>> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in San Francisco at the Professional Business Women of California Conference, the 28th year, I think Hillary must be in the neighborhood because everyone is streaming up to the keynote rooms. It's getting towards the end of the day. But we're excited to have Adam Smiley on. He's the author of The Quarter-Life Breakthrough. Welcome Adam. >> Great to be here, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So you gave a talk a little bit earlier on, I assume the theme of kind of your general thing. Would you just, Quarter-Life Breakthrough, what is Quarter-Life Breakthrough? >> So this is a book about how to empower the next generation. How young people can find meaning in their careers and their lives. So the subtitle of the book is Invent Your Own Path, Find Meaningful Work, and Build a Life That Matters. So everyone talks about millennials, you hear them in the news, "Oh they're the lazy generation," >> Right, right. >> "The entitled generation." The Me, Me, Me generation. I actually think that couldn't be further from the truth. So the truth is that actually 50% of millennials would take a pay cut to find work that matches their values. 90% want to use their skills for good. So my book is a guide for people to find purpose in their careers and really help them find meaning at the workplace and help companies empower that generation at work. >> So from being the older guy, so then is it really incumbent, you know, because before people didn't work for good, they worked for paycheck, right. They went, they punched in, they got paid, they went home. So is it really incumbent then on the employers now to find purposeful work? And how much of it has to be purposeful? I mean, unfortunately, there's always some of that, that grimy stuff that you just have to do. So what's the balance? >> Yeah and it's not to say that millennials don't want a paycheck, everyone wants money. I obviously want to make more money than less money. But it's also that this generation is really looking for meaning in the workplace. And one of the main things, if you look at all the studies, whether it's the Deloitte Millennial Study or the IBM Study, this is a generation that wants to move the needle forward on social issues at work. Not just after work or on the weekends, but at the workplace. And I think it's incumbent upon companies to really think about how they're providing those opportunities for purpose. Both in the mission of the company, what someone's doing every day, and opportunities outside of work, whether it's service projects, paid sabbaticals for people to do purpose-driven projects, really thinking about how someone is inspired to do mission during work every day. >> Right, it's interesting, Bev Crair at the keynote talked about, the question I think was, do you have to separate, kind of your personal views from your professional views and your social life? And she made a very powerful statement, she's like, "I'm comfortable enough with my employer that I can say what I feel and if there's ever a question they can ask me about it. But I don't gait what I say based on my employer as long as I'm being honest and truthful." So you know it's an interesting twist on an old theme. Where before you kind of had your separate worlds. You know, you had your work life and your home life, but now between email and text and social media, there is no kind of they're there for work and it's really invaded into the personal. So is that why the personal has to kind of invade back into the work? >> And when it comes to millennials, one word that always comes up is authenticity. People do not want to separate who they are at home from who they are at work. They want to be their whole person. Now obviously there's a line you don't cross. I'm not going to tell someone exactly what I think of them or tell the boss to go screw themselves or insult somebody or put on social media something that's secret that we're doing at the company. But I think that people want to feel that they get to show up who they are, have their beliefs echoed at the workplace, be able to be their full self, their full values, their mission, their goals, have that reflected in what they do, and have people at the company actually acknowledge that. You're not just an employee, I actually know what's going on in your life. I know what your dreams are, I know what your family's going through. I care about where you're headed, not just today or while you work here, but when you leave the company. Because that's the other thing, is that we're accepting that most of the people entering the workforce now or starting a new job, they're going to be there on average two to three years, maybe four, five, or six years. They're not going to be there ten, fifteen, twenty years like they used to be. So how do you actually empower someone to make an impact while they're there. And help them find the next lily pad, as they call it. The next opportunity. Because they're going to have a lot of those lily pads as they go throughout their career. >> It's interesting. We interviewed a gal named Marcia Conrad at an IBM event many years ago. She just made a really funny observation, she's like, "You know, people come in and you interview them and they're these really cool people and that's why you hire them, because they've got all these personality traits and habits and hobbies and things that they do, and energy." And then they come into the company, and then the old-school, you drop the employee, you know manual on top of them, basically saying stop being you. Stop being the person that we just hired. So that's completely flipped up on its head. >> Right, one of the things I talked about in the session today was this idea of stay interviews versus exit interviews. Normally when we do performance managements, kind of like, okay, you're leaving, what did you think? Why are you doing that when someone leaves? Do it to be like, what would make you stay? What do you want to accomplish while you're here? And you're not being graded against what everyone else is being graded on, what do you want to be graded on? What are your goals? What are your metrics for success? Performance achievement versus just performance measurement. I think is very important for this generation, because otherwise it's like, well why am I being judged on the standards that were written in 1986? This is what I'm trying to do here. >> It's interesting, even Jeff Immelt at GE, they've thrown out the annual review because it's a silly thing. You kind of collect your data two weeks before and the other fifty weeks everybody is just working. I have another hypothesis I want to run by you though. On this kind of purpose-driven. Today so many more things are as a service, transportation as a service, you know there seems to be less emphasis on things and more emphasis on experiences. It also feels like it's easier to see your impact whether it's writing a line of code, or doing something in social media. And you know there was an interesting campaign, Casey Neistat did, participated a couple weeks ago, right. They raised $2 million and basically got Turkish Airlines to fly in a couple hundred thousand metric tons of food to Somalia. And my question is, is it just because you can do those things so much easier and see an impact? Is that why, kind of this, increased purposefulness, I'm struggling on the word. >> I think the tools are certainly more available for people to take action. I think the connection is there. People are seeing what's going on in the world in a way that they've never been exposed to before with social media, with communication technology. It's up front and center. I think also that as technology takes over our lives, you see this with kind of statistics around depression and anxiety, people are starved for that in-person connection. They're starved for that meaning, that actual conversation. We're always doing this, but really a lot of data shows that people experience true joy, true fulfillment, true connection, true experience is what you're talking about, when they're in a room with someone. So people want that. So it's kind of a return back to that purpose-driven life, that purpose-driven tribe, village experience because the rest of the time we're on our phones. And yeah, it's cool, but something's missing. So people are starting to go back to work and be like, "I want that inspiration" that other generations may have gotten from church or from outside of work, or from their community, or from their village, or from the elders, or from a youth group or something. They're like, "I want that in the workplace. I want that everyday." >> Well so this is more top-down right? I mean I just think again, kind of the classic, back in the day, you were kind of compelled to give x percentage of your pay to United Way or whatever. And that was like this big aggregation mechanism that would roll up the money and distribute it to God-knows-where. Completely different model than, and you can see, because of social media and ubiquitous cell phones all over the place, you can actually see who that kid is, that's getting your thing on the other side. >> And it's empowering someone to say, "Okay this is what's important to me. These are the causes that I'd like to support. This is where I want my money to go and here's why." >> So what do you think's the biggest misunderstanding of millennials from old people like me or even older hopefully? >> Well one thing that I do think that millennials don't get right is the importance of patience. I think a lot of times people say, you know, "oh millennials, they want things to happen too quickly." I think that that's true. I think that my generation, I'm going to be the first to admit and say that we need to do a better job of being patient, being persistent. You can't expect things to happen overnight. You can't expect to start a job and in two months get promoted or to feel like you're with the Board of Directors. Things take time. At the same time, it's incumbent upon older generations to listen to these young people, to make them feel like they have a voice, to make them feel like they're heard and that their ideas matter, even if they don't have the final say, to make them feel like they actually matter. Because I think sometimes people assume that they don't know anything. They don't know everything, but they have some really brilliant ideas and if you listen to those ideas they might actually be really good for the company both in terms of profit and purpose. So that's one thing I would say. >> Okay, just, so first time with this show, just get your impressions of the show. >> Oh it's great. This is a great show. You all are doing a great job, a great interview. >> No not our show. The PBWC, I mean of course we're doing a good job, we have you on. I mean the PBWC. >> It's a great, you know for me, it's real exciting to be at the end of an event where I'm one of the only male speakers. Because usually, I've been doing the speaking circuit thing now for a year or two. And I go to these events, I go to panels, I go to conferences, keynotes, and it's mostly male speakers, which is a huge problem. There's far far far fewer women and people of color speaking at these events than men. And one of the things I'm really trying to change is that but also pay equity around speaking, because I talked to some of my female colleagues about what they were paid for a specific event, and they'll say, "Well they covered my transportation, they covered my lift and a salad, or my hotel maybe." I'm like, well I got paid $5000. That's messed up. We did the same amount of work. We did the same panel or doing the same keynote, similar experience levels. That's messed up. And so I'm trying to change that by doing this thing called the Women Speaker Initiative. Which is a mentorship program to empower more women and people of color to be speakers and then to make sure that they're paid fairly when compared to men. >> So how do people get involved with that? >> They should just got to my website, smileyposwolsky.com and check out Women Speaker Initiative. >> Alright, well Adam, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. Great great topic and I'm sure, look forward to catching up again later. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Alright. He's Adam, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. We're at the Professional Business Women of California conference, twenty eighth year. Thanks for watching.

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. This segment is about surviving and thriving and with the digital revolution that's happening, the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with guardian life. Nick Volpi CIO of individual markets at guardian life and Kim golly CTO of life. And is at Accenture essentially, obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on, Kevin. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks John. Good to be here. >>So I wonder before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate, the good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can kind of see kind of what's happening because of the pandemic forced everyone to kind of identify what's working. What's not working what the double-down on innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic kind of relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses, Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what guardian lives doing kind of in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >>Yeah. Thanks John. So, you know, the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance traditionally, you know, life insurance, underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person fluids labs, uh, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke that all came to an abrupt halt, right doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, um, adopt the application and adopt our new medical questionnaires and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at, you know, certain limits and certain levels and how we, when we needed fluids. So we, we, we have pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about, uh, you know, 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to, you know, north of 98% across the board. >>Um, in addition, we kind of saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started taking a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing. Like kind of have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, you know, this digitation digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business, right? And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lift and shift. >>Kim, I want to get your perspective at a century I'm, I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months, lots of use cases with a central, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters get called in to like help out cause the cloud actually now isn't an enabler. Um, how do you see the impact of the, of the pandemic around reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >>So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact >>Is, you know, we talk about Nick raised the, you know, such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that? There's been talking on the table for a number of years. Um, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became a very informed, I became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about a prior. Um, but that's, it they'll think about it. I mean, even essentially we, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, uh, that we're easily able to adopt. Uh, but clients that weren't were really left behind. Um, so we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that weren't didn't have as much forethought as the likes of guardian, et cetera. >>Nick, that brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud, or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared people who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or how many active projects were even being full deployments in there did well, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, the, the enablement we had and, and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, and I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud at that point. Um, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their environments, but, you know, guardian had a strategy of getting out of the data center and moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. Um, so we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly, uh, when, when the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that, that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customer's needs. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey and at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >>So let's talk about the connection with, with the sensors, life insurance and annuity platform also known as a, I think the acronym is, uh, what was that? Why was that relevant? What, what was that all about? >>Yeah. So I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. Um, so >>It's essentially, >>I suspect you would write John, like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the, the, the, the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and his product continues to change. And you had regulations like 7,702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1st, 2022, we realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. >>And we just really got to a place where combination of our, our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible and be capable for our customers. Married really well with the, the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the Ayla platform, um, their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. You know, we're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut tests in times niggly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the CA the cloud capability and halo capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform, uh, coming up in live very soon here before. >>Well, I get to, um, a center's perspective. I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that. Nick, if you don't mind the, you basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring has you have you seen? What's your vision? I should say, what's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a playbook you get in the cloud replatform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources. Then you gotta look for innovation where you can start changing. What, how you do things to refactor the business model. >>Yeah. So I think that, you know, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability, right? So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities, right? Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives, what this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single rapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALA behind the scenes, you don't have that. You know, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a, uh, a trailer to it, right? And that's what we were doing today. Our digital front ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe backends by introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive, you know, trailer to it. Um, so it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front end innovation that we've been working on for, you know, two or three years prior. >>I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way, right? You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Um, can you talk about how you guys look at that Nick and terminally? Because a lot of CEO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. And I think that's, that's our exact, that's our exact path forward, right? We don't, we don't feel like we need to boil the ocean. Right. We're going after the surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers, right? So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there that are, you know, full, completely closed. They're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALA capability to the next generation of products. The next generation of customer needs understanding data, data capture is very important. And right. