that was America's competitiveness in telecommunications took a huge hit. And today, to this day telecommunications is dominated by European, Chinese and other firms. And the big American sort of players of the time AT&T which Western Electric became Lucent, Lucent is now owned by Nokia and is really out of it completely and most notably and compellingly Bell Labs, the Bell Labs once the world's most prominent research institution now also a shell of itself and as it was part of Lucent is also now owned by the Finnish company Nokia. So that restructuring greatly damaged America's core strength in telecommunications hardware and research and one can argue we've never recovered right through this 5IG today. So it's a very good example of the market taking care of, the big problem, but meddling leading to some unintended consequences that have hurt the American competitiveness and as we'll talk about, probably later, you can see some of that going on again today and in the past with Microsoft and Intel. >> Right, yeah, Bell Labs was an American gem, kind of like Xerox PARC and basically gone now. You mentioned Intel and Microsoft, Microsoft and Intel. As many people know, some young people don't, IBM unwillingly handed its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft by outsourcing the micro processor and operating system, respectively. Those two companies ended up with IBM ironically, agreeing to take OS2 which was its proprietary operating system and giving Intel, Microsoft Windows not realizing that its ability to dominate a new disruptive market like PCs and operating systems had been vaporized to your earlier point by the new Wintel ecosystem. Now Dave, the government wanted to break Microsoft apart and split its OS business from its application software, in the case of Intel, Intel only had one business. You pointed out microprocessors so it couldn't bust it up, but take us through the history here and the consequences of each. >> Well, the Microsoft one is sort of a classic because the antitrust case which was raging in the sort of mid nineties and 1998 when it finally ended, those were the very, once again, everybody said, Bill Gates was unstoppable, no one could compete with Microsoft they'd buy them, destroy them, predatory pricing, whatever they were accusing of the attacks on Netscape all these sort of things. But those the very years where it was becoming clear first that Microsoft basically missed the early big years of the internet and then again, later missed all the early years of the mobile phone business going back to BlackBerrys and pilots and all those sorts of things. So here we are the government making the case that this company is unstoppable and you can't compete with them the very moment they're entirely on the defensive. And therefore wasn't surprising that that suit eventually was dropped with some minor concessions about Microsoft making it a little bit easier for third parties to work with them and treating people a little bit more, even handling perfectly good things that they did. But again, the more market took care of the problem far more than the antitrust activities did. The Intel one is also interesting cause it's sort of like the AT& T one. On the one hand antitrust actions made Intel much more likely and in fact, required to work with AMD enough to keep that company in business and having AMD lowered prices for consumers certainly probably sped up innovation in the personal computer business and appeared to have a lot of benefits for those early years. But when you look at it from a longer point of view and particularly when look at it again from a global point of view you see that, wow, they not so clear because that very presence of AMD meant that there's a lot more pressure on Intel in terms of its pricing, its profitability, its flexibility and its volumes. All the things that have made it harder for them to A, compete with chips made in Taiwan, let alone build them in the United States and therefore that long term effect of essentially requiring Intel to allow AMD to exist has undermined Intel's position globally and arguably has undermined America's position in the long run. And certainly Intel today is far more vulnerable to an ARM and Invidia to other specialized chips to China, to Taiwan all of these things are going on out there, they're less capable of resisting that than they would've been otherwise. So, you thought we had some real benefits with AMD and lower prices for consumers, but the long term unintended consequences are arguably pretty bad. >> Yeah, that's why we recently wrote in Intel two "Strategic To Fail", we'll see, Okay. now we come to 2022 and there are five companies with anti-trust targets on their backs. Although Microsoft seems to be the least susceptible to US government ironically intervention at this this point, but maybe not and we show "The Cincos Comas Club" in a homage to Russ Hanneman of the show "Silicon Valley" Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all with trillion dollar plus valuations. But meta briefly crossed that threshold like Mr. Hanneman lost a comma and is now well under that market cap probably around five or 600 million, sorry, billion. But under serious fire nonetheless Dave, people often don't realize the immense monopoly power that IBM had which relatively speaking when measured its percent of industry revenue or profit dwarf that of any company in tech ever, but the industry is much smaller then, no internet, no cloud. Does it call for a different approach this time around? How should we think about these five companies their market power, the implications of government action and maybe what you suggested more narrow action versus broad sweeping changes. >> Yeah, and there's a lot there. I mean, if you go back to the old days IBM had what, 70% of the computer business globally and AT&T had 90% or so of the American telecom market. So market shares that today's players can only dream of. Intel and Microsoft had 90% of the personal computer market. And then you look at today the big five and as wealthy and as incredibly successful as they've been, you sort of have almost the argument that's wrong on the face of it. How can five companies all of which compete with each other to at least some degree, how can they all be monopolies? And the reality is they're not monopolies, they're all oligopolies that are very powerful firms, but none of them have an outright monopoly on anything. There are competitors in all the spaces that they're in and increasing and probably increasingly so. And so, yeah, I think people conflate the extraordinary success of the companies with this belief that therefore they are monopolist and I think they're far less so than those in the past. >> Great, all right, I want to do a quick drill down to cloud computing, it's a key component of digital business infrastructure in his book, "Seeing Digital", Dave Moschella coined a term the matrix or the key which is really referred to the key technology platforms on which people are going to build digital businesses. Dave, we joke you should have called it the metaverse you were way ahead of your time. But I want to look at this ETR chart, we show spending momentum or net score on the vertical access market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. We show this view a lot, we put a dotted line at the 40% mark which indicates highly elevated spending. And you can sort of see Microsoft in the upper right, it's so far up to the right it's hidden behind the January 22 and AWS is right there. Those two dominate the cloud far ahead of the pack including Google Cloud. Microsoft and to a lesser extent AWS they dominate in a lot of other businesses, productivity, collaboration, database, security, video conferencing. MarTech with LinkedIn PC software et cetera, et cetera, Googles or alphabets of business of course is ads and we don't have similar spending data on Apple and Facebook, but we know these companies dominate their respective business. But just to give you a sense of the magnitude of these companies, here's some financial data that's worth looking at briefly. The table ranks companies by market cap in trillions that's the second column and everyone in the club, but meta and each has revenue well over a hundred billion dollars, Amazon approaching half a trillion dollars in revenue. The operating income and cash positions are just mind boggling and the cash equivalents are comparable or well above the revenues of highly successful tech companies like Cisco, Dell, HPE, Oracle, and Salesforce. They're extremely profitable from an operating income standpoint with the clear exception of Amazon and we'll come back to that in a moment and we show the revenue multiples in the last column, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, just insane. Dave, there are other equally important metrics, CapX is one which kind of sets the stage for future scale and there are other measures. >> Yeah, including our research and development where those companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars over the years. And I think it's easy to look at those numbers and just say, this doesn't seem right, how can any companies have so much and spend so much? But if you think of what they're actually doing, those companies are building out the digital infrastructure of essentially the entire world. And I remember once meeting some folks at Google, and they said, beyond AI, beyond Search, beyond Android, beyond all the specific things we do, the biggest thing we're actually doing is building a physical infrastructure that can deliver search results on any topic in microseconds and the physical capacity they built costs those sorts of money. And when people start saying, well, we should have lots and lots of smaller companies well, that sounds good, yeah, it's all right, but where are those companies going to get the money to build out what needs to be built out? And every country in the world is trying to build out its digital infrastructure and some are going to do it much better than others. >> I want to just come back to that chart on Amazon for a bit, notice their comparatively tiny operating profit as a percentage of revenue, Amazon is like Bezos giant lifestyle business, it's really never been that profitable like most retail. However, there's one other financial data point around Amazon's business that we want to share and this chart here shows Amazon's operating profit in the blue bars and AWS's in the orange. And the gray line is the percentage of Amazon's overall operating profit that comes from AWS. That's the right most access, so last quarter we were well over a hundred percent underscoring the power of AWS and the horrendous margins in retail. But AWS is essentially funding Amazon's entrance into new markets, whether it's grocery or movies, Bezos moves into space. Dave, a while back you collaborated with us and we asked our audience, what could disrupt Amazon? And we came up with your detailed help, a number of scenarios as shown here. And we asked the audience to rate the likelihood of each scenario in terms of its likelihood of disrupting Amazon with a 10 being highly likely on average the score was six with complacency, arrogance, blindness, you know, self-inflicted wounds really taking the top spot with 6.5. So Dave is breaking up Amazon the right formula in your view, why or why not? >> Yeah, there's a couple of things there. The first is sort of the irony that when people in the sort of regulatory world talk about the power of Amazon, they almost always talk about their power in consumer markets, whether it's books or retail or impact on malls or main street shops or whatever and as you say that they make very little money doing that. The interest people almost never look at the big cloud battle between Amazon, Microsoft and lesser extent Google, Alibaba others, even though that's where they're by far highest market share and pricing power and all those things are. So the regulatory focus is sort of weird, but you know, the consumer stuff obviously gets more appeal to the general public. But that survey you referred to me was interesting because one of the challenges I sort of sent myself I was like okay, well, if I'm going to say that IBM case, AT&T case, Microsoft's case in all those situations the market was the one that actually minimized the power of those firms and therefore the antitrust stuff wasn't really necessary. Well, how true is that going to be again, just cause it's been true in the past doesn't mean it's true now. So what are the possible scenarios over the 2020s that might make it all happen again? And so each of those were sort of questions that we put out to others, but the ones that to me by far are the most likely I mean, they have the traditional one of company cultures sort of getting fat and happy and all, that's always the case, but the more specific ones, first of all by far I think is China. You know, Amazon retail is a low margin business. It would be vulnerable if it didn't have the cloud profits behind it, but imagine a year from now two years from now trade tensions with China get worse and Christmas comes along and China just says, well, you know, American consumers if you want that new exercise bike or that new shoes or clothing, well, anything that we make well, actually that's not available on Amazon right now, but you can get that from Alibaba. And maybe in America that's a little more farfetched, but in many countries all over the world it's not farfetched at all. And so the retail divisions vulnerability to China just seems pretty obvious. Another possible disruption, Amazon has spent billions and billions with their warehouses and their robots and their automated inventory systems and all the efficiencies that they've done there, but you could argue that maybe someday that's not really necessary that you have Search which finds where a good is made and a logistical system that picks that up and delivers it to customers and why do you need all those warehouses anyways? So those are probably the two top one, but there are others. I mean, a lot of retailers as they get stronger online, maybe they start pulling back some of the premium products from Amazon and Amazon takes their cut of whatever 30% or so people might want to keep more of that in house. You see some of that going on today. So the idea that the Amazon is in vulnerable disruption is probably is wrong and as part of the work that I'm doing, as part of stuff that I do with Dave and SiliconANGLE is how's that true for the others too? What are the scenarios for Google or Apple or Microsoft and the scenarios are all there. And so, will these companies be disrupted as they have in the past? Well, you can't say for sure, but the scenarios are certainly plausible and I certainly wouldn't bet against it and that's what history tells us. And it could easily happen once again and therefore, the antitrust should at least be cautionary and humble and realize that maybe they don't need to act as much as they think. >> Yeah, now, one of the things that you mentioned in your piece was felt like narrow remedies, were more logical. So you're not arguing for totally Les Affaire you're pushing for remedies that are more targeted in scope. And while the EU just yesterday announced new rules to limit the power of tech companies and we showed the article, some comments here the regulators they took the social media to announce a victory and they had a press conference. I know you watched that it was sort of a back slapping fest. The comments however, that we've sort of listed here are mixed, some people applauded, but we saw many comments that were, hey, this is a horrible idea, this was rushed together. And these are going to result as you say in unintended consequences, but this is serious stuff they're talking about applying would appear to be to your point or your prescription more narrowly defined restrictions although a lot of them to any company with a market cap of more than 75 billion Euro or turnover of more than 77.5 billion Euro which is a lot of companies and imposing huge penalties for violations up to 20% of annual revenue for repeat offenders, wow. So again, you've taken a brief look at these developments, you watched the press conference, what do you make of this? This is an application of more narrow restrictions, but in your quick assessment did they get it right? >> Yeah, let's break that down a little bit, start a little bit of history again and then get to Europe because although big sweeping breakups of the type that were proposed for IBM, Microsoft and all weren't necessary that doesn't mean that the government didn't do some useful things because they did. In the case of IBM government forces in Europe and America basically required IBM to make it easier for companies to make peripherals type drives, disc drives, printers that worked with IBM mainframes. They made them un-bundle their software pricing that made it easier for database companies and others to sell their of products. With AT&T it was the government that required AT&T to actually allow other phones to connect to the network, something they argued at the time would destroy security or whatever that it was the government that required them to allow MCI the long distance carrier to connect to the AT network for local deliveries. And with that Microsoft and Intel the government required them to at least treat their suppliers more even handly in terms of pricing and policies and support and such things. So the lessons out there is the big stuff wasn't really necessary, but the little stuff actually helped a lot and I think you can see the scenarios and argue in the piece that there's little stuff that can be done today in all the cases for the big five, there are things that you might want to consider the companies aren't saints they take advantage of their power, they use it in ways that sometimes can be reigned in and make for better off overall. And so that's how it brings us to the European piece of it. And to me, the European piece is much more the bad scenario of doing too much than the wiser course of trying to be narrow and specific. What they've basically done is they have a whole long list of narrow things that they're all trying to do at once. So they want Amazon not to be able to share data about its selling partners and they want Apple to open up their app store and they don't want people Google to be able to share data across its different services, Android, Search, Mail or whatever. And they don't want Facebook to be able to, they want to force Facebook to open up to other messaging services. And they want to do all these things for all the big companies all of which are American, and they want to do all that starting next year. And to me that looks like a scenario of a lot of difficult problems done quickly all of which might have some value if done really, really well, but all of which have all kinds of risks for the unintended consequence we've talked before and therefore they seem to me being too much too soon and the sort of problems we've seen in the past and frankly to really say that, I mean, the Europeans would never have done this to the companies if they're European firms, they're doing this because they're all American firms and the sort of frustration of Americans dominance of the European tech industry has always been there going back to IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and all of them. But it's particularly strong now because the tech business is so big. And so I think the politics of this at a time where we're supposedly all this great unity of America and NATO and Europe in regards to Ukraine, having the Europeans essentially go after the most important American industry brings in the geopolitics in I think an unavoidable way. And I would think the story is going to get pretty tense over the next year or so and as you say, the Europeans think that they're taking massive actions, they think they're doing the right thing. They think this is the natural follow on to the GDPR stuff and even a bigger version of that and they think they have more to come and they see themselves as the people taming big tech not just within Europe, but for the world and absent any other rules that they may pull that off. I mean, GDPR has indeed spread despite all of its flaws. So the European thing which it doesn't necessarily get huge attention here in America is certainly getting attention around the world and I would think it would get more, even more going forward. >> And the caution there is US public policy makers, maybe they can provide, they will provide a tailwind maybe it's a blind spot for them and it could be a template like you say, just like GDPR. Okay, Dave, we got to leave it there. Thanks for coming on the program today, always appreciate your insight and your views, thank you. >> Hey, thanks a lot, Dave. >> All right, don't forget these episodes are all available as podcast, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, "Breaking Analysis Podcast". Check out ETR website, etr.ai. We publish every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @davevellante. Comment on my LinkedIn post. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Michelle for "theCUBE Insights" powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (slow tempo music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone, this is Stephanie Chan with theCUBE. Recently analyst Dave Ross RADIO entitled, Pat Gelsinger has a vision. It just needs the time, the cash and a miracle where he highlights why he thinks Intel is years away from reversing position in the semiconductor industry. Welcome Dave. >> Hey thanks, Stephanie. Good to see you. >> So, Dave you been following the company closely over the years. If you look at Wall Street Journal most analysts are saying to hold onto Intel. can you tell us why you're so negative on it? >> Well, you know, I'm not a stock picker Stephanie, but I've seen the data there are a lot of... some buys some sells, but most of the analysts are on a hold. I think they're, who knows maybe they're just hedging their bets they don't want to a strong controversial call that kind of sitting in the fence. But look, Intel still an amazing company they got tremendous resources. They're an ICON and they pay a dividend. So, there's definitely an investment case to be made to hold onto the stock. But I would generally say that investors they better be ready to hold on to Intel for a long, long time. I mean, Intel's they're just not the dominant player that it used to be. And the challenges have been mounting for a decade and look competitively Intel's fighting a five front war. They got AMD in both PCs and the data center the entire Arm Ecosystem` and video coming after with the whole move toward AI and GPU they're dominating there. Taiwan Semiconductor is by far the leading fab in the world with terms of output. And I would say even China is kind of the fifth leg of that stool, long term. So, lot of hurdles to jump competitively. >> So what are other sources of Intel's trouble sincere besides what you just mentioned? >> Well, I think they started when PC volumes peaked which was, or David Floyer, Wikibon wrote back in 2011, 2012 that he tells if it doesn't make some moves, it's going to face some trouble. So, even though PC volumes have bumped up with the pandemic recently, they pair in comparison to the wafer volume that are coming out of the Arm Ecosystem, and TSM and Samsung factories. The volumes of the Arm Ecosystem, Stephanie they dwarf the output of Intel by probably 10 X in semiconductors. I mean, the volume in semiconductors is everything. And because that's what costs down and Intel they just knocked a little cost manufacture any anymore. And in my view, they may never be again, not without a major change in the volume strategy, which of course Gelsinger is doing everything he can to affect that change, but they're years away and they're going to have to spend, north of a 100 billion dollars trying to get there, but it's all about volume in the semiconductor game. And Intel just doesn't have it right now. >> So you mentioned Pat Gelsinger he was a new CEO last January. He's a highly respected CEO and in truth employed more than four decades, I think he has knowledge and experience. including 30 years at Intel where he began his career. What's your opinion on his performance thus far besides the volume and semiconductor industry position of Intel? >> Well, I think Gelsinger is an amazing executive. He's a technical visionary, he's an execution machine, he's doing all the right things. I mean, he's working, he was at the state of the union address and looking good in a suit, he's saying all the right things. He's spending time with EU leaders. And he's just a very clear thinker and a super strong strategist, but you can't change Physics. The thing about Pat is he's known all along what's going on with Intel. I'm sure he's watched it from not so far because I think it's always been his dream to run the company. So, the fact that he's made a lot of moves. He's bringing in new management, he's repairing some of the dead wood at Intel. He's launched, kind of relaunched if you will, the Foundry Business. But I think they're serious about that. You know, this time around, they're spinning out mobile eye to throw off some cash mobile eye was an acquisition they made years ago to throw off some more cash to pay for the fabs. They have announced things like; a fabs in Ohio, in the Heartland, Ze in Heartland which is strikes all the right chords with the various politicians. And so again, he's doing all the right things. He's trying to inject. He's calling out his best Andrew Grove. I like to say who's of course, The Iconic CEO of Intel for many, many years, but again you can't change Physics. He can't compress the cycle any faster than the cycle wants to go. And so he's doing all the right things. It's just going to take a long, long time. >> And you said that competition is better positioned. Could you elaborate on why you think that, and who are the main competitors at this moment? >> Well, it's this Five Front War that I talked about. I mean, you see what's happened in Arm changed everything, Intel remember they passed on the iPhone didn't think it could make enough money on smartphones. And that opened the door for Arm. It was eager to take Apple's business. And because of the consumer volumes the semiconductor industry changed permanently just like the PC volume changed the whole mini computer business. Well, the smartphone changed the economics of semiconductors as well. Very few companies can afford the capital expense of building semiconductor fabrication facilities. And even fewer can make cutting edge chips like; five nanometer, three nanometer and beyond. So companies like