(upbeat music) >> Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT. We are in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, hosting alongside Stu Miniman. We're joined by Fran Scott. She is a science and engineering presenter. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> No worries at all. It's good to be here actually. >> So you are a well known face to UK audiences. You are a three times BAFTA nominated science and engineering presenter. Well-known. >> Give her a winner. (laughter) >> You're the Susan Lucci of science. You are the pyrotechnician and you lead the Christmas lectures at the Royal Institute. >> Yeah. I head up the demonstration team at the Royal Institution. We come up with all the science demonstrations, so the visual ways to show the science ideas. I head up that team. We build the demonstrations and we show science to people rather than just tell them about it. >> So mostly, you have a very cool job. (chuckles) >> I love my job. >> I want to hear how you got into this. What was it? What inspired you? >> Oh gosh, two very different questions. In terms of what inspired me, I was very lucky enough to be able to pursue what I love. And I came from a family where answers weren't given out willy-nilly. If you didn't know something, it wasn't a bad thing. It was like a, "Let's look it up. Let's look it up." I grew up in an atmosphere where you could be anything because you didn't have to know what you had to be. You could just have a play with it. I love being hands-on and making things, and I grew up on a farm, so I was quite practical. But I also loved science. Went to university, did neuroscience at university. I enjoyed the learning part but, where I was in terms of the science hierarchy, I found out that once you actually go into a lab, there's a lot of lab work and not much learning straight away, and it was the learning that I loved. And so my friends actually got me into science communication. They took me to the science museum and they were like, "Fran, you will love this." And I was like, "Will I?" And I was like, "You are so right." I got a job at the science museum in London by just approaching someone on that visit and being like, "How do I get a job here?" And they were like, "Well, you got to do this, this, this." I was like, "I can do that." I got the job there and I realized I loved science demonstrations and building stuff. Eventually I just combined that love of science and being practical together. And now I produce and write, build science props and science stage shows. And then it became a thing. (laughter) Hand it to me, I love it. >> So Fran, our audience is very much the technology community. Very supportive of STEM initiatives. Give us a little flavor as to some of the things you're working on. Where is there need for activities? >> I suppose the biggest example of that would be a show that I did a few years ago where there was a big push for new coders within the UK. And I was getting approached time and time again for visual ways to show computer coding. Or programming, as we used to call it back in the day. I didn't have an answer because then, I wasn't a coder. So I was like, "Well, I'll learn. And then I'll figure out a demonstration because this is what I do. So why don't I do it on coding?" And so yeah, I set about. I learnt code. And I came up with an explosions based coding show. Error 404. And we toured around the country with that. Google picked it up and it was a huge success just because it was something that people wanted to learn about. And people were stumped as to how to show coding visually. But because this is what we do day in and day out with different subjects, we could do it with coding just like we do it with physics. >> What do you think is the key? A lot of your audience is kids. >> Yes and family audiences. >> So what is the key to getting people excited about science? >> I think science itself is exciting if people are allowed to understand how brilliant it is. I think some of the trouble comes from when people take the step too big, and so you'd be like, "Hang on but, why is that cool? Why?" Because they don't under... Well they would understand if they were fed to them in a way that they get it. The way I say it is, anyone can understand anything as long as you make the steps to get there small enough. Sometimes the steps are too big for you to understand the amazingness of that thing that's happening. And if you don't understand that amazingness, of course you're going to lose interest. Because everyone around you is going, "Ah, this is awesome, this is awesome!" And you're like, "What? What's awesome?" I think it's up to us as adults and as educators to just try and not patronize the children, definitely not, but just give them those little steps so they can really see the beauty of what it is that we're in awed by. >> One of the things that is a huge issue in the technology industry is the dearth of women in particular, in the ranks of technology and then also in leadership roles. As a woman in science and also showing little girls everywhere all over the UK what it is to be a woman in science, that's a huge responsibility. How do you think of that, and how are you in particular trying to speak to them and say, "You can do this"? >> I've done a lot of research onto this because this was the reason I went into what I'm into. I worked a lot of the time behind the scenes just trying to get the science right. And then I realized there was no one like me doing science presenting. The girl was always the little bit of extra on the side and it was the man who was the knowledgeable one that was showing how to do the science. And