>>Hi, I'm Peter Burress. And welcome to another cute conversation. This one from BMC Helix is immersion days in Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California One of the biggest challenges that every IittIe organization faces. In fact, every business is how to start merging greater control through I t sm as well as greater change and evolve ability of systems through Dev ops. It's a big topic. A lot of folks looking at how best to do it. We've got a great person here to talk to us about it. Dick Stark is the president CEO of right star Dick. Welcome to the Cube. >>Well, thanks very much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity beyond the Cube here. >>Excellent. Well, why don't we start? Tell us a little about right start? >>Sure. Right. Stars in I t sm consultancy and we happen to be a dev Ops consulted to say at the same time, we're also a BMC solution provider and lasting solution provider. Now, we've been a BMC solution provider for for 16 years, so we've been in this space a long time and we've earned several accolades up along the way. We made it into the Forrester I t s m service provider. It's not called a Magic Quadrant because that's what God gardener uses. But instead it's a wave report. And so we made it sort of into the far right hand quadrant there. And if you added up all the points we ended up in North America being rated number five out of all the different idea Sam Consultancy. So it's very proud about that. And then last year with BMC, we were the North American Solution provider of the year in the D S. M space. >>Well is an export person, I can tell you Congratulations. Those waves very seriously. Let's jump into this question, though off what does I t. S m from a technology and people in process standpoint have to do to accommodate some of the changes that are being founded and defusing out of the Hole Dev Ops world, which is just having an enormous impact on our I t thinks and does >>it really has. And you know, we've been in the space a long time and I t s m Sometimes I tell the words are interchangeable and there are about if you can believe this about three million people That ended up getting an Idol certification of some short like an Idol Foundation certificate. And over time, that's been have been a really a big, big deal. However, Idol now is lost, its luster just a little bit. And it's allowed Dev ops to sort of sneak in or add dollar whatever you won't want to call it, and I'd listen. Standing still, though, they've bounced back and bounce back in a hard way. And they've they've come up with what's now called Idle for an Idol For was just released this this year, and it takes some of those Dev ops principles, and it has its own value stream as well and is a result Idle for or agile idol or whatever you wanna call it now is taking a little bit stronger position. And when I say Dev ops principles, it's things like Collaborate. It's things like promote, it's It's things like operate and automate. It's It's It's all about it again. It's all about collaboration in some of these other values that that you'll see in Dev ops. I guess what what happened is we spent a lot of time on the Idol side of things, and we did things for process sake and a good example would be changed management and spent a lot of time putting together is change management processes per this idol framework. Okay, And what what happened is that a lot of the users then rebelled a little bit because it might take longer to go through and fill out all the paperwork of It's not paperwork the online tool set then to do a change than to actually perform the change itself. So I don't got a little bit of a bad rap. And so that's where this whole Dev ops thing has come in. And the whole idea right now is to get Dev and Ops under the Shame umbrella, because that's not typically very used to do. But it's, but it's certainly happening. >>Well, let's talk about why that intersections happening, right? So I'm gonna I'm gonna show a little bit of history from my perspective as well, you know, I told began, First of all, it started in some government agencies many years ago, but it started as the basis of it was How do we take better care of the assets with an I T. Which at the time were mainly hardware. In many respects, what we've seen happen over the last 25 30 years that Idol has been an extent. Is that the nature of the assets that I t recognizes? His acknowledges delivering value for the business has changed. We've gone from hardware to infrastructure is code. That's where Dev Ops is so many respects. What you're saying is that Iittle is now trying to bring the best of what it means to do a good job of asset management with a new class of assets. Namely, software is code infrastructures code, and that's where we have to have that marriage. I got that right. >>That's that's correct. And you don't want to have silent silos. You want to be a silo buster if if anything else. And I just wanted to mention something else that I think is kind of fun along with this Idol. Four. We now do what's called the Mars Lander simulation traded it replaced. If you've heard of the Apollo 13 simulation, will Mars four, even though it's idle for specific, it's really all about Dev ops, and I took the Mars board just about a month or so ago, and it's a lot of fun. You sit down and the whole objective is to get get to Mars and you're a business. So and you're going to be selling the data that you're going to collect along along the way. And so the whole idea is to is to make a profit, and you have all these different roles that you play. When I went through it, I was the release manager then. But you might have a business analyst. You might have a service desk person. You have vendors and a it's it's really it's very realistic that and typically like a lot of large enterprises, you start playing the game and it's just chaos, and you have to go back and try this over and over again until essentially you get it right. And I was surprised how easy it is to get sucked in. If you're in a big enterprise, your silent, you have a specific role that you have to d'oh and you have instructions how you're supposed to do that and you want to stick to it. Whatever you know, whatever your assignment is, you have to do that. But that's not the right thing to Dio. Remember, it's about collaboration. It's about transparency. It's been it's about posting your goals, posting the results and moving forward from from there. And so I was surprised how I got sucked into it. And so I can understand why we need to make some progress in this space. And it's all about getting people to change their behavior a little bit in some of these new tool set certainly help >>well, as well. You're going back to what you said. He used to be the three R's of any regime or rolls responsibilities and relationships, and so the roles have are evolving. But often it's just in name only the responsibilities. You know today it's still code. It still has to run on hard, where it's not a bunch of hamsters, they're doing things. But as you said, it's really the relationships amongst the various actors as we introduce more business people. As technology gets put into position to generate more revenue or to do more with customer experience, the relationships are being pressured, are being really pushed to evolve. So how do you see in your practice in right stars practice. How do you see the relationships between Dev ops and I T s M and the business starting to evolve so that you can have amore coherent, comprehensive view of how you make sister? Well, >>I think in that particular case, it's gonna take some time. I mean, it's not gonna happen overnight. I mean, that's why you have agile coaches, or that's while you have the scales agile, or the safe framework is because people don't get it. And they need to understand how to work together better with others. And so it's not gonna happen by just implementing a new new tool set turning the key and then say, OK, everything's gonna be fine. It's good to get the integration between the different tool sets. And the technology is certainly there to do that. But without having some instruction to begin with and having the door in users cooperate. You're not going to see that kind of kind of performance improvement or cost statements or whatever it is that you're looking for. You're not going to see that >>they're one of the biggest challenges in any changes. Abandonment. The user's ultimately abandoned. So as you look a tte. The ideas M tool set that you're utilizing mainly from being right is it is that there's a degree of there's always a degree of pedagogic tool away, it says. Here's how you should do things. What you're discovering is that tool set is really catalyzing. Helping to catalyze positive changes in your mind within a lot of your customer base is, well, the >>thing about Helix, and I'm very excited about this because we're making a lot of good progress with. He likes our customer base that we have right now and give you a good example. George Washing University were based in a D C. Area day. If they are, too, they've been a long time remedy customer. We've moved them to Helix, and then, just recently, when I say recently started a year ago in August, they moved to the BMC Chap Cat box platform. Then, this past August, they totally went cold turkey with chatbots throughout the entire university. That makes a tremendous difference in the performance and not just performance, but also on the cost and the efficiency that the university, particularly from a service management perspective, is providing to its university employees and to its students, just like you mentioned today in the keynote session that it's all about mobility. And practically practically all the students there rely on their their cellphone day in and day out. And so when they have a question at G W. If it's how do I get a new account? How do I get a park parking permit? G on the wireless in my dorm room isn't working. You don't pick up the phone and call. Nobody does that you texted at. And this is a chap off its power by IBM Watson, and it works great. And there's lots of good things that are gonna come out of that. For example, students, I think they probably still have to turn paper sent. You know, maybe that's all Elektronik Lee delivered, but I think you might still have to print out a paper and turn it into your professor. You know, I'm not sure, but bluebirds Anyway, you're probably you're probably gonna do this late at night when the service desk is an open. So what do you do if you can't get the printer to work? Well, you pick up your cell phone, you text in that That the issue and bingo. You've got a response. So those are the sorts of things that are gonna make for a tremendous amount of impact, and it's gonna cause people to change their behavior in really a good way. Another good example. We have another longtime hospital customer. They have a 24 by seven service desk. They're huge, and they pay a lot of money to operate that 24 by seven. But they hardly get any call said at night. Right? Because not that many people work. So why don't they just turn that and you start using chatbots and think of that the r A. Y. It's just incredible. And I think you're going to see more. And that more situations like that as we move forward. >>Dick start President CEO of right Starr. Yep. Thanks very much for being too. >>Thanks very much. Appreciate it. Okay. >>And what's going on? Peter Burress. You've been watching other cube conversation from BMC Helix immersion days in Santa Clara. Thanks very much. Next time

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering A W s reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back. Everyone's Cube Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS. Reinforce Amazon Web sources. First inaugural conference around security. It's not Osama. It's a branded event. Big time ecosystem developing. We have returning here. Cube Alumni Bill Jeff for VP of strategy and the partnerships that Iron Net Cyber Security Company. Welcome back. Thanks. General Keith Alexander, who was on a week and 1/2 ago. And it was public sector summit. Good to see you. Good >> to see you. Thanks for >> having my back, but I want to get into some of the Iran cyber communities. We had General Qi 1000. He was the original commander of the division. So important discussions that have around that. But don't get your take on the event. You guys, you're building a business. The minute cyber involved in public sector. This is commercial private partnership. Public relations coming together. Yeah. Your models are sharing so bringing public and private together important. >> Now that's exactly right. And it's really great to be here with eight of us were really close partner of AWS is we'll work with them our entire back in today. Runs on AWS really need opportunity. Get into the ecosystem, meet some of the folks that are working that we might work with my partner but to deliver a great product, right? And you're seeing a lot of people move to cloud, right? And so you know some of the big announcement that are happening here today. We're willing. We're looking to partner up with eight of us and be a first time provider for some key new Proactiv elves. AWS is launching in their own platform here today. So that's a really neat thing for us to be partnered up with this thing. Awesome organization. I'm doing some of >> the focus areas around reinforcing your party with Amazon shares for specifics. >> Yes. So I don't know whether they announced this capability where they're doing the announcement yesterday or today. So I forget which one so I'll leave that leave that leave that once pursued peace out. But the main thing is, they're announcing couple of new technology plays way our launch party with them on the civility place. So we're gonna be able to do what we were only wanted to do on Prem. We're gonna be able to do in the cloud with AWS in the cloud formation so that we'll deliver the same kind of guy that would deliver on prime customers inside their own cloud environments and their hybrid environment. So it's a it's a it's a sea change for us. The company, a sea change for a is delivering that new capability to their customers and really be able to defend a cloud network the way you would nonpregnant game changer >> described that value, if you would. >> Well, so you know, one of the key things about about a non pregnant where you could do you could look at all the flows coming past you. You look at all the data, look at in real time and develop behavior. Lana looks over. That's what we're doing our own prime customers today in the cloud with his world who looked a lox, right? And now, with the weight of your capability, we're gonna be able to integrate that and do a lot Maur the way we would in a in a in a normal sort of on Prem environment. So you really did love that. Really? Capability of scale >> Wagon is always killed. The predictive analytics, our visibility and what you could do. And too late. Exactly. Right. You guys solve that with this. What are some of the challenges that you see in cloud security that are different than on premise? Because that's the sea, So conversation we've been hearing. Sure, I know on premise. I didn't do it on premises for awhile. What's the difference between the challenge sets, the challenges and the opportunities they provide? >> Well, the opportunities air really neat, right? Because you've got that even they have a shared responsibility model, which is a little different than you officially have it. When it's on Prem, it's all yours essential. You own that responsibility and it is what it is in the cloud. Its share responsible to cloud provider the data holder. Right? But what's really cool about the cloud is you could deliver some really interesting Is that scale you do patch updates simultaneously, all your all your back end all your clients systems, even if depending how your provisioning cloud service is, you could deliver that update in real time. You have to worry about. I got to go to individual systems and update them, and some are updated. Summer passed. Some aren't right. Your servers are packed simultaneously. You take him down, you're bringing back up and they're ready to go, right? That's a really capability that for a sigh. So you're delivering this thing at scale. It's awesome now, So the challenge is right. It's a new environment so that you haven't dealt with before. A lot of times you feel the hybrid environment governed both an on Prem in sanitation and class sensation. Those have to talkto one another, right? And you might think about Well, how do I secure those those connections right now? And I think about spending money over here when I got all seduced to spend up here in the cloud. And that's gonna be a hard thing precisely to figure out, too. And so there are some challenges, but the great thing is, you got a whole ecosystem. Providers were one of them here in the AWS ecosystem. There are a lot here today, and you've got eight of us as a part of self who wants to make sure that they're super secure, but so are yours. Because if you have a problem in their cloud, that's a challenge. Them to market this other people. You talk about >> your story because your way interviews A couple weeks ago, you made a comment. I'm a recovering lawyer, kind of. You know, we all laughed, but you really start out in law, right? >> How did you end up here? Yeah, well, the truth is, I grew up sort of a technology or myself. My first computer is a trash 80 a trs 80 color computer. RadioShack four k of RAM on board, right. We only >> a true TRS 80. Only when I know what you're saying. That >> it was a beautiful system, right? Way stored with sword programs on cassette tapes. Right? And when we operated from four Keita 16 k way were the talk of the Rainbow Computer Club in Santa Monica, California Game changer. It was a game here for 16. Warning in with 60 give onboard. Ram. I mean, this is this is what you gonna do. And so you know, I went from that and I in >> trouble or something, you got to go to law school like you're right >> I mean, you know, look, I mean, you know it. So my dad, that was a chemist, right? So he loved computers, love science. But he also had an unrequited political boners body. He grew up in East Africa, Tanzania. It was always thought that he might be a minister in government. The Socialist came to power. They they had to leave you at the end of the day. And he came to the states and doing chemistry, which is course studies. But he still loved politics. So he raised at NPR. So when I went to college, I studied political science. But I paid my way through college doing computer support, life sciences department at the last moment. And I ran 10 based. He came on climate through ceilings and pulled network cable do punch down blocks, a little bit of fibrous placing. So, you know, I was still a murderer >> writing software in the scythe. >> One major, major air. And that was when when the web first came out and we had links. Don't you remember? That was a text based browser, right? And I remember looking to see him like this is terrible. Who would use http slash I'm going back to go for gophers. Awesome. Well, turns out I was totally wrong about Mosaic and Netscape. After that, it was It was it was all hands on >> deck. You got a great career. Been involved a lot in the confluence of policy politics and tech, which is actually perfect skill set for the challenge we're dealing. So I gotta ask you, what are some of the most important conversations that should be on the table right now? Because there's been a lot of conversations going on around from this technology. I has been around for many decades. This has been a policy problem. It's been a societal problem. But now this really focus on acute focus on a lot of key things. What are some of the most important things that you think should be on the table for techies? For policymakers, for business people, for lawmakers? >> One. I think we've got to figure out how to get really technology knowledge into the hands of policymakers. Right. You see, you watch the Facebook hearings on Capitol Hill. I mean, it was a joke. It was concerning right? I mean, anybody with a technology background to be concerned about what they saw there, and it's not the lawmakers fault. I mean, you know, we've got to empower them with that. And so we got to take technologist, threw it out, how to get them to talk policy and get them up on the hill and in the administration talking to folks, right? And one of the big outcomes, I think, has to come out of that conversation. What do we do about national level cybersecurity, Right, because we assume today that it's the rule. The private sector provides cyber security for their own companies, but in no other circumstance to expect that when it's a nation state attacker, wait. We don't expect Target or Wal Mart or any other company. J. P. Morgan have surface to air missiles on the roofs of their warehouses or their buildings to Vegas Russian bear bombers. Why, that's the job of the government. But when it comes to cyberspace, we expect Private Cummings defending us everything from a script kiddie in his basement to the criminal hacker in Eastern Europe to the nation state, whether Russia, China, Iran or North Korea and these nation states have virtually a limited resource. Your armies did >> sophisticated RND technology, and it's powerful exactly like a nuclear weaponry kind of impact for digital. >> Exactly. And how can we expect prices comes to defend themselves? It's not. It's not a fair fight. And so the government has to have some role. The questions? What role? How did that consist with our values, our principles, right? And how do we ensure that the Internet remains free and open, while still is sure that the president is not is not hampered in doing its job out there. And I love this top way talk about >> a lot, sometimes the future of warfare. Yeah, and that's really what we're talking about. You go back to Stuxnet, which opened Pandora's box 2016 election hack where you had, you know, the Russians trying to control the mean control, the narrative. As you pointed out, that that one video we did control the belief system you control population without firing a shot. 20 twenties gonna be really interesting. And now you see the U. S. Retaliate to Iran in cyberspace, right? Allegedly. And I was saying that we had a conversation with Robert Gates a couple years ago and I asked him. I said, Should we be Maur taking more of an offensive posture? And he said, Well, we have more to lose than the other guys Glasshouse problem? Yeah, What are your thoughts on? >> Look, certainly we rely intimately, inherently on the cyber infrastructure that that sort of is at the core of our economy at the core of the world economy. Increasingly, today, that being said, because it's so important to us all the more reason why we can't let attacks go Unresponded to write. And so if you're being attacked in cyberspace, you have to respond at some level because if you don't, you'll just keep getting punched. It's like the kid on the playground, right? If the bully keeps punching him and nobody does anything, not not the not the school administration, not the kid himself. Well, then the boy's gonna keep doing what he's doing. And so it's not surprising that were being tested by Iran by North Korea, by Russia by China, and they're getting more more aggressive because when we don't punch back, that's gonna happen. Now we don't have to punch