AMD and Invidia, they don't make chips they design them and then they ship them to foundries like TSM and Samsung to manufacture them. And because TSM has such huge volumes, thanks to large part to Apple it's further down or up I guess the experience curve and experience means everything in terms of cost. And they're leaving Intel behind. I mean, the best example I can give you is Apple would look at the, a series chip, and now the M one and the M one ultra, I think about the traditional Moore's law curve that we all talk about two X to transistor density every two years doubling. Intel's lucky today if can keep that pace up, let's assume it can. But meanwhile, look at Apple's Arm based M one to M one Ultra transition. It occurred in less than two years. It was more like, 15 or 18 months. And it went from 16 billion transistors on a package to over a 100 billion. And so we're talking about the competition Apple in this case using Arm standards improving it six to seven X inside of a two year period while Intel's running it two X. And that says it all. So Intel is on a curve that's more expensive and slower than the competition. >> Well recently, until what Lujan Harrison did with 5.4 billion So it can make more check order companies last February I think the middle of February what do you think of that strategic move? >> Well, it was designed to help with Foundry. And again, I said left that out of my things that in Intel's doing, as Pat's doing there's a long list actually and many more. Again I think, it's an Israeli based company they're a global company, which is important. One of the things that Pat stresses is having a a presence in Western countries, I think that's super important, he'd like to get the percentage of semiconductors coming out of Western countries back up to at least maybe not to where it was previously but by the end of the decade, much more competitive. And so that's what that acquisition was designed to do. And it's a good move, but it's, again it doesn't change Physics. >> So Dave, you've been putting a lot of content out there and been following Intel for years. What can Intel do to go back on track? >> Well, I think first it needs great leadership and Pat Gelsinger is providing that. Since we talked about it, he's doing all the right things. He's manifesting his best. Andrew Grove, as I said earlier, splitting out the Foundry business is critical because we all know Moore's law. This is Right Law talks about volume in any business not just semiconductors, but it's crucial in semiconductors. So, splitting out a separate Foundry business to make chips is important. He's going to do that. Of course, he's going to ask Intel's competitors to allow Intel to manufacture their chips which they very well may well want to do because there's such a shortage right now of supply and they need those types of manufacturers. So, the hope is that that's going to drive the volume necessary for Intel to compete cost effectively. And there's the chips act. And it's EU cousin where governments are going to possibly put in some money into the semiconductor manufacturing to make the west more competitive. It's a key initiative that Pat has put forth and a challenge. And it's a good one. And he's making a lot of moves on the design side and committing tons of CapEx in these new fabs as we talked about but maybe his best chance is again the fact that, well first of all, the market's enormous. It's a trillion dollar market, but secondly there's a very long term shortage in play here in semiconductors. I don't think it's going to be cleared up in 2022 or 2023. It's just going to be keep being an explotion whether it's automobiles and factory devices and cameras. I mean, virtually every consumer device and edge device is going to use huge numbers of semiconductor chip. So, I think that's in Pat's favor, but honestly Intel is so far behind in my opinion, that I hope by the end of this decade, it's going to be in a position maybe a stronger number two position, and volume behind TSM maybe number three behind Samsung maybe Apple is going to throw Intel some Foundry business over time, maybe under pressure from the us government. And they can maybe win that account back but that's still years away from a design cycle standpoint. And so again, maybe in the 2030's, Intel can compete for top dog status, but that in my view is the best we can hope for this national treasure called Intel. >> Got it. So we got to leave it right there. Thank you so much for your time, Dave. >> You're welcome Stephanie. Good to talk to you >> So you can check out Dave's breaking analysis on theCUBE.net each Friday. This is Stephanie Chan for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCube's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its partners with two live sets on the scene. In addition to two remote studios. And we'll have somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred guests on the program this year at re:Invent. I'm extremely delighted to welcome a very, very special guest. Right now. He served as the director of the NSA under two presidents, and was the first commander of the U.S Cyber Command. He's a Cube alumni, he's founder and co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity. General Keith Alexander. Thanks for joining us today General. >> Thanks, David. It's an honor to be here at re:Invent, you know, with AWS. All that they're doing and all they're making possible for us to defend sector states, companies and nations in cyber. So an honor to be here. >> Well, welcome back to theCube. Let's dive right in. I'd like to know how you would describe the current cyber threat landscape that we face. >> Well, I think it's growing. Well, let's start right out. You know, the good news or the bad news, the bad news is getting worse. We're seeing that. If you think about SolarWinds, you think about the Hafnium attacks on Microsoft. You think about this rapid growth in ransomware. We're seeing criminals and nation states engaging in ways that we've never seen in the past. It's more blatant. They're going after more quickly, they're using cyber as an element of national power. Let's break that down just a little bit. Do you go back to two, July. Xi Jinping, talked about breaking heads in bloodshed when he was referring to the United States and Taiwan. And this has gone hot and cold, that's a red line for him. They will do anything to keep Taiwan from breaking away. And this is a huge existential threat to us into the region. And when this comes up, they're going to use cyber to go after it. Perhaps even more important and closer right now is what's going on with Russia in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. We saw this in 2014, when Russia took over the Crimea. The way they did it, staging troops. They did that in 2008 against Georgia. And now there are, by some reports over a hundred thousand troops on the border of Eastern Ukraine. Some call it an exercise, but that's exactly what they did in Georgia. That's what they did in the Crimea. And in both those cases, they preceded those attacks, those physical attacks with cyber attacks. If you go to 2017, when Russia hit the Ukrainian government with the NotPetya attack that had global repercussions. Russia was responsible for SolarWinds, they have attacked our infrastructure to find out what our government is doing and they continue going. This is getting worse. You know, it's interesting when you think about, so what do you do about something like that? How do we stop that? And the answer is we've got to work together. You know, Its slam commissioner addressed it. The meeting with the president on August 25th. This is a great statement by the CEO and chairman of Southern Company, Tom Fanning. He said this, "the war is being waged on our nation's critical infrastructure in particular, our energy sector, our telecommunications sector and financial sector." The private sector owns and operates 87% of the critical infrastructure in the United States, making collaboration between industry and the federal government imperative too, for these attacks. SO >> General, I want to dig just a little bit on that point that you make for generations, people have understood that the term is 'kinetic war', right? Not everyone has heard that phrase, but for generations we've understood the concept of someone dropping a bomb on a building as being an attack. You've just mentioned that, that a lot of these attacks are directed towards the private sector. The private sector doesn't have an army to respond to those attacks. Number one, that's our government's responsibility. So the question I have is, how seriously are people taking these kinds of threats when compared to the threat of kinetic war? Because my gosh, you can take down the entire electrical grid now. That's not something you can do with a single bomb. What are your, what are your thoughts on that? >> So you're hitting on a key point, a theoretical and an operational point. If you look back, what's the intent of warfare? It's to get the mass of people to give up. The army protects the mass of people in that fight. In cyber, there's no protection. Our critical infrastructure is exposed to our adversaries. That's the problem that we face. And because it's exposed, we have a tremendous vulnerability. So those who wish us harm, imagine the Colonial Pipeline attack an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude bigger. The impact on our country would paralyze much of what we do today. We are not ready for that. That's the issue that Tom Fanning and others have brought up. We don't practice between the public sector and the private sector working together to defend this country. We need to do that. That's the issue that we have to really get our hands around. And when we talk about practice, what do we mean? It means we have to let that federal government, the ones that are going to protect us, see what's going on. There is no radar picture. Now, since we're at re:Invent, the cloud, where AWS and others have done, is create an infrastructure that allows us to build that bridge between the public and private sector and scale it. It's amazing what we can now do. We couldn't do that when I was running Cyber Command. And running Cyber Command, we couldn't see threats on the government. And we couldn't see threats on critical infrastructure. We couldn't see threats on the private sector. And so it all went and all the government did was say, after the fact you've been attacked. That's not helpful. >> So >> It's like they dropped a bomb. We didn't know. >> Yeah, so what does IronNet doing to kind of create this radar capability? >> So, well, thanks. That's a great question because there's four things that you really got to do. First. You've got to be able to detect the SolarWinds type attacks, which we did. You've got to have a hunt platform that can see what it is. You've got to be able to use machine learning and AI to really cut down the number of events. And the most important you need to be able to anonymize and share that into the cloud and see where those attacks are going to create that radar picture. So behavioral analytics, then you use signature based as well, but you need those sets of analytics to really see what's going on. Machine learning, AI, a hunt platform, and cloud. And then analytics in the cloud to see what's going on, creates that air traffic control, picture radar, picture for cyber. That's what we're doing. You see, I think that's the important part. And that's why we really value the partnership with AWS. They've been a partner with us for six years, helping us build through that. You can see what we can do in the cloud. We could never do in hardware alone. Just imagine trying to push out equipment and then do that for hundreds of companies. It's not viable. So SaaS, what we are as a SaaS company, you can now do that at scale, and you can push this out and we can create, we can defend this nation in cyber if we work together. And that's the thing, you know, I really, had a great time in the military. One of the things I learned in the military, you need to train how you're going to fight. They're really good at that. We did that in the eighties, and you can see what happened in 1990 in the Gulf war. We need to now do that between the public and private sector. We have to have those training. We need to continuously uplift our capabilities. And that's where the cloud and all these other things make that possible. That's the future of cybersecurity. You know, it's interesting David, our country developed the internet. We're the ones that pioneered that. We ought to be the first to secure. >> Seems to make sense. And when you talk about collective defense in this private public partnership, that needs to happen, you get examples of some folks in private industry and what they're doing, but, but talk a little bit more about, maybe what isn't happening yet. What do we need to do? I don't want you to necessarily get political and start making budgetary suggestions, but unless you want to, but what, but where do you see, where do we really need to push forward from a public perspective in order to make these connections? And then how is that connection actually happen? This isn't someone from the IronNet security service desk, getting on a red phone and calling the White House, how are the actual connections made? >> So it has to be, the connections have to be just like we do radar. You know, when you think about radars across our nation or radar operator doesn't call up one of the towers and say, you've got an aircraft coming at you at such and such a speed. I hope you can distinguish between those two aircraft and make sure they don't bump into each other. They get a picture and they get a way of tracking it. And multiple people can see that radar picture at a speed. And that's how we do air traffic control safety. We need the same thing in cyber, where the government has a picture. The private sector has a picture and they can see what's going on. The private sector's role is I'm going to do everything I can, you know, and this is where the energy sector, I use that quote from Tom Fanning, because what they're saying is, "it's our job to keep the grid up." And they're putting the resources to do it. So they're actually jumping on that in a great way. And what they're saying is "we'll share that with the government", both the DHS and DOD. Now we have to have that same picture created for DHS and DOD. I think one of the things that we're doing is we're pioneering the building of that picture. So that's what we do. We build the picture to bring people together. So think of that is that's the capability. Everybody's going to own a piece of that, and everybody's going to be operating in it. But if you can share that picture, what you can begin to do is say, I've got an attack coming against company A. Company A now sees what it has to do. It can get fellow companies to help them defend, collective defense, knowledge sharing, crowdsourcing. At the same time, the government can see that attack going on and say, "my job is to stop that." If it's DHS, I could see what I have to do. Within the country, DOD can say, "my job is to shoot the archers." How do we go do what we're authorized to do under rules of engagement? So now you have a way of the government and the private sector working together to create that picture. Then we train them and we train them. We should never have had an event like SolarWinds happen in the future. We got to get out in front. And if we do that, think of the downstream consequences, not only can we detect who's doing it, we can hold them accountable and make them pay a price. Right now. It's pretty free. They get in, pap, that didn't work. They get away free. That didn't work, we get away free. Or we broke in, we got, what? 18,000 companies in 30,000 companies. No consequences. In the future there should be consequences. >> And in addition to the idea of consequences, you know, in the tech sector, we have this concept of a co-op petition, where we're often cooperating and competing. The adversaries from, U.S perspective are also great partners, trading partners. So in a sense, it sounds like what you're doing is also kind of adhering to the old adage that, that good fences make for great neighbors. If we all know that our respective infrastructures are secure, we can sort of get on with the honest business of being partners, because you want to make the cost of cyber war too expensive. Is that, is that a fair statement? >> Yes. And I would take that analogy and bend it slightly to the following. Today every company defends itself. So you take 90 companies with 10 people, each doing everything they can to defend themselves. Imagine in the world we trying to build, those 90 companies work together. You have now 900 people working together for the collective defense. If you're in the C-suite or the board of those companies, which would rather have? 900 help new security or 10? This isn't hard. And so what we say is, yes. That neighborhood watch program for cyber has tremendous value. And beyond neighborhood watch, I can also share collaboration because, I might not have the best people in every area of cyber, but in those 900, there will be, and we can share knowledge crowdsource. So it's actually let's work together. I would call it Americans working together to defend America. That's what we need to do. And the states we going to have a similar thing what they're doing, and that's how we'll work this together. >> Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. General Alexander it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on to theCube as part of our 2021 AWS re:Invent coverage. Are you going to get a chance to spend time during the conference in Las Vegas? So you just flying in, flying out. Any chance? >> Actually yeah. >> It's there, we're still negotiating working that. I've registered, but I just don't know I'm in New York city for two meetings and seeing if I can get to Las Vegas. A lot of friends, you know, Adam Solski >> Yes >> and the entire AWS team. They're amazing. And we really liked this partnership. I'd love to see you there. You're going to be there, David? Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And I look forward to that, so I hope hopefully we get that chance again. Thank you so much, General Alexander, and also thank you to our title sponsor AMD for sponsoring this year's re:Invent. Keep it right here for more action on theCube, you're leader in hybrid tech event coverage, I'm Dave Nicholson for the Cube. Thanks. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante semiconductors are the heart of technology innovation for decades technology improvements have marched the cadence of silicon advancements in performance cost power and packaging in the past 10 years the dynamics of the semiconductor industry have changed dramatically soaring factory costs device volume explosions fabulous chip companies greater programmability compressed time to tape out a lot more software content the looming presence of china these and other factors have changed the power structure of the semiconductor business chips today power every aspect of our lives and have led to a global semiconductor shortage that's been well covered but we've never seen anything like it before we believe silicon's success in the next 20 years will be determined by volume manufacturing capabilities design innovation public policy geopolitical dynamics visionary leadership and innovative business models that can survive the intense competition in one of the most challenging businesses in the world hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis it's our pleasure to welcome daniel newman in one of the leading analysts in the technology business and founder of futurum research daniel welcome to the program thanks so much dave great to see you thanks for having me big topic yeah i'll say i'm really looking forward to this and so here's some of the topics that we want to cover today if we have time changes in the semiconductor industry i've said they've been dramatic the shift to nofap companies we're going to talk about volume manufacturing those shifts that have occurred largely due to the arm model we want to cover intel and dig into that and what it has to do to to survive and thrive these changes and then we want to take a look at how alternative processors are impacting the world people talk about is moore's law dead is it alive and well daniel you have strong perspectives on all of this including nvidia love to get your thoughts on on that plus talk about the looming china threat as i mentioned in in the intro but daniel before we get into it do these topics they sound okay how do you see the state of the semiconductor industry today where have we come from where are we and where are we going at the macro level there are a lot of different narratives that are streaming alongside and they're not running in parallel so much as they're running and converging towards one another but it gradually different uh you know degrees so the last two years has welcomed a semiconductor conversation that we really hadn't had and that was supply chain driven the covid19 pandemic brought pretty much unprecedented desire demand thirst or products that are powered by semiconductors and it wasn't until we started running out of laptops of vehicles of servers that the whole world kind of put the semiconductor in focus again like it was just one of those things dave that we as a society it's sort of taken for granted like if you need a laptop you go buy a laptop if you needed a vehicle there'd always be one on the lot um but as we've seen kind of this exponentialism that's taken place throughout the pandemic what we ended up realizing is that semiconductors are eating the world and in fact the next industrial the entire industrial itself the complex is powered by semiconductor technology so everything we we do and we want to do right you went from a vehicle that might have had 50 or 100 worth of semiconductors on a few different parts to one that might have 700 800 different chips in it thousands of dollars worth of semi of semiconductors so you know across the board though yes you're dealing with the dynamics of the shortage you're dealing with the dynamics of innovation you're dealing with moore's law and sort of coming to the end which is leading to new process we're dealing with the foundry versus fab versus invention and product development uh situation so there's so many different concurrent semiconductor narratives that are going on dave and we can talk about any of them and all of them and i'm sure as we do we'll overlap all these different themes you know maybe you can solve this mystery for me there's this this this chip shortage and you can't invent vehicle inventory is so tight but yet when you listen to uh the the ads if the the auto manufacturers are pounding the advertising maybe they're afraid of tesla they don't want to lose their brand awareness but anyway so listen it's by the way a background i want to get a little bit academic here but but bear with me i want to introduce actually reintroduce the concept of wright's law to our audience we know we all know about moore's law but the earlier instantiation actually comes from theodore wright t.p wright he was this engineer in the airplane industry and the math is a little bit abstract to apply but roughly translated says as the cumulative number of units produced doubles your cost per unit declines by a fixed percentage now in airplanes that was around 15 percent in semiconductors we think that numbers more like 20 25 when you add the performance improvements you get from silicon advancements it translates into something like 33 percent cost cost declines when you can double your cumulative volume so that's very important because it confers strategic advantage to the company with the largest volume so it's a learning curve dynamic and it's like andy jassy says daniel there's no compression algorithm for experience and it definitely applies here so if you apply wright's law to what's happening in the industry today we think we can get a better understanding of for instance why tsmc is dominating and why intel is struggling any quick thoughts on that well you have to take every formula like that in any sort of standard mathematics and kind of throw it out the window when you're dealing with the economic situation we are right now i'm not i'm not actually throwing it out the window but what i'm saying is that when supply and demand get out of whack some of those laws become a little bit um more difficult to sustain over the long term what i will say about that is we have certainly seen this found um this fabulous model explode over the last few years you're seeing companies that can focus on software frameworks and innovation that aren't necessarily getting caught up in dealing with the large capital expenditures and overhead the ability to as you suggested in the topics here partner with a company like arm that's developing innovation and then and then um you know offering it uh to everybody right and for a licensee and then they can quickly build we're seeing what that's doing with companies like aws that are saying we're going to just build it alibaba we're just going to build it these aren't chip makers these aren't companies that were even considered chip makers they are now today competing as chip makers so there's a lot of different dynamics going back to your comment about wright's law like i said as we normalize and we figure out this situation on a global scale um i do believe that the who can manufacture the most will certainly continue to have significant competitive advantages yeah no so that's a really interesting point that you're bringing up because one of the things that it leads me to think is that the chip shortage could actually benefit intel i think will benefit intel so i want to introduce this some other data and then get your thoughts on this very simply the chart on the left shows pc shipments which peaked in in 2011 and then began at steady decline until covid and they've the pcs as we know have popped up in terms of volume in the past year and looks like they'll be up again this year the chart on the right is cumulative arm shipments and so as we've reported we think arm wafer volumes are 10x those of x86 volumes and and as such the arm ecosystem has far better cost structure than intel and that's why pat gelsinger was called in to sort of save the day so so daniel i just kind of again opened up this this can of worms but i think you're saying long term volume is going to be critical that's going to confer low cost advantages but in the in in the near to mid-term intel could actually benefit from uh from this chip shortage well intel is the opportunity to