the woman was like, "Oh, well that's amazing." And I was like, "Hang on. Let's try and flip this." And it just so happened that I didn't care if it was me. I just wanted a woman to do it. And it just happened that that was me. But now that I'm in that position, one, well I run a business as well. I run a business where we can train other new presenters to do it. It's that giving back. So yes, I train other presenters. I also make sure there's opportunity for other presenters. But I also try, and actually I work with a lot of TV shows, and work on their language. And work on the combination of like, "Okay, so you've got a man doing that, you got women doing this. Let's have a look at more diversity." And just trying to show the kids that there are people like them doing science. There's that classic phrase that, "You can't be what you can't see." So yes, it comes responsibility, but also there's a lot of fun. And if you can do the science, be intelligent, be fun, and just be normal and just enjoy your job, then people go, "Hang on," whether they're a boy or a girl, they go, "I want a bit of that," in terms of, "I want that as my job." And so by showing that, then I'm hopefully encouraging more people to do it. But it's about getting out and encouraging the next generation to do it as well. >> Fran, you're going to be moderating a panel in the keynote later this afternoon. Give our audience a little bit. What brought you to this event? What's going into it? And for those that don't get to see it live, what they're missing. >> I am one lucky woman. So the panel I'm moderating, it's all about great design and I am a stickler for great design. As a scientist, prop-builder, person that does engineering day in and day out, I love something when it's perfectly designed. If there is such a thing as a perfect design. So this panel that we've got, Tobias Manisfitz, Satish Ramachandran, and Peter Kreiner from Noma. And so they all come with their own different aspect of design. Satish works at Nutanix. Peter works at Noma, the restaurant here in Copenhagen. And Tobias, he designs the visual effects for things such as Game of Thrones and Call of Duty. And so yes, they each design things for... They're amazing at their level but in such a different way and for a different audience. I'm going to be questioning them on what is great design to them and what frictionless design means and just sort of picking their amazing brains. >> I love that fusion of technology and design as something they talked about in the keynote this morning. Think of Apple or Tesla, those two things coming together. I studied engineering and I feel like there was a missing piece of my education to really go into the design. Something I have an appreciation for, that I've seen in my career. But it's something special to bring those together. >> Yeah. I think care is brought in mostly because yes, one, I love design. But also I've worked a lot with LEGO. And so I was brought in to be the engineering judge on the UK version of LEGO Masters. Apparently, design in children's builds is the same as questioning the owner of NOMA restaurant. (chuckles) >> So what do you think? Obviously you're doing the panel tomorrow. What is in your mind the key to great design? Because as you said, you're a sucker for anything that is just beautiful and seamless and intuitive. And we all know what great design is when we hold it in our hands or look at it. But it is this very ineffable quality of something that... >> So the panel's later today actually. But in terms of great design, yes, we all know when we have great design. But the trouble comes in creating good design. I think the key, and it's always obvious when you say it out loud, but it's that hand in hand partnership with aesthetics and practicality. You can't have something that's just beautiful. But you can't have something that just works. You need to have it as a mixture of both. It's those engineers talking with the designers, the designers talking with the engineers. The both of them talking with the consumers. And from that, good design comes. But don't forget, good design means they're for different people as well. >> What are some of the most exciting things you're working on, because you are a professional pyrotechnician. We've never had someone like this on theCUBE before. This is amazing. This is a first time ever. >> I was strictly told no fire. >> Yes, thank you. We appreciate that. >> Well at the moment, as I said at the beginning, I'm lucky enough to head up the demo team at the Royal Institution. We are just heading into our Christmas lectures. Now if you don't know these Christmas lectures, they were the first science ever done to a juvenile audience. Back in 1825 was when they started. It's a tradition in the UK and so this year, we're just starting to come up with the demonstrations for them. And this year they presented by Hannah Fry, and so they're going to be on maths and algorithms and how that makes you lucky or does it make you lucky? We've been having some really fun meetings. I can't give away too much, but there definitely be some type of stunt involved. That's all I can say. But there's going to be a lot of building. I really need to get back, get my sore out, get stuff made. >> Excellent. And who is the scientist you most admire? >> Oh my word. >> Living or dead? >> Who is the scientist I most admire? (sighs) I do have... Oh gosh, this is... >> The wheels are churning. >> It's a cheesy one though, but Da Vinci. Just for his multi-pronged approach and the fact that he had so much going on in his brain that he couldn't even get everything down on paper. He'd half draw something and then