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured, what these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. Right. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can turn it faster. >>You have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way on the traditional systems. You're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern on these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALA coupled with em, with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >>Okay. I'm okay. CTO of a live as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have, this is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old, right? But in a way in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, the, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And I think, you know, this is, I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster and your customers don't have to build all that lower level abstractions. If you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Cause this is a real great use case. >>Yeah, it is. You know, our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel and with cloud and native services as AWS and, uh, provide w we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bets, we can get a great service. That's fully managed that has, uh, security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem. I'm focusing on that. And we will work together, uh, in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code, low code. You know, it's strange a modern system, like a lip has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. >>So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients that would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, but that's the ultimate goal. So alien, the no code, no code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is the cloud moving in calculating native services, using the built-in security that comes with all that, um, and extending the function and then being able to tap into, you know, the InsureTech FinTech internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay. Uh, it's, it's very strong part of the exercise, so you can have the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. >>You know, all programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. You know, there's one really small, simple example I can use. Um, I'd say guardian is one of our industries, market leaders, when, and when they approach the security, they really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very, um, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, you know, because we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business. So, and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is the product. Definitely. I think it is, uh, everything Nick said you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success. >>Yeah. Great, great call out there, Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get into the customer side of it. This enablement platform is kind of the new platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting because you have to take this kind of low code, no code capability, and you still got to code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast, um, platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction. >>Yeah. So I think, you know, I'll, I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALA, right? And here's the beauty of it. So we have something called launchpad where we're able to quickly stand up in AIDAP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful 85% or more of all the work we've done with Inala is configuration versus code. And I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. Um, so if our developers and even our, our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development buyer and start to play with, um, actuarial calculations, new product features and function, and then spin that to a more higher end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has the flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments. Whereas in days past you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And, you know, I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination available in AWS has really a new capability to guardian that we're really excited about. >>I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their, their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >>Yes. I'll, I'll give you real dates. Right? So we engage really engaged with Accenture on the ALA program. Right before Thanksgiving of last year, we had our environment stood up and running all of our vitamins dev set UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS. And we are about to launch our first product configuration into the, of the platform come November. So within a year we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the Ayla platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >>It's amazing. You know, that's just great example to me, uh, where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is kinda plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now on the customer side, you mentioned, um, you guys love, uh, providing value to the customers. What is the impact of the customer? Okay, now you're a customer guardian life's customer. What's the impact of them. Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >>Yeah, so, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream, right? Whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ad-lib, um, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new backend policy admin systems has really brought us to a new, a new level. Um, whether it be repricing, product innovation, um, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer may need. You know, we're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back end policy admin, going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new, more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with, with, >>Okay, final question. What's next for guardian life's journey year with Accenture. What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's what's on your mind? What's next? >>Uh, so that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Excentra, at least I've had it in my head. Um, we, we want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability or life insurance, and our newest, um, four systems that are kind of weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these, for new business capability, um, by end of 2024. And that's, you know, I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner, and then we begin to migrate the, the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then, you know, complete the product. >>But along the way, you know, given regulation, given new, uh, customer customer needs, you know, meeting the needs of the customers changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks, right? So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well, by the third quarter, fourth quarter of next year, that would be a success. As far as that. >>Awesome. You guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen kind of where the modernization trend is today and kind of where it's going. It's the Nick. Appreciate it, Kim. Thanks for coming out with a censure Nixon. It's an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. Um, this is, I got you here. You know, you guys are doing a lot of great work for other CEOs out there that are going through this right now, whether whatever they are on the spectrum missed the cloud way of getting in. Now this notion of refactoring and then replatforming, and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there, out there, or the CEOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >>Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CEOs, we go for the white hot core first, right? We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business should be fall over. Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? Right? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker, portals, um, beneficiary portals, uh, simple, you know, AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native new builds. Right? So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud. Like why, when you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful the conversation and move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business. Should it be >>What's the other expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever metaphor you. That's what you're essentially saying. There, get, get some, get some, get your sea legs, get, get practice >>Exactly. Then go for the hard stuff, right? >>It's such a valid point. John is, you know, we see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and, and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and you know, it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first from a weakest link until it's, the journey is complete, you're never going to maximize. So it was a, it was a very, uh, different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff. And then, >>Yeah. Well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that the talk about the impact of the personnel, Kim and Nick, because you know, there's a morale issue going on too. There's a, there's a, there's a training. I won't say training, but there's not re-skilling, but there's the rigor. If you're refactoring, you are, re-skilling, you're doing new things, the impact on morale and confidence. If you're not, you get the white, you don't wanna be in the white core unconfident. >>Maybe I should get first. Cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, but yeah. Um, what we see with a lot of insurance companies, uh, they grow through acquisition. Okay. They're very large companies grown over time, uh, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a ten-year staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, uh, those staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today, and they're not so, uh, fair with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through >>The final word here. Go for it. >>Yeah. John, I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention. We see here at guardian. I have a 50 year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto a lip and is one of the most essential. And I've actually had Accenture tell me if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new. I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of guardian, the kind of backing guardians putting behind this, right? We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50 year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves, and is now a key part of this implementation, >>Hey, who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in, right? I mean Barston magnet trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on. Great insight, Kim, great stuff for the century as always a great story here, right? At the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now, we're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model with powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story. Appreciate it. Thanks John. Appreciate it. Okay. So cube coverage of 80 of us executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This segment is about surviving and thriving with the digital revolution that's happening in the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with Guardian Life, Nick Volpe, CIO of Individual Markets at Guardian Life and Kim Gully, CTO of Life and Annuities at Accenture. Accenture obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, Guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on. Kim, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, good to be here. >> So, well, before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate. The good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can see what's happening because the pandemic forced everyone to identify what's working, what's not working, what the double-down on. Innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses. Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what Guardian Life's doing in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >> Yeah, thanks John. So the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance, traditionally life insurance underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person, fluids, labs, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke, that all came to an abrupt halt. Doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, adopt the application, and adopt our medical questionnaires, and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at certain limits and certain levels and when we needed the fluids. So we are pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to the north of 98% across the board. In addition, we saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started to take a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing, that have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, this digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business. And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lifted shift. >> Kim, I want to get your perspective at Accenture. I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months. A lot of use cases with Accenture, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters, get called in to like help out 'cause the cloud actually now is an enabler. How do you see the impact of the pandemic reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >> So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact is we talk about, Nick raise such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that, is being talked on the table for a number of years, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about it prior, but that's it, they'll think about it. I mean, even Accenture, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, they were easily able to adopt, but clients that weren't, were really left behind. So we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that didn't have as much forethought as likes of Guardian, et cetera. >> Nick, it brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared. People who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or having active projects or even being full deployments in there did well. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, the enablement we had and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, in I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud. At that point, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their SIT environments, but Guardian had the strategy of getting out of the data center or moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. So we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly. When the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customers need. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey. And at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >> Let's talk about the connection with Accenture's life insurance and annuity platform also known ALIP, I think the acronym is. What was that? Why was that relevant? What was that all about? >> Yeah, so I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. >> He essentially help that, love it. (laughs) >> Yeah, you would suspect you would, right John? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of Guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and it's product continues to change and you had regulations like 7702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1, 2022. We realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. And we just really got to a place where combination of our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible, and be capable for our customers, married really well with the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the ALIP platform. Their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. We're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut test in times significantly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the cloud capability and the ALIP capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform coming up in live very soon here. >> Before I get to Accenture's perspective, I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that, Nick, if you don't mind. You basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture, take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring have you seen? What's your vision, I should say. What's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a playbook. You get in the cloud, re-platform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources, then you've got to look for innovation where you can start changing, how you do things to refactor the business model. >> Yeah, so I think that, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability. So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities. Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives. What this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single wrapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALIP behind the scenes, you don't have that, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a trailer to it, and that's what we were doing today. Our digital front-ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe back-ends. By introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive trailer to it. So it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front-end innovation that we've been working on for two or three years prior. >> I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way. You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Could you talk about how you guys look at that Nick internally because a lot of CIO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. And I think that's our exact path forward. We don't feel like we need to blow the ocean. We're going after this surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers. So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there, that are for completely closed, they're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALIP capability to the next generation of products, the next generation of customer needs, understanding data. Data capture is very important. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured. What these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can churn it faster, you have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way. On the traditional systems, you're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern. On these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALIP coupled with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front-end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >> Kim, okay, CTO of ALIP as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have. This is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old. But in a way, in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And this is I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster, and your customers don't have to build all the lower level abstractions, if you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Because this is a real great use case. >> Yeah, it is. Our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel. And with cloud and native services that AWS provide, we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bits. We can get a great service that's fully managed, that has security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem, I'm focusing on that. And we will work together in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code/low code. It's strange. A modern system like ALIP has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means, I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients. That would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, let's be realistic, but that's the ultimate goal. So ALIP, the no code/low code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is, the cloud moving in, calculating native services using the built-in security that comes with all that and extending the function and then be able to tap into the InsurTech, FinTech, internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay, it's very strong part of the exercise. So you can add the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. All programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. There's one really small simple example I can use. I'd say Guardian is one of our industries market leaders when they approach the security. They really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, 'cause we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges, we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is a product definitely. I think it is everything Nick said, you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out, there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success as well. >> Yeah, great, great call out there. Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get it to the customer side of it. This enablement platform is the new, I mean, platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting 'cause you have to take this low code/no code capability. I mean, you still got a code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast. Platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, so I think I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALIP, and here's the beauty of it. So we have something called LaunchPad where we're able to quickly stand up in ALIP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful with 85% or more, of all the work we've done with an ALIP is configuration versus code and I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. So if our developers and even our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development environment, start to play with actuarial calculations, new product features and function and then spin that to a more higher-end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has a flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments, whereas in days past, you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination of ALIP and AWS has really brought a new capability to Guardian and we're really excited about. >> I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you, compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Yes, I'll give you real dates. So we really engaged with Accenture on the ALIP program right before Thanksgiving of last year. We had our environment stood up and running, all of our DEV, SIT, UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS and we are about to launch our first product configuration into the ALIP platform coming November. So within a year, we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the ALIP platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >> That's amazing. That's just great example to me where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now, on the customer side you mentioned, you guys love providing value to the customers. What is the impact to the customer? Okay, now you're a customer, Guardian Life's customer. What's the impact to them? Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ALIP, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new back-end policy admin systems has really brought us to a new level, whether it be repricing, product innovation, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer might need. We're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back-end policy admin going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with ALIP. >> Okay, final question. What's next for Guardian Life's journey year with Accenture? What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's on your mind? What's next? >> So that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Accenture, at least I've had it in my head. We want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability, our life insurance, and our annuities, for systems that are weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these for new business capability by end of 2024. And I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner. And then we begin to migrate the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then complete the product. But along the way, given regulation, given new customer needs, meeting the needs of the customer's changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks. So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform, and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well by the 3rd quarter, 4th quarter of next year, that would be a success as far as I'm concerned. >> Awesome, you guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen where the modernization trend is today and where it's going. So Nick appreciate it. Kim, thanks for coming out with Accenture. Nick, so just an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. This is I got you here. You guys are doing a lot of great work. For other CIOs out there that are going through this right now, whatever they are on the spectrum, missed the CloudWave, getting in now, this notion of refactoring and then re-platforming and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access, with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there of the CIOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >> Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CIOs, we go for the white hot core first. We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business. Should we fall over? Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker portals, beneficiary portals, simple AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native, new builds. So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud, like why? When you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful, the conversation to move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business should it go alright. >> What's the old expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever your metaphor you use, that's what you're essentially saying there. Get some, your sea legs, get practice. >> Exactly. >> Then go for the hard stuff. >> It's such a valid point, John. We see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first, from a weakest link until the journey is complete, you never going to maximize. So it was a very different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff and then hit in the core. >> Yeah, well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that, talk about the impact to the personnel, Kim and Nick, because there's a morale issue going on too. There's a training. I won't say training, but there's a not re-skilling, but there's the rigor, if you're refactoring, you are re-skilling, you're doing new things. The impact of morale and confidence you get certainly. you don't want to be in the white core unconfident. >> Maybe I should get first 'cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, yeah. What we see with a lot of insurance companies, they grow through acquisition. Okay, they're very large companies, grown over time, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a tenure staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, that staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today and then not so aware with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through. >> Nick you're the final word here. Go for it. >> Yeah, John. I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention we see here at Guardian. I have a 50-year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto ALIP and is one of the most essential, and I've actually had Accenture tell me, if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new, I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of Guardian, the kind of backing Guardian's putting behind this. We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50-year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves and is now a key part of this implementation. >> And who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in. I mean, back in the trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on, great insight. Kim, great stuff for the Accenture, as always a great story here. We're here at the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now. We're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story, appreciate it. >> Thanks John, appreciate it. >> Okay, it's CUBE coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>the idea of cloud is changing from a set of remote services somewhere out there in the cloud to an operating model that supports workloads on prem across clouds and increasingly at the near and far edge moreover, workloads are evolving from a predominance of general purpose systems to increasingly data intensive applications, developers are a new breed of innovators and kubernetes is a linchpin of creating new cloud native workloads that are in the cloud but also modernizing existing application portfolios to connect them to cloud native apps. Hello, we want to welcome back to HPD discovered 2021 the cubes ongoing coverage. This is Dave Volonte and with me are scott. Buchanan is the vice president of marketing at VM ware and Toby Weiss, who is the vice president of global hybrid cloud practice at HP gents. Welcome to the Q. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Day agreed to be here. >>Okay, thanks for having >>us. So you heard my little narrative upfront. Um and so let's get into it. I want to start with with some of the key trends that you guys see in the marketplace and maybe scott you could kick us off from VM ware's perspective. What are you seeing that's really driving? Uh I. T. Today. >>Well, Dave you started with a conversation around cloud, right, and you can't really have a conversation around cloud without also talking about applications. And so much of the interaction that we're having with customers these days is about how we bring apps and clouds together and modernize across those two dimensions at the same time. And that's a pretty complex discussion to have and it's a complex journey to navigate. And so we're here to talk to customers and to work with h Pe to help our customers across those two dimensions. >>Great, so Toby I mean, it's always been about applications, as scott said, but but the application, the nature of applications is changing how we develop applications. The mentioned it sort of data intensive applications were injecting ai into virtually everything the apps, the process, the the people even um uh from a from the perspective of really a company that supports applications with infrastructure, what are you seeing in the marketplace? What can you add to that discussion? >>Yes. Great point. Dave you know, with the scent with applications becoming more central, think about what that means uh and has been for developer communities and developers becoming uh more important customers for I. T. Uh We have to make it easier for these developers uh to speed their innovations to market. Right? The business demands newer and faster capabilities of these applications. So our job in the infrastructure and was called the platform layer is to help we need to build these kinds of platforms that allow developers to innovate more quickly. >>So we talked earlier about sort of modernizing apps. I mean, it seems to me that the starting point there is you want to containerized and obviously kubernetes is the, is the key there, But so okay, so if that's the starting point, where is the journey, what does that look like? Maybe scott you could chime in there >>Sure. A couple of quick thoughts there, Dave and Toby to build on first is if you look at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Landscape today, what you can do at landscape dot c n c f dot io Holy Smokes, is that a jungle? So a lot of organizations need a guide through that CN cf landscape, they need a partner that they can trust to show them the way through that landscape. And then secondly, there needs to be ways to make these technologies easier to adopt and to use in practice, kubernetes being the ultimate example of that. And so we've been hard at work to try and make it easy and natural to make kubernetes part of one's existing infrastructure, so that building with and working with containers can be done on the same platform that you're using for virtual machines. >>So let's talk a little bit about cloud. Um and how you guys are thinking about cloud, remember told me that Back in VM World 2010, it was the very first vm world for the Cube. All we talked about was a cloud, but it was a private cloud, was really what we were talking about, which at the time largely met the virtualized data center. Um it was kind of before the software defined data center and today we're still talking about cloud, but it's it's hybrid cloud. It's kind of the narrative that I set up front data center. It's become for the most part software to find. And so how do you see this changing the I. T. Operating model? >>I think it's a great question. And look today you will see us talk a lot about this notion of cloud everywhere. So less differentiation about private and public and more about the experience of cloud. Right. Public. Cloud brought great innovations and what better than to bring those innovations to on premise workloads that we have chosen to operate and work there. So as we think about cloud more as an experience we want for our developers and our end users and our I. T. Organizations. We begin to think about how can we replicate that experience in an on premise environment. And so part of that is having the technologies that enable you to do that. The other part is um we most of us have evolved right the organization operating models to operate our cloud infrastructures off premises. Well now expanding that more holistically across our organization so we don't have to operating models but a single operating model that bridges both and and brings the ability of both of those together to get the most benefit as we really become to integrate and become truly hybrid in our organization. So I think the operating model is critical and the kinds of experiences we deliver to the users of that I. T. Uh infrastructure and operating model is critical as well. >>Are you guys are both basically in the infrastructure business but scott maybe we can start with you. There's a lot of changes that we're talking about in it. Generally the data center specifically especially big changes in workloads, with a lot more data intensive apps ai being injected into everything kubernetes, making things more fassel. And in many ways it simplifies things, but it also puts stress on the system because you've got to protect this. They they're no longer stateless apps right there, state full and you gotta protect them and and so they've got to be compliant. Um now you've got the edge coming in. Uh So my question is, what does infrastructure have to do to keep pace with all this application innovation? >>Uh one of the conversations that we are having increasingly with our customers is how can they embrace a dev sec ops mindset in their organization and adopt some of these more modern patterns and practices and make sure that security is embedded in the life cycle of the container. And and so I think that this is part of, the answer is equipping the operator through infrastructure to set guard rails in place so that the development organization can work with freedom inside of those guard rails. They can draw on a catalogs of curated container. Images, catalogs of apps start from templates. Those are the building blocks that allow developers to work faster and that allow an operator to ensure the integrity and compliance of the containers and the applications of the organizations building. >>Yeah, So, so that's kind of uh when I hear scott talked about that Toby I think infrastructure as code designing security and governance in right? We always we always said I was an afterthought. We kind of bolted it on second. The security team had to take care of that. This is always the same thing with backup. Right? So we got an app. It's all ready to go. How do we back it up? And so that's changing that whole notion of, of infrastructure as code. Um, I want to talk about Green lake in a minute, but, but before we get there, I wonder if you could talk about how HP E thinks about VM ware and how you guys are partnering. I'm specifically interested and where each of you sees the value that you bring to the table for your joint customers. >>Yeah, great question. You know, and, and starting to think about history like you did 2010 being the start of a cube journey. I, I remember in 2003 when we first partnered with VM ware in the very first data center consolidations and we built practices around this has been quite a long partnership with VM ware and I'm excited to see this. This partnership evolved today, especially into this cloud native space and direction. Uh It's critical we need you know uh you know customers have choices and we need great partners like VM ware uh to help satisfy the many different use cases and choices that our customers have. So while we bring you know good depth when it comes to building these infrastructures that become highly automated uh managed in some cases and consumable like on a consumption basis and automated like we help clients automate their ci Cd pipeline. We depend on technologies and partners like them where to make these outcomes real for our customers. >>Yeah I think there's a way to connect a couple of the points that we've been talking about today. Got some data from a state of kubernetes study that we just ran And this is 350. IT. decision makers who said uh that they're running kubernetes on premise, 55% of respondents are running kubernetes on premise today. And so Vm ware and HP gets worked together to bring kubernetes to those enterprises, 96% of them said that they're having a challenge selecting the right kubernetes distribution, 60 of them in that C. N. C. F. Landscape and the # one criteria that they're going to use to choose the right distribution uh set them on a path forward is that it's easy to deploy and to operate and to maintain in production. And so I think that this is where VM ware and HP get to come together to help try and keep things as simple as possible for customers as they navigate. A fairly complex world. >>That's interesting scott. So who are those um those on prem users of containers and kubernetes? Is it the is it the head of you know the the application team and an insurance company whose kind of maintaining the claims about? Is it is a guy's building new cloud native apps to help companies get digital first. Who are those, What's the persona look like >>in our conversations? You know, this is the infrastructure and operations team seen that there's energy around kubernetes and maybe there's some use in test and development and parts of the organization. And by centralizing over ownership of that kubernetes footprint, they can ensure that it's compliant if policy is set properly to your point earlier that it's meets the security standards for the organization. And so it's increasingly that SRE or site reliability engineer or platform operator who's taking ownership of that kubernetes footprint for the organization to ensure that consistency of management and experience for the development teams across the larger organs. Toby, is that what you're seeing? >>2? We see uh