position itself as a leader in solving the repatriation crisis uh this will kind of carry over when we talk more about china and taiwan and that relationship and what's going on there we've really identified a massive gap in our uh in america supply chain in the global supply chain because we went from i don't have the stat off hand but i have a rough number dave and we can validate this later but i think it was in like the 30-ish high 30ish percentile of manufacturing of chips were done here in the united states around 1990 and now we're sub 10 as of 2020. so we we offshored almost all of our production and so when we hit this crisis and we needed more manufacturing volume we didn't have it ready part of the problem is you get people like elon musk that come out and make comments to the media like oh it'll be fixed later this year well you can't build a fab in a year you can't build a fab and start producing volume and the other problem is not all chips are the same so not every fab can produce every chip and when you do have fabs that are capable of producing multiple chips it costs millions of dollars to change the hardware and to actually change the process so it's not like oh we're going to build 28 today because that's what ford needs to get all those f-150s out of the lot and tomorrow we're going to pump out more sevens for you know a bunch of hp pcs it's a major overhaul every time you want to retool so there's a lot of complexity here but intel is the one domestic company us-based that has basically raised its hand and said we're going to put major dollars into this and by the way dave the arm chart you showed me could have a very big implication as to why intel wants to do that yeah so right because that's that's a big part of of foundry right is is get those volumes up so i want to hold that thought because i just want to introduce one more data point because one of the things we often talk about is the way in which alternative processors have exploded onto the scene and this chart here if you could bring that up patrick thank you shows the way in which i think you're pointing out intel is responding uh by leveraging alternative fat but once again you know kind of getting getting serious about manufacturing chips what the chart shows is the performance curve it's on a log scale for in the blue line is x86 and the orange line is apple's a series and we're using that as a proxy for sort of the curve that arm is on and it's in its performance over time culminating in the a15 and it measures trillions of operations per second so if you take the traditional x86 curve of doubling every 18 to 24 months that comes out roughly to about 40 percent improvement per year in performance and that's diminishing as we all know to around 30 percent a year because the moore's law is waning the orange line is powered by arm and it's growing at over a hundred percent really 110 per year when you do the math and that's when you combine the cpu the the the neural processing unit the the the xpu the dsps the accelerators et cetera so we're seeing apple use arm aws to you to your point is building chips on on graviton and and and tesla's using our list is long and this is one reason why so daniel this curve is it feels like it's the new performance curve in the industry yeah we are certainly in an era where companies are able to take control of the innovation curve using the development using the open ecosystem of arm having more direct control and price control and of course part of that massive arm number has to do with you know mobile devices and iot and devices that have huge scale but at the same time a lot of companies have made the decision either to move some portion of their product development on arm or to move entirely on arm part of why it was so attractive to nvidia part of the reason that it's under so much scrutiny that that deal um whether that deal will end up getting completed dave but we are seeing an era where we want we i said lust for power i talked about lust for semiconductors our lust for our technology to do more uh whether that's software-defined vehicles whether that's the smartphones we keep in our pocket or the desktop computer we use we want these machines to be as powerful and fast and responsive and scalable as possible if you can get 100 where you can get 30 improvement with each year and generation what is the consumer going to want so i think companies are as normal following the demand of consumers and what's available and at the same time there's some economic benefits they're they're able to realize as well i i don't want to i don't want to go too deep into nvidia arm but what do you handicap that that the chances that that acquisition actually happens oh boy um right now there's a lot of reasons it should happen but there are some reasons that it shouldn't i still kind of consider it a coin toss at this point because fundamentally speaking um you know it should create more competition but there are some people out there that believe it could cause less and so i think this is going to be hung up with regulators a little bit longer than we thought we've already sort of had some previews into that dave with the extensions and some of the timelines that have already been given um i know that was a safe answer and i will take credit for being safe this one's going to be a hard one to call but it certainly makes nvidia an amazing uh it gives amazing prospects to nvidia if they're able to get this deal done yeah i i agree with you i think it's 50 50. okay my i want to pose the question is intel too strategic to fail in march of this year we published this article where we posed that question uh you and i both know pat pretty well we talked about at the time the multi-front war intel is waging in a war with amd the arm ecosystem tsmc the design firms china and we looked at the company's moves which seemed to be right from a strategy standpoint the looking at the potential impact of the u.s government intel's partnership with ibm and what that might portend the us government has a huge incentive to make sure intel wins with onshore manufacturing and that looming threat from china but daniel is intel too strategic to fail and is pat gelsinger making the right moves well first of all i do believe at this current juncture where the semiconductor and supply chain shortage and crisis still looms that intel is too strategic to fail i also believe that intel's demise is somewhat overstated not to say intel doesn't have a slate of challenges that it's going to need to address long term just with the technology adoption curve that you showed being one of them dave but you have to remember the company still has nearly 90 of the server cpu market it still has a significant market share in client and pc it is seeing market share erosion but it's not happened nearly as fast as some people had suggested it would happen with right now with the demand in place and as high as it is intel is selling chips just about as quickly as it can make them and so we right now are sort of seeing the tam as a whole the demand as a whole continue to expand and so intel is fulfilling that need but where are they really too strategic to fail i mean we've seen in certain markets in certain uh process in um you know client for instance where amd has gained of course that's still x86 we've seen uh where the m1 was kind of initially thought to be potentially a pro product that would take some time it didn't take nearly as long for them to get that product in good shape um but the foundry and fab side is where i think intel really has a chance to flourish right now one it can play in the arm space it can build these facilities to be able to produce and help support the production of volumes of chips using arm designs so that actually gives intel and inroads two is it's the company that has made the most outspoken commitment to invest in the manufacturing needs of the united states both here in the united states and in other places across the world where we have friendly ally relationships and need more production capabilities if not in intel b and there is no other logical company that's us-based that's going to meet the regulator and policymakers requirements right now that is also raising their hand and saying we have the know-how we've been doing this we can do more of this and so i think pat is leaning into the right area and i think what will happen is very likely intel will support manufacturing of chips by companies like qualcomm companies like nvidia and if they're able to do that some of the market share losses that they're potentially facing with innovation challenges um and engineering challenges could be offset with growth in their fab and foundry businesses and i think i think pat identified it i think he's going to market with it and you know convincing the street that's going to be a whole nother thing that this is exciting um but i think as the street sees the opportunity here this is an area that intel can really lean into so i think i i think people generally would recognize at least the folks i talk to and it'll be interested in your thoughts who really know this business that intel you know had the best manufacturing process in in the world obviously that's coming to question but but but but for instance people say well intel's 10 nanometer you know is comparable to tsm seven nanometer and that's sort of overstated their their nanometer you know loss but but so so they they were able to point as they were able to sort of hide some of the issues maybe in design with great process and and i i believe that comes down to volume so the question i have then is and i think so i think patrick's pat is doing the right thing because he's going after volume and that's what foundry brings but can he get enough volume or does he need for inst for instance i mean one of the theories i've put out there is that apple could could save the day for intel if the if the us government gets apple in a headlock and says hey we'll back off on break up big tech but you got to give pat some of your foundry volume that puts him on a steeper learning curve do you do you worry sometimes though daniel that intel just even with like qualcomm and broadcom who by the way are competitors of theirs and don't necessarily love them but even even so if they could get that those wins that they still won't have the volume to compete on a cost basis or do you feel like even if they're numbered a number three even behind samsung it's good enough what are your thoughts on that well i don't believe a company like intel goes into a business full steam and they're not new to this business but the obvious volume and expansion that they're looking at with the intention of being number two or three these great companies and you know that's same thing i always say with google cloud google's not out to be the third cloud they're out to be one well that's intel will want to to be stronger if the us government and these investments that it's looking at making this 50 plus billion dollars is looking to pour into this particular space which i don't think is actually enough but if if the government makes these commitments and intel being likely one of the recipients of at least some of these dollars to help expedite this process move forward with building these facilities to make increased manufacturing very likely there's going to be some precedent of law a policy that is going to be put in place to make sure that a certain amount of the volume is done here stateside with companies this is a strategic imperative this is a government strategic imperative this is a putting the country at risk of losing its technology leadership if we cannot manufacture and control this process of innovation so i think intel is going to have that as a benefit that the government is going to most likely require some of this manufacturing to take place here um especially if this investment is made the last thing they're going to want to do is build a bunch of foundries and build a bunch of fabs and end up having them not at capacity especially when the world has seen how much of the manufacturing is now being done in taiwan so i think we're concluding and i i i correctly if i'm wrong but intel is too strategic to fail and and i i sometimes worry they can go bankrupt you know trying to compete with the likes of tsmc and that's why the the the public policy and the in the in the partnership with the u.s government and the eu is i think so important yeah i don't think bankruptcy is an immediate issue i think um but while i follow your train of thought dave i think what you're really looking at more is can the company grow and continue to get support where i worry about is shareholders getting exhausted with intel's the merry-go-round of not growing fast enough not gaining market share not being clearly identified as a leader in any particular process or technology and sort of just playing the role of the incumbent and they the company needs to whether it's in ai whether it's at the edge whether it's in the communications and service provider space intel is doing well you look at their quarterly numbers they're making money but if you had to say where are they leading right now what what which thing is intel really winning uh consistently at you know you look at like ai and ml and people will point to nvidia you look at you know innovation for um client you know and even amd has been super disruptive and difficult for intel uh of course you we've already talked about in like mobile um how impactful arm has been and arm is also playing a pretty big role in servers so like i said the market share and the technology leadership are a little out of skew right now and i think that's where pat's really working hard is identifying the opportunities for for intel to play market leader and technology leader again and for the market to clearly say yes um fab and foundry you know could this be an area where intel becomes the clear leader domestically and i think that the answer is definitely yes because none of the big chipmakers in the us are are doing fabrication you know they're they're all outsourcing it to overseas so if intel can really lead that here grow that large here then it takes some of the pressure off of the process and the innovation side and that's not to say that intel won't have to keep moving there but it does augment the revenue creates a new profit center and makes the company even more strategic here domestically yeah and global foundry tapped out of of sub 10 nanometer and that's why ibm's pseudonym hey wait a minute you had a commitment there the concern i have and this is where again your point is i think really important with the chip shortage you know to go from you know initial design to tape out took tesla and apple you know sub sub 24 months you know probably 18 months with intel we're on a three-year design to tape out cycle maybe even four years so they've got to compress that but that as you well know that's a really hard thing to do but the chip shortage is buying them time and i think that's a really important point that you brought out early in this segment so but the other big question daniel i want to test with you is well you mentioned this about seeing arm in the enterprise not a lot of people talk about that or have visibility on that but i think you're right on so will arm and nvidia be able to seriously penetrate the enterprise the server business in particular clearly jensen wants to be there now this data from etr lays out many of the enterprise players and we've superimposed the semiconductor giants in logos the data is an xy chart it shows net score that's etr's measure of spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal axis market share is not like idc market share its presence in the data set and as we reported before aws is leading the charge in enterprise architecture as daniel mentioned they're they're designing their own chips nitro and graviton microsoft is following suit as is google vmware has project monterey cisco is on the chart dell hp ibm with red hat are also shown and we've superimposed intel nvidia china and arm and now we can debate the position of the logos but we know that one intel has a dominant position in the data center it's got to protect that business it cannot lose ground as it has in pcs because the margin pressure it would face two we know aws with its annapurna acquisition is trying to control its own destiny three we know vmware has project monterey and is following aws's lead to support these new workloads beyond x86 general purpose they got partnerships with pansando and arm and others and four we know cisco they've got chip design chops as does hpe maybe to a lesser extent and of course we know ibm has excellent semiconductor design expertise especially when it comes to things like memory disaggregation as i said jensen's going hard after the data center you know him well daniel we know china wants to control its own destiny and then there's arm it dominates mobile as you pointed out in iot can it make a play for the data center daniel how do you see this picture and what are your thoughts on the future of enterprise in the context of semiconductor competition it's going to take some time i believe but some of the investments and products that have been brought to market and you mentioned that shorter tape out period that shorter period for innovation whether it's you know the graviton uh you know on aws or the aiml chips that uh with trainium and inferentia how quickly aws was able to you know develop build deploy to market an arm-based solution that is being well received and becoming an increasing component of the services and and uh products that are being offered from aws at this point it's still pretty small and i would i would suggest that nvidia and arm in the spirit of trying to get this deal done probably don't necess don't want the enterprise opportunity to be overly inflated as to how quickly the company's going to be able to play in that space because that would somewhat maybe slow or bring up some caution flags that of the regulators that are that are monitoring this at the same time you could argue that arm offering additional options in competition much like it's doing in client will offer new form factors new designs um new uh you know new skus the oems will be able to create more customized uh hardware offerings that might be able to be unique for certain enterprises industries can put more focus you know we're seeing the disaggregation with dpus and how that technology using arm with what aws is doing with nitro but what what these different companies are doing to use you know semiconductor technology to split out security networking and storage and so you start to see design innovation could become very interesting on the foundation of arm so in time i certainly see momentum right now the thing is is most companies in the enterprise are looking for something that's fairly well baked off the shelf that can meet their needs whether it's sap or whether it's you know running different custom applications that the business is built on top of commerce solutions and so intel meets most of those needs and so arm has made a lot of sense for instance with these cloud scale providers but not necessarily as much sense for enterprises especially those that don't want to necessarily look at refactoring all the workloads but as software becomes simpler as refactoring becomes easier to do between different uh different technologies and processes you start to say well arm could be compelling and you know because the the bottom line is we know this from mobile devices is most of us don't care what the processor is the average person the average data you know they look at many of these companies the same in enterprise it's always mattered um kind of like in the pc world it used to really matter that's where intel inside was born but as we continue to grow up and you see these different processes these different companies nvidia amd intel all seen as very worthy companies with very capable technologies in the data center if they can offer economics if they can offer performance if they can offer faster time to value people will look at them so i'd say in time dave the answer is arm will certainly become more and more competitive in the data center like it was able to do at the edge in immobile yeah one of the things that we've talked about is that you know the software-defined data center is awesome but it also created a lot of wasted overhead in terms of offloading storage and and networking security and that much of that is being done with general purpose x86 processors which are more expensive than than for instance using um if you look at what as you mentioned great summary of what aws is doing with graviton and trainium and other other tooling what ampere is doing um in in in oracle and you're seeing both of those companies for example particularly aws get isvs to write so they can run general purpose applications on um on arm-based processors as well it sets up well for ai inferencing at the edge which we know arms dominating the edge we see all these new types of workloads coming into the data center if you look at what companies like nebulon and pensando and and others are doing uh you're seeing a lot of their offloads are going to arm they're putting arm in even though they're still using x86 in a lot of cases but but but they're offloading to arm so it seems like they're coming into the back door i understand your point actually about they don't want to overplay their hand there especially during these negotiations but we think that that long term you know it bears watching but intel they have such a strong presence they got a super strong ecosystem and they really have great relationships with a lot of the the enterprise players and they have influence over them so they're going to use that the the the chip shortage benefits them the uh the relationship with the us government pat is spending a lot of time you know working that so it's really going to be interesting to see how this plays out daniel i want to give you the last word your final thoughts on what we talked about today and where you see this all headed i think the world benefits as a whole with more competition and more innovation pressure i like to see more players coming into the fray i think we've seen intel react over the last year under pat gelsinger's leadership we've seen the technology innovation the angstrom era the 20a we're starting to see what that roadmap is going to look like we've certainly seen how companies like nvidia can disrupt come into market and not just using hardware but using software to play a major role but as a whole as innovation continues to take form at scale we all benefit it means more intelligent software-defined vehicles it puts phones in our hands that are more powerful it gives power to you know cities governments and enterprises that can build applications and tools that give us social networks and give us data-driven experiences so i'm very bullish and optimistic on as a whole i said this before i say it again i believe semiconductors will eat the world and then you know you look at the we didn't even really talk about the companies um you know whether it's in ai uh like you know grok or grav core there are some very cool companies building things you've got qualcomm bought nuvia another company that could you know come out of the blue and offer us new innovations in mobile and personal computing i mean there's so many cool companies dave with the scale of data the uh the the growth and demand and desire for connectivity in the world um it's never been a more interesting time to be a fan of technology the only thing i will say as a whole as a society as i hope we can fix this problem because it does create risks the supply chain inflation the economics all that stuff ties together and a lot of people don't see that but if we can't get this manufacturing issue under control we didn't really talk about china dave and i'll just say taiwan and china are very physically close together and the way that china sees taiwan and the way we see taiwan is completely different we have very little control over what can happen we've all seen what's happened with hong kong so there's just so many as i said when i started this conversation we've got all these trains on the track they're all moving but they're not in parallel these tracks are all converging but the convergence isn't perpendicular so sometimes we don't see how all these things interrelate but as a whole it's a very exciting time love being in technology and uh love having the chance to come out here and talk with you i love the optimism and you're right uh that competition in china that's going to come from china as well xi has made it a part of his legacy i think to you know re-incorporate taiwan that's going to be interesting to see i mean taiwan ebbs and flows with regard to you know its leadership sometimes they're more pro i guess i should say less anti-china maybe that's the better way to say it uh and and and you know china's putting in big fab capacity for nand you know maybe maybe people look at that you know some of that is the low end of the market but you know clay christensen would say well to go take a look at the steel industry and see what happened there so so we didn't talk much about china and that was my oversight but but they're after self-sufficiency it's not like they haven't tried before kind of like intel has tried foundry before but i think they're really going for it this time but but now what are your do you believe that china will be able to get self-sufficiency let's say within the next 10 to 15 years with semiconductors yes i would never count china out of anything if they put their mind to it if it's something that they want to put absolute focus on i think um right now china vacillates between wanting to be a good player and a good steward to the world and wanting to completely run its own show the the politicization of what's going on over there we all saw what happened in the real estate market this past week we saw what happened with tech ed over the last few months we've seen what's happened with uh innovation and entrepreneurship it is not entirely clear if china wants to give the more capitalistic and innovation ecosystem a full try but it is certainly shown that it wants to be seen as a world leader over the last few decades it's accomplished that in almost any area that it wants to compete dave i would say if this is one of gigi ping's primary focuses wanting to do this it would be very irresponsible to rule it out as a possibility daniel i gotta tell you i i love collaborating with you um we met face to face just recently and i hope we could do this again i'd love to have you you back on on the program thanks so much for your your time and insights today thanks for having me dave so daniel's website futuram research that's three use in futurum uh check that out for termresearch.com uh the the this individual is really plugged in he's forward thinking and and a great resource at daniel newman uv is his twitter so go follow him for some great stuff and remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen all you do is search for breaking analysis podcast we publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and by the way daniel thank you for contributing your your quotes to siliconangle the writers there love you uh you can always connect on twitter i'm at divalanto you can email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com appreciate the comments on linkedin and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time you