something else would come to him. >> I had the opportunity of interviewing Walter Isaacson last year, and he loved... It was the, as we talked about, the science and the design and the merging of those. But reading that biography of him, what struck me is he never finished anything because it would never meet the perfection in his mind to get it done. I've seen that in creative people. They'll start things and then they'll move on to the next thing and there. Me as a engineering by training, it's like no, no. You need to finish work. Manufacturing from standpoint, work in progress is the worst thing you could have out there. >> He would be a rubbish entrepreneur. (chuckling) >> Right, but we're so lucky to have had his brain. >> Exactly. I think that's the thing. I think it gives us an insight into what the brain is capable of and what you can design without even knowing you're designing something. >> Well Fran, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This was so fun. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of .NEXT. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! (funky electronic music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante! >> Welcome, everybody, to this Cube conversation here in our Marlborough offices. I am very excited today, I spent a number of years at IDC, which, of course, is owned by IDG. And there's a new book out, relatively new, called Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire. And it's a great book, lotta stories that I didn't know, many that I did know, and the author of that book, Glenn Rifkin, is here to talk about not only Pat McGovern but also some of the lessons that he put forth to help us as entrepreneurs and leaders apply to create better businesses and change the world. Glenn, thanks so much for comin' on theCube. >> Thank you, Dave, great to see ya. >> So let me start with, why did you write this book? >> Well, a couple reasons. The main reason was Patrick McGovern III, Pat's son, came to me at the end of 2016 and said, "My father had died in 2014 and I feel like his legacy deserves a book, and many people told me you were the guy to do it." So the background on that I, myself, worked at IDG back in the 1980s, I was an editor at Computerworld, got to know Pat during that time, did some work for him after I left Computerworld, on a one-on-one basis. Then I would see him over the years, interview him for the New York Times or other magazines, and every time I'd see Pat, I'd end our conversation by saying, "Pat, when are we gonna do your book?" And he would laugh, and he would say, "I'm not ready to do that yet, there's just still too much to do." And so it became sort of an inside joke for us, but I always really did wanna write this book about him because I felt he deserved a book. He was just one of these game-changing pioneers in the tech industry. >> He really was, of course, the book was even more meaningful for me, we, you and I started right in the same time, 1983-- >> Yeah. >> And by that time, IDG was almost 20 years old and it was quite a powerhouse then, but boy, we saw, really the ascendancy of IDG as a brand and, you know, the book reviews on, you know, the back covers are tech elite: Benioff wrote the forward, Mark Benioff, you had Bill Gates in there, Walter Isaacson was in there, Guy Kawasaki, Bob Metcalfe, George Colony-- >> Right. >> Who actually worked for a little stint at IDC for a while. John Markoff of The New York Times, so, you know, the elite of tech really sort of blessed this book and it was really a lot to do with Pat McGovern, right? >> Oh, absolutely, I think that the people on the inside understood how important he was to the history of the tech industry. He was not, you know, a household name, first of all, you didn't think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and then Pat McGovern, however, those who are in the know realize that he was as important in his own way as they were. Because somebody had to chronicle this story, somebody had to share the story of the evolution of this amazing information technology and how it changed the world. And Pat was never a front-of-the-TV-camera guy-- >> Right. >> He was a guy who put his people forward, he put his products forward, for sure, which is why IDG, as a corporate name, you know, most people don't know what that means, but people did know Macworld, people did know PCWorld, they knew IDC, they knew Computerworld for sure. So that was Pat's view of the world, he didn't care whether he had the spotlight on him or not. >> When you listen to leaders like Reed Hoffman or Eric Schmidt talk about, you know, great companies and how to build great companies, they always come back to culture. >> Yup. >> The book opens with a scene of, and we all, that I usually remember this, well, we're just hangin' around, waitin' for Pat to come in and hand out what was then called the Christmas bonus-- >> Right. >> Back when that wasn't politically incorrect to say. Now, of course, it's the holiday bonus. But it was, it was the Christmas bonus time and Pat was coming around and he was gonna personally hand a bonus, which was a substantial bonus, to every single employee at the company. I mean, and he did that, really, literally, forever. >> Forever, yeah. >> Throughout his career. >> Yeah, it was unheard of, CEOs just didn't do that and still don't do that, you were lucky, you got a message on the, you know, in the lunchroom from the CEO, "Good work, troops! Keep up the good work!" Pat just had a really different view of the culture of this company, as you know from having been there, and I know. It was very familial, there was a sense that we were all in this