we see quite a few we engage with quite a few developer teams in business leads that have ambitions to speed their application development processes And uh you know, they want help and often, as I stated, the intro, they might be coming off of a much older deployment uh maybe from 2015 where there there were an early adopter of a container platform methodology and wanting to get to some newer platform or they they may be in charge of getting a mobile banking application and its features to market much more quickly. So and often when we get a quote maybe from a client and might come from, you know, the VP of a business unit. But often as we engage, it's, you know, the developers are pretty much our customers and their developer leaders and teams, >>so you're running into container technical debt. Already you're seeing that out there. It sounds like your legacy >>container. It takes some expertise to, to come off those older. You know, the first instance creations of these container platforms were pretty much open source and yeah, you want to bring it to something that's more modern and has the kinds of features, enterprise grade features you might need. >>So is it not so problematic for for customers? Because as I said before, a lot of those apps were sort of disposable and stateless and, and, and now they're saying, hey, we can actually use kubernetes to build, you know, mission critical apps. And so there, that's when they sort of decide to pivot to a new modern platform or is there a more complex migration involved? What are you seeing? >>Okay, I'll give my hot, take your Toby and then uh, ask you for yours. But I guess, uh, I feel like the conversations that I'm involved in with customers is, you know, always begins with their broader application portfolio. These enterprises have hundreds thousands of applications and job one is to figure out how to categorize them into those which need to be re hosted or platform or re factored or reimagined entirely. And so they're looking for help figuring out how to categorize those applications and ultimately how to attack each category of application. Some should be re platforms on environments that make best use of kubernetes, some need to be re factored, some need to be reimagined. And so they are again looking for that expert guide to show them the way >>right. And when we engage in those early discussions, we call it right Mix advisory. Um, you know, you're trying to take a full, a broad scope as you said, scott down to a few and uh you know determine kind of the first movers if you will also you know clients will engage you know for very specific applications that are or suite of applications. Again like mobile applications for banking. I think you're a good example because you know they have an ambition. I mean the leader of that kind of application may very well think that is the mission critical application for the company, right? But of course finance, they have a different point of view. So you know that that application to them is the center of their business getting you know, their customer access to the core banking features that they have and you know they want to zero in on the kind of ecosystem it takes in in the speed at which they can push new features through. So we see both as well um you know the broader scope application, weaning down to the few discovery application, uh and then of course a very focused effort to help a particular business unit speed development on their mobile app, for example, >>it's interesting scott you were talking about sort of, the conversation starts with the application portfolio and there have been there have been these sort of milestones around, you know, major application portfolio, I'll call him rationalizations, I mean there's always an ongoing, but y two K was one of those, this is sort of the big move to SAS was another one, obviously cloud and it feels like kubernetes, I mean it's like the cloud to Dato coming on. Prem is another one of those opportunities to rationalize applications. We all know the stats right, we always see 85% of the spend is to keep the lights on and the other the only small portion of innovation and you know, there's always a promise we can change that. It reminds me of the heavy year, I would go to the boston marathon, it was this guy would run and he had a hat on with the extension and it was a can of Budweiser way out there and he couldn't reach it and so he would run. It was almost the same thing here is they never get there because they have so many projects coming online and the project portfolio and and then and then the C I O has got to maintain those in the application heads and so it's this this ongoing thing. But you do see spikes in rationalization initiatives and it feels like with this push to modernization and digitization maybe the pandemic accelerated that too. Is that a reasonable premise? You're seeing sort of a milestone or a marker in terms of increased effort around rationalization and modernization today because of kubernetes? >>Yeah, I definitely think that there are a couple of kubernetes is a catalyzing technology and the challenges of the pandemic or a catalyzing moment. Right. And I feel like uh Organisations have seen over the past 18 months now that those enterprises that have a way to get innovation to market to customers faster, not once a quarter, but many times a day, are the ones that are separating themselves in competitive marketplaces and ultimately delivering superior customer experiences. So it comes back to some of the ideas full circle that Toby started with around delivering a superior developer experience so that those developers can get code to production and into the hands of customers on a much more rapid basis. Like that's the outcome that enterprises really care about at the end of the day. And kubernetes is part of the way to get there, but it's the outcome that's key. Great thank >>you. And one of our practices dave there was uh you know, that's been our bread and butter for so many years. This, you know, this broad based discovery, narrowing down to a strategy and a plan for migrating and moving certain workloads. We see a slight twist today in that clients and organizations want to move quicker too. The apps, they know that, you know, they want to focus on, they want to prove it by through the broad based discovery and kind of a strategic analysis but they want to get quicker right away to the workloads. They are quite sure that need re factoring or leverage the benefit of a modern developer environment. >>Yeah. And they don't want to be messing around with the provisioning, lungs and servers and all that stuff. They want that to be simplified. So we're gonna end on Green Lake and I want to understand how you guys are thinking about Green Lake in terms of your partnership and, and how you're working together, you know, maybe Toby you could sort of give us the update from your perspective, you can't have a conversation with HP today without talking about Green Lake. So give us the kool aid injection. And then I really interested in how VM ware thinks about participating in that. >>Absolutely. And, and thank you for uh, yeah, for helping us out here. You know, I see more and more of our engagements with clients that ask for and, and, and want to sign a Green Life based contract, >>but, >>and that is one very important foundational element. Uh and there's there's so much more because remember we talked about the cloud experience in cloud everywhere and Green Lake brings us an opportunity to bring dimensions to that, especially on the consumption model because that's that's an important element if we begin adding partners such as VM ware to this equation, especially for clients that have huge investments in VM where there's an opportunity here to really bring a lot of value with this cloud experience to our customers through this partnership. >>All right scott, we're gonna give you the last word. What's your take on this? >>Hey listen hard for me to to to add much to what Toby said, he nailed that you see a ton of energy in this space. I think we've covered a bunch of key topics today. Their ongoing conversations with our customers in Green Lake is a way to take that conversation to the next level. >>Guys really appreciate you coming on and give us your perspectives on kubernetes and and and and thank you scott for that data. 55% of I. T. Decision makers out of 350 said they're doing on prem kubernetes. That's a new stat. I hadn't I would have expected to be that high but I guess I'm not surprised it's the rage the developers want the latest and greatest guys. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and I appreciate you coming on the cube. >>Thank you. Dave. >>Thanks Dave. >>Thank you for watching the cubes ongoing coverage. Hp es discover 2021. The virtual version will be right back.

>>the idea of cloud is changing from a set of remote services somewhere out there in the cloud to an operating model that supports workloads on prem across clouds and increasingly at the near and far edge moreover, workloads are evolving from a predominance of general purpose systems to increasingly data intensive applications, developers are a new breed of innovators and kubernetes is a linchpin of creating new cloud native workloads that are in the cloud but also modernizing existing application portfolios to connect them to cloud native apps. Hello, we want to welcome back to HPD discovered 2021 the cubes ongoing coverage. This is Dave Volonte and with me are scott. Buchanan is the vice president of marketing at VM ware and Toby Weiss, who is the vice president of global hybrid cloud practice at HP gents. Welcome to the Q. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Day agreed to be here. >>Okay, thanks for having >>us. So you heard my little narrative upfront. Um and so let's get into it. I want to start with with some of the key trends that you guys see in the marketplace and maybe scott you could kick us off from VM ware's perspective. What are you seeing that's really driving? Uh I. T. Today. >>Well, Dave you started with a conversation around cloud, right, and you can't really have a conversation around cloud without also talking about applications. And so much of the interaction that we're having with customers these days is about how we bring apps and clouds together and modernize across those two dimensions at the same time. And that's a pretty complex discussion to have and it's a complex journey to navigate. And so we're here to talk to customers and to work with h Pe to help our customers across those two dimensions. >>Great, so Toby I mean, it's always been about applications, as scott said, but but the application, the nature of applications is changing how we develop applications. The mentioned it sort of data intensive applications were injecting ai uh into virtually everything the apps, the process, the people even um uh from a from the perspective of really a company that supports applications with infrastructure, what are you seeing in the marketplace? What can you add to that discussion? >>Yes. Great point. Dave you know, with the scent with applications becoming more central, think about what that means uh and has been for developer communities and developers becoming uh more important customers for I. T. Uh We have to make it easier for these developers uh to speed their innovations to market. Right? The business demands newer and faster capabilities of these applications. So our job in the infrastructure and uh it was called the platform layer is to help we need to build these kinds of platforms that allow developers to innovate more quickly. >>So we talked earlier about sort of modernizing apps. I mean, it seems to me that the starting point there is you want to containerized and obviously kubernetes is the, is the key there, but so okay, so if that's the starting point, where's the journey, what does that look like? Maybe scott you could chime in there >>Sure. A couple of quick thoughts there, dave and Toby to build on first, is if you look at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Landscape today, which you can do at landscape dot c n c f dot io Holy Smokes, is that a jungle? So a lot of organizations need a guide through that CN cf landscape, they need a partner that they can trust to show them the way through that landscape. And then secondly, there needs to be ways to make these technologies easier to adopt and to use in practice kubernetes being the ultimate example of that. And so we've been hard at work to try and make it easy and natural to make kubernetes Part of 1's existing infrastructure. So that building with and working with containers can be done on the same platform that you're using for virtual machines. >>So let's let's talk a little bit about cloud and how you guys are thinking about cloud. Remember told me that Back in VM World 2010, it was the very first vm world for the Cube. All we talked about was a cloud, but it was a private cloud was really what we were talking about, which at the time largely met the virtualized data center. Um it was kind of before the software defined data center and today we're still talking about cloud, but it's it's hybrid cloud, it's kind of the narrative that I set up front data center. It's become for the most part software to find. And so how do you see this changing the I. T. Operating model? >>I think it's a great question. And and look today you will see us talk a lot about this notion of cloud everywhere. So less differentiation about private and public and more about the experience of cloud. Right public. Cloud brought great innovations and what better than to bring those innovations to on premise workloads that we've chosen to operate and work there. So as we think about cloud more as an experience we want for our developers and our end users and our I. T. Organizations. We begin to think about how can we replicate that experience in an on premise environment. And so part of that is having the technologies that enable you to do that. The other part is um We most of us have evolved alrighty organization operating models to operate our cloud infrastructures off premises. Well now expanding that more holistically across our organization so we don't have to operating models but a single operating model that bridges both and brings the ability of both those together to get the most benefit as we really become to integrate and become truly hybrid in our organization. So I think the operating model is critical and um the kinds of experiences we deliver to the users of that I. T. Uh infrastructure and operating model is critical as well. >>Are you guys are both basically in the infrastructure business scott? Maybe we can start with you there's a lot of changes that we're talking about in it. Generally the data center specifically especially big changes in workloads with a lot more data intensive apps ai being injected into everything Kubernetes, making things more facile. And in many ways it simplifies things, but it also puts stress on the system because you've got to protect this, they're no longer stateless apps right there, state full and you gotta protect them and and so they've got to be compliant. Um Now you've got the edge coming in. Uh So my question is, what does infrastructure have to do to keep pace with all this application innovation? >>Uh One of the conversations that we are having increasingly with our customers is how can they embrace a dev sec ops mindset in their organization and adopt some of these more modern patterns and practices and make sure that security is embedded in the life cycle of the container. And and so, you know, I think that this is part of, the answer is equipping the operator through infrastructure to set guard rails in place so that the development organization can work with freedom inside of those guard rails that it can draw on a catalogs of curated container images, catalogs of apps start from templates. Those are the building blocks that allow developers to work faster and that allow an operator to ensure the integrity and compliance of the containers and the applications that the organizations building. >>Yeah, So, so that's kind of uh when I hear scott talking about that Toby I think infrastructure as code designing security and governance in we always we always said I was an afterthought, we kind of bolted it on second. The security team had to take care of that. This is always the same thing with backup. Right? So we got an app. It's all ready to go. How do we back it up? And so that's changing that whole notion of infrastructure as code. Um, I want to talk about Green lake in a minute, but, but before we get there, I wonder if you could talk about how HP E thinks about VM ware and how you guys are partnering. I'm specifically interested and where each of you sees the value that you bring to the table for your joint customers. >>Yeah, great question. You know, and, and starting to think about history like you did 2010 being the start of a cube journey. I, I remember in 2003 when we first partnered with VM ware in the very first data center consolidations and we built practices around this. It's been quite a long partnership with VM ware and I'm excited to see this. This partnership evolved today, especially into this cloud, native space and direction. Uh, it's critical we need you know uh you know customers have choices and we need great partners like VM ware uh to help satisfy the many different use cases and choices that our customers have. So while we bring you know good depth when it comes to building these infrastructures that become highly automated um and managed in some cases and consume consumable like on a consumption basis and automated like we help clients automate their ci Cd pipeline. We depend on technologies and partners like them where to make these outcomes real for our customers. >>Yeah I think there's a way to connect a couple of the points that we've been talking about today. Got some data from a state of kubernetes study that we just ran and this is 350 I. T. Decision makers who said uh that they're running kubernetes on premise, 55% of respondents are running kubernetes on premise today and so VM ware and HP get to work together to bring kubernetes to those enterprises, 96% of them said that they're having a challenge selecting the right kubernetes distribution, 60 of them in that C. N. C. F. Landscape and the number one criteria that they're going to use to choose the right distribution, you know set them on a path forward is that it's easy to deploy and to operate and to maintain in production. And so I think that this is where the m wear and HP get to come together to help try and keep things as simple as possible for customers as they navigate. A fairly complex world. >>That's interesting scott. So who are those um those on prem users of containers and kubernetes? Is it the is it the head of you know the the application team and an insurance company whose kind of maintaining the claims about? Is it is a guy's building new cloud native apps to help companies get digital first. Who are those? What's the persona look like >>in our conversations? You know, this is the infrastructure and operations team seen that there's energy around kubernetes and maybe there's some use in test and development and parts of the organization. And by centralizing over ownership of that kubernetes footprint, they can ensure that it's compliant if policy is set properly to your point earlier that it's meets the security standards for the organization. And so it's increasingly that SRE or site reliability engineer or platform operator who's taking ownership of that kubernetes footprint for the organization to ensure that consistency of management and experience for the development teams across the larger order Toby, is that what you're seeing? Two, >>yeah, we see uh we see quite a few, we engage with quite a few developer teams in business leads that have ambitions to speed their application development