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Well, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great conversation with two great guests, going to explore the edge, what it means in terms of commercial, but also national security. And as the world goes digital, we're going to have that deep dive conversation around how it's all transforming. We've got Ki Lee, Vice President of Booz Allen's Digital Business. Ki, great to have you. John Pisano, Principal at Booz Allen's Digital Cloud Solutions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. >> And thanks for having us, John. >> So one of the most hottest topics, obviously besides cloud computing having the most refactoring impact on business and government and public sector has been the next phase of cloud growth and cloud scale, and that's really modern applications and consumer, and then here for national security and for governments here in the U.S. is military impact. And as digital transformation starts to go to the next level, you're starting to see the architectures emerge where the edge, the IoT edge, the industrial IoT edge, or any kind of edge concept, 5G is exploding, making that much more of a dense, more throughput for connectivity with wireless. You got Amazon with Snowball, Snowmobile, all kinds of ways to deploy technology, that's IT like and operational technologies. It's causing quite a cloud operational opportunity and disruption, so I want to get into it. Ki, let's start with you. I mean, we're looking at an architecture that's changing both commercial and public sector with the edge. What are the key considerations that you guys see as people have to really move fast in this new architecture of digital? >> Yeah, John, I think it's a great question. And if I could just share our observation on why we even started investing in edge. You mentioned the cloud, but as we've reflected upon kind of the history of IT, then you take a look from mainframes to desktops to servers to cloud to mobile and now IoT, what we observed was that industry investing in infrastructure led to kind of an evolution of IT, right? So as you mentioned, with industry spending billions on IoT and edge, we just feel that that's going to be the next evolution. If you take a look at, you mentioned 5G, I think 5G will be certainly an accelerator to edge because of the resilience, the lower latency and so forth. But taking a look at what's happening in space, you mentioned space earlier as well, right, and what Starlink is doing by putting satellites to actually provide transport into the space, we're thinking that that actually is going to be the next ubiquitous thing. Once transport becomes ubiquitous, just like cloud allows storage to be ubiquitous. We think that the next generation internet will be space-based. So when you think about it, connected, it won't be connected servers per se, it will be connected devices. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> That's kind of some of the observations and why we've been really focusing on investing in edge. >> I want to come back to that piece around space and edge and bring it from a commercial and then also tactical architecture in a minute 'cause there's a lot to unpack there, role of open source, modern application development, software and hardware supply chains, all are core issues that are going to emerge. But I want to get with John real quick on cloud impact, because you think about 5G and the future of work or future of play, you've got people, right? So whether you're at a large concert like Coachella or a 49ers or Patriots game or Redskins game if you're in the D.C. area, you got people there, of congestion, and now you got devices now serving those people. And that's their play, people at work, whether it's a military operation, and you've got work, play, tactical edge things. How is cloud connecting? 'Cause this is like the edge has never been kind of an IT thing. It's been more of a bandwidth or either telco or something else operationally. What's the cloud at scale, cloud operations impact? >> Yeah, so if you think about how these systems are architected and you think about those considerations that Ki kind of touched on, a lot of what you have to think about now is what aspects of the application reside in the cloud, where you tend to be less constrained. And then how do you architect that application to move out towards the edge, right? So how do I tier my application? Ultimately, how do I move data and applications around the ecosystem? How do I need to evolve where my application stages things and how that data and those apps are moved to each of those different tiers? So when we build a lot of applications, especially if they're in the cloud, they're built with some of those common considerations of elasticity, scalability, all those things; whereas when you talk about congestion and disconnected operations, you lose a lot of those characteristics, and you have to kind of rethink that. >> Ki, let's get into the aspect you brought up, which is space. And then I was mentioning the tactical edge from a military standpoint. These are use cases of deployments, and in fact, this is how people have to work now. So you've got the future of work or play, and now you've got the situational deployments, whether it's a new tower of next to a stadium. We've all been at a game or somewhere or a concert where we only got five bars and no connectivity. So we know what that means. So now you have people congregating in work or play, and now you have a tactical deployment. What's the key things that you're seeing that it's going to help make that better? Are there any breakthroughs that you see that are possible? What's going on in your view? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what's enabling all of this, again, one is transport, right? So whether it's 5G to increase the speed and decrease the latency, whether it's things like Starlink with making transport and comms ubiquitous, that tied with the fact that ships continue to get smaller and faster, right? And when you're thinking about tactical edge, those devices have limited size, weight, power conditions and constraints. And so the software that goes on them has to be just as lightweight. And that's why we've actually partnered with SUSE and what they've done with K3s to do that. So I think those are some of the enabling technologies out there. John, as you've kind of alluded to it, there are additional challenges as we think about it. We're not, it's not a simple transition and monetization here, but again, we think that this will be the next major disruption. >> What do you guys think, John, if you don't mind weighing in too on this as modern application development happens, we just were covering CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, DockerCon, containers are very popular. Kubernetes is becoming super great. As you look at the telco landscape where we're kind of converging this edge, it has to be commercially enterprise grade. It has to have that transit and transport that's intelligent and all these new things. How does open source fit into all this? Because we're seeing open source becoming very reliable, more people are contributing to open source. How does that impact the edge in your opinion? >> So from my perspective, I think it's helping accelerate things that traditionally maybe may have been stuck in the traditional proprietary software confines. So within our mindset at Booz Allen, we were very focused on open architecture, open based systems, which open source obviously is an aspect of that. So how do you create systems that can easily interface with each other to exchange data, and how do you leverage tools that are available in the open source community to do that? So containerization is a big drive that is really going throughout the open source community. And there's just a number of other tools, whether it's tools that are used to provide basic services like how do I move code through a pipeline all the way through? How do I do just basic hardening and security checking of my capabilities? Historically, those have tend to be closed source type apps, whereas today you've got a very broad community that's able to very quickly provide and develop capabilities and push it out to a community that then continues to adapt and add to it or grow that library of stuff. >> Yeah, and then we've got trends like Open RAN. I saw some Ground Station for the AWS. You're starting to see Starlink, you mentioned. You're bringing connectivity to the masses. What is that going to do for operators? Because remember, security is a huge issue. We talk about security all the time. Where does that kind of come in? Because now you're really OT, which has been very purpose-built kind devices in the old IoT world. As the new IoT and the edge develop, you're going to need to have intelligence. You're going to be data-driven. There is an open source impact key. So, how, if I'm a senior executive, how do I get my arms around this? I really need to think this through because the security risks alone could be more penetration areas, more surface area. >> Right. That's a great question. And let me just address kind of the value to the clients and the end users in the digital battlefield as our warriors to increase survivability and lethality. At the end of the day from a mission perspective, we know we believe that time's a weapon. So reducing any latency in that kind of observe, orient, decide, act OODA loop is value to the war fighter. In terms of your question on how to think about this, John, you're spot on. I mean, as I've mentioned before, there are various different challenges, one, being the cyber aspect of it. We are absolutely going to be increasing our attack surface when you think about putting processing on edge devices. There are other factors too, non-technical that we've been thinking about s we've tried to kind of engender and kind of move to this kind of edge open ecosystem where we can kind of plug and play, reuse, all kind of taking the same concepts of the open-source community and open architectures. But other things that we've considered, one, workforce. As you mentioned before, when you think about these embedded systems and so forth, there aren't that many embedded engineers out there. But there is a workforce that are digital and software engineers that are trained. So how do we actually create an abstraction layer that we can leverage that workforce and not be limited by some of the constraints of the embedded engineers out there? The other thing is what we've, in talking with several colleagues, clients, partners, what people aren't thinking about is actually when you start putting software on these edge devices in the billions, the total cost of ownership. How do you maintain an enterprise that potentially consists of billions of devices? So extending the standard kind of DevSecOps that we move to automate CI/CD to a cloud, how do we move it from cloud to jet? That's kind of what we say. How do we move DevSecOps to automate secure containers all the way to the edge devices to mitigate some of those total cost of ownership challenges. >> It's interesting, as you have software defined, this embedded system discussion is hugely relevant and important because when you have software defined, you've got to be faster in the deployment of these devices. You need security, 'cause remember, supply chain on the hardware side and software in that too. >> Absolutely. >> So if you're going to have a serviceability model where you have to shift left, as they say, you got to be at the point of CI/CD flows, you need to be having security at the time of coding. So all these paradigms are new in Day-2 operations. I call it Day-0 operations 'cause it should be in everyday too. >> Yep. Absolutely. >> But you've got to service these things. So software supply chain becomes a very interesting conversation. It's a new one that we're having on theCUBE and in the industry Software supply chain is a superly relevant important topic because now you've got to interface it, not just with other software, but hardware. How do you service devices in space? You can't send a break/fix person in space. (chuckles) Maybe you will soon, but again, this brings up a whole set of issues. >> No, so I think it's certainly, I don't think anyone has the answers. We sure don't have all the answers but we're very optimistic. If you take a look at what's going on within the U.S. Air Force and what the Chief Software Officer Nic Chaillan and his team, and we're a supporter of this and a plankowner of Platform One. They were ahead of the curve in kind of commoditizing some of these DevSecOps principles in partnership with the DoD CIO and that shift left concept. They've got a certified and accredited platform that provides that DevSecOps. They have an entire repository in the Iron Bank that allows for hardened containers and reciprocity. All those things are value to the mission and around the edge because those are all accelerators. I think there's an opportunity to leverage industry kind of best practices as well and patterns there. You kind of touched upon this, John, but these devices honestly just become firmware. The software is just, if the devices themselves just become firmware , you can just put over the wire updates onto them. So I'm optimistic. I think all the piece parts are taking place across industry and in the government. And I think we're primed to kind of move into this next evolution. >> Yeah. And it's also some collaboration. What I like about, why I'm bringing up the open source angle and I think this is where I think the major focus will shift to, and I want to get your reaction to it is because open source is seeing a lot more collaboration. You mentioned some of the embedded devices. Some people are saying, this is the weakest link in the supply chain, and it can be shored up pretty quickly. But there's other data, other collective intelligence that you can get from sharing data, for instance, which hasn't really been a best practice in the cybersecurity industry. So now open source, it's all been about sharing, right? So you got the confluence of these worlds colliding, all aspects of culture and Dev and Sec and Ops and engineering all coming together. John, what's your reaction to that? Because this is a big topic. >> Yeah, so it's providing a level of transparency that historically we've not seen, right? So in that community, having those pipelines, the results of what's coming out of it, it's allowing anyone in that life cycle or that supply chain to look at it, see the state of it, and make a decision on, is this a risk I'm willing to take or not? Or am I willing to invest and personally contribute back to the community to address that because it's important to me and it's likely going to be important to some of the others that are using it? So I think it's critical, and it's enabling that acceleration and shift that I talked about, that now that everybody can see it, look inside of it, understand the state of it, contribute to it, it's allowing us to break down some of the barriers that Ki talked about. And it reinforces that excitement that we're seeing now. That community is enabling us to move faster and do things that maybe historically we've not been able to do. >> Ki, I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned battlefield, and I've been covering a lot of the tactical edge around the DOD's work. You mentioned about the military on the Air Force side, Platform One, I believe, was from the Air Force work that they've done, all cloud native kind of directions. But when you talk about a war field, you talk about connectivity. I mean, who controls the DNS in Taiwan, or who controls the DNS in Korea? I mean, we have to deploy, you've got to stand up infrastructure. How about agility? I mean, tactical command and control operations, this has got to be really well done. So this is not a trivial thing. >> No. >> How are you seeing this translate into the edge innovation area? (laughs) >> It's certainly not a trivial thing, but I think, again, I'm encouraged by how government and industry are partnering up. There's a vision set around this joint all domain command control, JADC2. And then all the services are getting behind that, are looking into that, and this vision of this military, internet of military things. And I think the key thing there, John, as you mentioned, it's not just the connected of the sensors, which requires the transport again, but also they have to be interoperable. So you can have a bunch of sensors and platforms out there, they may be connected, but if they can't speak to one another in a common language, that kind of defeats the purpose and the mission value of that sensor or shooter kind of paradigm that we've been striving for for ages. So you're right on. I mean, this is not a trivial thing, but I think over history we've learned quite a bit. Technology and innovation is happening at just an amazing rate where things are coming out in months as opposed to decades as before. I agree, not trivial, but again, I think there are all the piece parts in place and being put into place. >> I think you mentioned earlier that the personnel, the people, the engineers that are out there, not enough, more of them coming in. I think now the appetite and the provocative nature of this shift in tech is going to attract a lot of people because the old adage is these are hard problems attracts great people. You got in new engineering, SRE like scale engineering. You have software development, that's changing, becoming much more robust and more science-driven. You don't have to be just a coder as a software engineer. You could be coming at it from any angle. So there's a lot more opportunities from a personnel standpoint now to attract great people, and there's real hard problems to solve, not just security. >> Absolutely. Definitely. I agree with that 100%. I would also contest that it's an opportunity for innovators. We've been thinking about this for some time, and we think there's absolute value from various different use cases that we've identified, digital battlefield, force protection, disaster recovery, and so forth. But there are use cases that we probably haven't even thought about, even from a commercial perspective. So I think there's going to be an opportunity just like the internet back in the mid '90s for us to kind of innovate based on this new kind of edge environment. >> It's a revolution. New leadership, new brands are going to emerge, new paradigms, new workflows, new operations, clearly great stuff. I want to thank you guys for coming on. I also want to thank Rancher Labs for sponsoring this conversation. Without their support, we wouldn't be here. And now they were acquired by SUSE. We've covered their event with theCUBE virtual last year. What's the connection with those guys? Can you guys take a minute to explain the relationship with SUSE and Rancher? >> Yeah. So it's actually it's fortuitous. And I think we just, we got lucky. There's two overall aspects of it. First of all, we are both, we partner on the Platform One basic ordering agreement. So just there we had a common mentality of DevSecOps. And so there was a good partnership there, but then when we thought about we're engaging it from an edge perspective, the K3s, right? I mean, they're a leader from a container perspective obviously, but the fact that they are innovators around K3s to reduce that software footprint, which is required on these edge devices, we kind of got a twofer there in that partnership. >> John, any comment on your end? >> Yeah, I would just amplify, the K3s aspects in leveraging the containers, a lot of what we've seen success in when you look at what's going on, especially on that tactical edge around enabling capabilities, containers, and the portability it provides makes it very easy for us to interface and integrate a lot of different sensors to close the OODA loop to whoever is wearing or operating that a piece of equipment that the software is running on. >> Awesome, I'd love to continue the conversation on space and the edge and super great conversation to have you guys on. Really appreciate it. I do want to ask you guys about the innovation and the opportunities of this new shift that's happening as the next big thing is coming quickly. And it's here on us and that's cloud, I call it cloud 2.0, the cloud scale, modern software development environment, edge with 5G changing the game. Ki, I completely agree with you. And I think this is where people are focusing their attention from startups to companies that are transforming and re-pivoting or refactoring their existing assets to be positioned. And you're starting to see clear winners and losers. There's a pattern emerging. You got to be in the cloud, you got to be leveraging data, you got to be horizontally scalable, but you got to have AI machine learning in there with modern software practices that are secure. That's the playbook. Some people are making it. Some people are not getting there. So I'd ask you guys, as telcos become super important and the ability to be a telco now, we just mentioned standing up a tactical edge, for instance. Launching a satellite, a couple of hundred K, you can launch a CubeSat. That could be good and bad. So the telco business is changing radically. Cloud, telco cloud is emerging as an edge phenomenon with 5G, certainly business commercial benefits more than consumer. How do you guys see the innovation and disruption happening with telco? >> As we think through cloud to edge, one thing that we realize, because our definition of edge, John, was actually at the point of data collection on the sensor themselves. Others' definition of edge is we're a little bit further back, what we call it the edge of the IT enterprise. But as we look at this, we realize that you needed this kind of multi echelon environment from your cloud to your tactical clouds where you can do some processing and then at the edge of themselves. Really at the end of the day, it's all about, I think, data, right? I mean, everything we're talking about, it's still all about the data, right? The AI needs the data, the telco is transporting the data. And so I think if you think about it from a data perspective in relationship to the telcos, one, edge will actually enable a very different paradigm and a distributed paradigm for data processing. So, hey, instead of bringing the data to some central cloud which takes bandwidth off your telcos, push the products to the data. So mitigate what's actually being sent over those telco lines to increase the efficiencies of them. So I think at the end of the day, the telcos are going to have a pretty big component to this, even from space down to ground station, how that works. So the network of these telcos, I think, are just going to expand. >> John, what's your perspective? I mean, startups are coming out. The scalability, speed of innovation is a big factor. The old telco days had, I mean, months and years, new towers go up and now you got a backbone. It's kind of a slow glacier pace. Now it's under siege with rapid innovation. >> Yeah, so I definitely echo the sentiments that Ki would have, but I would also, if we go back and think about the digital battle space and what we've talked about, faster speeds being available in places it's not been before is great. However, when you think about facing an adversary that's a near-peer threat, the first thing they're going to do is make it contested, congested, and you have to be able to survive. While yes, the pace of innovation is absolutely pushing comms to places we've not had it before, we have to be mindful to not get complacent and over-rely on it, assuming it'll always be there. 'Cause I know in my experience wearing the uniform, and even if I'm up against an adversary, that's the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do whatever I can to disrupt your ability to communicate. So how do you take it down to that lowest level and still make that squad, the platoon, whatever that structure is, continue survivable and lethal. So that's something I think, as we look at the innovations, we need to be mindful of that. So when I talk about how do you architect it? What services do you use? Those are all those things that you have to think about. What if I lose it at this echelon? How do I continue the mission? >> Yeah, it's interesting. And if you look at how companies have been procuring and consuming technology, Ki, it's been like siloed. "Okay, we've got a workplace workforce project, and we have the tactical edge, and we have the siloed IT solution," when really work and play, whether it's work here in John's example, is the war fighter. And so his concern is safety, his life and protection. >> Yeah. >> The other department has to manage the comms, (laughs) and so they have to have countermeasures and contingencies ready to go. So all this is, they all integrate it now. It's not like one department. It's like it's together. >> Yeah. John, I love what you just said. I mean, we have to get away from this siloed thinking not only within a single organization, but across the enterprise. From a digital battlefield perspective, it's a joint fight, so even across these enterprise of enterprises, So I think you're spot on. We have to look horizontally. We have to integrate, we have to inter-operate, and by doing that, that's where the innovation is also going to be accelerated too, not reinventing the wheel. >> Yeah, and I think the infrastructure edge is so key. It's going to be very interesting to see how the existing incumbents can handle themselves. Obviously the towers are important. 