back in cyberspace, right? A common sort of fetish about Cyrus is a >> response to the issue is gonna respond to the bully in this case, your eggs. Exactly. Playground Exactly. We'll talk about the Iran. >> So So if I If I if I can't Yeah, the response could be Hey, we could do this. Let them know you could Yes. And it's a your move >> ate well, And this is the key is that it's not just responding, right. So Bob Gates or told you we can't we talk about what we're doing. And even in the latest series of alleged responses to Iran, the reason we keep saying alleged is the U. S has not publicly acknowledged it, but the word has gotten out. Well, of course, it's not a particularly effective deterrence if you do something, but nobody knows you did it right. You gotta let it out that you did it. And frankly, you gotta own it and say, Hey, look, that guy punch me, I punch it back in the teeth. So you better not come after me, right? We don't do that in part because these cables grew up in the intelligence community at N S. A and the like, and we're very sensitive about that But the truth is, you have to know about your highest and capabilities. You could talk about your abilities. You could say, Here are my red lines. If you cross him, I'm gonna punch you back. If you do that, then by the way, you've gotta punch back. They'll let red lines be crossed and then not respond. And then you're gonna talk about some level of capabilities. It can't all be secret. Can't all be classified. Where >> are we in this debate? Me first. Well, you're referring to the Thursday online attack against the intelligence Iranian intelligence community for the tanker and the drone strike that they got together. Drone take down for an arm in our surveillance drones. >> But where are we >> in this debate of having this conversation where the government should protect and serve its people? And that's the role. Because if a army rolled in fiscal army dropped on the shores of Manhattan, I don't think Citibank would be sending their people out the fight. Right? Right. So, like, this is really happening. >> Where are we >> on this? Like, is it just sitting there on the >> table? What's happening? What's amazing about it? Hi. This was getting it going well, that that's a Q. What's been amazing? It's been happening since 2012 2011 right? We know about the Las Vegas Sands attack right by Iran. We know about North Korea's. We know about all these. They're going on here in the United States against private sector companies, not against the government. And there's largely been no response. Now we've seen Congress get more active. Congress just last year passed to pass legislation that gave Cyber command the authority on the president's surgery defenses orders to take action against Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. If certain cyber has happened, that's a good thing, right to give it. I'll be giving the clear authority right, and it appears the president willing to make some steps in that direction, So that's a positive step. Now, on the back end, though, you talk about what we do to harden ourselves, if that's gonna happen, right, and the government isn't ready today to defend the nation, even though the Constitution is about providing for the common defense, and we know that the part of defense for long. For a long time since Secretary Panetta has said that it is our mission to defend the nation, right? But we know they're not fully doing that. How do they empower private sector defense and one of keys That has got to be Look, if you're the intelligence community or the U. S. Government, you're Clinton. Tremendous sense of Dad about what you're seeing in foreign space about what the enemy is doing, what they're preparing for. You have got to share that in real time at machine speed with industry. And if you're not doing that and you're still count on industry to be the first line defense, well, then you're not empowered. That defense. And if you're on a pair of the defense, how do you spend them to defend themselves against the nation? State threats? That's a real cry. So >> much tighter public private relationship. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And it doesn't have to be the government stand in the front lines of the U. S. Internet is, though, is that you could even determine the boundaries of the U. S. Internet. Right? Nobody wants an essay or something out there doing that, but you do want is if you're gonna put the private sector in the in the line of first defense. We gotta empower that defense if you're not doing that than the government isn't doing its job. And so we gonna talk about this for a long time. I worked on that first piece of information sharing legislation with the House chairman, intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger from Maryland, right congressman from both sides of the aisle, working together to get a fresh your decision done that got done in 2015. But that's just a first step. The government's got to be willing to share classified information, scaled speed. We're still not seeing that. Yeah, How >> do people get involved? I mean, like, I'm not a political person. I'm a moderate in the middle. But >> how do I How do people get involved? How does the technology industry not not the >> policy budgets and the top that goes on the top tech companies, how to tech workers or people who love Tad and our patriots and or want freedom get involved? What's the best approach? >> Well, that's a great question. I think part of is learning how to talk policy. How do we get in front policymakers? Right. And we're I run. I run a think tank on the side at the National Institute at George Mason University's Anton Scalia Law School Way have a program funded by the Hewlett Foundation who were bringing in technologists about 25 of them. Actually. Our next our second event. This Siri's is gonna be in Chicago this weekend. We're trained these technologies, these air data scientists, engineers and, like talk Paul's right. These are people who said We want to be involved. We just don't know how to get involved And so we're training him up. That's a small program. There's a great program called Tech Congress, also funded by the U. A. Foundation that places technologists in policy positions in Congress. That's really cool. There's a lot of work going on, but those are small things, right. We need to do this, its scale. And so you know, what I would say is that their technology out there want to get involved, reach out to us, let us know well with our partners to help you get your information and dad about what's going on. Get your voice heard there. A lot of organizations to that wanna get technologies involved. That's another opportunity to get in. Get in the building is a >> story that we want to help tell on be involved in David. I feel passion about this. Is a date a problem? So there's some real tech goodness in there. Absolutely. People like to solve hard problems, right? I mean, we got a couple days of them. You've got a big heart problems. It's also for all the people out there who are Dev Ops Cloud people who like to work on solving heart problems. >> We got a lot >> of them. Let's do it. So what's going on? Iron? Give us the update Could plug for the company. Keith Alexander found a great guy great guests having on the Cube. That would give the quick thanks >> so much. So, you know, way have done two rounds of funding about 110,000,000. All in so excited. We have partners like Kleiner Perkins Forge point C five all supporting us. And now it's all about We just got a new co CEO in Bill Welshman. See Scaler and duo. So he grew Z scaler. $1,000,000,000 valuation he came in to do Oh, you know, they always had a great great exit. Also, we got him. We got Sean Foster in from from From Industry also. So Bill and Sean came together. We're now making this business move more rapidly. We're moving to the mid market. We're moving to a cloud platform or aggressively and so exciting times and iron it. We're coming toe big and small companies near you. We've got the capability. We're bringing advanced, persistent defense to bear on his heart problems that were threat analytics. I collected defence. That's the key to our operation. We're excited >> to doing it. I call N S A is a service, but that's not politically correct. But this is the Cube, so >> Well, look, if you're not, if you want to defensive scale, right, you want to do that. You know, ECE knows how to do that key down here at the forefront of that when he was in >> the government. Well, you guys are certainly on the cutting edge, riding that wave of common societal change technology impact for good, for defence, for just betterment, not make making a quick buck. Well, you know, look, it's a good business model by the way to be in that business. >> I mean, It's on our business cards. And John Xander means it. Our business. I'd say the Michigan T knows that he really means that, right? Rather private sector. We're looking to help companies to do the right thing and protect the nation, right? You know, I protect themselves >> better. Well, our missions to turn the lights on. Get those voices out there. Thanks for coming on. Sharing the lights. Keep covers here. Day one of two days of coverage. Eight of us reinforce here in Boston. Stay with us for more Day one after this short break.

>> live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering a ws public sector summit by Amazon Web services. >> Welcome back, everyone to our nation's capital. We are the Cube. We are live at A W s Public Sector summit. I'm your host Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Farrier. We're joined by Ken Eisner Director Worldwide Educational programs at a WS Thanks so much for coming on the show >> you for having me. >> So tell our viewers a little bit. About what? What you do as the director of educational programs. Sure, I head >> up a program called a Ws Educate a ws educate is Amazon's global initiative to provide students and teachers around the world with the resource is that they need really to propel students into this awesome field of cloud computing. We launched it back in May of 2,015 and we did it to fill this demand. If we look at it today, what kind of right in the midst of this fourth industrial revolution is changing the means of production obviously in the digital on cloud space, But it's also creating this new worker class all around. Yeah, the cloud Advanced services like machine learning I robotics, I ot and so on. And if you looked at the employer demand, um, Cloud computing has been the number one linked in skill for the past four years in a row. We look at cloud computing. We kind of divide into four families. Software development, cloud architecture, the data world, you know, like machine learning I data science, business intelligence and Alex and then the middle school opportunities like technical customer support, age and cybersecurity, which can range all the way from middle school of Ph. D. But yet the timeto hire these people has grown up dramatically. Glass door as study of companies over there platform between two thousand 92 1,050 18 and show that the timeto higher had increased by 80%. Yet just think about that we talk about I mean, this conference is all about innovation. If you don't have builders, if you don't have innovators, how the heck Kenya Kenya innovate? >> Can I gotta ask you, Andy, just to have known him for over eight years and reporting on him and covering it was on when when everyone didn't understand yet what it was. Now everyone kind of does our congratulations and success. But to see him on stage, talk passionately about education. Yeah, mean and knowing Andy means it's kind of boiled up because he's very reserved, very conservative guy, pragmatic. But for him to be overtly projecting, his opinion around education, which was really yeah, pretty critical means something's going on. This is a huge issue not just in politics, riel, state, local areas where education, where >> the root of income inequality it's it's a lot of. >> There's a lot of challenges. People just aren't ready for these new types of jobs that are coming out that >> pay well, by the way. And this is Elliott >> of him out there that are unfilled for the first time, there are more jobs unfilled than there are candidates for them. You're solving this problem. Tell us what's going on in Amazon. Why the fewer what's going on with all this? Why everyone's so jacked up >> a great point. I, Andy, I think, said that education is at a crisis point today and really talked about that racial inequality piece way. Timeto hire people in the software development space Cloud architecture um technical called cloud Support Age. It's incredibly long so that it's just creating excess costs into the system, but were so passionate, like if you look at going to the cloud, Amazon wants to disrupt areas where we do not see that progress happening. Education is an area that's in vast need for disruption. There are people were doing amazing stuff. We've heard from Cal Poly. We've heard from Yeah, Arizona State. Carnegie Mellon. There's Joseph Alan at North Northeastern. >> People are >> doing great stuff. We're looking at you some places that are doing dual enrollment programs between high school and community in college and higher ed. But we're not moving fast enough, but you guys >> are provided with educate your program. This is people can walk in the front door without any kind of going through gatekeepers or any kind of getting college. This is straight up from the front, or they could be dropouts that could be post college re Skilling. Whatever it is, they could walk in the front door and get skilled up through educators that correct, >> we send people the ws educate dot com. All you need is some element of being in school activity, or you won't be going back from Re Skilling perspective and you came free access into resource is whether your student teacher get free access into content. That's map two jobs, because again, would you people warm from the education way? All want enlightenment contributors to sai all important, But >> really they >> want careers and all the stats gallop ransom good stats about both what, yet students and what industry wants. They want them to be aligned to jobs. And we're seeing that there's a man >> my master was specifically If I'm unemployed and I want to work, what can I do? I walk into you, You can go >> right on and we can you sign up, we'll give you access to these online cloud. Career pathways will give you micro credentials so we can bad you credential you against you We belong something on Samarian Robo maker. So individual services and full pathways. >> So this a >> direct door for someone unemployed We're going to get some work and a high paying job, >> right? Right. Absolutely. >> We and we also >> give you free access into a ws because we know that hands on practice doing real world applications is just vital. So we >> will do that end. By the way, at the end of >> this, we have a job board Amazon customer In part of our job, we're all saying >> these air >> jobs are super high in demand. You can apply to get a job as an intern or as a full time. Are you through our job? >> This is what people don't know about Rebecca. The war is not out there, and this is the people. Some of the problems. This is a solution >> exactly, but I actually want to get drilled down a little bit. This initiative is not just for grown ups. It's it's for Kimmie. This is for you. Kid starts in kindergarten, So I'm really interested to hear what you're doing and how you're thinking about really starting with the little kids and particularly underrepresented minorities and women who are not. There were also under representative in the in the cloud industry how you're thinking expansively about getting more of those people into these jacks. And actually, it's still >> Day one within all y'all way started with Way started with 18 and older because we saw that as the Keith the key lever into that audience and start with computer science but we've expanded greatly. Our wee last year reinvent, We introduced pathways for students 14 over and cloud literacy materials such as a cloud inventor, Cloud Explorer and Cloud Builder. Back to really get at those young audiences. We've introduced dual enrollment stuff that happens between high school community college or high school in higher ed, and we're working on partnerships with scratch First Robotics Project lead the way that introduced, whether it's blocked based coding, robotics were finding robotics is such a huge door opener again, not just for technically and >> get into it absolutely, because it's hands on >> stuff is relevant. They weren't relevant stuff that they can touch that. They can feel that they can open their browser, make something happen, build a mobile application. But they also want tohave pathways into the future. They want to see something that they can. Eventually you'll wind up in and a ws the cloud just makes it real, because you, Khun do real worlds stuff from a browser by working with the first robot. Biotics are using scratch toe develop Ai ai extensions in recognition and Lex and Polly and so on. So we've entered into partnerships with him right toe. Open up those doors and create that long term engagement and pipe on into the high demand jobs of tomorrow. >> What do you do in terms of the colleges that you mentioned and you mention Northeastern and Cal Poly Arizona State? What? What are you seeing? Is the most exciting innovations there. >> Yes. So, first of all, we happen to be it. We're in over 24 100 institutions around the world. We actually, by the way, began in the U. S. And was 65% us. Now it's actually 35% US 65% outside. We're in 200 countries and territories around the world. But institutions such as the doing amazing stuff Polo chow at a Georgia Tech. Things that he's doing with visual ization on top of a ws is absolutely amazing. We launched a cloud Ambassador program to reward and recognize the top faculty from around the world. They're truly doing amazing stuff, but even more, we're seeing the output from students. There was a student, Alfredo Cologne. He was lived in Puerto Rico, devastated by Hurricane Maria. So lost his, you know, economic mobility came to Florida and started taking classes at local schools. He found a ws educate and just dove headlong into it. Did eight Pathways and then applied for a job in Dev Ops at Universal Studios and received a job. He is one of my favorite evangelists, but and it's not just that higher ed. We found community college students. We launched a duel enrolment with between Santa Monica College and Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles, focusing again a majority minority students, largely Hispanic, in that community. Um, and Michael Brown, you finish the cloud computing certificate, applied for an internship, a mission clouds so again a partner of ours and became a God. Hey, guys, internship And they start a whole program around. So not only were seeing your excitement out of the institutions, which we are, but we're also seeing Simon. Our students and businesses all want to get involved in this hiring brigade. >> Can I gotta ask. We're learning so much about Amazon would cover him for a long time. You know all the key buzzwords. Yeah, raise the bar all these terms working backwards. So >> tell us about what's your >> working backwards plan? Because you have a great mission and we applaud. I think it's a super critical. I think it's so under promoted. I think we'll do our best to kind of promote. It's really valuable to society and getting people their jobs. Yeah, but it's a great opportunity, you know, itself. But what's your goal? What's your What's your objective? How you gonna get there, What your priorities, What do you what do you what do you need >> to wear? A pure educational workforce? And today our job is to work backwards from employers and this cloud opportunity, >> the thing that we >> care about our customers still remains or student on DH. So we want to give excessive mobility to students into these fields in cloud computing, not just today and tomorrow. That requires a lot that requires machine lurking in the algorithm that you that changed the learning objectives you based on career, so content maps to thes careers, and we're gonna be working with educational institutions on that recruited does. Recruiting doesn't do an effective job at matching students into jobs. >> Are we >> looking at all of just the elite institutions as signals for that? That's a big >> students are your customer and customer, but older in support systems that that support you, right? Like Cal Poly and others to me. >> Luli. We've also got governments. So we were down in Louisiana just some last month, and Governor Bel Edwards said, We're going to state why with a WS educates cloud degree program across all of their community college system across the University of Louisiana State system and into K 12 because we believe in those long term pathways. Never before have governors have ministers of country were being with the Ministry of Education for Singapore in Indonesia, and we're working deep into India. Never had they been more aligned toe workforce development. It creates huge unrest. We've seen this in Spain and Greece we see in the U. S. But it's also this economic imperative, and Andy is right. Education is at a crisis. Education is not solving the needs of all their constituents, but also industries to blame. We haven't been deeply partnered with education. That partnership is such a huge part of >> this structural things of involved in the educational system. It's Lanier's Internets nonlinear got progressions air differently. This is an opportunity because I think if the it's just like competition, Hey, if the U. S Department of Education not get their act together. People aren't going to go to school. I mean, Peter Thiel, another political spectrums, was paying people not to go to college when I was a little different radical view Andy over here saying, Look at it. That's why you >> see the >> data points starting to boil up. I see some of my younger son's friends all saying questioning right what they could get on YouTube. What's accessible now, Thinking Lor, You can learn about anything digitally now. This is totally People are starting to realize that I might not need to be in college or I might not need to be learning this. I can go direct >> and we pay lip >> service to lifelong education if you end. If you terminally end education at X year, well, you know what's what's hap happening with the rest of your life? We need to be lifelong learners. And, yes, we need to have off ramps and the on ramps throughout our education. Thie. Other thing is, it's not just skill, it's the skills are important, and we need to have people were certified in various a ws skills and come but we also need to focus on those competencies. Education does a good job around critical decision making skills and stuff like, um, collaboration. But >> do they really >> do a good job at inventing? Simplified? >> Do they teach kids >> to fam? Are we walking kids to >> social emotional, you know? >> Absolutely. Are we teaching? Were kids have tio think big to move >> fast and have that bias for action? >> I think that I want to have fun doing it way. Alright, well, so fun having you on the show. A great conversation. >> Thank you. I appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John. For your you are watching the cube. Stay tuned.