processes And uh you know, they want help and often as I stated, the intro, they might be coming off of a much older deployment uh maybe from 2015 where there there were an early adopter of a container platform methodology and wanting to get to some newer platform or they they may be in charge of getting a mobile banking application and its features to market much more quickly. So, and often when we get a quote maybe from a client, it might come from, you know, the VP of a business unit. But often as we engage, it's, you know, the developers are pretty much our customers and their developer leaders and teams, >>so you're running into container technical debt already. You're seeing that out there. It sounds like your legacy >>container. It takes some expertise to, to come off those older. You know, the first instance creations of these container platforms were pretty much open source. And yeah, you want to bring it to something that's more modern and has the kinds of features, enterprise grade features you might need. >>So is it not so problematic for for customers? Because as I said before, a lot of those apps were sort of disposable and stateless. And, and, and now they're saying, hey, we can actually use kubernetes to build, you know, mission critical apps. And so there, that's when they sort of decide to pivot to a new modern platform or is there a more complex migration involved? What are you seeing? >>Okay, I'll give my hot, take your Toby and then uh, ask you for yours. But I guess I feel like the conversations that I'm involved in with customers is, you know, always begins with their broader application portfolio. These enterprises have hundreds thousands of applications and job one is to figure out how to categorize them into those which need to be re hosted or platforms or re factored or reimagined entirely. And so they're looking for help figuring out how to categorize those applications and ultimately how to attack each category of application. Some should be re platforms on environments that make best use of kubernetes, some need to be re factored, some need to be reimagined. And so they are again looking for that expert guide to show them the way >>right. And when we engage in those early discussions, we call it right Mix advisory. Um, you know, you're trying to take a full of broad scope as he said, scott down to a few and uh you know, determine kind of the first movers if you will also, you know, clients will engage you know, for very specific applications that are or suite of applications. Again like mobile applications for banking I think are a good example because you know they have an ambition. I mean the leader of that kind of application may very well think that is the mission critical application for the company, right? But of course finance, they have a different point of view. So you know that that application to them is the center of their business getting, you know, their customer access to the core banking features that they have and you know, they want to zero in on the kind of ecosystem. It takes in in the speed at which they can push new features through. So we see both as well um you know, the broader scope application, weaning down to the few discovery application, uh and then of course a very focused effort to help a particular business unit speed development on their mobile app, for example, >>it's interesting scott you were talking about sort of the conversation starts with the application portfolio and there have been there have been these sort of milestones around, you know, major application portfolio, I'll call him rationalizations, I mean there's always an ongoing but y two K was one of those, this is sort of the big move to SAS was another one, obviously cloud and it feels like kubernetes, I mean it's like the cloud to Dato coming on Prem is another one of those opportunities to rationalize applications. We all know the stats right, we always see 85% of the spend is to keep the lights on and the other the only small portions innovation and you know, there's always a promise we can change that. It reminds me of the every year I would go to the boston marathon, it was this guy would run and he had a hat on with the extension and it was a can of Budweiser way out there and he couldn't reach it and so he would run, it was almost the same thing here is they never get there because they have so many projects coming online and the project portfolio and and then and then the C I O has got to maintain those in the application heads and so it's this, this ongoing thing but you do see spikes in rationalization initiatives and it feels like with this push to modernization and digitization maybe the pandemic accelerated that too. Is that a reasonable premise? You seeing sort of a milestone or a marker in terms of increased effort around rationalization and modernization today because of kubernetes? >>Yeah, I definitely think that there are a couple of kubernetes is a catalyzing technology and the challenges of the pandemic or a catalyzing moment. Right. And I feel like uh Organisations have seen over the past 18 months now that those enterprises that have a way to get innovation to market to customers faster, not once a quarter, but many times a day are the ones that are separating themselves in competitive marketplaces and ultimately delivering superior customer experiences. So it comes back to some of the ideas full circle that Toby started with around delivering a superior developer experience so that those developers can get code to production and into the hands of customers on a much more rapid basis. Like that's the outcome that enterprises really care about at the end of the day. And kubernetes is part of the way to get there. But it's the outcome that's key. Great, thank >>you. And one of our practices dave there was uh you know, that's been our bread and butter for so many years. This, you know, this broad based discovery, narrowing down to a strategy and a plan for migrating and moving certain workloads. We see a slight twist today in that clients and organizations want to move quicker too. The apps, they know that, you know, they want to focus on, they want to prove it by through the broad based discovery and kind of a strategic analysis, but they want to get quicker right away to the workloads. They are quite sure that need re factoring or leverage the benefit of a modern developer environment >>and they don't want to be messing around with provisioning lungs and servers and all that stuff. They want that to be simplified. So we're gonna end on Green Lake and I want to understand how you guys are thinking about Green Lake in terms of your partnership and how you're working together, you know, maybe Toby you could sort of give us the update from your perspective, you can't have a conversation with HP today without talking about Green Lake. So give us the kool aid injection. And then I really interested in how VM ware thinks about participating in that. >>Absolutely. And, and thank you for uh, yeah, for helping us out here. You know, I see more and more of our engagements with clients that ask for and, and, and want to sign a Green Life based contract, >>but, >>and that is one very important foundational element. Uh and there's there's so much more because remember we talked about the cloud experience in cloud everywhere and Green Lake brings us an opportunity to bring dimensions to that, especially on the consumption model because that's that's an important element if we begin adding partners such as VM ware to this equation, especially for clients that have huge investments in VM where there's an opportunity here to really bring a lot of value with this cloud experience to our customers through this partnership. >>All right scott, we're gonna give you the last word. What's your take on this? >>Hey listen hard for me to to to add much to what Toby said, he nailed that you see a ton of energy in this space. I think we've covered a bunch of key topics today. Their ongoing conversations with our customers in Green Link is a way to take that conversation to the next level. >>Guys really appreciate you coming on and give us your perspectives on kubernetes and and and and thank you scott for that data. 55% of I. T. Decision makers out of 350 said they're doing on prem kubernetes. That's a new stat. I hadn't I would have expected to be that high but I guess I'm not surprised it's the rage the developers want the latest and greatest guys. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and I appreciate you coming on the cube. >>Thank you. Dave. >>Thanks Dave. >>Thank you for watching the cubes ongoing coverage. Hp es discover 2021. The virtual version will be right back. >>Mm.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM on 2020. Brought to you by IBM >>already. This is Dave Volante. We're here with a preview of VM on 2020. Danny Allen, CTO of Eve dinner, which we're face to face, man. But great to see you online. >>Great senior as well. This is the next best thing, right? >>It is. I mean, you know, VM on has been a great conference for the last several years. We've attended with you, but let's let's get into it. You know, Kobe, 19 obviously shifts tow virtual, but there's a lot of things going on. I'm sure in your business >>a >>lot of talk about business resiliency. How has the pandemic could have affected theme and how you're managing the business? >>Well, it's certainly impacted the entire industry. And actually, one of the interesting things that has happened, of course, is that used to get on an airplane in flight of the customer, shake their hand and close a deal that obviously isn't happening. Um, that's the external side of the internal side of it is you know, everyone went into an office. We have a culture especially in inside sales and support of people going dollar citizen. Obviously, we had to close them. The downside is we loose some of that model that we had in the past, But the upside the bright side of this is we've been doing fantastic impact. The numbers that we have achieved are the same as if Kobe 19 hydrant it. No, I attribute that to a few different things. One is that, >>you >>know, we have a broad spectrum of customers 375,000 across all segments across all industries. And while it's still early in the year, who knows what's going to happen? What I can say is that my business results standpoint. It's been good from a product strategy standpoint, which is where I said, Of course it's It's actually been better than good because we actually have the opportunity to focus a little bit more perhaps, than we have in the past, too. Speaking to customers and delivering on things that are harder to do when you're on airplanes all the time. >>Well, I mean, we've been reporting on the Cube. That is really a story of the haves and have nots. I mean, my take away there is he had it not been for over 19 maybe maybe the numbers would even be higher. But at the same time, though, the whole like I said, business resiliency work from home people really thinking about data protection has really come to the fore. So some of the other trends, obviously their tail winds, cloud data the whole notion of multi cloud. I'm sure we're going to hear a lot about this at VM on virtual. >>Yeah, so as you know, our objective is to be the most trusted provider of backup solutions that deliver Cloud data management. And so there's a big focus on cloud. Where we certainly think of Cloud, of course, is the Big Three hyper scaler is of AWS, Azure and Google, and you're going to hear announcements, but all three of those and products that continue to enhance our capabilities there. But it's also our partners we have in our in our virtual solutions lab. We actually have 30 partners there, but we have a huge stable, if you will, our partner ecosystem of VM Cloud service providers and we're excited that they're going to be there as well and we're highlighting some of their innovations. >>Yeah. I mean, we're dropping a breaking analysis this week on Cloud all three of those cloud suppliers. As you mentioned, >>we >>have a lot of momentum behind, you know, their businesses. Right now it's the cloud. Is that pandemics? Pandemics. But downturns have always been good to cloud. And I think this is no no change. So give us a little glimpse as to what we're going to hear from a product standpoint. That theme on 20 >>20 Well, a few different, exciting things in the past is, you know, we launched being back up for ah aws. That was our first cloud native solution. We just recently launched Beam Backup or Microsoft Azure, and you're going to see iterations on those products. Demoed live on stage by the legendary Anton Cost Dev and always a fan favorite, Rick Vanover. So you're going to see demos of those. You're also going to see the first foray into partnerships with Google as well Google Cloud Platform. You combine all those hyper scaler is right now. They did Ah, I think a little over 67 billion last year in 2019 and obviously the compound annual growth rate is projected to go to 375 billion. So we're gonna highlight some of the capabilities that we've introduced in the last few months and over the rest of 2020 with them. >>Well, and you're right. I mean, we just reported we just saw in the first quarter earnings reports you got AWS has a $38 billion business growing in the mid thirties. You got azure and >>Google growing >>faster from from a smaller base, but still enormous, many, many billions. You also have the hands on labs. It's this two days, June 17th of June 18th. So check it out. Go sign up. But you've got a hands on labs that you're bringing to the virtual experience. >>Yes. So we're doing 20 breakout sessions, 10 life fashions, and that's exciting. But actually, for the first time, it was based on demand. We're doing what we call a v Mathon, and that's going to bring 20 to 30 live sessions where actually users can come and collaborate live with the experts. And one of the things about a virtual event, of course, is that this opens it up globally for people to come and register for free, but they can actually interact on an ongoing basis over those two days with the experts from being so well, some people are disappointed that we can't be their face to face. We're still going to have the legendary party. But we're also doing some of these V marathons and live interactions, which is a new opportunity for us. I think it's exciting. >>Well, you better make sure you have your auto scaling on any FCS. Some of these virtual conferences get so many people. We just saw one on Twitter with s so much demand, it went down. I'm sure you guys got your infrastructure together, so bring us home. You know, why should I attend Beam on 2020? >>Well, everyone knows VM for its high energy. It's exciting conferences, lots of announcements. We have partners there with us on stage. This is taking it to the next level. We're taking that same conference. That is exciting. Lots of energy. We're doing it online, which brings it to a global market. And we're not decreasing the energy. In fact, we're still having that legendary already. We're still doing all those massive announcements So this just is a is a next generation. I would argue of where the industry is going. We're excited to be there with our partners. >>So very exciting. Time for being blockbuster acquisition in January. Congratulations, Danny to you. And very excited for VM on. Check it out June 17th and 18th. A great thing. Typical wien, right? It just works. You go there. It's not like a huge example. This is a few things. You got an email and a couple of the things Boom registrations. Simple. Danny, thanks so much for helping us with this preview. Really appreciate it. >>Thanks very much, Dave. Always a pleasure and happy to speak with you. >>Alright, Stay safe. Everybody, This is Dave Volante for the Cube. We'll see you next time. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation. >> Welcome to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. At the Cube Studios. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We're here for a company profile coming called De Monte. Here. Tom Barton, CEO. As V M World approaches a lot of stuff is going to be talked about kubernetes applications. Micro Service's will be the top conversation, Certainly in the underlying infrastructure to power that Tom Barton is the CEO of De Monte, which is in that business. Tom, we've known each other for a few years. You've done a lot of great successful ventures. Thehe Monty's new one. Your got on your plate here right now? >> Yes, sir. And I'm happy to be here, so I've been with the Amante GIs for about a year or so. Um, I found out about the company through a head turner. Andi, I have to admit I had not heard of the company before. Um, but I was a huge believer in containers and kubernetes. So has already sold on that. And so I had a friend of mine. His name is Brian Walden. He had done some massive kubernetes cloud based deployments for us at Planet Labs, a company that I was out for a little over three years. So I had him do technical due diligence. Brian was also the number three guy, a core OS, um, and so deeply steeped in all of the core technologies around kubernetes, including things like that CD and other elements of the technology. So he looked at it, came back and gave me two thumbs up. Um, he liked it so much that I then hired him. So he is now our VP of product management. And the the cool thing about the Amanti is essentially were a purpose built solution for running container based workloads in kubernetes on premises and then hooking that in with the cloud. So we believe that's very much gonna be a hybrid cloud world where for the major corporations that we serve Fortune 500 companies like banks like energy and utilities and so forth Ah, lot of their workload will maintain and be maintained on premises. They still want to be cloud compatible. So you need a purpose built platform to sort of manage both environments >> Yeah, we certainly you guys have compelling on radar, but I was really curious to see when you came in and took over at the helm of the CEO. Because your entrepreneurial career really has been unique. You're unique. Executive. Both lost their lands. And as an operator you have an open source and software background. And also you have to come very successful companies and exits there as well as in the hardware side with trackable you took. That company went public. So you got me. It's a unique and open source software, open source and large hardware. Large data center departments at scale, which is essentially the hybrid cloud market right now. So you kind of got the unique. You have seen the view from all the different sides, and I think now more than ever, with Public Cloud certainly being validated. Everyone knows Amazon of your greenfield. You started the cloud, but the reality is hybrid. Cloud is the operating model of the genesis. Next generation of companies drive for the next 20 to 30 years, and this is the biggest conversation. The most important story in tech. You're in the middle of it with a hot start up with a name that probably no one's ever heard of, >> right? We hope to change that. >> Wassily. Why did you join this company? What got your attention? What was the key thing once you dug in there? What was the secret sauce was what Got your attention? Yes. So to >> me again, the market environment. I'm a huge believer that if you look at the history of the last 15 years, we went from an environment that was 0% virtualized too. 95% virtualized with, you know, Vienna based technologies from VM Wear and others. I think that fundamentally, containers in kubernetes are equally as important. They're going to be equally as transformative going forward and how people manage their workloads both on premises and in the clouds. Right? And the fact that all three public cloud providers have anointed kubernetes as the way of the future and the doctor image format and run time as the wave of the future means, you know, good things were