5G obviously, that's more deployments, not as centralized in terms of the spectrum. It's more dense. It's going to create more connectivity options. How do you guys see that impacting? Because certainly more gear, like obviously not the centralized tower, from a backhaul standpoint but now the edge, the radios themselves, the wireless transit is key. That's the real edge here. How do you guys see that evolving? >> We're seeing a lot of innovations actually through small companies who are really focused on very specific niche problems. I think it's a great starting point because what they're doing is showing the art of the possible. Because again, we're in a different environment now. There's different rules. There's different capabilities. But then we're also seeing, you mentioned earlier on, some of the larger companies, the Amazons, the Microsofts, also investing as well. So I think the merge of the, you know, or the unconstrained or the possible by these small companies that are just kind of driving innovations supported by the maturity and the heft of these large companies who are building out these hardened kind of capabilities, they're going to converge at some point. And that's where I think we're going to get further innovation. >> Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Final question for you guys, as people are watching this, a lot of smart executives and teams are coming together to kind of put the battle plans together for their companies as they transition from old to this new way, which is clearly cloud-scale, role of data. We hit out all the key points I think here. As they start to think about architecture and how they deploy their resources, this becomes now the new boardroom conversation that trickles down and includes everyone, including the developers. The developers are now going to be on the front lines. Mid-level managers are going to be integrated in as well. It's a group conversation. What are some of the advice that you would give to folks who are in this mode of planning architecture, trying to be positioned to come out of this pandemic with a massive growth opportunity and to be on the right side of history? What's your advice? >> It's such a great question. So I think you touched upon it. One is take the holistic approach. You mentioned architectures a couple of times, and I think that's critical. Understanding how your edge architectures will let you connect with your cloud architecture so that they're not disjointed, they're not siloed. They're interoperable, they integrate. So you're taking that enterprise approach. I think the second thing is be patient. It took us some time to really kind of, and we've been looking at this for about three years now. And we were very intentional in assessing the landscape, how people were discussing around edge and kind of pulling that all together. But it took us some time to even figure it out, hey, what are the use cases? How can we actually apply this and get some ROI and value out for our clients? So being a little bit patient in thinking through kind of how we can leverage this and potentially be a disruptor. >> John, your thoughts on advice to people watching as they try to put the right plans together to be positioned and not foreclose any future value. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the points that Ki raised, I would, number one, amplify the fact of recognize that you're going to have a hybrid environment of legacy and modern capabilities. And in addition to thinking open architectures and whatnot, think about your culture, the people, your processes, your techniques and whatnot, and your governance. How do you make decisions when it needs to be closed versus open? Where do you invest in the workforce? What decisions are you going to make in your architecture that drive that hybrid world that you're going to live in? All those recipes, patience, open, all that, that I think we often overlook the cultural people aspect of upskilling. This is a very different way of thinking on modern software delivery. How do you go through this lifecycle? How's security embedded? So making sure that's part of that boardroom conversation I think is key. >> John Pisano, Principal at Booz Allen Digital Cloud Solutions, thanks for sharing that great insight. Ki Lee, Vice President at Booz Allen Digital Business. Gentlemen, great conversation. Thanks for that insight. And I think people watching are going to probably learn a lot on how to evaluate startups to how they put their architecture together. So I really appreciate the insight and commentary. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier. This is theCUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching. 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>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante >> The latest Arm Neoverse announcement further cements our opinion that it's architecture business model and ecosystem execution are defining a new era of computing and leaving Intel in it's dust. We believe the company and its partners have at least a two year lead on Intel and are currently in a far better position to capitalize on a major waves that are driving the technology industry and its innovation. To compete our view is that Intel needs a new strategy. Now, Pat Gelsinger is bringing that but they also need financial support from the US and the EU governments. Pat Gelsinger was just noted as asking or requesting from the EU government $9 billion, sorry, 8 billion euros in financial support. And very importantly, Intel needs a volume for its new Foundry business. And that is where Apple could be a key. Hello, everyone. And welcome to this week's weekly bond Cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis will explain why Apple could be the key to saving Intel and America's semiconductor industry leadership. We'll also further explore our scenario of the evolution of computing and what will happen to Intel if it can't catch up. Here's a hint it's not pretty. Let's start by looking at some of the key assumptions that we've made that are informing our scenarios. We've pointed out many times that we believe Arm wafer volumes are approaching 10 times those of x86 wafers. This means that manufacturers of Arm chips have a significant cost advantage over Intel. We've covered that extensively, but we repeat it because when we see news reports and analysis and print it's not a factor that anybody's highlighting. And this is probably the most important issue that Intel faces. And it's why we feel that Apple could be Intel's savior. We'll come back to that. We've projected that the chip shortage will last no less than three years, perhaps even longer. As we reported in a recent breaking analysis. Well, Moore's law is waning. The result of Moore's law, I.e the doubling of processor performance every 18 to 24 months is actually accelerating. We've observed and continue to project a quadrupling of performance every two years, breaking historical norms. Arm is attacking the enterprise and the data center. We see hyperscalers as the tip of their entry spear. AWS's graviton chip is the best example. Amazon and other cloud vendors that have engineering and software capabilities are making Arm-based chips capable of running general purpose applications. This is a huge threat to x86. And if Intel doesn't quickly we believe Arm will gain a 50% share of an enterprise semiconductor spend by 2030. We see the definition of Cloud expanding. Cloud is no longer a remote set of services, in the cloud, rather it's expanding to the edge where the edge could be a data center, a data closet, or a true edge device or system. And Arm is by far in our view in the best position to support the new workloads and computing models that are emerging as a result. Finally geopolitical forces are at play here. We believe the U S government will do, or at least should do everything possible to ensure that Intel and the U S chip industry regain its leadership position in the semiconductor business. If they don't the U S and Intel could fade to irrelevance. Let's look at this last point and make some comments on that. Here's a map of the South China sea in a way off in the Pacific we've superimposed a little pie chart. And we asked ourselves if you had a hundred points of strategic value to allocate, how much would you put in the semiconductor manufacturing bucket and how much would go to design? And our conclusion was 50, 50. Now it used to be because of Intel's dominance with x86 and its volume that the United States was number one in both strategic areas. But today that orange slice of the pie is dominated by TSMC. Thanks to Arm volumes. Now we've reported extensively on this and we don't want to dwell on it for too long but on all accounts cost, technology, volume. TSMC is the clear leader here. China's president Xi has a stated goal of unifying Taiwan by China's Centennial in 2049, will this tiny Island nation which dominates a critical part of the strategic semiconductor pie, go the way of Hong Kong and be subsumed into China. Well, military experts say it was very hard for China to take Taiwan by force, without heavy losses and some serious international repercussions. The US's military presence in the Philippines and Okinawa and Guam combined with support from Japan and South Korea would make it even more difficult. And certainly the Taiwanese people you would think would prefer their independence. But Taiwanese leadership, it ebbs and flows between those hardliners who really want to separate and want independence and those that are more sympathetic to China. Could China for example, use cyber warfare to over time control the narrative in Taiwan. Remember if you control the narrative you can control the meme. If you can crawl the meme you control the idea. If you control the idea, you control the belief system. And if you control the belief system you control the population without firing a shot. So is it possible that over the next 25 years China could weaponize propaganda and social media to reach its objectives with Taiwan? Maybe it's a long shot but if you're a senior strategist in the U S government would you want to leave that to chance? We don't think so. Let's park that for now and double click on one of our key findings. And that is the pace of semiconductor performance gains. As we first reported a few weeks ago. Well, Moore's law is moderating the outlook for cheap dense and efficient processing power has never been better. This slideshows two simple log lines. One is the traditional Moore's law curve. That's the one at the bottom. And the other is the current pace of system performance improvement that we're seeing measured in trillions of operations per second. Now, if you calculate the historical annual rate of processor performance improvement that we saw with x86, the math comes out to around 40% improvement per year. Now that rate is slowing. It's now down to around 30% annually. So we're not quite doubling every 24 months anymore with x86 and that's why people say Moore's law is dead. But if you look at the (indistinct) effects of packaging CPU's, GPU's, NPUs accelerators, DSPs and all the alternative processing power you can find in SOC system on chip and eventually system on package it's growing at more than a hundred percent per annum. And this means that the processing power is now quadrupling every 24 months. That's impressive. And the reason we're here is Arm. Arm has redefined the core process of model for a new era of computing. Arm made an announcement last week which really recycle some old content from last September, but it also put forth new proof points on adoption and performance. Arm laid out three components and its announcement. The first was Neoverse version one which is all about extending vector performance. This is critical for high performance computing HPC which at one point you thought that was a niche but it is the AI platform. AI workloads are not a niche. Second Arm announced the Neoverse and two platform based on the recently introduced Arm V9. We talked about that a lot in one of our earlier Breaking Analysis. This is going to performance boost of around 40%. Now the third was, it was called CMN-700 Arm maybe needs to work on some of its names, but Arm said this is the industry's most advanced mesh interconnect. This is the glue for the V1 and the N2 platforms. The importance is it allows for more efficient use and sharing of memory resources across components of the system package. We talked about this extensively in previous episodes the importance of that capability. Now let's share with you this wheel diagram underscores the completeness of the Arm platform. Arms approach is to enable flexibility across an open ecosystem, allowing for value add at many levels. Arm has built the architecture in design and allows an open ecosystem to provide the value added software. Now, very importantly, Arm has created the standards and specifications by which they can with certainty, certify that the Foundry can make the chips to a high quality standard, and importantly that all the applications are going to run properly. In other words, if you design an application, it will work across the ecosystem and maintain backwards compatibility with previous generations, like Intel has done for years but Arm as we'll see next is positioning not only for existing workloads but also the emerging high growth applications. To (indistinct) here's the Arm total available market as we see it, we think the end market spending value of just the chips going into these areas is $600 billion today. And it's going to grow to 1 trillion by 2030. In other words, we're allocating the value of the end market spend in these sectors to the marked up value of the Silicon as a percentage of the total spend. It's enormous. So the big areas are Hyperscale Clouds which we think is around 20% of this TAM and the HPC and AI workloads, which account for about 35% and the Edge will ultimately be the largest of all probably capturing 45%. And these are rough estimates and they'll ebb and flow and there's obviously some overlap but the bottom line is the market is huge and growing very rapidly. And you see that little red highlighted area that's enterprise IT. Traditional IT and that's the x86 market in context. So it's relatively small. What's happening is we're seeing a number of traditional IT vendors, packaging x86 boxes throwing them over the fence and saying, we're going after the Edge. And what they're doing is saying, okay the edge is this aggregation point for all these end point devices. We think the real opportunity at the Edge is for AI inferencing. That, that is where most of the activity and most of the spending is going to be. And we think Arm is going to dominate that market. And this brings up another challenge for Intel. So we've made the point a zillion times that PC volumes peaked in 2011. And we saw that as problematic for Intel for the cost reasons that we've beat into your head. And lo and behold PC volumes, they actually grew last year thanks to COVID and we'll continue to grow it seems for a year or so. Here's some ETR data that underscores that fact. This chart shows the net score. Remember that's spending momentum it's the breakdown for Dell's laptop business. The green means spending is accelerating and the red is decelerating. And the blue line is net score that spending momentum. And the trend is up and to the right now, as we've said this is great news for Dell and HP and Lenovo and Apple for its laptops, all the laptops sellers but it's not necessarily great news for Intel. Why? I mean, it's okay. But what it does is it shifts Intel's product mix toward lower margin, PC chips and it squeezes Intel's gross margins. So the CFO has to explain that margin contraction to wall street. Imagine that the business that got Intel to its monopoly status is growing faster than the high margin server business. And that's pulling margins down. So as we said, Intel is fighting a war on multiple fronts. It's battling AMD in the core x86 business both PCs and servers. It's watching Arm mop up in mobile. It's trying to figure out how to reinvent itself and change its culture to allow more flexibility into its designs. And it's spinning up a Foundry business to compete with TSMC. So it's got to fund all this while at the same time propping up at stock with buybacks Intel last summer announced that it was accelerating it's $10 billion stock buyback program, $10 billion. Buy stock back, or build a Foundry which do you think is more important for the future of Intel and the us semiconductor industry? So Intel, it's got to protect its past while building his future and placating wall street all at the same time. And here's where it gets even more dicey. Intel's got to protect its high-end x86 business. It is the cash cow and funds their operation. Who's Intel's biggest customer Dell, HP, Facebook, Google Amazon? Well, let's just say Amazon is a big customer. Can we agree on that? And we know AWS is biggest revenue generator is EC2. And EC2 was powered by microprocessors made from Intel and others. We found this slide in the Arm Neoverse deck and it caught our attention. The data comes from a data platform called lifter insights. The charts show, the rapid growth of AWS is graviton chips which are they're custom designed chips based on Arm of course. The blue is that graviton and the black vendor A presumably is Intel and the gray is assumed to be AMD. The eye popper is the 2020 pie chart. The instant deployments, nearly 50% are graviton. So if you're Pat Gelsinger, you better be all over AWS. You don't want to lose this customer and you're going to do everything in your power to keep them. But the trend is not your friend in this account. Now the story gets even gnarlier and here's the killer chart. It shows the ISV ecosystem platforms that run on graviton too, because AWS has such good engineering and controls its own stack. It can build Arm-based chips that run software designed to run on general purpose x86 systems. Yes, it's true. The ISV, they got to do some work, but large ISV they have a huge incentives because they want to ride the AWS wave. Certainly the user doesn't know or care but AWS cares because it's driving costs and energy consumption down and performance up. Lower cost, higher performance. Sounds like something Amazon wants to consistently deliver, right? And the ISV portfolio that runs on our base graviton and it's just going to continue to grow. And by the way, it's not just Amazon. It's Alibaba, it's Oracle, it's Marvell. It's 10 cents. The list keeps growing Arm, trotted out a number of names. And I would expect over time it's going to be Facebook and Google and Microsoft. If they're not, are you there? Now the last piece of the Arm architecture story that we want to share is the progress that they're making and compare that to x86. This chart shows how Arm is innovating and let's start with the first line under platform capabilities. Number of cores supported per die or, or system. Now die is what ends up as a chip on a small piece of Silicon. Think of the die as circuit diagram of the chip if you will, and these circuits they're fabricated on wafers using photo lithography. The wafers then cut up into many pieces each one, having a chip. Each of these pieces is the chip. And two chips make up a system. The key here is that Arm is quadrupling the number of cores instead of increasing thread counts. It's giving you cores. Cores are better than threads because threads are shared and cores are independent and much easier to virtualize. This is particularly important in situations where you want to be as efficient as possible sharing massive resources like the Cloud. Now, as you can see in the right hand side of the chart under the orange Arm is dramatically increasing the amount of capabilities compared to previous generations. And one of the other highlights to us is that last line that CCIX and CXL support again Arm maybe needs to name these better. These refer to Arms and memory sharing capabilities within and between processors. This allows CPU's GPU's NPS, et cetera to share resources very often efficiently especially compared to the way x86 works where everything is currently controlled by the x86 processor. CCIX and CXL support on the other hand will allow designers to program the system and share memory wherever they want within the system directly and not have to go through the overhead of a central processor, which owns the memory. So for example, if there's a CPU, GPU, NPU the CPU can say to the GPU, give me your results at a specified location and signal me when you're done. So when the GPU is finished calculating and sending the results, the GPU just signals the operation is complete. Versus having to ping the CPU constantly, which is overhead intensive. Now composability in that chart means the system it's a fixed. Rather you can programmatically change the characteristics of the system on the fly. For example, if the NPU is idle you can allocate more resources to other parts of the system. Now, Intel is doing this too in the future but we think Arm is way ahead. At least by two years this is also huge for Nvidia, which today relies on x86. A major problem for Nvidia has been coherent memory management because the utilization of its GPU is appallingly low and it can't be easily optimized. Last week, Nvidia announced it's intent to provide an AI capability for the data center without x86 I.e using Arm-based processors. So Nvidia another big Intel customer is also moving to Arm. And if it's successful acquiring Arm which is still a long shot this trend is only going to accelerate. But the bottom line is if Intel can't move fast enough to stem the momentum of Arm we believe Arm will capture 50% of the enterprise semiconductor spending by 2030. So how does Intel continue to lead? Well, it's not going to be easy. Remember we said, Intel, can't go it alone. And we posited that the company would have to initiate a joint venture structure. We propose a triumvirate of Intel, IBM with its power of 10 and memory aggregation and memory architecture And Samsung with its volume manufacturing expertise on the premise that it coveted in on US soil presence. Now upon further review we're not sure the Samsung is willing to give up and contribute its IP to this venture. It's put a lot of money and a lot of emphasis on infrastructure in South Korea. And furthermore, we're not convinced that Arvind Krishna who we believe ultimately made the call to Jettisons. Jettison IBM's micro electronics business wants to put his efforts back into manufacturing semi-conductors. So we have this conundrum. Intel is fighting AMD, which is already at seven nanometer. Intel has a fall behind in process manufacturing which is strategically important to the United States it's military and the nation's competitiveness. Intel's behind the curve on cost and architecture and is losing key customers in the most important market segments. And it's way behind on volume. The critical piece of the pie that nobody ever talks about. Intel must become more price and performance competitive with x86 and bring in new composable designs that maintain x86 competitive. And give the ability to allow customers and designers to add and customize GPU's, NPUs, accelerators et cetera. All while launching a successful Foundry business. So we think there's another possibility to this thought exercise. Apple is currently reliant on TSMC and is pushing them hard toward five nanometer, in fact sucking up a lot of that volume and TSMC is maybe not servicing some other customers as well as it's servicing Apple because it's a bit destructive, it is distracted and you have this chip shortage. So Apple because of its size gets the lion's share of the attention but Apple needs a trusted onshore supplier. Sure TSMC is adding manufacturing capacity in the US and Arizona. But back to our precarious scenario in the South China sea. Will the U S government and Apple sit back and hope for the best or will they hope for the best and plan for the worst? Let's face it. If China gains control of TSMC, it could block access to the latest and greatest process technology. Apple just announced that it's investing billions of dollars in semiconductor technology across the US. The US government is pressuring big tech. What about an Apple Intel joint venture? Apple brings the volume, it's Cloud, it's Cloud, sorry. It's money it's design leadership, all that to the table. And they could partner with Intel. It gives Intel the Foundry business and a guaranteed volume stream. And maybe the U S government gives Apple a little bit of breathing room and the whole big up big breakup, big tech narrative. And even though it's not necessarily specifically targeting Apple but maybe the US government needs to think twice before it attacks big tech and thinks about the long-term strategic ramifications. Wouldn't that be ironic? Apple dumps Intel in favor of Arm for the M1 and then incubates, and essentially saves Intel with a pipeline of Foundry business. Now back to IBM in this scenario, we've put a question mark on the slide because maybe IBM just gets in the way and why not? A nice clean partnership between Intel and Apple? Who knows? Maybe Gelsinger can even negotiate this without giving up any equity to Apple, but Apple could be a key ingredient to a cocktail of a new strategy under Pat Gelsinger leadership. Gobs of cash from the US and EU governments and volume from Apple. Wow, still a long shot, but one worth pursuing because as we've written, Intel is too strategic to fail. Okay, well, what do you think? You can DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or comment on my LinkedIn post. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts so please subscribe wherever you listen. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey analysis. And I want to thank my colleague, David Floyer for his collaboration on this and other related episodes. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Braking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Intel's big announcement this week underscores the threat that the United States faces from China. The US needs to lead in semiconductor design and manufacturing. And that lead is slipping because Intel has been fumbling the ball over the past several years, a mere two months into the job, new CEO Pat Gelsinger wasted no time in setting a new course for perhaps, the most strategically important American technology company. We believe that Gelsinger has only shown us part of his plan. This is the beginning of a long and highly complex journey. Despite Gelsinger's clear vision, his deep understanding of technology and execution ethos, in order to regain its number one position, Intel we believe we'll need to have help from partners, competitors and very importantly, the US government. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we'll peel the onion Intel's announcement of this week and explain why we're perhaps not as sanguine as was Wall Street on Intel's prospects. And we'll lay out what we think needs to take place for Intel to once again, become top gun and for us to gain more confidence. By the way this is the first time we're broadcasting live with Braking Analysis. We're broadcasting on the CUBE handles on Twitch, Periscope and YouTube and going forward we'll do this regularly as a live program and we'll bring in the community perspective into the conversation through chat. Now you may recall that in January, we kind of dismissed analysis that said Intel didn't have to make any major strategic changes to its business when they brought on Pat Gelsinger. Rather we said the exact opposite. Our view at time was that the root of Intel's problems could be traced to the fact that it wasn't no longer the volume leader. Because mobile volumes dwarf those of x86. As such we said that Intel couldn't go up the learning curve for next gen technologies as fast as its competitors and it needed to shed its dogma of being highly vertically integrated. We said Intel needed to more heavily leverage outsourced foundries. But more specifically, we suggested that in order for Intel to regain its volume lead, it needed to, we said at the time, spin out its manufacturing, create a joint venture sure with a volume leader, leveraging Intel's US manufacturing presence. This, we still believe with some slight refreshes to our thinking based on what Gelsinger has announced. And we'll talk about that today. Now specifically there were three main pieces and a lot of details to Intel's announcement. Gelsinger made it clear that Intel is not giving up its IDM or integrated device manufacturing ethos. He called this IDM 2.0, which comprises Intel's internal manufacturing, leveraging external Foundries and creating a new business unit called Intel Foundry Services. It's okay. Gelsinger said, "We are not giving up on integrated manufacturing." However, we think this is somewhat nuanced. Clearly Intel can't, won't and shouldn't give up on IDM. However, we believe Intel is entering a new era where it's giving designers more choice. This was not explicitly stated. However we feel like Intel's internal manufacturing arm will have increased pressure to serve its designers in a more competitive manner. We've already seen this with Intel finally embracing EUV or extreme ultraviolet lithography. Gelsinger basically said that Intel didn't lean into EUV early on and that it created more complexity in its 10 nanometer process, which dominoed into seven nanometer and as you know the rest of the story and Intel's delays. But since mid last year, it's embraced the technology. Now as a point of reference, Samsung started applying EUV for its seven nanometer technology in 2018. And it began shipping in early 2020. So as you can see, it takes years to get this technology into volume production. The point is that Intel realizes it needs to be more competitive. And we suspect, it will give more freedom to designers to leverage outsource manufacturing. But Gelsinger clearly signaled that IDM is not going away. But the really big news is that Intel is setting up a new division with a separate PNL that's going to report directly to Pat. Essentially it's hanging out a shingle and saying, we're open for business to make your chips. Intel is building two new Fabs in Arizona and investing $20 billion as part of this initiative. Now well Intel has tried this before earlier last decade. Gelsinger says that this time we're serious and we're going to do it right. We'll come back to that. This organizational move while not a spin out or a joint venture, it's part of the recipe that we saw as necessary for Intel to be more competitive. Let's talk about why Intel is doing this. Look at lots has changed in the world of semiconductors. When you think about it back when Pat was at Intel in the '90s, Intel was the volume leader. It crushed the competition with x86. And the competition at the time was coming from risk chips. And when Apple changed the game with iPod and iPhone and iPad, the volume equation flipped to mobile. And that led to big changes in the industry. Specifically, the world started to separate design from manufacturing. We now see firms going from design to tape out in 12 months versus taking three years. A good example is Tesla and his deal with ARM and Samsung. And what's happened is Intel has gone from number one in Foundry in terms of clock speed, wafer density, volume, lowest cost, highest margin to falling behind. TSMC, Samsung and alternative processor competitors like NVIDIA. Volume is still the maker of kings in this business. That hasn't changed and it confers advantage in terms of cost, speed and efficiency. But ARM wafer volumes, we estimate are 10x those of x86. That's a big change since Pat left Intel more than a decade ago. There's also a major chip shortage today. But you know this time, it feels a little different than the typical semiconductor boom and bust cycles. Semiconductor consumption is entering a new era and new use cases emerging from automobiles to factories, to every imaginable device piece of equipment, infrastructure, silicon is everywhere. But the biggest threat of all is China. China wants to be self-sufficient in semiconductors by 2025. It's putting approximately $60 billion into new chip Fabs, and there's more to come. China wants to be the new economic leader of the world and semiconductors are critical to that goal. Now there are those poopoo the China threat. This recent article from Scott Foster lays out some really good information. But the one thing that caught our attention is a statement that China's semiconductor industry is nowhere near being a major competitor in the global market. Let alone an existential threat to the international order and the American way of life. I think Scotty is stuck in the engine room and can't see the forest of the trees, wake up. Sure. You can say China is way behind. Let's take an example. NAND. Today China is at about 64 3D layers whereas Micron they're at 172. By 2022 China's going to be at 128. Micron, it's going to be well over 200. So what's the big deal? We say talk to us in 2025 because we think China will be at parody. That's just one example. Now the type of thinking that says don't worry about China and semi's reminds me of the epic lecture series that Clay Christiansen gave as a visiting professor at Oxford University on the history of, and the economics of the steel industry. Now if you haven't watched this series, you should. Basically Christiansen took the audience through the dynamics of steel production. And he asked the question, "Who told the steel manufacturers that gross margin was the number one measure of profitability? Was it God?" he joked. His point was, when new entrance came into the market in the '70s, they were bottom feeders going after the low margin, low quality, easiest to make rebar sector. And the incumbents nearly pulled back and their mix shifted to higher margin products and their gross margins went up and life was good. Until they lost the next layer. And then the next, and then the next, until it was game over. Now, one of the things that got lost in Pat's big announcement on the 23rd of March was that Intel guided the street below consensus on revenue and earnings. But the stock went up the next day. Now when asked about gross margin in the Q&A segment of the announcement, yes, gross margin is a if not the key metric in semi's in terms of measuring profitability. When asked Intel CFO George Davis explained that with the uptick in PCs last year there was a product shift to the lower margin PC sector and that put pressure on gross margins. It was a product mix thing. And revenue because PC chips are less expensive than server chips was affected as were margins. Now we shared this chart in our last Intel update showing, spending momentum over time for Dell's laptop business from ETR. And you can see in the inset, the unit growth and the market data from IDC, yes, Dell's laptop business is growing, everybody's laptop business is growing. Thank you COVID. But you see the numbers from IDC, Gartner, et cetera. Now, as we pointed out last time, PC volumes had peaked in 2011 and that's when the long arm of rights law began to eat into Intel's dominance. Today ARM wafer production as we said is far greater than Intel's and well, you know the story. Here's the irony, the very bucket that conferred volume adventures to Intel PCs, yes, it had a slight uptick last year, which was great news for Dell. But according to Intel it pulled down its margins. The point is Intel is loving the high end of the market because it's higher margin and more profitable. I wonder what Clay Christensen would say to that. Now there's more to this story. Intel's CFO blame the supply constraints on Intel's revenue and profit pressures yet AMD's revenue and profits are booming. So RTSMCs. Only Intel can't seem to thrive when there's this massive chip shortage. Now let's get back to Pat's announcement. Intel is for sure, going forward investing $20 billion in two new US-based fabrication facilities. This chart shows Intel's investments in US R&D, US CapEx and the job growth that's created as a result, as well as R&D and CapEx investments in Ireland and Israel. Now we added the bar on the right hand side from a Wall Street journal article that compares TSMC CapEx in the dark green to that of Intel and the light green. You can see TSMC surpass the CapEx investment of Intel in 2015, and then Intel took the lead back again. And in 2017 was, hey it on in 2018. But last year TSMC took the lead, again. And appears to be widening that lead quite substantially. Leading us to our conclusion that this will not be enough. These moves by Intel will not be enough. They need to do more. And a big part of this announcement was partnerships and packaging. Okay. So here's where it gets interesting. Intel, as you may know was late to the party with SOC system on a chip. And it's going to use its packaging prowess to try and leap frog the competition. SOC bundles things like GPU, NPU, DSUs, accelerators caches on a single chip. So better use the real estate if you will. Now Intel wants to build system on package which will dis-aggregate memory from compute. Now remember today, memory is very poorly utilized. What Intel is going to do is to create a package with literally thousands of nodes comprising small processors, big processors, alternative processors, ARM processors, custom Silicon all sharing a pool of memory. This is a huge innovation and we'll come back to this in a moment. Now as part of the announcement, Intel trotted out some big name customers, prospects and even competitors that it wants to turn into prospects and customers. Amazon, Google, Satya Nadella gave a quick talk from Microsoft to Cisco. All those guys are designing their own chips as does Ericsson and look even Qualcomm is on the list, a competitor. Intel wants to earn the right to make chips for these firms. Now many on the list like Microsoft and Google they'd be happy to do so because they want more competition. And Qualcomm, well look if Intel can do a good job and be a strong second sourced, why not? Well, one reason is they compete aggressively with Intel but we don't like Intel so much but it's very possible. But the two most important partners on this slide are one IBM and two, the US government. Now many people were going to gloss over IBM in this announcement, but we think it's one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. Yes. IBM and semiconductors. IBM actually has some of the best semiconductor technology in the world. It's got great architecture and is two to three years ahead of Intel with POWER10. Yes, POWER. IBM is the world's leader in terms of dis-aggregating compute from memory with the ability to scale to thousands of nodes, sound familiar? IBM leads in power density, efficiency and it can put more stuff closer together. And it's looking now at a 20x increase in AI inference performance. We think Pat has been thinking about this for a while and he said, how can I leave leap frog system on chip. And we think he thought and said, I'll use our outstanding process manufacturing and I'll tap IBM as a partner for R&D and architectural chips to build the next generation of systems that are more flexible and performant than anything that's out there. Now look, this is super high end stuff. And guess who needs really high end massive supercomputing capabilities? Well, the US military. Pat said straight up, "We've talked to the government and we're honored to be competing for the government/military chips boundary." I mean, look Intel in my view was going to have to fall down into face not win this business. And by making the commitment to Foundry Services we think they will get a huge contract from the government, as large, perhaps as $10 billion or more to build a secure government Foundry and serve the military for decades to come. Now Pat was specifically asked in the Q&A section is this Foundry strategy that you're embarking on viable without the help of the US government? Kind of implying that it was a handout or a bailout. And Pat of course said all the right things. He said, "This is the right thing for Intel. Independent of the government, we haven't received any commitment or subsidies or anything like that from the US government." Okay, cool. But they have had conversations and I have no doubt, and Pat confirmed this, that those conversations were very, very positive that Intel should head in this direction. Well, we know what's happening here. The US government wants Intel to win. It needs Intel to win and its participation greatly increases the probability of success. But unfortunately, we still don't think it's enough for Intel to regain its number one position. Let's look at that in a little bit more detail. The headwinds for Intel are many. Look it can't just flick a switch and catch up on manufacturing leadership. It's going to take four years. And lots can change in that time. It tells market momentum as well as we pointed out earlier is headed in the wrong direction from a financial perspective. Moreover, where is the volume going to come from? It's going to take years for Intel to catch up for ARMS if it never can. And it's going to have to fight to win that business from its current competitors. Now I have no doubt. It will fight hard under Pat's excellent leadership. But the Foundry business is different. Consider this, Intel's annual CapEx expenditures, if you divide that by their yearly revenue it comes out to about 20% of revenue. TSMC spends 50% of its revenue each year on CapEx. This is a different animal, very service oriented. So look, we're not pounding the table saying Intel's worst days are over. We don't think they are. Now, there are some positives, I'm showing those in the right-hand side. Pat Gelsinger was born for this job. He proved that the other day, even though we already knew it. I have never seen him more excited and more clearheaded. And we agreed that the chip demand dynamic is going to have legs in this decade and beyond with Digital, Edge, AI and new use cases that are going to power that demand. And Intel is too strategic to fail. And the US government has huge incentives to make sure that it succeeds. But it's still not enough in our opinion because like the steel manufacturers Intel's real advantage today is increasingly in the high end high margin business. And without volume, China is going to win this battle. So we continue to believe that a new joint venture is going to emerge. Here's our prediction. We see a triumvirate emerging in a new joint venture that is led by Intel. It brings x86, that volume associated with that. It brings cash, manufacturing prowess, R&D. It brings global resources, so much more than we show in this chart. IBM as we laid out brings architecture, it's R&D, it's longstanding relationships. It's deal flow, it can funnel its business to the joint venture as can of course, parts of Intel. We see IBM getting a nice licensed deal from Intel and or the JV. And it has to get paid for its contribution and we think it'll also get a sweet deal and the manufacturing fees from this Intel Foundry. But it's still not enough to beat China. Intel needs volume. And that's where Samsung comes in. It has the volume with ARM, has the experience and a complete offering across products. We also think that South Korea is a more geographically appealing spot in the globe than Taiwan with its proximity to China. Not to mention that TSMC, it doesn't need Intel. It's already number one. Intel can get a better deal from number two, Samsung. And together these three we think, in this unique structure could give it a chance to become number one by the end of the decade or early in the 2030s. We think what's happening is our take, is that Intel is going to fight hard to win that government business, put itself in a stronger negotiating position and then cut a deal with some supplier. We think Samsung makes more sense than anybody else. Now finally, we want to leave you with some comments and some thoughts from the community. First, I want to thank David Foyer. His decade plus of work and knowledge of this industry along with this collaboration made this work possible. His fingerprints are all over this research in case you didn't notice. And next I want to share comments from two of my colleagues. The first is Serbjeet Johal. He sent this to me last night. He said, "We are not in our grandfather's compute era anymore. Compute is getting spread into every aspect of our economy and lives. The use of processors is getting more and more specialized and will intensify with the rise in edge computing, AI inference and new workloads." Yes, I totally agree with Sarbjeet. And that's the dynamic which Pat is betting and betting big. But the bottom line is summed up by my friend and former IDC mentor, Dave Moschella. He says, "This is all about China. History suggests that there are very few second acts, you know other than Microsoft and Apple. History also will say that the antitrust pressures that enabled AMD to thrive are the ones, the very ones that starved Intel's cash. Microsoft made the shift it's PC software cash cows proved impervious to competition. The irony is the same government that attacked Intel's monopoly now wants to be Intel's protector because of China. Perhaps it's a cautionary tale to those who want to break up big tech." Wow. What more can I add to that? Okay. That's it for now. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. These episodes are all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search for Braking Analysis podcasts and you can always connect with me on Twitter @dvellante or email me at david.vellante, siliconangle.com As always I appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and in clubhouse please follow me so that you're notified when we start a room and start riffing on these topics. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle, everybody to Cuban cloud. My name is Dave Volonte, and I'll be here throughout the day with my co host, John Ferrier, who was quarantined in an undisclosed location in California. He's all good. Don't worry. Just precautionary. John, how are you doing? >>Hey, great to see you. John. Quarantine. My youngest daughter had covitz, so contact tracing. I was negative in quarantine at a friend's location. All good. >>Well, we wish you the best. Yeah, well, right. I mean, you know what's it like, John? I mean, you're away from your family. Your basically shut in, right? I mean, you go out for a walk, but you're really not in any contact with anybody. >>Correct? Yeah. I mean, basically just isolation, Um, pretty much what everyone's been kind of living on, kind of suffering through, but hopefully the vaccines are being distributed. You know, one of the things we talked about it reinvent the Amazon's cloud conference. Was the vaccine on, but just the whole workflow around that it's gonna get better. It's kind of really sucky. Here in the California area, they haven't done a good job, a lot of criticism around, how that's rolling out. And, you know, Amazon is now offering to help now that there's a new regime in the U. S. Government S o. You know, something to talk about, But certainly this has been a terrible time for Cove it and everyone in the deaths involved. But it's it's essentially pulled back the covers, if you will, on technology and you're seeing everything. Society. In fact, um, well, that's big tech MIT disinformation campaigns. All these vulnerabilities and cyber, um, accelerated digital transformation. We'll talk about a lot today, but yeah, it's totally changed the world. And I think we're in a new generation. I think this is a real inflection point, Dave. You know, modern society and the geo political impact of this is significant. You know, one of the benefits of being quarantined you'd be hanging out on these clubhouse APS, uh, late at night, listening to experts talk about what's going on, and it's interesting what's happening with with things like water and, you know, the island of Taiwan and China and U. S. Sovereignty, data, sovereignty, misinformation. So much going on to talk about. And, uh, meanwhile, companies like Mark injuries in BC firm starting a media company. What's going on? Hell freezing over. So >>we're gonna be talking about a lot of that stuff today. I mean, Cuba on cloud. It's our very first virtual editorial event we're trying to do is bring together our community. It's a it's an open forum and we're we're running the day on our 3 65 software platform. So we got a great lineup. We got CEO Seo's data Practitioners. We got a hard core technologies coming in, cloud experts, investors. We got some analysts coming in and we're creating this day long Siri's. And we've got a number of sessions that we've developed and we're gonna unpack. The future of Cloud computing in the coming decade is, John said, we're gonna talk about some of the public policy new administration. What does that mean for tech and for big tech in General? John, what can you add to that? >>Well, I think one of the things that we talked about Cove in this personal impact to me but other people as well. One of the things that people are craving right now is information factual information, truth texture that we call it. But hear this event for us, Davis, our first inaugural editorial event. Robbo, Kristen, Nicole, the entire Cube team Silicon angle, really trying to put together Morva cadence we're gonna doom or of these events where we can put out feature the best people in our community that have great fresh voices. You know, we do interview the big names Andy Jassy, Michael Dell, the billionaires with people making things happen. But it's often the people under there that are the rial newsmakers amid savory, for instance, that Google one of the most impressive technical people, he's gotta talk. He's gonna present democratization of software development in many Mawr riel people making things happen. And I think there's a communal element. We're going to do more of these. Obviously, we have, uh, no events to go to with the Cube. So we have the cube virtual software that we have been building and over years and now perfecting and we're gonna introduce that we're gonna put it to work, their dog footing it. We're gonna put that software toe work. We're gonna do a lot mawr virtual events like this Cuban cloud Cuban startup Cuban raising money. Cuban healthcare, Cuban venture capital. Always think we could do anything. Question is, what's the right story? What's the most important stories? Who's telling it and increase the aperture of the lens of the industry that we have and and expose that and fastest possible. That's what this software, you'll see more of it. So it's super exciting. We're gonna add new features like pulling people up on stage, Um, kind of bring on the clubhouse vibe and more of a community interaction with people to meet each other, and we'll roll those out. But the goal here is to just showcase it's cloud story in a way from people that are living it and providing value. So enjoy the day is gonna be chock full of presentations. We're gonna have moderated chat in these sessions, so it's an all day event so people can come in, drop out, and also that's everything's on demand immediately after the time slot. But you >>want to >>participate, come into the time slot into the cube room or breakout session. Whatever you wanna call it, it's a cube room, and the people in there chatting and having a watch party. So >>when you're in that home page when you're watching, there's a hero video there. Beneath that, there's a calendar, and you'll see that red line is that red horizontal line of vertical line is rather, it's a linear clock that will show you where we are in the day. If you click on any one of those sessions that will take you into the chat, we'll take you through those in a moment and share with you some of the guests that we have upcoming and and take you through the day what I wanted to do. John is trying to set the stage for the conversations that folks are gonna here today. And to do that, I wanna ask the guys to bring up a graphic. And I want to talk to you, John, about the progression of cloud over time and maybe go back to the beginning and review the evolution of cloud and then really talk a little bit about where we think it Z headed. So, guys, if you bring up that graphic when a W S announced s three, it was March of 2000 and six. And as you recall, John you know, nobody really. In the vendor and user community. They didn't really pay too much attention to that. And then later that year, in August, it announced E C two people really started. They started to think about a new model of computing, but they were largely, you know, chicken tires. And it was kind of bleeding edge developers that really leaned in. Um what? What were you thinking at the time? When when you saw, uh, s three e c to this retail company coming into the tech world? >>I mean, I thought it was totally crap. I'm like, this is terrible. But then at that time, I was thinking working on I was in between kind of start ups and I didn't have a lot of seed funding. And then I realized the C two was freaking awesome. But I'm like, Holy shit, this is really great because I don't need to pay a lot of cash, the Provisional Data center, or get a server. Or, you know, at that time, state of the art startup move was to buy a super micro box or some sort of power server. Um, it was well past the whole proprietary thing. But you have to assemble probably anyone with 5 to 8 grand box and go in, and we'll put a couple ghetto rack, which is basically, uh, you know, you put it into some coasting location. It's like with everybody else in the tech ghetto of hosting, still paying monthly fees and then maintaining it and provisioning that's just to get started. And then Amazon was just really easy. And then from there you just It