>> Live from New York City it's theCube. Covering Lenovo Transform 2.0. Brought to you by Lenovo. >> Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of Lenovo Transform, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Madhu Matta; He is the VP and GM High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence at Lenovo and Dr. Daniel Gruner the CTO of SciNet at University of Toronto. Thanks so much for coming on the show gentlemen. >> Thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> So, before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about the Lenovo mission in this area to use the power of supercomputing to help solve some of society's most pressing challenges; and that is climate change, and curing cancer. Can you talk a little bit, tell our viewers a little bit about what you do and how you see your mission. >> Yeah so, our tagline is basically, Solving humanity's greatest challenges. We're also now the number one supercomputer provider in the world as measured by the rankings of the top 500 and that comes with a lot of responsibility. One, we take that responsibility very seriously, but more importantly, we work with some of the largest research institutions, universities all over the world as they do research, and it's amazing research. Whether it's particle physics, like you saw this morning, whether it's cancer research, whether it's climate modeling. I mean, we are sitting here in New York City and our headquarters is in Raleigh, right in the path of Hurricane Florence, so the ability to predict the next anomaly, the ability to predict the next hurricane is absolutely critical to get early warning signs and a lot of survival depends on that. So we work with these institutions jointly to develop custom solutions to ensure that all this research one it's powered and second to works seamlessly, and all their researchers have access to this infrastructure twenty-four seven. >> So Danny, tell us a little bit about SciNet, too. Tell us what you do, and then I want to hear how you work together. >> And, no relation with Skynet, I've been assured? Right? >> No. Not at all. It is also no relationship with another network that's called the same, but, it doesn't matter. SciNet is an organization that's basically the University of Toronto and the associated research hospitals, and we happen to run Canada's largest supercomputer. We're one of a number of computer sites around Canada that are tasked with providing resources and support, support is the most important, to academia in Canada. So, all academics, from all the different universities, in the country, they come and use our systems. From the University of Toronto, they can also go and use the other systems, it doesn't matter. Our mission is, as I said, we provide a system or a number of systems, we run them, but we really are about helping the researchers do their research. We're all scientists. All the guys that work with me, we're all scientists initially. We turned to computers because that was the way we do the research. You can not do astrophysics other than computationally, observationally and computationally, but nothing else. Climate science is the same story, you have so much data and so much modeling to do that you need a very large computer and, of course, very good algorithms and very careful physics modeling for an extremely complex system, but ultimately it needs a lot of horsepower to be able to even do a single simulation. So, what I was showing with Madhu at that booth earlier was results of a simulation that was done just prior us going into production with our Lenovo system where people were doing ocean circulation calculations. The ocean is obviously part of the big Earth system, which is part of the climate system as well. But, they took a small patch of the ocean, a few kilometers in size in each direction, but did it at very, very high resolution, even vertically going down to the bottom of the ocean so that the topography of the ocean floor can be taken into account. That allows you to see at a much smaller scale the onset of tides, the onset of micro-tides that allow water to mix, the cold water from the bottom and the hot water from the top; The mixing of nutrients, how life goes on, the whole cycle. It's super important. Now that, of course, gets coupled with the atmosphere and with the ice and with the radiation from the sun and all that stuff. That calculation was run by a group from, the main guy was from JPL in California, and he was running on 48,000 cores. Single runs at 48,000 cores for about two- to three-weeks and produced a petabyte of data, which is still being analyzed. That's the kind of resolution that's been enabled... >> Scale. >> It gives it a sense of just exactly... >> That's the scale. >> By a system the size of the one we have. It was not possible to do that in Canada before this system. >> I tell you both, when I lived on the vendor side and as an analyst, talking to labs and universities, you love geeking out. Because first of all, you always have a need for newer, faster things because the example you just gave is like, "Oh wait." "If I can get the next generation chipset." "If the networking can be improved." You know you can take that petabyte of data and process it so much faster. >> If I could only get more money to buy a bigger one. >> We've talked to the people at CERN and JPL and things like that. - Yeah. >> And it's like this is where most companies are it's like, yeah it's a little bit better, and it might make things a little better and make things nice, but no, this is critical to move along the research. So talk a little bit more about the infrastructure and what you look for and how that connects to the research and how you help close that gap over time. >> Before you go, I just want to also highlight a point that Danny made on solving humanity's greatest challenges which is our motto. He talked about the data analysis that he just did where they are looking at the surface of the ocean, as well as, going down, what is it, 264 nautical layers underneath the ocean? To analyze that much data, to start looking at marine life and protecting marine life. As you start to understand that level of nautical depth, they can start to figure out the nutrients value and other contents that are in that water to be able to start protecting the marine life. There again, another of humanity's greatest challenge right there that he's giving you... >> Nothing happens in isolation; It's all interconnected. >> Yeah. >> When you finally got a grant, you're able to buy a computer, how do you buy the computer that's going to give you the most bang for your buck? The best computer to do the science that we're all tasked with doing? It's tough, right? We don't fancy ourselves as computer architects; we engage the computer companies who really know about architecture to help us do it. The way we did our procurement was, 'Ok vendors, we have a set pot of money, we're willing to spend every last penny of this money, you give us the biggest and the baddest for our money." Now, it has to have a certain set of criteria. You have to be able to solve a number of benchmarks, some sample calculations that we provided. The ones that give you the best performance that's a bonus. It also has to be able to do it with the least amount of power, so we don't have to heat up the world and pay through the nose with power. Those are objective criteria that anybody can understand. But then, there's also the other criteria, so, how well will it run? How is it architected? How balanced is it? Did we get the iOS sub-system for all the storage that was the one that actually meets the criteria? What other extras do we have that will help us make the system run in a much smoother way and for a wide variety of disciplines because we run the biologists together with the physicists and the engineers and the humanitarians, the humanities people. Everybody uses the system. To make a long story short, the proposal that we got from Lenovo won the bid both in terms of what we got for in terms of hardware and also the way it was put together, which was quite innovative. >> Yeah. >> I want to hear about, you said give us the biggest, the baddest, we're willing to empty our coffers for this, so then where do you go from there? How closely do you work with SciNet, how does the relationship evolve and do you work together to innovate and kind of keep going? >> Yeah. I see it as not a segment or a division. I see High Performance Computing as a practice, and with any practice, it's many pieces that come together; you have a conductor, you have the orchestra, but the end of the day the delivery of that many systems is the concert. That's the way to look at it. To deliver this, our practice starts with multiple teams; one's a benchmarking team that understands the application that Dr. Gruner and SciNet will be running because they need to tune to the application the performance of the cluster. The second team is a set of solution architects that are deep engineers and understand our portfolio. Those two work together to say against this application, "Let's build," like he said, "the biggest, baddest, best-performing solution for that particular application." So, those two teams work together. Then we have the third team that kicks in once we win the business, which is coming on site to deploy, manage, and install. When Dr. Gruner talks about the infrastructure, it's a combination of hardware and software that all comes together and the software is open-source based that we built ourselves because we just felt there weren't the right tools in the industry to manage this level of infrastructure at that scale. All this comes together to essentially rack and roll onto their site. >> Let me just add to that. It's not like we went for it in a vacuum. We had already talked to the vendors, we always do. You always go, and they come to you and 'when's your next money coming,' and it's a dog and pony show. They tell you what they have. With Lenovo, at least the team, as we know it now, used to be the IBM team, iXsystems team, who built our previous system. A lot of these guys were already known to us, and we've always interacted very well with them. They were already aware of our thinking, where we were going, and that we're also open to suggestions for things that are non-conventional. Now, this can backfire, some data centers are very square they will only prescribe what they want. We're not prescriptive at all, we said, "Give us ideas about what can make this work better." These are the intangibles in a procurement process. You also have to believe in the team. If you don't know the team or if you don't know their track record then that's a no-no, right? Or, it takes points away. >> We brought innovations like DragonFly, which Dr. Dan will talk about that, as well as, we brought in for the first time, Excelero, which is a software-defined storage vendor and it was a smart part of the bid. We were able to flex muscles and be more creative versus just the standard. >> My understanding, you've been using water cooling for about a decade now, maybe? - Yes. >> Maybe you could give us a little bit about your experiences, how it's matured over time, and then Madhu will talk and bring us up to speed on project Neptune. >> Okay. Our first procurement about 10 years ago, again, that was the model we came up with. After years of wracking our brains, we could not decide how to build a data center and what computers to buy, it was like a chicken and egg process. We ended up saying, 'Okay, this is what we're going to do. Here's the money, here's is our total cost of operation that we can support." That included the power bill, the water, the maintenance, the whole works. So much can be used for infrastructure, and the rest is for the operational part. We said to the vendors, "You guys do the work. We want, again, the biggest and the baddest that we can operate within this budget." So, obviously, it has to be energy efficient, among other things. We couldn't design a data center and then put in the systems that we didn't know existed or vice-versa. That's how it started. The initial design was built by IBM, and they designed the data center for us to use water cooling for everything. They put rear door heat exchanges on the racks as a means of avoiding the use of blowing air and trying to contain the air which is less efficient, the air, and is also much more difficult. You can flow water very efficiently. You open the door of one of these racks. >> It's amazing. >> And it's hot air coming out, but you take the heat, right there in-situ, you remove it through a radiator. It's just like your car radiator. >> Car radiator. >> It works very well. Now, it would be nice if we could do even better by doing the hot water cooling and all that, but we're not in a university environment, we're in a strip mall out in the boonies, so we couldn't reuse the heat. Places like LRZ they're reusing the heat produced by the computers to heat their buildings. >> Wow. >> Or, if we're by a hospital, that always needs hot water, then we could have done it. But, it's really interesting how the option of that design that we ended up with the most efficient data center, certainly in Canada, and one of the most efficient in North America 10 years ago. Our PUE was 1.16, that was the design point, and this is not with direct water cooling through the chip. >> Right. Right. >> All right, bring us up to speed. Project Neptune, in general? >> Yes, so Neptune, as the name suggests, is the name of the God of the Sea and we chose that to brand our entire suite of liquid cooling products. Liquid cooling products is end to end in the sense that it's not just hardware, but, it's also software. The other key part of Neptune is a lot of these, in fact, most of these, products were built, not in a vacuum, but designed and built in conjunction with key partners like Barcelona Supercomputer, LRZ in Germany, in Munich. These were real-life customers working with us jointly to design these products. Neptune essentially allows you, very simplistically put, it's an entire suite of hardware and software that allows you to run very high-performance processes at a level of power and cooling utilization that's like using a much lower processor, it dissipates that much heat. The other key part is, you know, the normal way of cooling anything is run chilled water, we don't use chilled water. You save the money of chillers. We use ambient temperature, up to 50 degrees, 90% efficiency, 50 degree goes in, 60 degree comes out. It's really amazing, the entire suite. >> It's 50 Celsius, not Fahrenheit. >> It's Celsius, correct. >> Oh. >> Dr. Bruner talked about SciNet with the rado-heat exchanger. You actually got to stand in front of it to feel the magic of this, right? As geeky as that is. You open the door and it's this hot 60-, 65-degree C air. You close the door it's this cool 20-degree air that's coming out. So, the costs of running a data center drop dramatically with either the rado-heat exchanger, our direct to node product, which we just got released the SE650, or we have something call the thermal-transfer module, which replaces a normal heat sink. Where for an air cool we bring water cool goodness to an air cool product. >> Danny, I wonder if you can give us the final word, just the climate science in general, how's the community doing? Any technological things that are holding us back right now or anything that excites you about the research right now? >> Technology holds you back by the virtual size of the calculations that you need to do, but, it's also physics that hold you back. >> Yes. Because doing the actual modeling is very difficult and you have to be able to believe that the physics models actually work. This is one of the interesting things that Dick Peltier, who happens to be our scientific director and he's also one of the top climate scientists in the world, he's proven through some of his calculations that the models are actually pretty good. The models were designed for current conditions, with current data, so that they would reproduce the evolution of the climate that we can measure today. Now, what about climate that started happening 10,000 years ago, right? The climate was going on; it's been going on forever and ever. There's been glaciations; there's been all these events. It turns out that it has been recorded in history that there are some oscillations in temperature and other quantities that happen about every 1,000 years and nobody had been able to prove why they would happen. It turns out that the same models that we use for climate calculations today, if you take them back and do what's called paleoclimate, you start with approximating the conditions that happened 10,000 years ago, and then you move it forward, these things reproduce, those oscillations, exactly. It's very encouraging that the climate models actually make sense. We're not talking in a vacuum. We're not predicting the end of the world, just because. These calculations are right. They're correct. They're predicting the temperature of the earth is climbing and it's true, we're seeing it, but it will continue unless we do something. Right? It's extremely interesting. Now he's he's beginning to apply those results of the paleoclimate to studies with anthropologists and archeologists. We're trying to understand the events that happened in the Levant in the Middle East thousands of years ago and correlate them with climate events. Now, is that cool or what? >> That's very cool. >> So, I think humanity's greatest challenge is again to... >> I know! >> He just added global warming to it. >> You have a fun job. You have a fun job. >> It's all the interdisciplinarity that now has been made possible. Before we couldn't do this. Ten years ago we couldn't run those calculations, now we can. So it's really cool. - Amazing. Great. Well, Madhu, Danny, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> It was really fun talking to you. >> Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from the Lenovo Transform just after this. (tech music)

(electronic dance music) (Intel Jingle) (ethereal electronic dance music) ♪ Okay ♪ (upbeat techno dance music) ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Yeah everybody get loose yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Ye-yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody everybody yeah ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody get loose whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ >> As a courtesy to the presenters and those around you, please silence all mobile devices, thank you. (electronic dance music) ♪ Everybody get loose ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (upbeat salsa music) ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ So happy ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) >> Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. 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If you are please standing, we ask that you please take an available seat. We will begin momentarily, thank you. ♪ Let go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ (upbeat electronic dance music) ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ I live ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ah ah ah ah ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ (bouncy techno music) >> Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask that you please take the available seats to your left, house left, there are many available seats. If you are standing, please make your way there. The program will begin momentarily, thank you. Good morning! This is Lenovo Transform 2.0! (keyboard clicks) >> Progress. Why do we always talk about it in the future? When will it finally get here? We don't progress when it's ready for us. We need it when we're ready, and we're ready now. Our hospitals and their patients need it now, our businesses and their customers need it now, our cities and their citizens need it now. To deliver intelligent transformation, we need to build it into the products and solutions we make every day. At Lenovo, we're designing the systems to fight disease, power businesses, and help you reach more customers, end-to-end security solutions to protect your data and your companies reputation. We're making IT departments more agile and cost efficient. We're revolutionizing how kids learn with VR. We're designing smart devices and software that transform the way you collaborate, because technology shouldn't just power industries, it should power people. While everybody else is talking about tomorrow, we'll keep building today, because the progress we need can't wait for the future. >> Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappen! (electronic dance music) (audience applauding) >> Alright. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning. >> Ooh, that was pretty good actually, I'll give it one more shot. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning! >> Oh, that's much better! Hope everyone's had a great morning. Welcome very much to the second Lenovo Transform event here in New York. I think when I got up just now on the steps I realized there's probably one thing in common all of us have in this room including myself which is, absolutely no one has a clue what I'm going to say today. So, I'm hoping very much that we get through this thing very quickly and crisply. I love this town, love New York, and you're going to hear us talk a little bit about New York as we get through here, but just before we get started I'm going to ask anyone who's standing up the back, there are plenty of seats down here, and down here on the right hand side, I think he called it house left is the professional way of calling it, but these steps to my right, your left, get up here, let's get you all seated down so that you can actually sit down during the keynote session for us. Last year we had our very first Lenovo Transform. We had about 400 people. It was here in New York, fantastic event, today, over 1,000 people. We have over 62 different technology demonstrations and about 15 breakout sessions, which I'll talk you through a little bit later on as well, so it's a much bigger event. Next year we're definitely going to be shooting for over 2,000 people as Lenovo really transforms and starts to address a lot of the technology that our commercial customers are really looking for. We were however hampered last year by a storm, I don't know if those of you who were with us last year will remember, we had a storm on the evening before Transform last year in New York, and obviously the day that it actually occurred, and we had lots of logistics. Our media people from AMIA were coming in. They took the, the plane was circling around New York for a long time, and Kamran Amini, our General Manager of our Data Center Infrastructure Group, probably one of our largest groups in the Lenovo DCG business, took 17 hours to get from Raleigh, North Carolina to New York, 17 hours, I think it takes seven or eight hours to drive. Took him 17 hours by plane to get here. And then of course this year, we have Florence. And so, obviously the hurricane Florence down there in the Carolinas right now, we tried to help, but still Kamran has made it today. Unfortunately, very tragically, we were hoping he wouldn't, but he's here today to do a big presentation a little bit later on as well. However, I do want to say, obviously, Florence is a very serious tragedy and we have to take it very serious. We got, our headquarters is in Raleigh, North Carolina. While it looks like the hurricane is just missing it's heading a little bit southeast, all of our thoughts and prayers and well wishes are obviously with everyone in the Carolinas on behalf of Lenovo, everyone at our headquarters, everyone throughout the Carolinas, we want to make sure everyone stays safe and out of harm's way. We have a great mixture today in the crowd of all customers, partners, industry analysts, media, as well as our financial analysts from all around the world. There's over 30 countries represented here and people who are here to listen to both YY, Kirk, and Christian Teismann speak today. And so, it's going to be a really really exciting day, and I really appreciate everyone coming in from all around the world. So, a big round of applause for everyone whose come in. (audience applauding) We have a great agenda for you today, and it starts obviously a very consistent format which worked very successful for us last year, and that's obviously our keynote. You'll hear from YY, our CEO, talk a little bit about the vision he has in the industry and how he sees Lenovo's turned the corner and really driving some great strategy to address our customer's needs. Kirk Skaugen, our Executive Vice President of DCG, will be up talking about how we've transformed the DCG business and once again are hitting record growth ratios for our DCG business. And then you'll hear from Christian Teismann, our SVP and General Manager for our commercial business, get up and talk about everything that's going on in our IDG business. There's really exciting stuff going on there and obviously ThinkPad being the cornerstone of that I'm sure he's going to talk to us about a couple surprises in that space as well. Then we've got some great breakout sessions, I mentioned before, 15 breakout sessions, so while this keynote section goes until about 11:30, once we get through that, please go over and explore, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. We have all of our subject matter experts from both our PC, NBG, and our DCG businesses out to showcase what we're doing as an organization to better address your needs. And then obviously we have the technology pieces that I've also spoken about, 62 different technology displays there arranged from everything IoT, 5G, NFV, everything that's really cool and hot in the industry right now is going to be on display up there, and I really encourage all of you to get up there. So, I'm going to have a quick video to show you from some of the setup yesterday on a couple of the 62 technology displays we've got on up on stage. Okay let's go, so we've got a demonstrations to show you today, one of the greats one here is the one we've done with NC State, a high-performance computing artificial intelligence demonstration of fresh produce. It's about modeling the population growth of the planet, and how we're going to supply water and food as we go forward. Whoo. Oh, that is not an apple. Okay. (woman laughs) Second one over here is really, hey Jonas, how are you? Is really around virtual reality, and how we look at one of the most amazing sites we've got, as an install on our high-performance computing practice here globally. And you can see, obviously, that this is the Barcelona supercomputer, and, where else in New York can you get access to being able to see something like that so easily? Only here at Lenovo Transform. Whoo, okay. (audience applauding) So there's two examples of some of the technology. We're really encouraging everyone in the room after the keynote to flow into that space and really get engaged, and interact with a lot of the technology we've got up there. It seems I need to also do something about my fashion, I've just realized I've worn a vest two days in a row, so I've got to work on that as well. Alright so listen, the last thing on the agenda, we've gone through the breakout sessions and the demo, tonight at four o'clock, there's about 400 of you registered to be on the cruise boat with us, the doors will open behind me. the boat is literally at the pier right behind us. You need to make sure you're on the boat for 4:00 p.m. this evening. Outside of that, I want everyone to have a great time today, really enjoy the experience, make it as experiential as you possibly can, get out there and really get in and touch the technology. There's some really cool AI displays up there for us all to get involved in as well. So ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a lover of tennis, as some of you would've heard last year at Lenovo Transform, as well as a lover of technology, Lenovo, and of course, New York City. I am obviously very pleasured to introduce to you Yang Yuanqing, our CEO, as we like to call him, YY. (audience applauding) (upbeat funky music) >> Good morning, everyone. >> Good morning. >> Thank you Rod for that introduction. Welcome to New York City. So, this is the second year in a row we host our Transform event here, because New York is indeed one of the most transformative cities in the world. Last year on this stage, I spoke about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and our vision around the intelligent transformation, how it would fundamentally change the nature of business and the customer relationships. And why preparing for this transformation is the key for the future of our company. And in the last year I can assure you, we were being very busy doing just that, from searching and bringing global talents around the world to the way we think about every product and every investment we make. I was here in New York just a month ago to announce our fiscal year Q1 earnings, which was a good day for us. I think now the world believes it when we say Lenovo has truly turned the corner to a new phase of growth and a new phase of acceleration in executing the transformation strategy. That's clear to me is that the last few years of a purposeful disruption at Lenovo have led us to a point where we can now claim leadership of the coming intelligent transformation. People often asked me, what is the intelligent transformation? I was saying this way. This is the unlimited potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by artificial intelligence being realized, ordering a pizza through our speaker, and locking the door with a look, letting your car drive itself back to your home. This indeed reflect the power of AI, but it just the surface of it. The true impact of AI will not only make our homes smarter and offices more efficient, but we are also completely transformed every value chip in every industry. However, to realize these amazing possibilities, we will need a structure built around the key components, and one that touches every part of all our lives. First of all, explosions in new technology always lead to new structures. This has happened many times before. In the early 20th century, thousands of companies provided a telephone service. City streets across the US looked like this, and now bundles of a microscopic fiber running from city to city bring the world closer together. Here's what a driving was like in the US, up until 1950s. Good luck finding your way. (audience laughs) And today, millions of vehicles are organized and routed daily, making the world more efficient. Structure is vital, from fiber cables and the interstate highways, to our cells bounded together to create humans. Thankfully the structure for intelligent transformation has emerged, and it is just as revolutionary. What does this new structure look like? We believe there are three key building blocks, data, computing power, and algorithms. Ever wondered what is it behind intelligent transformation? What is fueling this miracle of human possibility? Data. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, not only PCs, mobile phones, have come online and been generating data. Today it is the cameras in this room, the climate controls in our offices, or the smart displays in our kitchens at home. The number of smart devices worldwide will reach over 20 billion in 2020, more than double the number in 2017. These devices and the sensors are connected and generating massive amount of data. By 2020, the amount of data generated will be 57 times more than all the grains of sand on Earth. This data will not only make devices smarter, but will also fuel the intelligence of our homes, offices, and entire industries. Then we need engines to turn the fuel into power, and the engine is actually the computing power. Last but not least the advanced algorithms combined with Big Data technology and industry know how will form vertical industrial intelligence and produce valuable insights for every value chain in every industry. When these three building blocks all come together, it will change the world. At Lenovo, we have each of these elements of intelligent transformations in a single place. We have built our business around the new structure of intelligent transformation, especially with mobile and the data center now firmly part of our business. I'm often asked why did you acquire these businesses? Why has a Lenovo gone into so many fields? People ask the same questions of the companies that become the leaders of the information technology revolution, or the third industrial transformation. They were the companies that saw the future and what the future required, and I believe Lenovo is the company today. From largest portfolio of devices in the world, leadership in the data center field, to the algorithm-powered intelligent vertical solutions, and not to mention the strong partnership Lenovo has built over decades. We are the only company that can unify all these essential assets and deliver end to end solutions. Let's look at each part. We now understand the important importance data plays as fuel in intelligent transformation. Hundreds of billions of devices and smart IoTs in the world are generating better and powering the intelligence. Who makes these devices in large volume and variety? Who puts these devices into people's home, offices, manufacturing lines, and in their hands? Lenovo definitely has the front row seats here. We are number one in PCs and tablets. We also produces smart phones, smart speakers, smart displays. AR/VR headsets, as well as commercial IoTs. All of these smart devices, or smart IoTs are linked to each other and to the cloud. In fact, we have more than 20 manufacturing facilities in China, US, Brazil, Japan, India, Mexico, Germany, and more, producing various devices around the clock. We actually make four devices every second, and 37 motherboards every minute. So, this factory located in my hometown, Hu-fi, China, is actually the largest laptop factory in the world, with more than three million square feet. So, this is as big as 42 soccer fields. Our scale and the larger portfolio of devices gives us access to massive amount of data, which very few companies can say. So, why is the ability to scale so critical? Let's look again at our example from before. The early days of telephone, dozens of service providers but only a few companies could survive consolidation and become the leader. The same was true for the third Industrial Revolution. Only a few companies could scale, only a few could survive to lead. Now the building blocks of the next revolution are locking into place. The (mumbles) will go to those who can operate at the scale. So, who could foresee the total integration of cloud, network, and the device, need to deliver intelligent transformation. Lenovo is that company. We are ready to scale. Next, our computing power. Computing power is provided in two ways. On one hand, the modern supercomputers are providing the brute force to quickly analyze the massive data like never before. On the other hand the cloud computing data centers with the server storage networking capabilities, and any computing IoT's, gateways, and miniservers are making computing available everywhere. Did you know, Lenovo is number one provider of super computers worldwide? 170 of the top 500 supercomputers, run on Lenovo. We hold 89 World Records in key workloads. We are number one in x86 server reliability for five years running, according to ITIC. a respected provider of industry research. We are also the fastest growing provider of hyperscale public cloud, hyper-converged and aggressively growing in edge computing. cur-ges target, we are expand on this point soon. And finally to run these individual nodes into our symphony, we must transform the data and utilize the computing power with advanced algorithms. Manufactured, industry maintenance, healthcare, education, retail, and more, so many industries are on the edge of intelligent transformation to improve efficiency and provide the better products and services. We are creating advanced algorithms and the big data tools combined with industry know-how to provide intelligent vertical solutions for several industries. In fact, we studied at Lenovo first. Our IT and research teams partnered with our global supply chain to develop an AI that improved our demand forecasting accuracy. Beyond managing our own supply chain we have offered our deep learning supply focused solution to other manufacturing companies to improve their efficiency. In the best case, we have improved the demand, focused the accuracy by 30 points to nearly 90 percent, for Baosteel, the largest of steel manufacturer in China, covering the world as well. Led by Lenovo research, we launched the industry-leading commercial ready AR headset, DaystAR, partnering with companies like the ones in this room. This technology is being used to revolutionize the way companies service utility, and even our jet engines. Using our workstations, servers, and award-winning imaging processing algorithms, we have partnered with hospitals to process complex CT scan data in minutes. So, this enable the doctors to more successfully detect the tumors, and it increases the success rate of cancer diagnosis all around the world. We are also piloting our smart IoT driven warehouse solution with one of the world's largest retail companies to greatly improve the efficiency. So, the opportunities are endless. This is where Lenovo will truly shine. When we combine the industry know-how of our customers with our end-to-end technology offerings, our intelligent vertical solutions like this are growing, which Kirk and Christian will share more. Now, what will drive this transformation even faster? The speed at which our networks operate, specifically 5G. You may know that Lenovo just launched the first-ever 5G smartphone, our Moto Z3, with the new 5G Moto model. We are partnering with multiple major network providers like Verizon, China Mobile. With the 5G model scheduled to ship early next year, we will be the first company to provide a 5G mobile experience to any users, customers. This is amazing innovation. You don't have to buy a new phone, just the 5G clip on. What can I say, except wow. (audience laughs) 5G is 10 times the fast faster than 4G. Its download speed will transform how people engage with the world, driverless car, new types of smart wearables, gaming, home security, industrial intelligence, all will be transformed. Finally, accelerating with partners, as ready as we are at Lenovo, we need partners to unlock our full potential, partners here to create with us the edge of the intelligent transformation. The opportunities of intelligent transformation are too profound, the scale is too vast. No company can drive it alone fully. We are eager to collaborate with all partners that can help bring our vision to life. We are dedicated to open partnerships, dedicated to cross-border collaboration, unify the standards, share the advantage, and market the synergies. We partner with the biggest names in the industry, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, and Disney. We also find and partner with the smaller innovators as well. We're building the ultimate partner experience, open, shared, collaborative, diverse. So, everything is in place for intelligent transformation on a global scale. Smart devices are everywhere, the infrastructure is in place, networks are accelerating, and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and Lenovo is at the center of it all. We are helping to drive change with the hundreds of companies, companies just like yours, every day. We are your partner for intelligent transformation. Transformation never stops. This is what you will hear from Kirk, including details about Lenovo NetApp global partnership we just announced this morning. We've made the investments in every single aspect of the technology. We have the end-to-end resources to meet your end-to-end needs. As you attend the breakout session this afternoon, I hope you see for yourself how much Lenovo has transformed as a company this past year, and how we truly are delivering a future of intelligent transformation. Now, let me invite to the stage Kirk Skaugen, our president of Data Center growth to tell you about the exciting transformation happening in the global Data C enter market. Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) >> Well, good morning. >> Good morning. >> Good morning! >> Good morning! >> Excellent, well, I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk about how we're transforming the Data Center and taking you as our customers through your own intelligent transformation journey. Last year I stood up here at Transform 1.0, and we were proud to announce the largest Data Center portfolio in Lenovo's history, so I thought I'd start today and talk about the portfolio and the progress that we've made over the last year, and the strategies that we have going forward in phase 2.0 of Lenovo's transformation to be one of the largest data center companies in the world. We had an audacious vision that we talked about last year, and that is to be the most trusted data center provider in the world, empowering customers through the new IT, intelligent transformation. And now as the world's largest supercomputer provider, giving something back to humanity, is very important this week with the hurricanes now hitting North Carolina's coast, but we take this most trusted aspect very seriously, whether it's delivering the highest quality products on time to you as customers with the highest levels of security, or whether it's how we partner with our channel partners and our suppliers each and every day. You know we're in a unique world where we're going from hundreds of millions of PCs, and then over the next 25 years to hundred billions of connected devices, so each and every one of you is going through this intelligent transformation journey, and in many aspects were very early in that cycle. And we're going to talk today about our role as the largest supercomputer provider, and how we're solving humanity's greatest challenges. Last year we talked about two special milestones, the 25th anniversary of ThinkPad, but also the 25th anniversary of Lenovo with our IBM heritage in x86 computing. I joined the workforce in 1992 out of college, and the IBM first personal server was launching at the same time with an OS2 operating system and a free mouse when you bought the server as a marketing campaign. (audience laughing) But what I want to be very clear today, is that the innovation engine is alive and well at Lenovo, and it's really built on the culture that we're building as a company. All of these awards at the bottom are things that we earned over the last year at Lenovo. As a Fortune now 240 company, larger than companies like Nike, or AMEX, or Coca-Cola. The one I'm probably most proud of is Forbes first list of the top 2,000 globally regarded companies. This was something where 15,000 respondents in 60 countries voted based on ethics, trustworthiness, social conduct, company as an employer, and the overall company performance, and Lenovo was ranked number 27 of 2000 companies by our peer group, but we also now one of-- (audience applauding) But we also got a perfect score in the LGBTQ Equality Index, exemplifying the diversity internally. We're number 82 in the top working companies for mothers, top working companies for fathers, top 100 companies for sustainability. If you saw that factory, it's filled with solar panels on the top of that. And now again, one of the top global brands in the world. So, innovation is built on a customer foundation of trust. We also said last year that we'd be crossing an amazing milestone. So we did, over the last 12 months ship our 20 millionth x86 server. So, thank you very much to our customers for this milestone. (audience applauding) So, let me recap some of the transformation elements that have happened over the last year. Last year I talked about a lot of brand confusion, because we had the ThinkServer brand from the legacy Lenovo, the System x, from IBM, we had acquired a number of networking companies, like BLADE Network Technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last year we've been ramping based on two brand structures, ThinkAgile for next generation IT, and all of our software-defined infrastructure products and ThinkSystem as the world's highest performance, highest reliable x86 server brand, but for servers, for storage, and for networking. We have transformed every single aspect of the customer experience. A year and a half ago, we had four different global channel programs around the world. Typically we're about twice the mix to our channel partners of any of our competitors, so this was really important to fix. We now have a single global Channel program, and have technically certified over 11,000 partners to be technical experts on our product line to deliver better solutions to our customer base. Gardner recently recognized Lenovo as the 26th ranked supply chain in the world. And, that's a pretty big honor, when you're up there with Amazon and Walmart and others, but in tech, we now are in the top five supply chains. You saw the factory network from YY, and today we'll be talking about product shipping in more than 160 countries, and I know there's people here that I've met already this morning, from India, from South Africa, from Brazil and China. We announced new Premier Support services, enabling you to go directly to local language support in nine languages in 49 countries in the world, going directly to a native speaker level three support engineer. And today we have more than 10,000 support specialists supporting our products in over 160 countries. We've delivered three times the number of engineered solutions to deliver a solutions orientation, whether it's on HANA, or SQL Server, or Oracle, et cetera, and we've completely reengaged our system integrator channel. Last year we had the CIO of DXE on stage, and here we're talking about more than 175 percent growth through our system integrator channel in the last year alone as we've brought that back and really built strong relationships there. So, thank you very much for amazing work here on the customer experience. (audience applauding) We also transformed our leadership. We thought it was extremely important with a focus on diversity, to have diverse talent from the legacy IBM, the legacy Lenovo, but also outside the industry. We made about 19 executive changes in the DCG group. This is the most senior leadership team within DCG, all which are newly on board, either from our outside competitors mainly over the last year. About 50 percent of our executives were now hired internally, 50 percent externally, and 31 percent of those new executives are diverse, representing the diversity of our global customer base and gender. So welcome, and most of them you're going to be able to meet over here in the breakout sessions later today. (audience applauding) But some things haven't changed, they're just keeping getting better within Lenovo. So, last year I got up and said we were committed with the new ThinkSystem brand to be a world performance leader. You're going to see that we're sponsoring Ducati for MotoGP. You saw the Ferrari out there with Formula One. That's not a surprise. We want the Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands to be synonymous with world record performance. So in the last year we've gone from 39 to 89 world records, and partners like Intel would tell you, we now have four times the number of world record workloads on Lenovo hardware than any other server company on the planet today, with more than 89 world records across HPC, Java, database, transaction processing, et cetera. And we're proud to have just brought on Doug Fisher from Intel Corporation who had about 10-17,000 people on any given year working for him in workload optimizations across all of our software. It's just another testament to the leadership team we're bringing in to keep focusing on world-class performance software and solutions. We also per ITIC, are the number one now in x86 server reliability five years running. So, this is a survey where CIOs are in a blind survey asked to submit their reliability of their uptime on their x86 server equipment over the last 365 days. And you can see from 2016 to 2017 the downtime, there was over four hours as noted by the 750 CXOs in more than 20 countries is about one percent for the Lenovo products, and is getting worse generation from generation as we went from Broadwell to Pearlie. So we're taking our reliability, which was really paramount in the IBM System X heritage, and ensuring that we don't just recognize high performance but we recognize the highest level of reliability for mission-critical workloads. And what that translates into is that we at once again have been ranked number one in customer satisfaction from you our customers in 19 of 22 attributes, in North America in 18 of 22. This is a survey by TVR across hundreds of customers of us and our top competitors. This is the ninth consecutive study that we've been ranked number one in customer satisfaction, so we're taking this extremely seriously, and in fact YY now has increased the compensation of every single Lenovo employee. Up to 40 percent of their compensation bonus this year is going to be based on customer metrics like quality, order to ship, and things of this nature. So, we're really putting every employee focused on customer centricity this year. So, the summary on Transform 1.0 is that every aspect of what you knew about Lenovo's data center group has transformed, from the culture to the branding to dedicated sales and marketing, supply chain and quality groups, to a worldwide channel program and certifications, to new system integrator relationships, and to the new leadership team. So, rather than me just talk about it, I thought I'd share a quick video about what we've done over the last year, if you could run the video please. Turn around for a second. (epic music) (audience applauds) Okay. So, thank you to all our customers that allowed us to publicly display their logos in that video. So, what that means for you as investors, and for the investor community out there is, that our customers have responded, that this year Gardner just published that we are the fastest growing server company in the top 10, with 39 percent growth quarter-on-quarter, and 49 percent growth year-on-year. If you look at the progress we've made since the transformation the last three quarters publicly, we've grown 17 percent, then 44 percent, then 68 percent year on year in revenue, and I can tell you this quarter I'm as confident as ever in the financials around the DCG group, and it hasn't been in one area. You're going to see breakout sessions from hyperscale, software-defined, and flash, which are all growing more than a 100 percent year-on-year, supercomputing which we'll talk about shortly, now number one, and then ultimately from profitability, delivering five consecutive quarters of pre-tax profit increase, so I think, thank you very much to the customer base who's been working with us through this transformation journey. So, you're here to really hear what's next on 2.0, and that's what I'm excited to talk about today. Last year I came up with an audacious goal that we would become the largest supercomputer company on the planet by 2020, and this graph represents since the acquisition of the IBM System x business how far we were behind being the number one supercomputer. When we started we were 182 positions behind, even with the acquisition for example of SGI from HP, we've now accomplished our goal actually two years ahead of time. We're now the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers, 117 on the list, are now Lenovo computers, and you saw in the video where the universities are said, but I think what I'm most proud of is when your customers rank you as the best. So the awards at the bottom here, are actually Readers Choice from the last International Supercomputing Show where the scientific researchers on these computers ranked their vendors, and we were actually rated the number one server technology in supercomputing with our ThinkSystem SD530, and the number one storage technology with our ThinkSystem DSS-G, but more importantly what we're doing with the technology. You're going to see we won best in life sciences, best in data analytics, and best in collaboration as well, so you're going to see all of that in our breakout sessions. As you saw in the video now, 17 of the top 25 research institutions in the world are now running Lenovo supercomputers. And again coming from Raleigh and watching that hurricane come across the Atlantic, there are eight supercomputers crunching all of those models you see from Germany to Malaysia to Canada, and we're happy to have a SciNet from University of Toronto here with us in our breakout session to talk about what they're doing on climate modeling as well. But we're not stopping there. We just announced our new Neptune warm water cooling technology, which won the International Supercomputing Vendor Showdown, the first time we've won that best of show in 25 years, and we've now installed this. We're building out LRZ in Germany, the first ever warm water cooling in Peking University, at the India Space Propulsion Laboratory, at the Malaysian Weather and Meteorological Society, at Uninett, at the largest supercomputer in Norway, T-Systems, University of Birmingham. This is truly amazing technology where we're actually using water to cool the machine to deliver a significantly more energy-efficient computer. Super important, when we're looking at global warming and some of the electric bills can be millions of dollars just for one computer, and could actually power a small city just with the technology from the computer. We've built AI centers now in Morrisville, Stuttgart, Taipei, and Beijing, where customers can bring their AI workloads in with experts from Intel, from Nvidia, from our FPGA partners, to work on their workloads, and how they can best implement artificial intelligence. And we also this year launched LICO which is Lenovo Intelligent Compute Orchestrator software, and it's a software solution that simplifies the management and use of distributed clusters in both HPC and AI model development. So, what it enables you to do is take a single cluster, and run both HPC and AI workloads on it simultaneously, delivering better TCO for your environment, so check out LICO as well. A lot of the customers here and Wall Street are very excited and using it already. And we talked about solving humanity's greatest challenges. In the breakout session, you're going to have a virtual reality experience where you're going to be able to walk through what as was just ranked the world's most beautiful data center, the Barcelona Supercomputer. So, you can actually walk through one of the largest supercomputers in the world from Barcelona. You can see the work we're doing with NC State where we're going to have to grow the food supply of the world by 50 percent, and there's not enough fresh water in the world in the right places to actually make all those crops grow between now and 2055, so you're going to see the progression of how they're mapping the entire globe and the water around the world, how to build out the crop population over time using AI. You're going to see our work with Vestas is this largest supercomputer provider in the wind turbine areas, how they're working on wind energy, and then with University College London, how they're working on some of the toughest particle physics calculations in the world. So again, lots of opportunity here. Take advantage of it in the breakout sessions. Okay, let me transition to hyperscale. So in hyperscale now, we have completely transformed our business model. We are now powering six of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world, which is a significant difference from where we were two years ago. And the reason we're doing that, is we've coined a term called ODM+. We believe that hyperscalers want more procurement power than an ODM, and Lenovo is doing about $18 billion of procurement a year. They want a broader global supply chain that they can get from a local system integrator. We're more than 160 countries around the world, but they want the same world-class quality and reliability like they get from an MNC. So, what we're doing now is instead of just taking off the shelf motherboards from somewhere, we're starting with a blank sheet of paper, we're working with the customer base on customized SKUs and you can see we already are developing 33 custom solutions for the largest hyperscalers in the world. And then we're not just running notebooks through this factory where YY said, we're running 37 notebook boards a minute, we're now putting in tens and tens and tens of thousands of server board capacity per month into this same factory, so absolutely we can compete with the most aggressive ODM's in the world, but it's not just putting these things in in the motherboard side, we're also building out these systems all around the world, India, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, China. This is an example of a new hyperscale customer we've had this last year, 34,000 servers we delivered in the first six months. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 68 days. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 35 days, with more than 99 percent on-time delivery to 35 data centers in 14 countries as diverse as South Africa, India, China, Brazil, et cetera. And I'm really ashamed to say it was 99.3, because we did have a forklift driver who rammed their forklift right through the middle of the one of the server racks. (audience laughing) At JFK Airport that we had to respond to, but I think this gives you a perspective of what it is to be a top five global supply chain and technology. So last year, I said we would invest significantly in IP, in joint ventures, and M and A to compete in software defined, in networking, and in storage, so I wanted to give you an update on that as well. Our newest software-defined partnership is with Cloudistics, enabling a fully composable cloud infrastructure. It's an exclusive agreement, you can see them here. I think Nag, our founder, is going to be here today, with a significant Lenovo investment in the company. So, this new ThinkAgile CP series delivers the simplicity of the public cloud, on-premise with exceptional support and a marketplace of essential enterprise applications all with a single click deployment. So simply put, we're delivering a private cloud with a premium experience. It's simple in that you need no specialists to deploy it. An IT generalist can set it up and manage it. It's agile in that you can provision dozens of workloads in minutes, and it's transformative in that you get all of the goodness of public cloud on-prem in a private cloud to unlock opportunity for use. So, we're extremely excited about the ThinkAgile CP series that's now shipping into the marketplace. Beyond that we're aggressively ramping, and we're either doubling, tripling, or quadrupling our market share as customers move from traditional server technology to software-defined technology. With Nutanix we've been public, growing about more than 150 percent year-on-year, with Nutanix as their fastest growing Nutanix partner, but today I want to set another audacious goal. I believe we cannot just be Nutanix's fastest growing partner but we can become their largest partner within two years. On Microsoft, we are already four times our market share on Azure stack of our traditional business. We were the first to launch our ThinkAgile on Broadwell and on Skylake with the Azure Stack Infrastructure. And on VMware we're about twice our market segment share. We were the first to deliver an Intel-optimized Optane-certified VSAN node. And with Optane technology, we're delivering 50 percent more VM density than any competitive SSD system in the marketplace, about 10 times lower latency, four times the performance of any SSD system out there, and Lenovo's first to market on that. And at VMworld you saw CEO Pat Gelsinger of VMware talked about project dimension, which is Edge as a service, and we're the only OEM beyond the Dell family that is participating today in project dimension. Beyond that you're going to see a number of other partnerships we have. I'm excited that we have the city of Bogota Columbia here, an eight million person city, where we announced a 3,000 camera video surveillance solution last month. With pivot three you're going to see city of Bogota in our breakout sessions. You're going to see a new partnership with Veeam around backup that's launching today. You're going to see partnerships with scale computing in IoT and hyper-converged infrastructure working on some of the largest retailers in the world. So again, everything out in the breakout session. Transitioning to storage and data management, it's been a great year for Lenovo, more than a 100 percent growth year-on-year, 2X market growth in flash arrays. IDC just reported 30 percent growth in storage, number one in price performance in the world and the best HPC storage product in the top 500 with our ThinkSystem DSS G, so strong coverage, but I'm excited today to announce for Transform 2.0 that Lenovo is launching the largest data management and storage portfolio in our 25-year data center history. (audience applauding) So a year ago, the largest server portfolio, becoming the largest fastest growing server OEM, today the largest storage portfolio, but as you saw this morning we're not doing it alone. Today Lenovo and NetApp, two global powerhouses are joining forces to deliver a multi-billion dollar global alliance in data management and storage to help customers through their intelligent transformation. As the fastest growing worldwide server leader and one of the fastest growing flash array and data management companies in the world, we're going to deliver more choice to customers than ever before, global scale that's never been seen, supply chain efficiencies, and rapidly accelerating innovation and solutions. So, let me unwrap this a little bit for you and talk about what we're announcing today. First, it's the largest portfolio in our history. You're going to see not just storage solutions launching today but a set of solution recipes from NetApp that are going to make Lenovo server and NetApp or Lenovo storage work better together. The announcement enables Lenovo to go from covering 15 percent of the global storage market to more than 90 percent of the global storage market and distribute these products in more than 160 countries around the world. So we're launching today, 10 new storage platforms, the ThinkSystem DE and ThinkSystem DM platforms. They're going to be centrally managed, so the same XClarity management that you've been using for server, you can now use across all of your storage platforms as well, and it'll be supported by the same 10,000 plus service personnel that are giving outstanding customer support to you today on the server side. And we didn't come up with this in the last month or the last quarter. We're announcing availability in ordering today and shipments tomorrow of the first products in this portfolio, so we're excited today that it's not just a future announcement but something you as customers can take advantage of immediately. (audience applauding) The second part of the announcement is we are announcing a joint venture in China. Not only will this be a multi-billion dollar global partnership, but Lenovo will be a 51 percent owner, NetApp a 49 percent owner of a new joint venture in China with the goal of becoming in the top three storage companies in the largest data and storage market in the world. We will deliver our R and D in China for China, pooling our IP and resources together, and delivering a single route to market through a complementary channel, not just in China but worldwide. And in the future I just want to tell everyone this is phase one. There is so much exciting stuff. We're going to be on the stage over the next year talking to you about around integrated solutions, next-generation technologies, and further synergies and collaborations. So, rather than just have me talk about it, I'd like to welcome to the stage our new partner NetApp and Brad Anderson who's the senior vice president