gonna happen there. What I thought was unique about the company was for the first time, you know, surprisingly, none of the exit is sick. Senders, um, in companies like Nutanix that have hyper converse solutions. They really didn't have anything that was purpose built for native container support. And so the founders all came from Cisco UCS. They had a lot of familiarity with the underpinnings of hyper converged architectures in the X 86 server landscape and networking, subsistence and storage subsystems. But they wanted to build it using the latest technologies, things like envy and me based Flash. Um, and they wanted to do it with a software stack that was native containers in Kubernetes. And today we support two flavors of that one that's fully open source around upstream kubernetes in another that supports our partner Red hat with open shift. >> I think you're really onto something pretty big here because one of things that day Volonte and Mine's too many men and our team had been looking at is we're calling a cloud to point over the lack of a better word kind of riff on the Web to point out concept. But cloud one daughter was Amazon. Okay, Dev ops agile, Great. Check the box. They move on with life. It's always a great resource, is never gonna stop. But cloud 2.0, is about networking. It's about securities but data. And if you look at all the innovation startups, we'll have one characteristic. They're all playing in this hyper converged hardware meat software stack with data and agility, kind of to make the original Dev ops monocle better. The one daughter which was storage and compute, which were virtualization planes. So So you're seeing that pattern and it's wide ranging at security is data everything else So So that's kind of what we call the Cloud two point game. So if you look at V m World, you look at what's going on the conversations around micro service red. It's an application centric conversation in an infrastructure show. So do you see that same vision? And if so, how do you guys see you enabling the customer at this saying, Hey, you know what? I have all this legacy. I got full scale data centers. I need to go full scale cloud and I need zero and disruption to my developer. Yeah, so >> this is the beauty of containers and kubernetes, which is they know it'll run on the premises they know will run in the cloud, right? Um and it's it is all about micro service is so whether they're trying to adopt them on our database, something like manga TB or Maria de B or Crunchy Post Grey's, whether it's on the operational side to enable sort of more frequent and incremental change, or whether it's on a developer side to take advantage of new ways of developing and delivering APS with C I. C. D. Tools and so forth. It's pretty much what people want to do because it's future proofing your software development effort, right? So there's sort of two streams of demand. One is re factoring legacy applications that are insufficiently kind of granule, arised on, behave and fail in a monolithic way. Um, as well as trying to adopt modern, modern, cloud based native, you know, solutions for things like databases, right? And so that the good news is that customers don't have to re factor everything. There are logical break points in their applications stack where they can say, Okay, maybe I don't have the time and energy and resource is too totally re factor a legacy consumer banking application. But at least I can re factor the data based here and serve up you know container in Kubernetes based service is, as Micro Service's database is, a service to be consumed by. >> They don't need to show the old to bring in the new right. It's used containers in our orchestration, Layla Kubernetes, and still be positioned for whether it's service measures or other things. Floor That piece of the shirt and everything else could run, as is >> right, and there are multiple deployments scenarios. Four containers. You can run containers, bare metal. Most of our customers choose to do that. You can also run containers on top of virtual machines, and you can actually run virtual machines on top of containers. So one of our major media customers actually run Splunk on top of K B M on top of containers. So there's a lot of different deployment scenarios. And really, a lot of the genius of our architecture was to make it easy for people that are coming from traditional virtualized environments to remap system. Resource is from the bm toe to a container at a native level or through Vienna. >> You mentioned the history lesson there around virtualization. How 15 years ago there was no virtualization now, but everything's virtualized we agree with you that containers and compares what is gonna change that game for the next 15 years? But what's it about VM? Where would made them successful was they could add virtualization without requiring code modification, right? And they did it kind of under the covers. And that's a concern Customs have. I have developers out there. They're building stacks. The building code. I got preexisting legacy. They don't really want to change their code, right? Do you guys fit into that narrative? >> We d'oh, right, So every customer makes their own choice about something like that. At the end of the day, I mentioned Splunk. So at the time that we supported this media customer on Splunk, Splunk had not yet provided a container based version for their application. Now they do have that, but at the time they supported K B M, but not native containers and so unmodified Splunk unmodified application. We took them from a batch job that ran for 23 hours down the one hour based on accelerating and on our perfect converged appliance and running unmodified code on unmodified K B m on our gear. Right, So some customers will choose to do that. But there are also other customers, particularly at scale for transaction the intensive applications like databases and messaging and analytics, where they say, You know, we could we could preserve our legacy virtualized infrastructure. But let's try it as a pair a metal container approach. And they they discovered that there's actually some savings from both a business standpoint and a technology tax standpoint or an overhead standpoint. And so, as I mentioned most of our customers, actually really. Deficiencies >> in the match is a great example sticking to the product technology differentiate. What's the big secret sauce describe the product? Why are you winning in accounts? What's the lift in your business right now? You guys were getting some traction from what I'm hearing. Yeah, >> sure. So look at the at the highest level of value Proposition is simplicity. There is no other purpose built, you know, complete hardware software stack that delivers coup bernetti coproduction kubernetes environment up and running in 15 minutes. Right. The X 86 server guys don't really have it. Nutanix doesn't really have it. The software companies that are active in this space don't really have it. So everything that you need that? The hardware platform, the storage infrastructure, the actual distribution of the operating system sent the West, for example. We distribute we actually distributed kubernetes distribution upstream and unmodified. And then, very importantly, in the combinations landscape, you have to have a storage subsystem in a networking subsystem using something called C s I container storage interface in C N I. Container networking interface. So we've got that full stack solution. No one else has that. The second thing is the performance. So we do a certain amount of hardware offload. Um, and I would say, Amazons purchase of Annapurna so Amazon about a company called Annapurna its basis of their nitro technology and its little known. But the reality is more than 50% of all new instances at E. C to our hardware assisted with the technology that they thought were offloaded. Yeah, exactly. So we actually offload storage and network processing via to P C I. D cards that can go into any industry server. Right? So today we ship on until whites, >> your hyper converge containers >> were African verge containers. Yeah, exactly. >> So you're selling a box. We sell a box with software that's the >> with software. But increasingly, our customers are asking us to unbundle it. So not dissimilar from the sort of journey that Nutanix went through. If a customer wants to buy and l will support Del customer wants to buy a Lenovo will support Lenovo and we'll just sell >> it. Or have you unbundled? Yetta, you're on bundling. >> We are actively taking orders for on bundling at the present time in this quarter, we have validated Del and Lenovo as alternate platforms, toothy intel >> and subscription revenue. On that, we >> do not yet. But that's the golden mask >> Titanic struggle with. So, yeah, and then they had to take their medicine. >> They did. But, you know, they had to do that as a public company. We're still a private company, so we can do that outside the limelight of the public >> markets. So, um, I'm expecting that you guys gonna get pretty much, um I won't say picked off, but certainly I think your doors are gonna be knocked on by the big guys. Certainly. Delic Deli and see, for instance, I think it's dirty. And you said yes. You're doing business with del name. See, >> um, we are doing as a channel partner and as an OM partner with them at the present time there, I wouldn't call them a customer. >> How do you look at V M were actually there in the V M, where business impact Gelsinger's on the record. It'll be on the Cube, he said. You know Cu Bernays the dial tone of the Internet, they're investing their doubling down on it. They bought Hep D O for half a billion dollars. They're big and cloud native. We expect to see a V M World tons of cloud Native conversation. Yes, good, bad for you. What's the take? The way >> legitimizes what we're doing right? And so obviously, VM, where is a large and successful company? That kind of, you know, legacy and presence in the data center isn't gonna go anywhere overnight. There's a huge set of tooling an infrastructure that bm where has developed in offers to their customers. But that said, I think they've recognized in their acquisition of Hep Theo is is indicative of the fact that they know that the world's moving this way. I think that at the end of the day, it's gonna be up to the customer right. The customer is going to say, Do I want to run containers inside? Of'em? Do I want to run on bare metal? Um, but importantly, I think because of, you know, the impact of the cloud providers in particular. If you think of the lingua franca of cloud Native, it's gonna be around Dr Image format. It's gonna be around kubernetes. It's not necessarily gonna be around V M, d K and BMX and E s X right. So these are all very good technologies, but I think increasingly, you know, the open standard and open source community >> people kubernetes on switches directly is no. No need, Right. Have anything else there? So I gotta ask you on the customer equation. You mentioned you, you get so you're taking orders. How you guys doing business today? Where you guys winning, given example of of why people while you're winning And then for anyone watching, how would they know if they should be a customer of yours? What's is there like? Is there any smoke signs and signals? Inside the enterprise? They mentioned batch to one hour. That's just music. Just a lot of financial service is used, for instance, you know they have timetables, and whether they're pulling back ups back are doing all the kinds of things. Timing's critical. What's the profile customer? Why would someone call you? What's the situation? The >> profile is heavy duty production requirements to run in both the developer context and an operating contact container in kubernetes based workloads on premises. They're compatible with the cloud right so increasingly are controlled. Plane makes it easy to manage workloads not just on premises but also back and forth to the public cloud. So I would argue that essentially all Fortune 500 companies Global 1000 companies are all wrestling with what's the right way to implement industry standard X 86 based hardware on site that supports containers and kubernetes in his cloud compatible Right? So that that is the number one question then, >> so I can buy a box and or software put it on my data center. Yes, and then have that operate with Amazon? Absolutely. Or Google, >> which is the beauty of the kubernetes standards, right? As long as you are kubernetes certified, which we are, you can develop and run any workload on our gear on the cloud on anyone else that's carbonated certified, etcetera. So you know that there isn't >> given example the workload that would be indicative. >> So Well, I'll cite one customer, Right. So, um, the reason that I feel confident actually saying the name is that they actually sort of went public with us at the recent Gardner conference a week or so ago when the customer is Duke Energy. So very typical trajectory of journey for a customer like this, which is? A couple years ago, they decided that they wanted re factor some legacy applications to make them more resilient to things like hurricanes and weather events and spikes in demand that are associated with that. And so they said, What's the right thing to do? And immediately they pick containers and kubernetes. And then he went out and they looked at five different vendors, and we were the only vendor that got their POC up and running in the required time frame and hit all five use case scenarios that they wanted to do right. So they ended up a re factoring core applications for how they manage power outages using containers and kubernetes, >> a real production were real. Production were developing standout, absolutely in a sandbox, pushing into production, working Absolutely. So you sounds like you guys were positioned to handle any workload. >> We can handle any workload, but I would say that where we shine is things that transaction the intensive because we have the hardware assist in the I o off load for the storage and the networking. You know, the most demanding applications, things like databases, things like analytics, things like messaging, Kafka and so forth are where we're really gonna >> large flow data, absolutely transactional data. >> We have customers that are doing simpler things like C I. C D. Which at the end of the day involves compiling things right and in managing code bases. But so we certainly have customers in less performance intensive applications, but where nobody can really touch us in morning. What I mean is literally sort of 10 to 30 times faster than something that Nutanix could do, for example, is just So >> you're saying you're 30 times faster Nutanix >> absolutely in trans actually intensive applications >> just when you sell a prescription not to dig into this small little bit. But does the customer get the hardware assist on that as well >> it is. To date, we've always bundled everything together. So the customers have automatically got in the heart >> of the finest on the hard on box. Yes. If I buy the software, I got a loaded on a machine. That's right. But that machine Give me the hardware. >> You will not unless you have R two p C I. D. Cards. Right? And so this is how you know we're just in the very early stages of negotiating with companies like Dell to make it easy for them to integrate her to P. C. I. D cards into their server platform. >> So the preferred flagship is the is the device. It's a think if they want the hardware sit, that they still need to software meeting at that intensive. It's right. If they don't need to have 30 times faster than Nutanix, they can just get the software >> right, right. And that will involve RCS. I plug in RCN I plug in our OS distribution are kubernetes distribution, and the control plane that manages kubernetes clusters >> has been great to get the feature on new company, um, give a quick plug for the company. What's your objectives? Were you trying to do. I'll see. Probably hiring. Get some financing, Any news, Any kind of Yeah, we share >> will be. And we will be announcing some news about financing. I'm not prepared to announce that today, but we're in very good shape with respected being funded for our growth. Um, and consequently, so we're now in growth mode. So today we're 55 people. I want to double back over the course of the next 4/4 and increasingly just sort of build out our sales force. Right? We didn't have a big enough sales force in North America. We've gotta establish a beachhead in India. We do have one large commercial banking customer in Europe right now. Um, we also have a large automotive manufacturer in a pack. But, um, you know, the total sales and marketing reach has been too low. And so a huge focus of what I'm doing now is building out our go to market model and, um, sort of 10 Xing the >> standing up, a lot of field going, going to market. How about on the biz, Dev side? I might imagine that you mentioned delicate. Imagine that there's a a large appetite for the hardware offload >> absolution? Absolutely. So something is. Deb boils down to striking partnerships with the cloud providers really on two fronts, both with respect the hardware offload and assist, but also supporting their on premises strategy. So Google, for example, is announced. Antos. This is their approach to supporting, you know, on premises, kubernetes workloads and how they interact with cool cloud. Right. As you can imagine, Microsoft and Amazon also have on premises aspirations and strategies, and we want to support those as well. This goes well beyond something like Amazon Outpost, which is really a narrow use case in point solution for certain markets. So cloud provider partnerships are very important. Exit E six server vendor partnership. They're very important. And then major, I s V. So we've announced some things with red hat. We were at the Red Hat Open summit in Boston a few months ago and announced our open ship project and product. Um, that is now G a. Also working with eyes, he's like Maria de be Mondo di B Splunk and others to >> the solid texting product team. You guys are solid. You feel good on the product. I feel very good about the product. What aboutthe skeptics are out there? Just to put the hard question to use? Man, it's crowded field. How do you gonna compete? What do you chances? How do you like your chances known? That's a very crowded field. You're going to rely on your fastballs, they say. And on the speed, what's the what's What's your thinking? Well, it's unique. >> And so part of the way or approve point that I would cite There is the channel, right? So when you go to the channel and channel is afraid that you're gonna piss off Del or E M. C or Net app or Nutanix or somebody you know, then they're not gonna promote you. But our channel partners air promoting us and talking about companies like Life Boat at the distribution level. Talking about companies like CD W S H. I, um, you know, W W t these these major North American distributors and resellers have basically said, Look, we have to put you in our line car because you're unique. There is no other purpose built >> and why that, like they get more service is around that they wrap service's around it. >> They want to kill the murder where they want to. Wrap service's around it, absolutely, and they want to do migrations from legacy environments towards Micro Service's etcetera. >> Great to have you on share the company update. Just don't get personal. If you don't mind personal perspective. You've been on the hardware side. You've seen the large scale data centers from racquetball and that experience you'll spit on the software side. Open source. What's your take on the industry right now? Because you're seeing, um, I talked a lot of sea cells around the security space and, you know, they all say, Oh, multi clouds a bunch of B s because I'm not going to split my development team between four clouds. I need to have my people building software stacks