was just awesome. I just knew Amazon would be great. They had a lot of things that they had to fix. You know, custom domains and user interface Council got better and better, but it was awesome. >>Well, what we really saw the cloud take hold from my perspective anyway, was the financial crisis in, you know, 709 It put cloud on the radar of a number of CFOs and, of course, shadow I T departments. They wanted to get stuff done and and take I t in in in, ah, pecs, bite sized chunks. So it really was. There's cloud awakening and we came out of that financial crisis, and this we're now in this 10 year plus boom um, you know, notwithstanding obviously the economic crisis with cove it. But much of it was powered by the cloud in the decade. I would say it was really about I t transformation. And it kind of ironic, if you will, because the pandemic it hits at the beginning of this decade, >>and it >>creates this mandate to go digital. So you've you've said a lot. John has pulled forward. It's accelerated this industry transformation. Everybody talks about that, but and we've highlighted it here in this graphic. It probably would have taken several more years to mature. But overnight you had this forced march to digital. And if you weren't a digital business, you were kind of out of business. And and so it's sort of here to stay. How do you see >>You >>know what this evolution and what we can expect in the coming decades? E think it's safe to say the last 10 years defined by you know, I t transformation. That's not gonna be the same in the coming years. How do you see it? >>It's interesting. I think the big tech companies are on, but I think this past election, the United States shows um, the power that technology has. And if you look at some of the main trends in the enterprise specifically around what clouds accelerating, I call the second wave of innovations coming where, um, it's different. It's not what people expect. Its edge edge computing, for instance, has talked about a lot. But industrial i o t. Is really where we've had a lot of problems lately in terms of hacks and malware and just just overall vulnerabilities, whether it's supply chain vulnerabilities, toe actual disinformation, you know, you know, vulnerabilities inside these networks s I think this network effects, it's gonna be a huge thing. I think the impact that tech will have on society and global society geopolitical things gonna be also another one. Um, I think the modern application development of how applications were written with data, you know, we always been saying this day from the beginning of the Cube data is his integral part of the development process. And I think more than ever, when you think about cloud and edge and this distributed computing paradigm, that cloud is now going next level with is the software and how it's written will be different. You gotta handle things like, where's the compute component? Is it gonna be at the edge with all the server chips, innovations that Amazon apple intel of doing, you're gonna have compute right at the edge, industrial and kind of human edge. How does that work? What's Leighton see to that? It's it really is an edge game. So to me, software has to be written holistically in a system's impact on the way. Now that's not necessarily nude in the computer science and in the tech field, it's just gonna be deployed differently. So that's a complete rewrite, in my opinion of the software applications. Which is why you're seeing Amazon Google VM Ware really pushing Cooper Netease and these service messes in the micro Services because super critical of this technology become smarter, automated, autonomous. And that's completely different paradigm in the old full stack developer, you know, kind of model. You know, the full stack developer, his ancient. There's no such thing as a full stack developer anymore, in my opinion, because it's a half a stack because the cloud takes up the other half. But no one wants to be called the half stack developer because it doesn't sound as good as Full Stack, but really Cloud has eliminated the technology complexity of what a full stack developer used to dio. Now you can manage it and do things with it, so you know, there's some work to done, but the heavy lifting but taking care of it's the top of the stack that I think is gonna be a really critical component. >>Yeah, and that that sort of automation and machine intelligence layer is really at the top of the stack. This this thing becomes ubiquitous, and we now start to build businesses and new processes on top of it. I wanna I wanna take a look at the Big Three and guys, Can we bring up the other The next graphic, which is an estimate of what the revenue looks like for the for the Big three. And John, this is I asked and past spend for the Big Three Cloud players. And it's It's an estimate that we're gonna update after earning seasons, and I wanna point a couple things out here. First is if you look at the combined revenue production of the Big Three last year, it's almost 80 billion in infrastructure spend. I mean, think about that. That Z was that incremental spend? No. It really has caused a lot of consolidation in the on Prem data center business for guys like Dell. And, you know, um, see, now, part of the LHP split up IBM Oracle. I mean, it's etcetera. They've all felt this sea change, and they had to respond to it. I think the second thing is you can see on this data. Um, it's true that azure and G C P they seem to be growing faster than a W s. We don't know the exact numbers >>because >>A W S is the only company that really provides a clean view of i s and pass. Whereas Microsoft and Google, they kind of hide the ball in their numbers. I mean, I don't blame them because they're behind, but they do leave breadcrumbs and clues about growth rates and so forth. And so we have other means of estimating, but it's it's undeniable that azure is catching up. I mean, it's still quite distance the third thing, and before I want to get your input here, John is this is nuanced. But despite the fact that Azure and Google the growing faster than a W s. You can see those growth rates. A W s I'll call this out is the only company by our estimates that grew its business sequentially last quarter. Now, in and of itself, that's not significant. But what is significant is because AWS is so large there $45 billion last year, even if the slower growth rates it's able to grow mawr and absolute terms than its competitors, who are basically flat to down sequentially by our estimates. Eso So that's something that I think is important to point out. Everybody focuses on the growth rates, but it's you gotta look at also the absolute dollars and, well, nonetheless, Microsoft in particular, they're they're closing the gap steadily, and and we should talk more about the competitive dynamics. But I'd love to get your take on on all this, John. >>Well, I mean, the clouds are gonna win right now. Big time with the one the political climate is gonna be favoring Big check. But more importantly, with just talking about covert impact and celebrating the digital transformation is gonna create a massive rising tide. It's already happening. It's happening it's happening. And again, this shift in programming, uh, models are gonna really kinda accelerating, create new great growth. So there's no doubt in my mind of all three you're gonna win big, uh, in the future, they're just different, You know, the way they're going to market position themselves, they have to be. Google has to be a little bit different than Amazon because they're smaller and they also have different capabilities, then trying to catch up. So if you're Google or Microsoft, you have to have a competitive strategy to decide. How do I wanna ride the tide If you will put the rising tide? Well, if I'm Amazon, I mean, if I'm Microsoft and Google, I'm not going to try to go frontal and try to copy Amazon because Amazon is just pounding lead of features and scale and they're different. They were, I would say, take advantage of the first mover of pure public cloud. They really awesome. It passed and I, as they've integrated in Gardner, now reports and integrated I as and passed components. So Gardner finally got their act together and said, Hey, this is really one thing. SAS is completely different animal now Microsoft Super Smart because they I think they played the right card. They have a huge installed base converted to keep office 3 65 and move sequel server and all their core jewels into the cloud as fast as possible, clarified while filling in the gaps on the product side to be cloud. So you know, as you're doing trends job, they're just it's just pedal as fast as you can. But Microsoft is really in. The strategy is just go faster trying. Keep pedaling fast, get the features, feature velocity and try to make it high quality. Google is a little bit different. They have a little power base in terms of their network of strong, and they have a lot of other big data capabilities, so they have to use those to their advantage. So there is. There is there is competitive strategy game application happening with these companies. It's not like apples, the apples, In my opinion, it never has been, and I think that's funny that people talk about it that way. >>Well, you're bringing up some great points. I want guys bring up the next graphic because a lot of things that John just said are really relevant here. And what we're showing is that's a survey. Data from E. T. R R Data partners, like 1400 plus CEOs and I T buyers and on the vertical axis is this thing called Net score, which is a measure of spending momentum. And the horizontal axis is is what's called market share. It's a measure of the pervasiveness or, you know, number of mentions in the data set. There's a couple of key points I wanna I wanna pick up on relative to what John just said. So you see A W S and Microsoft? They stand alone. I mean, they're the hyper scale er's. They're far ahead of the pack and frankly, they have fall down, toe, lose their lead. They spend a lot on Capex. They got the flywheel effects going. They got both spending velocity and large market shares, and so, but they're taking a different approach. John, you're right there living off of their SAS, the state, their software state, Andi, they're they're building that in to their cloud. So they got their sort of a captive base of Microsoft customers. So they've got that advantage. They also as we'll hear from from Microsoft today. They they're building mawr abstraction layers. Andy Jassy has said We don't wanna be in that abstraction layer business. We wanna have access to those, you know, fine grain primitives and eso at an AP level. So so we can move fast with the market. But but But so those air sort of different philosophies, John? >>Yeah. I mean, you know, people who know me know that I love Amazon. I think their product is superior at many levels on in its way that that has advantages again. They have a great sass and ecosystem. They don't really have their own SAS play, although they're trying to add some stuff on. I've been kind of critical of Microsoft in the past, but one thing I'm not critical of Microsoft, and people can get this wrong in the marketplace. Actually, in the journalism world and also in just some other analysts, Microsoft has always had large scale eso to say that Microsoft never had scale on that Amazon owned the monopoly on our franchise on scales wrong. Microsoft had scale from day one. Their business was always large scale global. They've always had infrastructure with MSN and their search and the distributive how they distribute browsers and multiple countries. Remember they had the lock on the operating system and the browser for until the government stepped in in 1997. And since 1997 Microsoft never ever not invested in infrastructure and scale. So that whole premise that they don't compete well there is wrong. And I think that chart demonstrates that there, in there in the hyper scale leadership category, hands down the question that I have. Is that there not as good and making that scale integrate in because they have that legacy cards. This is the classic innovator's dilemma. Clay Christensen, right? So I think they're doing a good job. I think their strategy sound. They're moving as fast as they can. But then you know they're not gonna come out and say We don't have the best cloud. Um, that's not a marketing strategy. Have to kind of hide in this and get better and then double down on where they're winning, which is. Clients are converting from their legacy at the speed of Microsoft, and they have a huge client base, So that's why they're stopping so high That's why they're so good. >>Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a little preview. I talked to gear up your f Who's gonna come on today and you'll see I I asked him because the criticism of Microsoft is they're, you know, they're just good enough. And so I asked him, Are you better than good enough? You know, those are fighting words if you're inside of Microsoft, but so you'll you'll have to wait to see his answer. Now, if you guys, if you could bring that that graphic back up I wanted to get into the hybrid zone. You know where the field is. Always got >>some questions coming in on chat, Dave. So we'll get to those >>great Awesome. So just just real quick Here you see this hybrid zone, this the field is bunched up, and the other companies who have a large on Prem presence and have been forced to initiate some kind of coherent cloud strategy included. There is Michael Michael, multi Cloud, and Google's there, too, because they're far behind and they got to take a different approach than a W s. But as you can see, so there's some real progress here. VM ware cloud on AWS stands out, as does red hat open shift. You got VM Ware Cloud, which is a VCF Cloud Foundation, even Dell's cloud. And you'd expect HP with Green Lake to be picking up momentum in the future quarters. And you've got IBM and Oracle, which there you go with the innovator's dilemma. But there, at least in the cloud game, and we can talk about that. But so, John, you know, to your point, you've gotta have different strategies. You're you're not going to take out the big too. So you gotta play, connect your print your on Prem to your cloud, your hybrid multi cloud and try to create new opportunities and new value there. >>Yeah, I mean, I think we'll get to the question, but just that point. I think this Zeri Chen's come on the Cube many times. We're trying to get him to come on lunch today with Features startup, but he's always said on the Q B is a V C at Greylock great firm. Jerry's Cloud genius. He's been there, but he made a point many, many years ago. It's not a winner. Take all the winner. Take most, and the Big Three maybe put four or five in there. We'll take most of the markets here. But I think one of the things that people are missing and aren't talking about Dave is that there's going to be a second tier cloud, large scale model. I don't want to say tear to cloud. It's coming to sound like a sub sub cloud, but a new category of cloud on cloud, right? So meaning if you get a snowflake, did I think this is a tale? Sign to what's coming. VM Ware Cloud is a native has had huge success, mainly because Amazon is essentially enabling them to be successful. So I think is going to be a wave of a more of a channel model of indirect cloud build out where companies like the Cube, potentially for media or others, will build clouds on top of the cloud. So if Google, Microsoft and Amazon, whoever is the first one to really enable that okay, we'll do extremely well because that means you can compete with their scale and create differentiation on top. So what snowflake did is all on Amazon now. They kind of should go to azure because it's, you know, politically correct that have multiple clouds and distribution and business model shifts. But to get that kind of performance they just wrote on Amazon. So there's nothing wrong with that. Because you're getting paid is variable. It's cap ex op X nice categorization. So I think that's the way that we're watching. I think it's super valuable, I think will create some surprises in terms of who might come out of the woodwork on be a leader in a category. Well, >>your timing is perfect, John and we do have some questions in the chat. But before we get to that, I want to bring in Sargi Joe Hall, who's a contributor to to our community. Sargi. Can you hear us? All right, so we got, uh, while >>bringing in Sarpy. Let's go down from the questions. So the first question, Um, we'll still we'll get the student second. The first question. But Ronald ask, Can a vendor in 2021 exist without a hybrid cloud story? Well, story and capabilities. Yes, they could live with. They have to have a story. >>Well, And if they don't own a public cloud? No. No, they absolutely cannot. Uh hey, Sergey. How you doing, man? Good to see you. So, folks, let me let me bring in Sergeant Kohala. He's a He's a cloud architect. He's a practitioner, He's worked in as a technologist. And there's a frequent guest on on the Cube. Good to see you, my friend. Thanks for taking the time with us. >>And good to see you guys to >>us. So we were kind of riffing on the competitive landscape we got. We got so much to talk about this, like, it's a number of questions coming in. Um, but Sargi we wanna talk about you know, what's happening here in Cloud Land? Let's get right into it. I mean, what do you guys see? I mean, we got yesterday. New regime, new inaug inauguration. Do you do you expect public policy? You'll start with you Sargi to have What kind of effect do you think public policy will have on, you know, cloud generally specifically, the big tech companies, the tech lash. Is it gonna be more of the same? Or do you see a big difference coming? >>I think that there will be some changing narrative. I believe on that. is mainly, um, from the regulators side. A lot has happened in one month, right? So people, I think are losing faith in high tech in a certain way. I mean, it doesn't, uh, e think it matters with camp. You belong to left or right kind of thing. Right? But parlor getting booted out from Italy s. I think that was huge. Um, like, how do you know that if a cloud provider will not boot you out? Um, like, what is that line where you draw the line? What are the rules? I think that discussion has to take place. Another thing which has happened in the last 23 months is is the solar winds hack, right? So not us not sort acknowledging that I was Russia and then wish you watching it now, new administration might have a different sort of Boston on that. I think that's huge. I think public public private partnership in security arena will emerge this year. We have to address that. Yeah, I think it's not changing. Uh, >>economics economy >>will change gradually. You know, we're coming out off pandemic. The money is still cheap on debt will not be cheap. for long. I think m and a activity really will pick up. So those are my sort of high level, Uh, >>thank you. I wanna come back to them. And because there's a question that chat about him in a But, John, how do you see it? Do you think Amazon and Google on a slippery slope booting parlor off? I mean, how do they adjudicate between? Well, what's happening in parlor? Uh, anything could happen on clubhouse. Who knows? I mean, can you use a I to find that stuff? >>Well, that's I mean, the Amazons, right? Hiding right there bunkered in right now from that bad, bad situation. Because again, like people we said Amazon, these all three cloud players win in the current environment. Okay, Who wins with the U. S. With the way we are China, Russia, cloud players. Okay, let's face it, that's the reality. So if I wanted to reset the world stage, you know what better way than the, you know, change over the United States economy, put people out of work, make people scared, and then reset the entire global landscape and control all with cash? That's, you know, conspiracy theory. >>So you see the riches, you see the riches, get the rich, get richer. >>Yeah, well, that's well, that's that. That's kind of what's happening, right? So if you start getting into this idea that you can't actually have an app on site because the reason now I'm not gonna I don't know the particular parlor, but apparently there was a reason. But this is dangerous, right? So what? What that's gonna do is and whether it's right or wrong or not, whether political opinion is it means that they were essentially taken offline by people that weren't voted for that. Weren't that when people didn't vote for So that's not a democracy, right? So that's that's a different kind of regime. What it's also going to do is you also have this groundswell of decentralized thinking, right. So you have a whole wave of crypto and decentralized, um, cyber punks out there who want to decentralize it. So all of this stuff in January has created a huge counterculture, and I had predicted this so many times in the Cube. David counterculture is coming and and you already have this kind of counterculture between centralized and decentralized thinking and so I think the Amazon's move is dangerous at a fundamental level. Because if you can't get it, if you can't get buy domain names and you're completely blackballed by by organized players, that's a Mafia, in my opinion. So, uh, and that and it's also fuels the decentralized move because people say, Hey, if that could be done to them, it could be done to me. Just the fact that it could be done will promote a swing in the other direction. I >>mean, independent of of, you know, again, somebody said your political views. I mean Parlor would say, Hey, we're trying to clean this stuff up now. Maybe they didn't do it fast enough, but you think about how new parlor is. You think about the early days of Twitter and Facebook, so they were sort of at a disadvantage. Trying to >>have it was it was partly was what it was. It was a right wing stand up job of standing up something quick. Their security was terrible. If you look at me and Cory Quinn on be great to have him, and he did a great analysis on this, because if you look the lawsuit was just terrible. Security was just a half, asshole. >>Well, and the experience was horrible. I mean, it's not It was not a great app, but But, like you said, it was a quick stew. Hand up, you know, for an agenda. But nonetheless, you know, to start, get to your point earlier. It's like, you know, Are they gonna, you know, shut me down? If I say something that's, you know, out of line, or how do I control that? >>Yeah, I remember, like, 2019, we involved closing sort of remarks. I was there. I was saying that these companies are gonna be too big to fail. And also, they're too big for other nations to do business with. In a way, I think MNCs are running the show worldwide. They're running the government's. They are way. Have seen the proof of that in us this year. Late last year and this year, um, Twitter last night blocked Chinese Ambassador E in us. Um, from there, you know, platform last night and I was like, What? What's going on? So, like, we used to we used to say, like the Chinese company, tech companies are in bed with the Chinese government. Right. Remember that? And now and now, Actually, I think Chinese people can say the same thing about us companies. Uh, it's not a good thing. >>Well, let's >>get some question. >>Let's get some questions from the chat. Yeah. Thank you. One is on M and a subject you mentioned them in a Who do you see is possible emanate targets. I mean, I could throw a couple out there. Um, you know, some of the cdn players, maybe aka my You know, I like I like Hashi Corp. I think they're doing some really interesting things. What do you see? >>Nothing. Hashi Corp. And anybody who's doing things in the periphery is a candidate for many by the big guys, you know, by the hyper scholars and number two tier two or five hyper scholars. Right. Uh, that's why sales forces of the world and stuff like that. Um, some some companies, which I thought there will be a target, Sort of. I mean, they target they're getting too big, because off their evaluations, I think how she Corpuz one, um, >>and >>their bunch in the networking space. Uh, well, Tara, if I say the right that was acquired by at five this week, this week or last week, Actually, last week for $500 million. Um, I know they're founder. So, like I found that, Yeah, there's a lot going on on the on the network side on the anything to do with data. Uh, that those air too hard areas in the cloud arena >>data, data protection, John, any any anything you could adhere. >>And I think I mean, I think ej ej is gonna be where the gaps are. And I think m and a activity is gonna be where again, the bigger too big to fail would agree with you on that one. But we're gonna look at white Spaces and say a white space for Amazon is like a monster space for a start up. Right? So you're gonna have these huge white spaces opportunities, and I think it's gonna be an M and a opportunity big time start ups to get bought in. Given the speed on, I think you're gonna see it around databases and around some of these new service meshes and micro services. I mean, >>they there's a There's a question here, somebody's that dons asking why is Google who has the most pervasive tech infrastructure on the planet. Not at the same level of other to hyper scale is I'll give you my two cents is because it took him a long time to get their heads out of their ads. I wrote a piece of around that a while ago on they just they figured out how to learn the enterprise. I mean, John, you've made this point a number of times, but they just and I got a late start. >>Yeah, they're adding a lot of people. If you look at their who their hiring on the Google Cloud, they're adding a lot of enterprise chops in there. They realized this years ago, and we've talked to many of the top leaders, although Curry and hasn't yet sit down with us. Um, don't know what he's hiding or waiting for, but they're clearly not geared up to chicken Pete. You can see it with some some of the things that they're doing, but I mean competed the level of Amazon, but they have strength and they're playing their strength, but they definitely recognize that they didn't have the enterprise motions and people in the DNA and that David takes time people in the enterprise. It's not for the faint of heart. It's unique details that are different. You can't just, you know, swing the Google playbook and saying We're gonna home The enterprises are text grade. They knew that years ago. So I think you're going to see a good year for Google. I think you'll see a lot of change. Um, they got great people in there. On the product marketing side is Dev Solution Architects, and then the SRE model that they have perfected has been strong. And I think security is an area that they