and general manager of NetApp Cloud Infrastructure. (upbeat music) (audience applauding) >> Thank You Kirk. >> So Brad, we've known each other a long time. It's an exciting day. I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say NetApp's perspective on this announcement. >> Very good, thank you very much, Kirk. Kirk and I go back to I think 1994, so hey good morning and welcome. My name is Brad Anderson. I manage the Cloud Infrastructure Group at NetApp, and I am honored and privileged to be here at Lenovo Transform, particularly today on today's announcement. Now, you've heard a lot about digital transformation about how companies have to transform their IT to compete in today's global environment. And today's announcement with the partnership between NetApp and Lenovo is what that's all about. This is the joining of two global leaders bringing innovative technology in a simplified solution to help customers modernize their IT and accelerate their global digital transformations. Drawing on the strengths of both companies, Lenovo's high performance compute world-class supply chain, and NetApp's hybrid cloud data management, hybrid flash and all flash storage solutions and products. And both companies providing our customers with the global scale for them to be able to meet their transformation goals. At NetApp, we're very excited. This is a quote from George Kurian our CEO. George spent all day yesterday with YY and Kirk, and would have been here today if it hadn't been also our shareholders meeting in California, but I want to just convey how excited we are for all across NetApp with this partnership. This is a partnership between two companies with tremendous market momentum. Kirk took you through all the amazing results that Lenovo has accomplished, number one in supercomputing, number one in performance, number one in x86 reliability, number one in x86 customers sat, number five in supply chain, really impressive and congratulations. Like Lenovo, NetApp is also on a transformation journey, from a storage company to the data authority in hybrid cloud, and we've seen some pretty impressive momentum as well. Just last week we became number one in all flash arrays worldwide, catching EMC and Dell, and we plan to keep on going by them, as we help customers modernize their their data centers with cloud connected flash. We have strategic partnerships with the largest hyperscalers to provide cloud native data services around the globe and we are having success helping our customers build their own private clouds with just, with a new disruptive hyper-converged technology that allows them to operate just like hyperscalers. These three initiatives has fueled NetApp's transformation, and has enabled our customers to change the world with data. And oh by the way, it has also fueled us to have meet or have beaten Wall Street's expectations for nine quarters in a row. These are two companies with tremendous market momentum. We are also building this partnership for long term success. We think about this as phase one and there are two important components to phase one. Kirk took you through them but let me just review them. Part one, the establishment of a multi-year commitment and a collaboration agreement to offer Lenovo branded flash products globally, and as Kurt said in 160 countries. Part two, the formation of a joint venture in PRC, People's Republic of China, that will provide long term commitment, joint product development, and increase go-to-market investment to meet the unique needs to China. Both companies will put in storage technologies and storage expertise to form an independent JV that establishes a data management company in China for China. And while we can dream about what phase two looks like, our entire focus is on making phase one incredibly successful and I'm pleased to repeat what Kirk, is that the first products are orderable and shippable this week in 160 different countries, and you will see our two companies focusing on the here and now. On our joint go to market strategy, you'll see us working together to drive strategic alignment, focused execution, strong governance, and realistic expectations and milestones. And it starts with the success of our customers and our channel partners is job one. Enabling customers to modernize their legacy IT with complete data center solutions, ensuring that our customers get the best from both companies, new offerings the fuel business success, efficiencies to reinvest in game-changing initiatives, and new solutions for new mission-critical applications like data analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Channel partners are also top of mind for both our two companies. We are committed to the success of our existing and our future channel partners. For NetApp channel partners, it is new pathways to new segments and to new customers. For Lenovo's channel partners, it is the competitive weapons that now allows you to compete and more importantly win against Dell, EMC, and HP. And the good news for both companies is that our channel partner ecosystem is highly complementary with minimal overlap. Today is the first day of a very exciting partnership, of a partnership that will better serve our customers today and will provide new opportunities to both our companies and to our partners, new products to our customers globally and in China. I am personally very excited. I will be on the board of the JV. And so, I look forward to working with you, partnering with you and serving you as we go forward, and with that, I'd like to invite Kirk back up. (audience applauding) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Well, thank you, Brad. I think it's an exciting overview, and these products will be manufactured in China, in Mexico, in Hungary, and around the world, enabling this amazing supply chain we talked about to deliver in over 160 countries. So thank you Brad, thank you George, for the amazing partnership. So again, that's not all. In Transform 2.0, last year, we talked about the joint ventures that were coming. I want to give you a sneak peek at what you should expect at future Lenovo events around the world. We have this Transform in Beijing in a couple weeks. We'll then be repeating this in 20 different locations roughly around the world over the next year, and I'm excited probably more than ever about what else is coming. Let's talk about Telco 5G and network function virtualization. Today, Motorola phones are certified on 46 global networks. We launched the world's first 5G upgradable phone here in the United States with Verizon. Lenovo DCG sells to 58 telecommunication providers around the world. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai, you saw China Telecom and China Mobile in the Lenovo booth, China Telecom showing a video broadband remote access server, a VBRAS, with video streaming demonstrations with 2x less jitter than they had seen before. You saw China Mobile with a virtual remote access network, a VRAN, with greater than 10 times the throughput and 10x lower latency running on Lenovo. And this year, we'll be launching a new NFV company, a software company in China for China to drive the entire NFV stack, delivering not just hardware solutions, but software solutions, and we've recently hired a new CEO. You're going to hear more about that over the next several quarters. Very exciting as we try to drive new economics into the networks to deliver these 20 billion devices. We're going to need new economics that I think Lenovo can uniquely deliver. The second on IoT and edge, we've integrated on the device side into our intelligent devices group. With everything that's going to consume electricity computes and communicates, Lenovo is in a unique position on the device side to take advantage of the communications from Motorola and being one of the largest device companies in the world. But this year, we're also going to roll out a comprehensive set of edge gateways and ruggedized industrial servers and edge servers and ISP appliances for the edge and for IoT. So look for that as well. And then lastly, as a service, you're going to see Lenovo delivering hardware as a service, device as a service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and hardware as a service, not just as a glorified leasing contract, but with IP, we've developed true flexible metering capability that enables you to scale up and scale down freely and paying strictly based on usage, and we'll be having those announcements within this fiscal year. So Transform 2.0, lots to talk about, NetApp the big news of the day, but a lot more to come over the next year from the Data Center group. So in summary, I'm excited that we have a lot of customers that are going to be on stage with us that you saw in the video. Lots of testimonials so that you can talk to colleagues of yourself. Alamos Gold from Canada, a Canadian gold producer, Caligo for data optimization and privacy, SciNet, the largest supercomputer we've ever put into North America, and the largest in Canada at the University of Toronto will be here talking about climate change. City of Bogota again with our hyper-converged solutions around smart city putting in 3,000 cameras for criminal detection, license plate detection, et cetera, and then more from a channel mid market perspective, Jerry's Foods, which is from my home state of Wisconsin, and Minnesota which has about 57 stores in the specialty foods market, and how they're leveraging our IoT solutions as well. So again, about five times the number of demos that we had last year. So in summary, first and foremost to the customers, thank you for your business. It's been a great journey and I think we're on a tremendous role. You saw from last year, we're trying to build credibility with you. After the largest server portfolio, we're now the fastest-growing server OEM per Gardner, number one in performance, number one in reliability, number one in customer satisfaction, number one in supercomputing. Today, the largest storage portfolio in our history, with the goal of becoming the fastest growing storage company in the world, top three in China, multibillion-dollar collaboration with NetApp. And the transformation is going to continue with new edge gateways, edge servers, NFV solutions, telecommunications infrastructure, and hardware as a service with dynamic metering. So thank you for your time. I've looked forward to meeting many of you over the next day. We appreciate your business, and with that, I'd like to bring up Rod Lappen to introduce our next speaker. Rod? (audience applauding) >> Thanks, boss, well done. Alright ladies and gentlemen. No real secret there. I think we've heard why I might talk about the fourth Industrial Revolution in data and exactly what's going on with that. You've heard Kirk with some amazing announcements, obviously now with our NetApp partnership, talk about 5G, NFV, cloud, artificial intelligence, I think we've hit just about all the key hot topics. It's with great pleasure that I now bring up on stage Mr. Christian Teismann, our senior vice president and general manager of commercial business for both our PCs and our IoT business, so Christian Teismann. (techno music) Here, take that. >> Thank you. I think I'll need that. >> Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, you and I last year, we had a bit of a chat about being in New York. >> Exports. >> You were an expat in New York for a long time. >> That's true. >> And now, you've moved from New York. You're in Munich? >> Yep. >> How does that feel? >> Well Munich is a wonderful city, and it's a great place to live and raise kids, but you know there's no place in the world like New York. >> Right. >> And I miss it a lot, quite frankly. >> So what exactly do you miss in New York? >> Well there's a lot of things in New York that are unique, but I know you spent some time in Japan, but I still believe the best sushi in the world is still in New York City. (all laughing) >> I will beg to differ. I will beg to differ. I think Mr. Guchi-san from Softbank is here somewhere. He will get up an argue very quickly that Japan definitely has better sushi than New York. But obviously you know, it's a very very special place, and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. What about Munich? Anything else that you like in Munich? >> Well I mean in Munich, we have pork knuckles. >> Pork knuckles. (Christian laughing) Very similar sushi. >> What is also very fantastic, but we have the real, the real Oktoberfest in Munich, and it starts next week, mid-September, and I think it's unique in the world. So it's very special as well. >> Oktoberfest. >> Yes. >> Unfortunately, I'm not going this year, 'cause you didn't invite me, but-- (audience chuckling) How about, I think you've got a bit of a secret in relation to Oktoberfest, probably not in Munich, however. >> It's a secret, yes, but-- >> Are you going to share? >> Well I mean-- >> See how I'm putting you on the spot? >> In the 10 years, while living here in New York, I was a regular visitor of the Oktoberfest at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, where I actually met my wife, and she's German. >> Very good. So, how about a big round of applause? (audience applauding) Not so much for Christian, but more I think, obviously for his wife, who obviously had been drinking and consequently ended up with you. (all laughing) See you later, mate. >> That's the beauty about Oktoberfest, but yes. So first of all, good morning to everybody, and great to be back here in New York for a second Transform event. New York clearly is the melting pot of the world in terms of culture, nations, but also business professionals from all kind of different industries, and having this event here in New York City I believe is manifesting what we are trying to do here at Lenovo, is transform every aspect of our business and helping our customers on the journey of intelligent transformation. Last year, in our transformation on the device business, I talked about how the PC is transforming to personalized computing, and we've made a lot of progress in that journey over the last 12 months. One major change that we have made is we combined all our device business under one roof. So basically PCs, smart devices, and smart phones are now under the roof and under the intelligent device group. But from my perspective makes a lot of sense, because at the end of the day, all devices connect in the modern world into the cloud and are operating in a seamless way. But we are also moving from a device business what is mainly a hardware focus historically, more and more also into a solutions business, and I will give you during my speech a little bit of a sense of what we are trying to do, as we are trying to bring all these components closer together, and specifically also with our strengths on the data center side really build end-to-end customer solution. Ultimately, what we want to do is make our business, our customer's businesses faster, safer, and ultimately smarter as well. So I want to look a little bit back, because I really believe it's important to understand what's going on today on the device side. Many of us have still grown up with phones with terminals, ultimately getting their first desktop, their first laptop, their first mobile phone, and ultimately smartphone. Emails and internet improved our speed, how we could operate together, but still we were defined by linear technology advances. Today, the world has changed completely. Technology itself is not a limiting factor anymore. It is how we use technology going forward. The Internet is pervasive, and we are not yet there that we are always connected, but we are nearly always connected, and we are moving to the stage, that everything is getting connected all the time. Sharing experiences is the most driving force in our behavior. In our private life, sharing pictures, videos constantly, real-time around the world, with our friends and with our family, and you see the same behavior actually happening in the business life as well. Collaboration is the number-one topic if it comes down to workplace, and video and instant messaging, things that are coming from the consumer side are dominating the way we are operating in the commercial business as well. Most important beside technology, that a new generation of workforce has completely changed the way we are working. As the famous workforce the first generation of Millennials that have now fully entered in the global workforce, and the next generation, it's called Generation Z, is already starting to enter the global workforce. By 2025, 75 percent of the world's workforce will be composed out of two of these generations. Why is this so important? These two generations have been growing up using state-of-the-art IT technology during their private life, during their education, school and study, and are taking these learnings and taking these behaviors in the commercial workspace. And this is the number one force of change that we are seeing in the moment. Diverse workforces are driving this change in the IT spectrum, and for years in many of our customers' focus was their customer focus. Customer experience also in Lenovo is the most important thing, but we've realized that our own human capital is equally valuable in our customer relationships, and employee experience is becoming a very important thing for many of our customers, and equally for Lenovo as well. As you have heard YY, as we heard from YY, Lenovo is focused on intelligent transformation. What that means for us in the intelligent device business is ultimately starting with putting intelligence in all of our devices, smartify every single one of our devices, adding value to our customers, traditionally IT departments, but also focusing on their end users and building products that make their end users more productive. And as a world leader in commercial devices with more than 33 percent market share, we can solve problems been even better than any other company in the world. So, let's talk about transformation of productivity first. We are in a device-led world. Everything we do is connected. There's more interaction with devices than ever, but also with spaces who are increasingly becoming smart and intelligent. YY said it, by 2020 we have more than 20 billion connected devices in the world, and it will grow exponentially from there on. And users have unique personal choices for technology, and that's very important to recognize, and we call this concept a digital wardrobe. And it means that every single end-user in the commercial business is composing his personal wardrobe on an ongoing basis and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and based where he's going and based what task he is doing. I would ask all of you to put out all the devices you're carrying in your pockets and in your bags. You will see a lot of you are using phones, tablets, laptops, but also cameras and even smartwatches. They're all different, but they have one underlying technology that is bringing it all together. Recognizing digital wardrobe dynamics is a core factor for us to put all the devices under one roof in IDG, one business group that is dedicated to end-user solutions across mobile, PC, but also software services and imaging, to emerging technologies like AR, VR, IoT, and ultimately a AI as well. A couple of years back there was a big debate around bring-your-own-device, what was called consumerization. Today consumerization does not exist anymore, because consumerization has happened into every single device we build in our commercial business. End users and commercial customers today do expect superior display performance, superior audio, microphone, voice, and touch quality, and have it all connected and working seamlessly together in an ease of use space. We are already deep in the journey of personalized computing today. But the center point of it has been for the last 25 years, the mobile PC, that we have perfected over the last 25 years, and has been the undisputed leader in mobility computing. We believe in the commercial business, the ThinkPad is still the core device of a digital wardrobe, and we continue to drive the success of the ThinkPad in the marketplace. We've sold more than 140 million over the last 26 years, and even last year we exceeded nearly 11 million units. That is about 21 ThinkPads per minute, or one Thinkpad every three seconds that we are shipping out in the market. It's the number one commercial PC in the world. It has gotten countless awards but we felt last year after Transform we need to build a step further, in really tailoring the ThinkPad towards the need of the future. So, we announced a new line of X1 Carbon and Yoga at CES the Consumer Electronics Show. And the reason is not we want to sell to consumer, but that we do recognize that a lot of CIOs and IT decision makers need to understand what consumers are really doing in terms of technology to make them successful. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> When you're the number one business laptop of all time, your only competition is yourself. (wall shattering) And, that's different. Different, like resisting heat, ice, dust, and spills. Different, like sharper, brighter OLA display. The trackpoint that reinvented controls, and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, built by an engineering and design team, doing the impossible for the last 25 years. This is the number one business laptop of all time, but it's not a laptop. It's a ThinkPad. (audience applauding) >> Thank you very much. And we are very proud that Lenovo ThinkPad has been selected as the best laptop in the world in the second year in a row. I think it's a wonderful tribute to what our engineers have been done on this one. And users do want awesome displays. They want the best possible audio, voice, and touch control, but some users they want more. What they want is super power, and I'm really proud to announce our newest member of the X1 family, and that's the X1 extreme. It's exceptionally featured. It has six core I9 intel chipset, the highest performance you get in the commercial space. It has Nvidia XTX graphic, it is a 4K UHD display with HDR with Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos Audio, two terabyte in SSD, so it is really the absolute Ferrari in terms of building high performance commercial computer. Of course it has touch and voice, but it is one thing. It has so much performance that it serves also a purpose that is not typical for commercial, and I know there's a lot of secret gamers also here in this room. So you see, by really bringing technology together in the commercial space, you're creating productivity solutions of one of a kind. But there's another category of products from a productivity perspective that is incredibly important in our commercial business, and that is the workstation business . Clearly workstations are very specifically designed computers for very advanced high-performance workloads, serving designers, architects, researchers, developers, or data analysts. And power and performance is not just about the performance itself. It has to be tailored towards the specific use case, and traditionally these products have a similar size, like a server. They are running on Intel Xeon technology, and they are equally complex to manufacture. We have now created a new category as the ultra mobile workstation, and I'm very proud that we can announce here the lightest mobile workstation in the industry. It is so powerful that it really can run AI and big data analysis. And with this performance you can go really close where you need this power, to the sensors, into the cars, or into the manufacturing places where you not only wannna read the sensors but get real-time analytics out of these sensors. To build a machine like this one you need customers who are really challenging you to the limit. and we're very happy that we had a customer who went on this journey with us, and ultimately jointly with us created this product. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> My world involves pathfinding both the hardware needs to the various work sites throughout the company, and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, laptop, or workstation to match those needs. My first impressions when I first seen the ThinkPad P1 was I didn't actually believe that we could get everything that I was asked for inside something as small and light in comparison to other mobile workstations. That was one of the I can't believe this is real sort of moments for me. (engine roars) >> Well, it's better than general when you're going around in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, and going on a track is not necessarily the best bet, so having a lightweight very powerful laptop is extremely useful. It can take a Xeon processor, which can support ECC from when we try to load a full car, and when we're analyzing live simulation results. through and RCFT post processor or example. It needs a pretty powerful machine. >> It's come a long way to be able to deliver this. I hate to use the word game changer, but it is that for us. >> Aston Martin has got a lot of different projects going. There's some pretty exciting projects and a pretty versatile range coming out. Having Lenovo as a partner is certainly going to ensure that future. (engine roars) (audience applauds) >> So, don't you think the Aston Martin design and the ThinkPad design fit very well together? (audience laughs) So if Q, would get a new laptop, I think you would get a ThinkPad X P1. So, I want to switch gears a little bit, and go into something in terms of productivity that is not necessarily on top of the mind or every end user but I believe it's on top of the mind of every C-level executive and of every CEO. Security is the number one threat in terms of potential risk in your business and the cost of cybersecurity is estimated by 2020 around six trillion dollars. That's more than the GDP of Japan and we've seen a significant amount of data breach incidents already this years. Now, they're threatening to take companies out of business and that are threatening companies to lose a huge amount of sensitive customer data or internal data. At Lenovo, we are taking security very, very seriously, and we run a very deep analysis, around our own security capabilities in the products that we are building. And we are announcing today a new brand under the Think umbrella that is called ThinkShield. Our goal is to build the world's most secure PC, and ultimately the most secure devices in the industry. And when we looked at this end-to-end, there is no silver bullet around security. You have to go through every aspect where security breaches can potentially happen. That is why we have changed the whole organization, how we look at security in our device business, and really have it grouped under one complete ecosystem of solutions, Security is always something where you constantly are getting challenged with the next potential breach the next potential technology flaw. As we keep innovating and as we keep integrating, a lot of our partners' software and hardware components into our products. So for us, it's really very important that we partner with companies like Intel, Microsoft, Coronet, Absolute, and many others to really as an example to drive full encryption on all the data seamlessly, to have multi-factor authentication to protect your users' identity, to protect you in unsecured Wi-Fi locations, or even simple things like innovation on the device itself, to and an example protect the camera, against usage with a little thing like a thinkShutter that you can shut off the camera. SO what I want to show you here, is this is the full portfolio of ThinkShield that we are announcing today. This is clearly not something I can even read to you today, but I believe it shows you the breadth of security management that we are announcing today. There are four key pillars in managing security end-to-end. The first one is your data, and this has a lot of aspects around the hardware and the software itself. The second is identity. The third is the security around online, and ultimately the device itself. So, there is a breakout on security and ThinkShield today, available in the afternoon, and encourage you to really take a deeper look at this one. The first pillar around productivity was the device, and around the device. The second major pillar that we are seeing in terms of intelligent transformation is the workspace itself. Employees of a new generation have a very different habit how they work. They split their time between travel, working remotely but if they do come in the office, they expect a very different office environment than what they've seen in the past in cubicles or small offices. They come into the office to collaborate, and they want to create ideas, and they really work in cross-functional teams, and they want to do it instantly. And what we've seen is there is a huge amount of investment that companies are doing today in reconfiguring real estate reconfiguring offices. And most of these kind of things are moving to a digital platform. And what we are doing, is we want to build an entire set of solutions that are just focused on making the workspace more productive for remote workforce, and to create technology that allow people to work anywhere and connect instantly. And the core of this is that we need to be, the productivity of the employee as high as possible, and make it for him as easy as possible to use these kind of technologies. Last year in Transform, I announced that we will enter the smart office space. By the end of last year, we brought the first product into the market. It's called the Hub 500. It's already deployed in thousands of our customers, and it's uniquely focused on Microsoft Skype for Business, and making meeting instantly happen. And the product is very successful in the market. What we are announcing today is the next generation of this product, what is the Hub 700, what has a fantastic audio quality. It has far few microphones, and it is usable in small office environment, as well as in major conference rooms, but the most important part of this new announcement is that we are also announcing a software platform, and this software platform allows you to run multiple video conferencing software solutions on the same platform. Many of you may have standardized for one software solution or for another one, but as you are moving in a world of collaborating instantly with partners, customers, suppliers, you always will face multiple software standards in your company, and Lenovo is uniquely positioned but providing a middleware platform for the device to really enable multiple of these UX interfaces. And there's more to come and we will add additional UX interfaces on an ongoing base, based on our customer requirements. But this software does not only help to create a better experience and a higher productivity in the conference room or the huddle room itself. It really will allow you ultimately to manage all your conference rooms in the company in one instance. And you can run AI technologies around how to increase productivity utilization of your entire conference room ecosystem in your company. You will see a lot more devices coming from the node in this space, around intelligent screens, cameras, and so on, and so on. The idea is really that Lenovo will become a core provider in the whole movement into the smart office space. But it's great if you have hardware and software that is really supporting the approach of modern IT, but one component that Kirk also mentioned is absolutely critical, that we are providing this to you in an as a service approach. Get it what you want, when you need it, and pay it in the amount that you're really using it. And within UIT there is also I think a new philosophy around IT management, where you're much more focused on the value that you are consuming instead of investing into technology. We are launched as a service two years back and we already have a significant number of customers running PC as a service, but we believe as a service will stretch far more than just the PC device. It will go into categories like smart office. It might go even into categories like phone, and it will definitely go also in categories like storage and server in terms of capacity management. I want to highlight three offerings that we are also displaying today that are sort of building blocks in terms of how we really run as a service. The first one is that we collaborated intensively over the last year with Microsoft to be the launch pilot for their Autopilot offering, basically deploying images easily in the same approach like you would deploy a new phone on the network. The purpose really is to make new imaging and enabling new PC as seamless as it's used to be in the phone industry, and we have a complete set of offerings, and already a significant number customers have deployed Autopilot with Lenovo. The second major offering is Premier Support, like in the in the server business, where Premier Support is absolutely critical to run critical infrastructure, we see a lot of our customers do want to have Premier Support for their end users, so they can be back into work basically instantly, and that you have the highest possible instant repair on every single device. And then finally we have a significant amount of time invested into understanding how the software as a service really can get into one philosophy. And many of you already are consuming software as a service in many different contracts from many different vendors, but what we've created is one platform that really can manage this all together. All these things are the foundation for a device as a service offering that really can manage this end-to-end. So, implementing an intelligent workplace can be really a daunting prospect depending on where you're starting from, and how big your company ultimately is. But how do you manage the transformation of technology workspace if you're present in 50 or more countries and you run an infrastructure for more than 100,000 people? Michelin, famous for their tires, infamous for their Michelin star restaurant rating, especially in New York, and instantly recognizable by the Michelin Man, has just doing that. Please welcome with me Damon McIntyre from Michelin to talk to us about the challenges and transforming collaboration and productivity. (audience applauding) (electronic dance music) Thank you, David. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> We on? >> So, how do you feel here? >> Well good, I want to thank you first of all for your partnership and the devices you create that helped us design, manufacture, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? I just had to say it and put out there, alright. And I was wondering, were those Michelin tires on that Aston Martin? >> I'm pretty sure there is no other tire that would fit to that. >> Yeah, no, thank you, thank you again, and thank you for the introduction. >> So, when we talk about the transformation happening really in the workplace, the most tangible transformation that you actually see is the drastic change that companies are doing physically. They're breaking down walls. They're removing cubes, and they're moving to flexible layouts, new desks, new huddle rooms, open spaces, but the underlying technology for that is clearly not so visible very often. So, tell us about Michelin's strategy, and the technology you are deploying to really enable this corporation. >> So we, so let me give a little bit a history about the company to understand the daunting tasks that we had before us. So we have over 114,000 people in the company under 170 nationalities, okay? If you go to the corporate office in France, it's Clermont. It's about 3,000 executives and directors, and what have you in the marketing, sales, all the way up to the chain of the global CIO, right? Inside of the Americas, we merged in Americas about three years ago. Now we have the Americas zone. There's about 28,000 employees across the Americas, so it's really, it's really hard in a lot of cases. You start looking at the different areas that you lose time, and you lose you know, your productivity and what have you, so there, it's when we looked at different aspects of how we were going to manage the meeting rooms, right? because we have opened up our areas of workspace, our CIO, CEOs in our zones will no longer have an office. They'll sit out in front of everybody else and mingle with the crowd. So, how do you take those spaces that were originally used by an individual but now turn them into like meeting rooms? So, we went through a large process, and looked at the Hub 500, and that really met our needs, because at the end of the day what we noticed was, it was it was just it just worked, okay? We've just added it to the catalog, so we're going to be deploying it very soon, and I just want to again point that I know everybody struggles with this, and if you look at all the minutes that you lose in starting up a meeting, and we know you know what I'm talking about when I say this, it equates to many many many dollars, okay? And so at the end the day, this product helps us to be more efficient in starting up the meeting, and more productive during the meeting. >> Okay, it's very good to hear. Another major trend we are seeing in IT departments is taking a more hands-off approach to hardware. We're seeing new technologies enable IT to create a more efficient model, how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, and how they are ultimately supporting themselves. So what's your strategy around the lifecycle management of the devices? >> So yeah you mentioned, again, we'll go back to the 114,000 employees in the company, right? You imagine looking at all the devices we use. I'm not going to get into the number of devices we have, but we have a set number that we use, and we have to go through a process of deploying these devices, which we right now service our own image. We build our images, we service them through our help desk and all that process, and we go through it. If you imagine deploying 25,000 PCs in a year, okay? The time and the daunting task that's behind all that, you can probably add up to 20 or 30 people just full-time doing that, okay? So, with partnering with Lenovo and their excellent technology, their technical teams, and putting together the whole process of how we do imaging, it now lifts that burden off of our folks, and it shifts it into a more automated process through the cloud, okay? And, it's with the Autopilot on the end of the project, we'll have Autopilot fully engaged, but what I really appreciate is how Lenovo really, really kind of got with us, and partnered with us for the whole process. I mean it wasn't just a partner between Michelin and Lenovo. Microsoft was also partnered during that whole process, and it really was a good project that we put together, and we hope to have something in a full production mode next year for sure. >> So, David thank you very, very much to be here with us on stage. What I really want to say, customers like you, who are always challenging us on every single aspect of our capabilities really do make the big difference for us to get better every single day and we really appreciate the partnership. >> Yeah, and I would like to say this is that I am, I'm doing what he's exactly said he just said. I am challenging Lenovo to show us how we can innovate in our work space with your devices, right? That's a challenge, and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. We've done some in the past, but I'm really going to challenge you, and my whole aspect about how to do that is bring you into our workspace. Show you how we make how we go through the process of making tires and all that process, and how we distribute those tires, so you can brainstorm, come back to the table and say, here's a device that can do exactly what you're doing right now, better, more efficient, and save money, so thank you. >> Thank you very much, David. (audience applauding) Well it's sometimes really refreshing to get a very challenging customers feedback. And you know, we will continue to grow this business together, and I'm very confident that your challenge will ultimately help to make our products even more seamless together. So, as we now covered productivity and how we are really improving our devices itself, and the transformation around the workplace, there is one pillar left I want to talk about, and that's really, how do we make businesses smarter than ever? What that really means is, that we are on a journey on trying to understand our customer's business, deeper than ever, understanding our customer's processes even better than ever, and trying to understand how we can help our customers to become more competitive by injecting state-of-the-art technology in this intelligent transformation process, into core processes. But this cannot be done without talking about a fundamental and that is the journey towards 5G. I really believe that 5G is changing everything the way we are operating devices today, because they will be connected in a way like it has never done before. YY talked about you know, 20 times 10 times the amount of performance. There are other studies that talk about even 200 times the performance, how you can use these devices. What it will lead to ultimately is that we will build devices that will be always connected to the cloud. And, we are preparing for this, and Kirk already talked about, and how many operators in the world we already present with our Moto phones, with how many Telcos we are working already on the backend, and we are working on the device side on integrating 5G basically into every single one of our product in the future. One of the areas that will benefit hugely from always connected is the world of virtual reality and augmented reality. And I'm going to pick here one example, and that is that we have created a commercial VR solution for classrooms and education, and basically using consumer type of product like our Mirage Solo with Daydream and put a solution around this one that enables teachers and schools to use these products in the classroom experience. So, students now can have immersive learning. They can studying sciences. They can look at environmental issues. They can exploring their careers, or they can even taking a tour in the next college they're going to go after this one. And no matter what grade level, this is how people will continue to learn in the future. It's quite a departure from the old world of textbooks. In our area that we are looking is IoT, And as YY already elaborated, we are clearly learning from our own processes around how we improve our supply chain and manufacturing and how we improve also retail experience and warehousing, and we are working with some of the largest companies in the world on pilots, on deploying IoT solutions to make their businesses, their processes, and their businesses, you know, more competitive, and some of them you can see in the demo environment. Lenovo itself already is managing 55 million devices in an IoT fashion connecting to our own cloud, and constantly improving the experience by learning from the behavior of these devices in an IoT way, and we are collecting significant amount of data to really improve the performance of these systems and our future generations of products on a ongoing base. We have a very strong partnership with a company called ADLINK from Taiwan that is one of the leading manufacturers of manufacturing PC and hardened devices to create solutions on the IoT platform. The next area that we are very actively investing in is commercial augmented reality. I believe augmented reality has by far more opportunity in commercial than virtual reality, because it has the potential to ultimately improve every single business process of commercial customers. Imagine in the future how complex surgeries can be simplified by basically having real-time augmented reality information about the surgery, by having people connecting into a virtual surgery, and supporting the surgery around the world. Visit a furniture store in the future and see how this furniture looks in your home instantly. Doing some maintenance on some devices yourself by just calling the company and getting an online manual into an augmented reality device. Lenovo is exploring all kinds of possibilities, and you will see a solution very soon from Lenovo. Early when we talked about smart office, I talked about the importance of creating a software platform that really run all these use cases for a smart office. We are creating a similar platform for augmented reality where companies can develop and run all their argumented reality use cases. So you will see that early in 2019 we will announce an augmented reality device, as well as an augmented reality platform. So, I know you're very interested on what exactly we are rolling out, so we will have a first prototype view available there. It's still a codename project on the horizon, and we will announce it ultimately in 2019, but I think it's good for you to take a look what we are doing here. So, I just wanted to give you a peek on what we are working beyond smart office and the device productivity in terms of really how we make businesses smarter. It's really about increasing productivity, providing you the most secure solutions, increase workplace collaboration, increase IT efficiency, using new computing devices and software and services to make business smarter in the future. There's no other company that will enable to offer what we do in commercial. No company has the breadth of commercial devices, software solutions, and the same data center capabilities, and no other company can do more for your intelligent transformation than Lenovo. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) >> Thanks mate, give me that. I need that. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are done. So firstly, I've got a couple of little housekeeping pieces at the end of this and then we can go straight into going and experiencing some of the technology we've got on the left-hand side of the room here. So, I want to thank Christian obviously. Christian, awesome as always, some great announcements there. I love the P1. I actually like the Aston Martin a little bit better, but I'll take either if you want to give me one for free. I'll take it. We heard from YY obviously about the industry and how the the fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting us all from a digital transformation perspective, and obviously Kirk on DCG, the great NetApp announcement, which is going to be really exciting, actually that Twitter and some of the social media panels are absolutely going crazy, so it's good to see that the industry is really taking some impact. Some of the publications are really great, so thank you for the media who are obviously in the room publishing right no. But now, I really want to say it's all of your turn. So, all of you up the back there who are having coffee, it's your turn now. I want everyone who's sitting down here after this event move into there, and really take advantage of the 15 breakouts that we've got set there. There are four breakout sessions from a time perspective. I want to try and get you all out there at least to use up three of them and use your fourth one to get out and actually experience some of the technology. So, you've got four breakout sessions. A lot of the breakout sessions are actually done twice. If you have not downloaded the app, please download the app so you can actually see what time things are going on and make sure you're registering correctly. There's a lot of great experience of stuff out there for you to go do. I've got one quick video to show you on some of the technology we've got and then we're about to close. Alright, here we are acting crazy. Now, you can see obviously, artificial intelligence machine learning in the browser. God, I hate that dance, I'm not a Millenial at all. It's effectively going to be implemented by healthcare. I want you to come around and test that out. Look at these two guys. This looks like a Lenovo management meeting to be honest with you. These two guys are actually concentrating, using their brain power to race each others in cars. You got to come past and give that a try. Give that a try obviously. Fantastic event here, lots of technology for you to experience, and great partners that have been involved as well. And so, from a Lenovo perspective, we've had some great alliance partners contribute, including obviously our number one partner, Intel, who's been a really big loyal contributor to us, and been a real part of our success here at Transform. Excellent, so please, you've just seen a little bit of tech out there that you can go and play with. I really want you, I mean go put on those black things, like Scott Hawkins our chief marketing officer from Lenovo's DCG business was doing and racing around this little car with his concentration not using his hands. He said it's really good actually, but as soon as someone comes up to speak to him, his car stops, so you got to try and do better. You got to try and prove if you can multitask or not. Get up there and concentrate and talk at the same time. 62 different breakouts up there. I'm not going to go into too much detai, but you can see we've got a very, very unusual numbering system, 18 to 18.8. I think over here we've got a 4849. There's a 4114. And then up here we've got a 46.1 and a 46.2. So, you need the decoder ring to be able to understand it. Get over there have a lot of fun. Remember the boat leaves today at 4:00 o'clock, right behind us at the pier right behind us here. There's 400 of us registered. Go onto the app and let us know if there's more people coming. It's going to be a great event out there on the Hudson River. Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote. I want to thank you all for being patient and thank all of our speakers today. Have a great have a great day, thank you very much. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ba do ♪

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering the AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to to the home of the Stanley Cup Champion Washington Capitals. You're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, and my co-host John Furrier. Welcome to the program. Bret Dennis who's the head of product management with Helio campus. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much for joining us. >> Go caps, thank you very much, appreciate it. >> Really bringing that [Inaudible] of having won the cup, lots of celebration, and there's a lot of energy here at this show. So we're heading into day two, what's your ... How do you feel about the show so far? >> It's good, it's been good. I did the Edstart program earlier in the week, and we did a sales pitch competition for startup Edtechs, so it's been really exciting, lot's of fun things going on. >> We've loved talking to startups here on theCUBE. I've talked to a number of companies, cyber-security, it's like, "Oh, okay, wait, which agency did you come out of." because of the NSA and the like. You have a similar story coming out of the University of Maryland >> Right. >> Give us a little bit of background on Helio campus. >> So we were spun out in 2016 from the University college. The Maryland board of regents had recognized the value that we'd brought to the University, over about six years of development in terms of the technology platform and the services we were bringing to the University and decided this would be really useful to other Universities, so let's spin it out into a company and go to market, and that's what we've been doing for the last two years. So it's been very exciting. >> Tell me about the product? What does it do? I mean obviously you guys incubate it in the college, so there's equity arrangements, you got a grant. Tell the story about the funding and then now, as you expand, what's that plan look like and how does Amazon fit into the whole mess? >> So we had an initial grant from the board of regions from the state of Maryland, and the idea was to assist colleges and Universities, to help them ask and answer their most pressing questions, but using data, and in order to effectively do that we wanted to bring a full solution that included platform technology as well as a services approach. So we're using Amazon Web Services and the Redshift database and platform to collect data from Universities, and then we have a services team that works with Tableau dashboards to not only help visualize data in meaningful ways, but also to explore how different data sets can be cross-seeded together across the student life cycle. >> Whose the user for you guys? Obviously big data analyst is awesome, we're seeing that clearly as one of those things where it's completely changing businesses >> Sure. And getting these kinds of insights that are actionable and different. Sometimes new questions can be answered. Who's the buyer, who's the user, how is that working? >> So institutional research is a key stakeholder for us. They are traditionally seen as the data owners of Universities and colleges, do most of the research, do most of the numbers crunching, but our idea is that we want to really democratize access to data to enrollment managers, to admissions managers, even to financial managers that want to have their own power to explore and interrogate the data, but do it in such a way that's a very intuitive process, so they don't have to be SQL query writers or really hardcore database developers. We're trying to get to those functional types of users to give the access to data >> So business users basically who don't have to be a data scientist to know Python and wrangle data, you're thinking about more of like turning them into analysts on the fly. >> We want them to be able to ask and answer their own questions without needing the technical skills. Now that's precisely why we bring the services in, so if they decide I really want to use a predictive, algorithmic approach to forecasting, or to admissions modeling, and we have data scientists available to provide that services level on top of the platform. >> Wondering if you might be able to give us an example, either generically, or if you can mention a specific company, just to help illustrate how they're transforming the use of data. >> So we work with the system at the system level for the University of North Carolina. So they had a need where they had done a lot of work on building up base data extracts of their own, but they needed a way to get that data out to campuses in a more effective way using rich visualizations. So we won an RFP with them and were able to help them, not only at the system level, but also at the campuses to make sure that the campuses and the board of regents and the board of governors are getting the data that they need, to again, understand what are my patterns and trends for success. What are specific student populations that we want to help, and we want to use data to help get to those insights. So that's been a real success story for us. >> Talk about the public sector impact of Amazon, obviously Amazon's well known in the startup community, you can spin up a server, that kind of changed the whole provisioning of a data center, now they got large enterprises doing all kinds of stuff, taking databases from big Oracle systems. But public sector, certainly education, we've seen community colleges, all the way up to premier institutions like the University of Maryland, this is now a game changer. So how are you seeing that evolve in other universities? What are your peers doing? What's their mindset? Where are they on the progress bar using cloud, if you will, cloud native, are they thinking microservices, are they thinking about [Inaudible], are they thinking about containers, where are they on the evolution? >> Yeah it is a game changer, and it is because scalability and security are probably two themes that I would bring up. So regardless of the amount of data that you want to use as part of the analysis, there's no limit in terms of using AWS and performance, from a performance perspective, if we want to bring in a new data set, test it, see if there is correlation, see if it's useful in helping answer their key questions, we can do that. But also it goes with out saying, the security, so we don't really have to do a lot of selling in terms of the security of AWS because the level of approvals and the level of certifications at AWS far exceeds beyond what any University could get on their own, or what any vendor individually could do on their own. So that's a natural benefit that comes with a platform. >> What other features or services in AWS are important for what you build, obviously, scalability, security, kind of a given when you talk about AWS. >> The Redshift platform has been really useful to us. The way that we architect our model is that we use Tableau on the front-end for BI, but also any user could have access at the database level and go into Redshift, now we supply security models so that only authorized users can get to that. So it's very helpful to have the security model on top of it, but the Redshift data structure really enables us to provide that experience at any level depending on what the need is of each user. So not many functional users would be going to that level, but Redshift really enables us to have the technical users and the traditional SQL query writers, and the ones that are doing the cross-seeding of the data to have access at that level. >> It's interesting you have a services model built in because it kind of makes sense because one of the benefits of the cloud, obviously, is speed. You get performance, just raw performance, but also speed to value, so you don't have to do a lot of heavy lifting to kind of understand where the value points are. So how does that change the services speed because Amazon's constantly introducing new services, how are you seeing that evolve? Because you can do some heavy lifting, okay here's a data set, is that the way the services are? How is the services changing with cloud? >> So our services model is really to hire individuals from Universities that have the subject matter expertise. So we have x directors of institutional research, x admission officers, so from our perspective we want to leave the technical, the platform, the architecture, the security services to the experts in that realm, that's not what our Universities are asking us for. They want to know how can you bring us subject matter expertise in the functional areas where we're struggling, we want to not have to worry about the technical piece at all. So I think that's where, from a cloud perspective, we're able to rely on the expertise at AWS and Amazon where, again, we're not having to worry about that and we can focus squarely on what the institutional needs are. >> So you're more efficient? >> I think so, yeah. >> You don't spend your time doing a lot wrangling of tech, standing up anything, just pretty much turnkey on the cloud side, focused on getting the users up and running with the tools that you guys have. >> Exactly, and we've had instenses where institutions have asked, "Oh, we want to do this research project, we need additional space." We can turn that up instantly through the value of the services provided through Amazon, which if we were to do that on our own it would be very expensive and a manual process. >> You can actually deliver services that values to the customer. I got to ask you a question, now looking forward, where's the head room? If you look at your business and how it's evolving, what's the head room that you see coming down the road that you're going towards, that you're going to bring to you customer base. >> Right, so with evolving technologies that we all know the buzzwords about, AI and machine learning, sort of taking the data science to the next level. I think that's what eventually we'll be asked to do, is to look at, "Well how can these be brought into education in a meaningful way? How can they provide us insight in ways that we're not doing today, again, more efficiently. We also value time or accelerating time to value, so again, I think right now we're moving data around and we're shifting data, and sometimes it can take a bit of time to do that. I think in the future we'll be able to turn up customers and start delivering that time to value in a much more accelerated way. >> So you said you attended some startup activity here at the show >> Yes. and also seen quite a few Universities here, so it sounds like you're learning to help build your business as well as from the customer standpoint, why don't you give us a little bit of insight as to the value that you get out of a show like this. >> Absolutely. So when the Universities attend we have meetings and we get an understandings of where they are now, what kinds of questions are they having, that's really what we want to get to, analytics is really nothing unless you understand what problem are you trying to solve. So being able to have those meaningful conversations in this type of environment is very helpful to us to understand, again, where are you now, what is your vision for where you want to go, how can we meet that at their point of need. >> What's the low-hanging fruit for these Universities use case wise? What are they using you guys for the most, if you had to look at the patterns? >> It can be arranged, so it can be I am not able to provide my stakeholders meaningful visualizations and insights and have them use data in a more meaningful way. So instead of giving you a table of lines and numbers, I can give you something that's actually actionable. That's really where we start at the dashboard level, the more advanced institutions, and everyone we work with has smart people on their teams but they may have other projects, they may not have time, they may not have the ability to hire expensive data scientists. So from that perspective on the advanced analytic side we can help with that advanced piece with our services team. >> They can get up to speed faster. Sometimes these projects can take months to stand up. >> It is, it's the acceleration that's huge. >> Great, what's the show vibe here? If you had to describe it for the folks that didn't make it. >> Yeah. >> What's the show about this year in your mind? What's the main big story here this year? >> It' a lot like last year for me, it is understanding, and I look at it from a data perspective of course, and it really is all about new technologies, and new vendors, and how we can understand, again, how these technologies can not only make us more efficient from a time perspective and cost perspective, but again, how can we more meaningfully answer the important questions that we have. >> Alright final question. Because you're a startup kind of within a cool environment at the University, which has got a lot of resources and access to some real use case data, what's the biggest thing you've learned over the past few years? Looking at the cloud, you're right in the middle of it, cloud native is super hot, there's people born in the cloud, people migrating the cloud, all kind of different levels of cloudifying businesses, some PurePlay cloud. What is the things that you learn the most? Looking back and saying, "Okay, these are the top three things that we learned." >> So I've worked for a foreign institution as well as for a number of different vendors in this space and I think the theme that I see is I want to go buy technology, "Oh I heard I need predictive analytics, Oh I heard that I need to have machine learning", well that's great that you know that, but have you really refined what your challenges and what you're trying to solve, and that goes for any technology whether it's cloud or a new server or a new application, really need to understand what is that core challenge and that's where we always start. Like any good product manager as we spoke about earlier, you've got to start with what problem you're trying to solve and then apply your solution in a meaningful way. So I think that would be my answer for that. >> Bret, thank for coming on theCUBE, thanks for sharing your story >> Thank you. Appreciate it, alright >> It was a pleasure. >> Bret Dennis here, spin out from University of Maryland, great startup doing big data analyst, obviously the clouds perfect for that and obviously creating more value. It's theCUBE bringing you the action here live in Washington D.C. I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (light electronic music)