for my AP eyes, and then I go to the vendors. They support my AP eyes where you can't be a supplier. Now that's on the sea suicide. But the big mega trend is there's software stacks being built inside the premise of the enterprise. Yes, that not mean they had developers before building. You know, Kobol, lapse in the old days, mainframes to client server wraps. But now you're seeing a Renaissance of developers building a stack for the domain specific applications that they need. I think that requires that they have to run on premise hyper scale like environment. What's your take on it >> might take is it's absolutely right. There is more software based innovation going on, so customers are deciding to write their own software in areas where they could differentiate right. They're not gonna do it in areas that they could get commodities solutions from a sass standpoint or from other kinds of on Prem standpoint. But increasingly they are doing software development, but they're all 99% of the time now. They're choosing doctor and containers and kubernetes as the way in which they're going to do that, because it will run either on Prem or in the Cloud. I do think that multi cloud management or a multi multi cloud is not a reality. Are our primary modality that we see our customers chooses tons of on premises? Resource is, that's gonna continue for the foreseeable future one preferred cloud provider, because it's simply too difficult to to do more than one. But at the same time they want an environment that will not allow themselves to be locked into that cloud bender. Right? So they want a potentially experiment with the second public cloud provider, or just make sure that they adhere to standards like kubernetes that are universally shared so that they can't be held hostage. But in practice, people don't. >> Or if they do have a militant side, it might be applications. Like if you're running office 3 65 right, That's Microsoft. It >> could be Yes, exactly. On one >> particular domain specific cloud, but not core cloud. Have a backup use kubernetes as the bridge. Right that you see that. Do you see that? I mean, I would agree with by the way we agreed to you on that. But the question we always ask is, we think you Bernays is gonna be that interoperability layer the way T c p I. P was with an I p Networks where you had this interoperability model. We think that there will be a future state of some point us where I could connect to Google and use that Microsoft and use Amazon. That's right together, but not >> this right. And so nobody's really doing that today, But I believe and we believe that there is, ah, a future world where a vendor neutral vendor, neutral with respect to public cloud providers, can can offer a hybrid cloud control plane that manages and brokers workloads for both production, as well as data protection and disaster recovery across any arbitrary cloud vendor that you want to use. Um, and so it's got to be an independent third party. So you know you're never going to trust Amazon to broker a workload to Google. You're never going to trust Google to broker a workload of Microsoft. So it's not gonna be one of the big three. And if you look at who could it be? It could be VM where pivotal. Now it's getting interesting. Appertaining. Cisco's got an interesting opportunity. Red hats got an interesting opportunity, but there is actually, you know, it's less than the number of companies could be counted on one hand that have the technical capability to develop hybrid cloud abstraction that that spans both on premises and all three. And >> it's super early. Had to peg the inning on this one first inning, obviously first inning really early. >> Yeah, we like our odds, though, because the disruption, the fundamental disruption here is containers and kubernetes and the interest that they're generating and the desire on the part of customers to go to micro service is so a ton of application re factoring in a ton of cloud native application development is going on. And so, you know, with that kind of disruption, you could say >> you're targeting opening application re factoring that needs to run on a cloud operating >> model on premise in public. That's correct. In a sense, dont really brings the cloud to theon premises environment, right? So, for example, we're the only company that has the concept of on premises availability zones. We have synchronous replication where you can have multiple clusters that air synchronously replicated. So if one fails the other one, you have no service disruption or loss of data, even for a state full application, right? So it's cloud like service is that we're bringing on Prem and then providing the links, you know, for both d. R and D P and production workloads to the public Cloud >> block locked Unpack with you guys. You might want to keep track of humaneness. Stateville date. It's a whole nother topic, as stateless data is easy to manage with AP Eyes and Service's wouldn't GET state. That's when it gets interesting. Com Part in the CEO. The new chief executive officer. Demonte Day How long you guys been around before you took over? >> About five years. Four years before me about been on board about a year. >> I'm looking forward to tracking your progress. We'll see ya next week and seven of'em Real Tom Barton, Sea of de Amante Here inside the Cube Hot startup. I'm John Ferrier. >> Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with too many man, You're watching The Cube Life from Del Technology. World twenty nineteen were here with about fifteen thousand other people, about four thousand Del Technologies Partners. But how? And now for the first time, we're pleased to welcome the CEO of Virtus Dream. Rory Reid Worry. It's great to have you joining student me on the Cube today. >> It is Lisa. It's a pleasure and riel honor to be on the show today. >> So this morning's Kino we were talking before we went live starts with lots of energy news announcements, partnerships, collaboration, walking, you. You're in industry veteran, which will dig into, I'm sure during the segment. >> Thirty five years. >> Thirty five years. That's >> amazing. Thirty five years is how old tells going tto be tthe when the next week. >> Thirty five years. >> That's a magic number. Congratulations. Thank you Virtus Dream. Talk to us about the integration you lead those efforts. Massive acquisition. What's going on now? What's exciting? You >> Well, I think it's kind of amazing what happened in the integration. This is the largest Tak integration in the world. Sixty seven billion dollars. Shortly after Del goes private, they're going to acquire Delhi, M. C, I, E, M, C and V M, where the huge undertaking thousands of people work on it less than ten months from the time it was announced. October of fifteen. It goes live on September seven sixteen. That's amazing, and our customers reacted and are partners in a just a kn amazing way. It's almost like it didn't happen. You know, I'm biased. I think it went really well. But look at the numbers. Look at the reaction in the marketplace. The growth, the synergy, the revenue, the kinds of impact. And then you see today at Del Adele Technology World. Michael does a keynote. He talked about the impact. Karen comes up and talks about giving back and the work that we're doing around Pathetic and printing three D and artificial intelligence based your limbs. I If you're not fired up about that, you can't get energized. And then you top that off with just a GN amazing discussion about the partnership between VM wear and Del Technologies on the Del Cloud And then the work that we're doing with Microsoft and Satya comes on stage with Michael and >> Pie. I >> mean, this is a power pack woman, and we put this company just three years ago together and look at the kind of impact its house in the industry. Amazing, just amazing. >> So worry. Yeah, I think Jeff Clarke said it well this morning. He said, If you're into technology and can't get excited by what's going on, you know, May maybe you're you know, it's kind of you know, my words. Maybe you're not in the right space. You've got a few of the interesting pieces of the Del Technologies family they talk about. You know, the massive acquisition of DMC with V M. Where Purchase dream Not such a small acquisition itself. Over a billion dollars, one point two billion dollars to billion dollars. And, you know, I remember back Bhumi wasn't out that long ago either, for you know, it was less than a billion dollars, but it was a >> ***. *** is an amazing set of technology. I know you're going tohave Chris McNab on later today. Chris and I have worked on what he called the gloomy acceleration plan the last two years. Way with that team have put in a strategy around taking advantage of just an amazing set of technology. Boo Mi's cloud integration software, I believe, is the absolute best on the planet and the work that we've done. We've doubled that business in the last eighteen months. We've added probably a billion dollars of market valuation they've reached. They add thousands of customers every quarter to that portfolio, the reach and touch and how that's going to drive the way data and applications talk in the cloud era. It's just at the beginning of the impact there. And then you look at a company like Virtus Dream. It's the leader in mission Critical application Work loads on the cloud. This is a company born on the cloud. It's based on the cloud nine years ago. It's the one hand to shake. Customers choose us with their most important applications and data because they need to know that it's gonna work and that we have the experience to Planet Tau migrated, optimize it and bring it to the cloud to cloud of fire and that were the single hand to shake. What's different about us is we have an eye *** way had the infrastructure as a service. We have a software stack with extreme software. Take time. I get fired up about Bloomie's technology Virtus Stream Extreme software. Amazing. And then on top of that, you layer on a white glove said of application and professional services. Very cool. But what was the coolest? Where some of the announcements today and how we're playing with its all of'Em went bare VM were based on, uh, Virtus Dream. And when they announced the partnership with Azure and the idea of V M wear work, clothes on Azure that's actually running will be running and running on. And we've been working with Microsoft and IBM where a virtuous string and it's and then and then you know >> when you say it's running on Virtue Stream, Is it your data centers? Is it part of the soft? Oh no, The >> data, the data centers air all Adger. It's using our software and our technology team have built that said, a technology that we've been in partnership for months with Microsoft and IBM, where to create this offering as one of the Cloud Service partners foundational. It's pretty foundation and you know it. But at the end of a think about del technology is one in the ingredient brand. Sure, that's foundational. This is a company built for the next ten years. Del Technologies. And the impact it's gonna have in the industry is just beginning. Where is it going to go? You saw it this morning in the Kino. Michael has some big, big ideas, >> so worry. A lot of times we look at things in the industry and people is like, Oh, it's binary. It's public cloud or Private Cloud. I've worked with a lot of service providers, and when you look at the world multi cloud, it's really more of an end in putting. That is together. Many of the service providers that air You know where I am seeing her del partners before you know, three or four years ago Oh my gosh, A ws and Microsoft. Well, okay. A partner a little like us off, But Amazons, the enemy. And today it's well, I have our stuff and I'm partnering and I probably have connections between them. Help us. Paint is toe where virtue stream fits into this. You know this spectrum today? >> Your stew. You're on the right point about multi cloud. We just did a press release today at a virtuous stream where we partnered with Forrester. We do, ah, whole industry study on the cloud and the future of the cloud multi cloud ninety seven percent of customers. We spoke to that force or spoke to have a multi cloud strategy for their mission. Critical applications at eighty nine percent of them plan to increase their spend on multi cloud mission critical activities. How we play in that space is that we're the trusted player we've done over eighteen hundred ASAP migration. Where an epic health care leader go talk to Novaya. They asked them how it's gone on Virtus Dreams Cloud amazing set of mission critical capability. But what we're taking is there's this infrastructure is a service in the software stack on the services that software stack is extreme. What we want to do is enable that software stack to manage data and applications in a private environment, a public environment on Prem, and it's all based on the M where so it ties directly into Jeff and Pat's announcement This morning, where they talked about Veum, where being a platform and how they're going to create the Del Cloud on that platform. Virtus Dream is one of the destinations for mission critical workload, but because it's based on VM, where technology it seamlessly begins to integrate across that and allows us to manage data and applications linking our extreme software with the BM, where capabilities that allowed that data and the AP eyes to exchange data and flow freely in a multi cloud world, ninety seven percent of the customers and the forest to research we just released are going to go multi cloud for mission critical, not just based. This's for their most critical applications data >> so future your energy is outstanding in your enthusiasm for this. What are some of the early reactions that customers air having to some of this exciting, groundbreaking news that's coming out today? What do your expectations? >> Well, you know, I spent time with customers, uh, every week and we talk about it, but I've actually talked to customers this day today about it. They found the energy, the passion that the technology that was introduced this morning was sort of game changing because to Stu's point, they are going in a multi cloud era and they know it's going to be multi cloud. And there's going to be on Prem public private. It's gonna link altogether. They need the technology trusted advisors that can work with them, not with a single answer. That only fits one way. Adele Technologies. You want to run on Prem? We have those capabilities you want to run on public count. We have those technologies you want to run in a hybrid kind of solution or a private cloud. We're going to create the ability with these announcements today, tow link it together and create the ability to do it seamlessly, efficiently, productively, cost effectively that allows Our customers too dramatically transformed their business to take them on that digital transformation to disrupt their industries and win. Because when our customers win, we win. That's what we do. Adelle Technologies, we and able our customers to win, and it's all about the customers every single day. You talked about the integration when Michael said every day when we were doing the integration, he said on every decision. When we were building the company, we basically built a new company level by level, he said. The guiding principle that every decision is customer in How does this matter of the customer? How does it make a difference for the customer? And I think we live that everyday. There's fifty fifteen thousand of our closest friends here in Las Vegas there, pretty excited to be here. And why did they take that time? Because we're one of their trusted partners on their digital transformation journey. That's not a bad place to be. If you can't get excited about that, >> Yeah, I'm Rory in the wrong industry. It was amazing to me how fast that immigration work happened. We talked to Howard Elias a bunch along the journey. I'm glad we finally get to you, get you on the record for >> Howard's in the Be's and Guy. What an awesome partner. >> And so you know, one of them's dried. It's ten months is you know, if this thing had taken twenty four months, so much of the industry would have changed by the time from when you went into when you went out. So I guess How do you how do you look at kind of those massive waves versus you know where you need to be with products today in the market and where customers are because you know the danger. You say I want to listen to the customers. Well, you get the old saying if you ask customers they wanted, you know Ah, faster buggy. You know how right you are so right, You make sure you're, you know, hitting that next wave and keeping up with it. I look at you know, all the pieces you have of the puzzle that is the family and in different places along the spectrum. >> Well, I think there's, you know, there's value in the diversity of thought, right, and we talk about on Workforce. But it's a business. The idea that Del technologies is this group of businesses and all these experiences coming together and the interactions with customers from the smallest mom and pop shops farms toe all the way to the most Jake Ganic industry. Transformational companies. You were exposed to a lot of things, and with the kind of forty, one hundred and forty thousand professionals working together and with Michael's vision and the El Tee's vision, there's an ability to see that future, and he is always looking at the future. It's interesting. I worked for a lot of interesting people, but you know, Michael's ability to Teo understand data and of you, he said. It's about having a big year, right? Your ears be twice the size of your mouth. I mean, you gotta listen. And I seriously think he must have a tree of Keebler elves creating data and information. I've never seen so much someone with more data and information. And he he listens. He values the input. He's quick to make a decision, but the team rot rallies around that idea. How can we find that future? And if we make a mistake, let's fix it fast. Let's learn really quick. Make that decision, learn quickly, adjust and capture the opportunity. And it's all about speed and what matters to the customer. I've seen it firsthand. I've been here four years. I spent twenty three years at IBM. I spent five years in Lenovo as their CEO and president. I was CEO and president of Advanced Micro Devices. It's amazing environment where you create a place where technological leaders come every day to solve the most difficult solutions with the founder of the company. That's one of the industry icons, and it's just an amazing privilege and honor to be part of it. And I think you feel that from every person you talk to, that's part of Del Technologies. I am being part of that. Integration was one of the most proudest experiences of my life, and you know what we did way never ran it as an integration office. We kept the decisions with the line with the business, and we had a rapid pays to get through it and decided, and we learned quickly and we adjusted as we went. It wasn't perfect, but it wass pretty close. It's pretty close and I'm bias. I got it. I buy just But it was good. It was good. It was really a great thing. And Howard, amazing guy. But it was because people believed in the vision and they all work together. And when people work together, you can grow, do amazing and great thing. >> You're right. It's all about the people >> it is >> or it's been such a pleasure. Having you on the cute this afternoon was to me. I wish we had more time because I know we can keep talking about it. You're gonna have to come back >> anytime. You like me. It was a pleasure. And thank you so much for taking time to speak to me when you talk to boo me this afternoon, make sure you get into that technology's world. Vast cloud integration platform >> you got. All right, guys. Thank you. Thank you. First to Minuteman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Day one of our double sat coverage of Del technology World twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for day two of three days of exclusive coverage from the Cube here at HPE Discover 2017. Our two next guests is Bill Mannel, VP and General Manager of HPC and AI for HPE. Bill, great to see you. And Dr. Nick Nystrom, senior of research at Pittsburgh's Supercomputer Center. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> My pleasure >> Thanks for having us. >> As we wrap up day two, first of all before we get started, love the AI, love the high performance computing. We're seeing great applications for compute. Everyone now sees that a lot of compute actually is good. That's awesome. What is the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center? Give a quick update and describe what that is. >> Sure. The quick update is we're operating a system called Bridges. Bridges is operating for the National Science Foundation. It democratizes HPC. It brings people who have never used high performance computing before to be able to use HPC seamlessly, almost as a cloud. It unifies HPC big data and artificial intelligence. >> So who are some of the users that are getting access that they didn't have before? Could you just kind of talk about some of the use cases of the organizations or people that you guys are opening this up to? >> Sure. I think one of the newest communities that's very significant is deep learning. So we have collaborations between the University of Pittsburgh life sciences and the medical center with Carnegie Mellon, the machine learning researchers. We're looking to apply AI machine learning to problems in breast and lung cancer. >> Yeah, we're seeing the data. Talk about some of the innovations that HPE's bringing with you guys in the partnership, because we're seeing, people are seeing the results of using big data and deep learning and breakthroughs that weren't possible before. So not only do you have the democratization cool element happening, you have a tsunami of awesome open source code coming in from big places. You see Google donating a bunch of machine learning libraries. Everyone's donating code. It's like open bar and open source, as I say, and the young kids that are new are the innovators as well, so not just us systems guys, but a lot of young developers are coming in. What's the innovation? Why is this happening? What's the ah-ha moment? Is it just cloud, is it a combination of things, talk about it. >> It's a combination of all the big data coming in, and then new techniques that allow us to analyze and get value from it and from that standpoint. So the traditional HPC world, typically we built equations which then generated data. Now we're actually kind of doing the reverse, which is we take the data and then build equations to understand the data. So it's a different paradigm. And so there's more and more energy understanding those two different techniques of kind of getting two of the same answers, but in a different way. >> So Bill, you and I talked in London last year. >> Yes. With Dr. Gho. And we talked a lot about SGI and what that acquisition meant to you guys. So I wonder if you could give us a quick update on the business? I mean it's doing very well, Meg talked about it on the conference call this last quarter. Really high point and growing. What's driving the growth, and give us an update on the business. >> Sure. And I think the thing that's driving the growth is all this data and the fact that customers want to get value from it. So we're seeing a lot of growth in industries like financial services, like in manufacturing, where folks are moving to digitization, which means that in the past they might have done a lot of their work through experimentation. Now they're moving it to a digital format, and they're simulating everything. So that's driven a lot more HPC over time. As far as the SGI, integration is concern. We've integrated about halfway, so we're at about the halfway point. And now we've got the engineering teams together and we're driving a road map and a new set of products that are coming out. Our Gen 10-based products are on target, and they're going to be releasing here over the next few months. >> So Nick, from your standpoint, when you look at, there's been an ebb and flow in the supercomputer landscape for decades. All the way back to the 70s and the 80s. So from a customer perspective, what do you see now? Obviously China's much more prominent in the game. There's sort of an arms race, if you will, in computing power. From a customer's perspective, what are you seeing, what are you looking for in a supplier? >> Well, so I agree with you, there is this arms race for exaflops. Where we are really focused right now is enabling data-intensive applications, looking at big data service, HPC is a service, really making things available to users to be able to draw on the large data sets you mentioned, to be able to put the capability class computing, which will go to exascale, together with AI, and data and Linux under one platform, under one integrated fabric. That's what we did with HPE for Bridges. And looking to build on that in the future, to be able to do the exascale applications that you're referring to, but also to couple on data, and to be able to use AI with classic simulation to make those simulations better. >> So it's always good to have a true practitioner on The Cube. But when you talk about AI and machine learning and deep learning, John and I sometimes joke, is it same wine, new bottle, or is there really some fundamental shift going on that just sort of happened to emerge in the last six to nine months? >> I think there is a fundamental shift. And the shift is due to what Bill mentioned. It's the availability of data. So we have that. We have more and more communities who are building on that. You mentioned the open source frameworks. So yes, they're building on the TensorFlows, on the Cafes, and we have people who have not been programmers. They're using these frameworks though, and using that to drive insights from data they did not have access to. >> These are flipped upside down, I mean this is your point, I mean, Bill pointed it out, it's like the models are upside down. This is the new world. I mean, it's crazy, I don't believe it. >> So if that's the case, and I believe it, it feels like we're entering this new wave of innovation which for decades we talked about how we march to the cadence of Moore's Law. That's been the innovation. You think back, you know, your five megabyte disk drive, then it went to 10, then 20, 30, now it's four terabytes. Okay, wow. Compared to what we're about to see, I mean it pales in comparison. So help us envision what the world is going to look like in 10 or 20 years. And I know it's hard to do that, but can you help us get our minds around the potential that this industry is going to tap? >> So I think, first of all, I think the potential of AI is very hard to predict. We see that. What we demonstrated in Pittsburgh with the victory of Libratus, the poker-playing bot, over the world's best humans, is the ability of an AI to beat humans in a situation where they have incomplete information, where you have an antagonist, an adversary who is bluffing, who is reacting to you, and who you have to deal with. And I think that's a real breakthrough. We're going to see that move into other aspects of life. It will be buried in apps. It will be transparent to a lot of us, but those sorts of AI's are going to influence a lot. That's going to take a lot of IT on the back end for the infrastructure, because these will continue to be compute-hungry. >> So I always use the example of Kasperov and he got beaten by the machine, and then he started a competition to team up with a supercomputer and beat the machine. Yeah, humans and machines beat machines. Do you expect that's going to continue? Maybe both your opinions. I mean, we're just sort of spitballing here. But will that augmentation continue for an indefinite period of time, or are we going to see the day that it doesn't happen? >> I think over time you'll continue to see progress, and you'll continue to see more and more regular type of symmetric type workloads being done by machines, and that allows us to do the really complicated things that the human brain is able to better process than perhaps a machine brain, if you will. So I think it's exciting from the standpoint of being able to take some of those other roles and so forth, and be able to get those done in perhaps a more efficient manner than we're able to do. >> Bill, talk about, I want to get your reaction to the concept of data. As data evolves, you brought up the model, I like the way you're going with that, because things are being flipped around. In the old days, I want to monetize my data. I have data sets, people are looking at their data. I'm going to make money from my data. So people would talk about how we monetizing the data. >> Dave: Old days, like two years ago. >> Well and people actually try to solve and monetize their data, and this could be use case for one piece of it. Other people are saying no, I'm going to open, make people own their own data, make it shareable, make it more of an enabling opportunity, or creating opportunities to monetize differently. In a different shift. That really comes down to the insights question. What's your, what trends do you guys see emerging where data is much more of a fabric, it's less of a discreet, monetizable asset, but more of an enabling asset. What's your vision on the role of data? As developers start weaving in some of these insights. You mentioned the AI, I think that's right on. What's your reaction to the role of data, the value of the data? >> Well, I think one thing that we're seeing in some of our, especially our big industrial customers is the fact that they really want to be able to share that data together and collect it in one place, and then have that regularly updated. So if you look at a big aircraft manufacturer, for example, they actually are putting sensors all over their aircraft, and in realtime, bringing data down and putting it into a place where now as they're doing new designs, they can access that data, and use that data as a way of making design trade-offs and design decision. So a lot of customers that I talk to in the industrial area are really trying to capitalize on all the data possible to allow them to bring new insights in, to predict things like future failures, to figure out how they need to maintain whatever they have in the field and those sorts of things at all. So it's just kind of keeping it within the enterprise itself. I mean, that's a challenge, a really big challenge, just to get data collected in one place and be able to efficiently use it just within an enterprise. We're not even talking about sort of pan-enterprise, but just within the enterprise. That is a significant change that we're seeing. Actually an effort to do that and see the value in that. >> And the high performance computing really highlights some of these nuggets that are coming out. If you just throw compute at something, if you set it up and wrangle it, you're going to get these insights. I mean, new opportunities. >> Bill: Yeah, absolutely. >> What's your vision, Nick? How do you see the data, how do you talk to your peers and people who are generally curious on how to approach it? How to architect data modeling and how to think about it? >> I think one of the clearest examples on managing that sort of data comes from the life sciences. So we're working with researchers at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and the Institute for Precision Medicine at Pitt Cancer Center. And there it's bringing together the large data as Bill alluded to. But there it's very disparate data. It is genomic data. It is individual tumor data from individual patients across their lifetime. It is imaging data. It's the electronic health records. And trying to be able to do this sort of AI on that to be able to deliver true precision medicine, to be able to say that for a given tumor type, we can look into that and give you the right therapy, or even more interestingly, how can we prevent some of these issues proactively? >> Dr. Nystrom, it's expensive doing what you do. Is there a commercial opportunity at the end of the rainbow here for you or is that taboo, I mean, is that a good thing? >> No, thank you, it's both. So as a national supercomputing center, our resources are absolutely free for open research. That's a good use of our taxpayer dollars. They've funded these, we've worked with HP, we've designed the system that's great for everybody. We also can make this available to industry at an extremely low rate because it is a federal resource. We do not make a profit on that. But looking forward, we are working with local industry to let them test things, to try out ideas, especially in AI. A lot of people want to do AI, they don't know what to do. And so we can help them. We can help them architect solutions, put things on hardware, and when they determine what works, then they can scale that up, either locally on prem, or with us. >> This is a great digital resource. You talk about federally funded. I mean, you can look at Yosemite, it's a state park, you know, Yellowstone, these are natural resources, but now when you start thinking about the goodness that's being funded. You want to talk about democratization, medicine is just the tip of the iceberg. This is an interesting model as we move forward. We see what's going on in government, and see how things are instrumented, some things not, delivery of drugs and medical care, all these things are coalescing. How do you see this digital age extending? Because if this continues, we should be doing more of these, right? >> We should be. We need to be. >> It makes sense. So is there, I mean I just not up to speed on what's going on with federally funded-- >> Yeah, I think one thing that Pittsburgh has done with the Bridges machine, is really try to bring in data and compute and all the different types of disciplines in there, and provide a place where a lot of people can learn, they can build applications and things like that. That's really unusual in HPC. A lot of times HPC is around big iron. People want to have the biggest iron basically on the top 500 list. This is where the focus hasn't been on that. This is where the focus has been on really creating value through the data, and getting people to utilize it, and then build more applications. >> You know, I'll make an observation. When we first started doing The Cube, we observed that, we talked about big data, and we said that the practitioners of big data, are where the guys are going to make all the money. And so far that's proven true. You look at the public big data companies, none of them are making any money. And maybe this was sort of true with ERP, but not like it is with big data. It feels like AI is going to be similar, that the consumers of AI, those people that can find insights from that data are really where the big money is going to be made here. I don't know, it just feels like-- >> You mean a long tail of value creation? >> Yeah, in other words, you used to see in the computing industry, it was Microsoft and Intel became, you know, trillion dollar value companies, and maybe there's a couple of others. But it really seems to be the folks that are absorbing those technologies, applying them, solving problems, whether it's health care, or logistics, transportation, etc., looks to where the huge economic opportunities may be. I don't know if you guys have thought about that. >> Well I think that's happened a little bit in big data. So if you look at what the financial services market has done, they've probably benefited far more than the companies that make the solutions, because now they understand what their consumers want, they can better predict their life insurance, how they should-- >> Dave: You could make that argument for Facebook, for sure. >> Absolutely, from that perspective. So I expect it to get to your point around AI as well, so the folks that really use it, use it well, will probably be the ones that benefit it. >> Because the tooling is very important. You've got to make the application. That's the end state in all this That's the rubber meets the road. >> Bill: Exactly. >> Nick: Absolutely. >> All right, so final question. What're you guys showing here at Discover? What's the big HPC? What's the story for you guys? >> So we're actually showing our Gen 10 product. So this is with the latest microprocessors in all of our Apollo lines. So these are specifically optimized platforms for HPC and now also artificial intelligence. We have a platform called the Apollo 6500, which is used by a lot of companies to do AI work, so it's a very dense GPU platform, and does a lot of processing and things in terms of video, audio, these types of things that are used a lot in some of the workflows around AI. >> Nick, anything spectacular for you here that you're interested in? >> So we did show here. We had video in Meg's opening session. And that was showing the poker result, and I think that was really significant, because it was actually a great amount of computing. It was 19 million core hours. So was an HPC AI application, and I think that was a really interesting success. >> The unperfect information really, we picked up this earlier in our last segment with your colleagues. It really amplifies the unstructured data world, right? People trying to solve the streaming problem. With all this velocity, you can't get everything, so you need to use machines, too. Otherwise you have a haystack of needles. Instead of trying to find the needles in the haystack, as they was saying. Okay, final question, just curious on this natural, not natural, federal resource. Natural resource, feels like it. Is there like a line to get in? Like I go to the park, like this camp waiting list, I got to get in there early. How do you guys handle the flow for access to the supercomputer center? Is it, my uncle works there, I know a friend of a friend? Is it a reservation system? I mean, who gets access to this awesomeness? >> So there's a peer reviewed system, it's fair. People apply for large allocations four times a year. This goes to a national committee. They met this past Sunday and Monday for the most recent. They evaluate the proposals based on merit, and they make awards accordingly. We make 90% of the system available through that means. We have 10% discretionary that we can make available to the corporate sector and to others who are doing proprietary research in data-intensive computing. >> Is there a duration, when you go through the application process, minimums and kind of like commitments that they get involved, for the folks who might be interested in hitting you up? >> For academic research, the normal award is one year. These are renewable, people can extend these and they do. What we see now of course is for large data resources. People keep those going. The AI knowledge base is 2.6 petabytes. That's a lot. For industrial engagements, those could be any length. >> John: Any startup action coming in, or more bigger, more-- >> Absolutely. A coworker of mine has been very active in life sciences startups in Pittsburgh, and engaging many of these. We have meetings every week with them now, it seems. And with other sectors, because that is such a great opportunity. >> Well congratulations. It's fantastic work, and we're happy to promote it and get the word out. Good to see HP involved as well. Thanks for sharing and congratulations. >> Absolutely. >> Good to see your work, guys. Okay, great way to end the day here. Democratizing supercomputing, bringing high performance computing. That's what the cloud's all about. That's what great software's out there with AI. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante bringing you all the data here from HPE Discover 2017. Stay tuned for more live action after this short break.