could really had a lot of value it. So, um always been a big fan of their huge network and all the intelligence they have that they could bring to bear on security. >>Yeah, I think Google's problem main problem that to actually there many, but one is that they don't They don't have the boots on the ground as compared to um, Microsoft, especially an Amazon actually had a similar problem, but they had a wide breath off their product portfolio. I always talk about feature proximity in cloud context, like if you're doing one thing. You wanna do another thing? And how do you go get that feature? Do you go to another cloud writer or it's right there where you are. So I think Amazon has the feature proximity and they also have, uh, aske Compared to Google, there's skills gravity. Larger people are trained on AWS. I think Google is trying there. So second problem Google is having is that that they're they're more focused on, I believe, um, on the data science part on their sort of skipping the cool components sort of off the cloud, if you will. The where the workloads needs, you know, basic stuff, right? That's like your compute storage and network. And that has to be well, talk through e think e think they will do good. >>Well, so later today, Paul Dillon sits down with Mids Avery of Google used to be in Oracle. He's with Google now, and he's gonna push him on on the numbers. You know, you're a distant third. Does that matter? And of course, you know, you're just a preview of it's gonna say, Well, no, we don't really pay attention to that stuff. But, John, you said something earlier that. I think Jerry Chen made this comment that, you know, Is it a winner? Take all? No, but it's a winner. Take a lot. You know the number two is going to get a big chunk of the pie. It appears that the markets big enough for three. But do you? Does Google have to really dramatically close the gap on be a much, much closer, you know, to the to the leaders in orderto to compete in this race? Or can they just kind of continue to bump along, siphon off the ad revenue? Put it out there? I mean, I >>definitely can compete. I think that's like Google's in it. Then it they're not. They're not caving, right? >>So But But I wrote I wrote recently that I thought they should even even put mawr oven emphasis on the cloud. I mean, maybe maybe they're already, you know, doubling down triple down. I just I think that is a multi trillion dollar, you know, future for the industry. And, you know, I think Google, believe it or not, could even do more. Now. Maybe there's just so much you could dio. >>There's a lot of challenges with these company, especially Google. They're in Silicon Valley. We have a big Social Justice warrior mentality. Um, there's a big debate going on the in the back channels of the tech scene here, and that is that if you want to be successful in cloud, you have to have a good edge strategy, and that involves surveillance, use of data and pushing the privacy limits. Right? So you know, Google has people within the country that will protest contract because AI is being used for war. Yet we have the most unstable geopolitical seen that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime going on right now. So, um, don't >>you think that's what happened with parlor? I mean, Rob Hope said, Hey, bar is pretty high to kick somebody off your platform. The parlor went over the line, but I would also think that a lot of the employees, whether it's Google AWS as well, said, Hey, why are we supporting you know this and so to your point about social justice, I mean, that's not something. That >>parlor was not just social justice. They were trying to throw the government. That's Rob e. I think they were in there to get selfies and being protesters. But apparently there was evidence from what I heard in some of these clubhouse, uh, private chats. Waas. There was overwhelming evidence on parlor. >>Yeah, but my point is that the employee backlash was also a factor. That's that's all I'm saying. >>Well, we have Google is your Google and you have employees to say we will boycott and walk out if you bid on that jet I contract for instance, right, But Microsoft one from maybe >>so. I mean, that's well, >>I think I think Tom Poole's making a really good point here, which is a Google is an alternative. Thio aws. The last Google cloud next that we were asked at they had is all virtual issue. But I saw a lot of I T practitioners in the audience looking around for an alternative to a W s just seeing, though, we could talk about Mano Cloud or Multi Cloud, and Andy Jassy has his his narrative around, and he's true when somebody goes multiple clouds, they put you know most of their eggs in one basket. Nonetheless, I think you know, Google's got a lot of people interested in, particularly in the analytic side, um, in in an alternative, hedging their bets eso and particularly use cases, so they should be able to do so. I guess my the bottom line here is the markets big enough to have Really? You don't have to be the Jack Welch. I gotta be number one and number two in the market. Is that the conclusion here? >>I think so. But the data gravity and the skills gravity are playing against them. Another problem, which I didn't want a couple of earlier was Google Eyes is that they have to boot out AWS wherever they go. Right? That is a huge challenge. Um, most off the most off the Fortune 2000 companies are already using AWS in one way or another. Right? So they are the multi cloud kind of player. Another one, you know, and just pure purely somebody going 200% Google Cloud. Uh, those cases are kind of pure, if you will. >>I think it's gonna be absolutely multi cloud. I think it's gonna be a time where you looked at the marketplace and you're gonna think in terms of disaster recovery, model of cloud or just fault tolerant capabilities or, you know, look at the parlor, the next parlor. Or what if Amazon wakes up one day and said, Hey, I don't like the cubes commentary on their virtual events, so shut them down. We should have a fail over to Google Cloud should Microsoft and Option. And one of people in Microsoft ecosystem wants to buy services from us. We have toe kind of co locate there. So these are all open questions that are gonna be the that will become certain pretty quickly, which is, you know, can a company diversify their computing An i t. In a way that works. And I think the momentum around Cooper Netease you're seeing as a great connective tissue between, you know, having applications work between clouds. Right? Well, directionally correct, in my opinion, because if I'm a company, why wouldn't I wanna have choice? So >>let's talk about this. The data is mixed on that. I'll share some data, meaty our data with you. About half the companies will say Yeah, we're spreading the wealth around to multiple clouds. Okay, That's one thing will come back to that. About the other half were saying, Yeah, we're predominantly mono cloud we didn't have. The resource is. But what I think going forward is that that what multi cloud really becomes. And I think John, you mentioned Snowflake before. I think that's an indicator of what what true multi cloud is going to look like. And what Snowflake is doing is they're building abstraction, layer across clouds. Ed Walsh would say, I'm standing on the shoulders of Giants, so they're basically following points of presence around the globe and building their own cloud. They call it a data cloud with a global mesh. We'll hear more about that later today, but you sign on to that cloud. So they're saying, Hey, we're gonna build value because so many of Amazon's not gonna build that abstraction layer across multi clouds, at least not in the near term. So that's a really opportunity for >>people. I mean, I don't want to sound like I'm dating myself, but you know the date ourselves, David. I remember back in the eighties, when you had open systems movement, right? The part of the whole Revolution OS I open systems interconnect model. At that time, the networking stacks for S N A. For IBM, decadent for deck we all know that was a proprietary stack and then incomes TCP I p Now os I never really happened on all seven layers, but the bottom layers standardized. Okay, that was huge. So I think if you look at a W s or some of the comments in the chat AWS is could be the s n a. Depends how you're looking at it, right? And you could say they're open. But in a way, they want more Amazon. So Amazon's not out there saying we love multi cloud. Why would they promote multi cloud? They are a one of the clouds they want. >>That's interesting, John. And then subject is a cloud architect. I mean, it's it is not trivial to make You're a data cloud. If you're snowflake, work on AWS work on Google. Work on Azure. Be seamless. I mean, certainly the marketing says that, but technically, that's not trivial. You know, there are latent see issues. Uh, you know, So that's gonna take a while to develop. What? Do your thoughts there? >>I think that multi cloud for for same workload and multi cloud for different workloads are two different things. Like we usually put multiple er in one bucket, right? So I think you're right. If you're trying to do multi cloud for the same workload, that's it. That's Ah, complex, uh, problem to solve architecturally, right. You have to have a common ap ice and common, you know, control playing, if you will. And we don't have that yet, and then we will not have that for a for at least one other couple of years. So, uh, if you if you want to do that, then you have to go to the lower, lowest common denominator in technical sort of stock, if you will. And then you're not leveraging the best of the breed technology off their from different vendors, right? I believe that's a hard problem to solve. And in another thing, is that that that I always say this? I'm always on the death side, you know, developer side, I think, uh, two deaths. Public cloud is a proxy for innovative culture. Right. So there's a catch phrase I have come up with today during shower eso. I think that is true. And then people who are companies who use the best of the breed technologies, they can attract the these developers and developers are the Mazen's off This digital sort of empires, amazingly, is happening there. Right there they are the Mazen's right. They head on the bricks. I think if you don't appeal to developers, if you don't but extensive for, like, force behind educating the market, you can't you can't >>put off. It's the same game Stepping story was seeing some check comments. Uh, guard. She's, uh, linked in friend of mine. She said, Microsoft, If you go back and look at the Microsoft early days to the developer Point they were, they made their phones with developers. They were a software company s Oh, hey, >>forget developers, developers, developers. >>You were if you were in the developer ecosystem, you were treated his gold. You were part of the family. If you were outside that world, you were competitors, and that was ruthless times back then. But they again they had. That was where it was today. Look at where the software defined businesses and starve it, saying it's all about being developer lead in this new way to program, right? So the cloud next Gen Cloud is going to look a lot like next Gen Developer and all the different tools and techniques they're gonna change. So I think, yes, this kind of developer ecosystem will be harnessed, and that's the power source. It's just gonna look different. So, >>Justin, Justin in the chat has a comment. I just want to answer the question about elastic thoughts on elastic. Um, I tell you, elastic has momentum uh, doing doing very well in the market place. Thea Elk Stack is a great alternative that people are looking thio relative to Splunk. Who people complain about the pricing. Of course it's plunks got the easy button, but it is getting increasingly expensive. The problem with elk stack is you know, it's open source. It gets complicated. You got a shard, the databases you gotta manage. It s Oh, that's what Ed Walsh's company chaos searches is all about. But elastic has some riel mo mentum in the marketplace right now. >>Yeah, you know, other things that coming on the chat understands what I was saying about the open systems is kubernetes. I always felt was that is a bad metaphor. But they're with me. That was the TCP I peep In this modern era, C t c p I p created that that the disruptor to the S N A s and the network protocols that were proprietary. So what KUBERNETES is doing is creating a connective tissue between clouds and letting the open source community fill in the gaps in the middle, where kind of way kind of probably a bad analogy. But that's where the disruption is. And if you look at what's happened since Kubernetes was put out there, what it's become kind of de facto and standard in the sense that everyone's rallying around it. Same exact thing happened with TCP was people were trashing it. It is terrible, you know it's not. Of course they were trashed because it was open. So I find that to be very interesting. >>Yeah, that's a good >>analogy. E. Thinks the R C a cable. I used the R C. A cable analogy like the VCRs. When they started, they, every VC had had their own cable, and they will work on Lee with that sort of plan of TV and the R C. A cable came and then now you can put any TV with any VCR, and the VCR industry took off. There's so many examples out there around, uh, standards And how standards can, you know, flair that fire, if you will, on dio for an industry to go sort of wild. And another trend guys I'm seeing is that from the consumer side. And let's talk a little bit on the consuming side. Um, is that the The difference wouldn't be to B and B to C is blood blurred because even the physical products are connected to the end user Like my door lock, the August door lock I didn't just put got get the door lock and forget about that. Like I I value the expedience it gives me or problems that gives me on daily basis. So I'm close to that vendor, right? So So the middle men, uh, middle people are getting removed from from the producer off the technology or the product to the consumer. Even even the sort of big grocery players they have their APs now, uh, how do you buy stuff and how it's delivered and all that stuff that experience matters in that context, I think, um, having, uh, to be able to sell to thes enterprises from the Cloud writer Breuder's. They have to have these case studies or all these sample sort off reference architectures and stuff like that. I think whoever has that mawr pushed that way, they are doing better like that. Amazon is Amazon. Because of that reason, I think they have lot off sort off use cases about on top of them. And they themselves do retail like crazy. Right? So and other things at all s. So I think that's a big trend. >>Great. Great points are being one of things. There's a question in there about from, uh, Yaden. Who says, uh, I like the developer Lead cloud movement, But what is the criticality of the executive audience when educating the marketplace? Um, this comes up a lot in some of my conversations around automation. So automation has been a big wave to automate this automate everything. And then everything is a service has become kind of kind of the the executive suite. Kind of like conversation we need to make everything is a service in our business. You seeing people move to that cloud model. Okay, so the executives think everything is a services business strategy, which it is on some level, but then, when they say Take that hill, do it. Developers. It's not that easy. And this is where a lot of our cube conversations over the past few months have been, especially during the cova with cute virtual. This has come up a lot, Dave this idea, and start being around. It's easy to say everything is a service but will implement it. It's really hard, and I think that's where the developer lead Connection is where the executive have to understand that in order to just say it and do it are two different things. That digital transformation. That's a big part of it. So I think that you're gonna see a lot of education this year around what it means to actually do that and how to implement it. >>I'd like to comment on the as a service and subject. Get your take on it. I mean, I think you're seeing, for instance, with HP Green Lake, Dell's come out with Apex. You know IBM as its utility model. These companies were basically taking a page out of what I what I would call a flawed SAS model. If you look at the SAS players, whether it's salesforce or workday, service now s a P oracle. These models are They're really They're not cloud pricing models. They're they're basically you got to commit to a term one year, two year, three year. We'll give you a discount if you commit to the longer term. But you're locked in on you. You probably pay upfront. Or maybe you pay quarterly. That's not a cloud pricing model. And that's why I mean, they're flawed. You're seeing companies like Data Dog, for example. Snowflake is another one, and they're beginning to price on a consumption basis. And that is, I think, one of the big changes that we're going to see this decade is that true cloud? You know, pay by the drink pricing model and to your point, john toe, actually implement. That is, you're gonna need a whole new layer across your company on it is quite complicated it not even to mention how you compensate salespeople, etcetera. The a p. I s of your product. I mean, it is that, but that is a big sea change that I see coming. Subject your >>thoughts. Yeah, I think like you couldn't see it. And like some things for this big tech exacts are hidden in the plain >>sight, right? >>They don't see it. They they have blind spots, like Look at that. Look at Amazon. They went from Melissa and 200 millisecond building on several s, Right, Right. And then here you are, like you're saying, pay us for the whole year. If you don't use the cloud, you lose it or will pay by month. Poor user and all that stuff like that that those a role models, I think these players will be forced to use that term pricing like poor minute or for a second, poor user. That way, I think the Salesforce moral is hybrid. They're struggling in a way. I think they're trying to bring the platform by doing, you know, acquisition after acquisition to be a platform for other people to build on top off. But they're having a little trouble there because because off there, such pricing and little closeness, if you will. And, uh, again, I'm coming, going, going back to developers like, if you are not appealing to developers who are writing the latest and greatest code and it is open enough, by the way open and open source are two different things that we all know that. So if your platform is not open enough, you will have you know, some problems in closing the deals. >>E. I want to just bring up a question on chat around from Justin didn't fitness. Who says can you touch on the vertical clouds? Has your offering this and great question Great CP announcing Retail cloud inventions IBM Athena Okay, I'm a huge on this point because I think this I'm not saying this for years. Cloud computing is about horizontal scalability and vertical specialization, and that's absolutely clear, and you see all the clouds doing it. The vertical rollouts is where the high fidelity data is, and with machine learning and AI efforts coming out, that's accelerated benefits. There you have tow, have the vertical focus. I think it's super smart that clouds will have some sort of vertical engine, if you will in the clouds and build on top of a control playing. Whether that's data or whatever, this is clearly the winning formula. If you look at all the successful kind of ai implementations, the ones that have access to the most data will get the most value. So, um if you're gonna have a data driven cloud you have tow, have this vertical feeling, Um, in terms of verticals, the data on DSO I think that's super important again, just generally is a strategy. I think Google doing a retail about a super smart because their whole pitches were not Amazon on. Some people say we're not Google, depending on where you look at. So every of these big players, they have dominance in the areas, and that's scarce. Companies and some companies will never go to Amazon for that reason. Or some people never go to Google for other reasons. I know people who are in the ad tech. This is a black and we're not. We're not going to Google. So again, it is what it is. But this idea of vertical specialization relevant in super >>forts, I want to bring to point out to sessions that are going on today on great points. I'm glad you asked that question. One is Alan. As he kicks off at 1 p.m. Eastern time in the transformation track, he's gonna talk a lot about the coming power of ecosystems and and we've talked about this a lot. That that that to compete with Amazon, Google Azure, you've gotta have some kind of specialization and vertical specialization is a good one. But of course, you see in the big Big three also get into that. But so he's talking at one o'clock and then it at 3 36 PM You know this times are strange, but e can explain that later Hillary Hunter is talking about she's the CTO IBM I B M's ah Financial Cloud, which is another really good example of specifying vertical requirements and serving. You know, an audience subject. I think you have some thoughts on this. >>Actually, I lost my thought. E >>think the other piece of that is data. I mean, to the extent that you could build an ecosystem coming back to Alan Nancy's premise around data that >>billions of dollars in >>their day there's billions of dollars and that's the title of the session. But we did the trillion dollar baby post with Jazzy and said Cloud is gonna be a trillion dollars right? >>And and the point of Alan Answer session is he's thinking from an individual firm. Forget the millions that you're gonna save shifting to the cloud on cost. There's billions in ecosystems and operating models. That's >>absolutely the business value. Now going back to my half stack full stack developer, is the business value. I've been talking about this on the clubhouses a lot this past month is for the entrepreneurs out there the the activity in the business value. That's the new the new intellectual property is the business logic, right? So if you could see innovations in how work streams and workflow is gonna be a configured differently, you have now large scale cloud specialization with data, you can move quickly and take territory. That's much different scenario than a decade ago, >>at the point I was trying to make earlier was which I know I remember, is that that having the horizontal sort of features is very important, as compared to having vertical focus. You know, you're you're more healthcare focused like you. You have that sort of needs, if you will, and you and our auto or financials and stuff like that. What Google is trying to do, I think that's it. That's a good thing. Do cook up the reference architectures, but it's a bad thing in a way that you drive drive away some developers who are most of the developers at 80 plus percent, developers are horizontal like you. Look at the look into the psyche of a developer like you move from company to company. And only few developers will say I will stay only in health care, right? So I will only stay in order or something of that, right? So they you have to have these horizontal capabilities which can be applied anywhere on then. On top >>of that, I think that's true. Sorry, but I'll take a little bit different. Take on that. I would say yes, that's true. But remember, remember the old school application developer Someone was just called in Application developer. All they did was develop applications, right? They pick the framework, they did it right? So I think we're going to see more of that is just now mawr of Under the Covers developers. You've got mawr suffer defined networking and software, defined storage servers and cloud kubernetes. And it's kind of like under the hood. But you got your, you know, classic application developer. I think you're gonna see him. A lot of that come back in a way that's like I don't care about anything else. And that's the promise of cloud infrastructure is code. So I think this both. >>Hey, I worked. >>I worked at people solved and and I still today I say into into this context, I say E r P s are the ultimate low code. No code sort of thing is right. And what the problem is, they couldn't evolve. They couldn't make it. Lightweight, right? Eso um I used to write applications with drag and drop, you know, stuff. Right? But But I was miserable as a developer. I didn't Didn't want to be in the applications division off PeopleSoft. I wanted to be on the tools division. There were two divisions in most of these big companies ASAP. Oracle. Uh, like companies that divisions right? One is the cooking up the tools. One is cooking up the applications. The basketball was always gonna go to the tooling. Hey, >>guys, I'm sorry. We're almost out of time. I always wanted to t some of the sections of the day. First of all, we got Holder Mueller coming on at lunch for a power half hour. Um, you'll you'll notice when you go back to the home page. You'll notice that calendar, that linear clock that we talked about that start times are kind of weird like, for instance, an appendix coming on at 1 24. And that's because these air prerecorded assets and rather than having a bunch of dead air, we're just streaming one to the other. So so she's gonna talk about people, process and technology. We got Kathy Southwick, whose uh, Silicon Valley CEO Dan Sheehan was the CEO of Dunkin Brands and and he was actually the c 00 So it's C A CEO connecting the dots to the business. Daniel Dienes is the CEO of you I path. He's coming on a 2:47 p.m. East Coast time one of the hottest companies, probably the fastest growing software company in history. We got a guy from Bain coming on Dave Humphrey, who invested $750 million in Nutanix. He'll explain why and then, ironically, Dheeraj Pandey stew, Minuteman. Our friend interviewed him. That's 3 35. 1 of the sessions are most excited about today is John McD agony at 403 p. M. East Coast time, she's gonna talk about how to fix broken data architectures, really forward thinking stuff. And then that's the So that's the transformation track on the future of cloud track. We start off with the Big Three Milan Thompson Bukovec. At one oclock, she runs a W s storage business. Then I mentioned gig therapy wrath at 1. 30. He runs Azure is analytics. Business is awesome. Paul Dillon then talks about, um, IDs Avery at 1 59. And then our friends to, um, talks about interview Simon Crosby. I think I think that's it. I think we're going on to our next session. All right, so keep it right there. Thanks for watching the Cuban cloud. Uh huh.