together, and it really was important for him to let every employee know that. The idea that he went to every desk in every office for IDG around the United States, when we were there in the '80s there were probably 5,000 employees in the US, he had to devote substantial amount-- >> Weeks and weeks! >> Weeks at a time to come to every building and do this, but year after year he insisted on doing it, his assistant at the time, Mary Dolaher told me she wanted to sign the cards, the Christmas cards, and he insisted that he ensign every one of them personally. This was the kind of view he had of how you keep employees happy, if your employees are happy, the customers are gonna be happy, and you're gonna make a lot of money. And that's what he did. >> And it wasn't just that. He had this awesome holiday party that you described, which was epic, and during the party, they would actually take pictures of every single person at the party and then they would load the carousel, you remember the 35-mm. carousel, and then, you know, toward the end of the evening, they would play that and everybody was transfixed 'cause they wanted to see their, the picture of themselves! >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) >> I mean, it was ge-- and to actually pull that off in the 1980s was not trivial! Today, it would be a piece of cake. And then there was the IDG update, you know, the Good News memos, there was the 10-year lunch, the 20-year trips around the world, there were a lot of really rich benefits that, you know, in and of themselves maybe not a huge deal, but that was the culture that he set. >> Yeah, there was no question that if you talked to anybody who worked in this company over, say, the last 50 years, you were gonna get the same kind of stories. I've been kind of amazed, I'm going around, you know, marketing the book, talking about the book at various events, and the deep affection for this guy that still holds five years after he died, it's just remarkable. You don't really see that with the CEO class, there's a couple, you know, Steve Jobs left a great legacy of creativity, he was not a wonderful guy to his employees, but Pat McGovern, people loved this guy, and they st-- I would be signing books and somebody'd say, "Oh, I've been at IDG for 27 years and I remember all of this," and "I've been there 33 years," and there's a real longevity to this impact that he had on people. >> Now, the book was just, it was not just sort of a biography on McGovern, it was really about lessons from a leader and an entrepreneur and a media mogul who grew this great company in this culture that we can apply, you know, as business people and business leaders. Just to give you a sense of what Pat McGovern did, he really didn't take any outside capital, he did a little bit of, you know, public offering with IDG Books, but, really, you know, no outside capital, it was completely self-funded. He built a $3.8 billion empire, 300 publications, 280 million readers, and I think it was almost 100 or maybe even more, 100 countries. And so, that's an-- like you were, used the word remarkable, that is a remarkable achievement for a self-funded company. >> Yeah, Pat had a very clear vision of how, first of all, Pat had a photographic memory and if you were a manager in the company, you got a chance to sit in meetings with Pat and if you didn't know the numbers better than he did, which was a tough challenge, you were in trouble! 'Cause he knew everything, and so, he was really a numbers-focused guy and he understood that, you know, his best way to make profit was to not be looking for outside funding, not to have to share the wealth with investors, that you could do this yourself if you ran it tightly, you know, I called it in the book a 'loose-tight organization,' loose meaning he was a deep believer in decentralization, that every market needed its own leadership because they knew the market, you know, in Austria or in Russia or wherever, better than you would know it from a headquarters in Boston, but you also needed that tightness, a firm grip on the finances, you needed to know what was going on with each of the budgets or you were gonna end up in big trouble, which a lot of companies find themselves in. >> Well, and, you know, having worked there, I mean, essentially, if you made your numbers and did so ethically, and if you just kind of followed some of the corporate rules, which we'll talk about, he kind of left you alone. You know, you could, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted, you could stay in any hotel, you really couldn't fly first class, and we'll maybe talk about that-- >> Right. >> But he was a complex man, I mean, he was obviously wealthy, he was a billionaire, he was very generous, but at the same time he was frugal, you know, he drove, you know, a little, a car that was, you know, unremarkable, and we had buy him a car. He flew coach, and I remember one time, I was at a United flight, and I was, I had upgraded, you know, using my miles, and I sat down and right there was Lore McGovern, and we both looked at each other and said right at the same time, "I upgraded!" (laughs) Because Pat never flew up front, but he would always fly with a stack of newspapers in the seat next to him. >> Yeah, well, woe to, you were lucky he wasn't on the plane and spotted you as he was walking past you into coach, because he was not real forgiving when he saw people, people would hide and, you know, try to avoid him at all cost. And, I mean, he was a big man, Pat was 6'3", you know, 250 lbs. at least, built like a linebacker, so he didn't fit into coach that well, and he wasn't flying, you know, the shuttle to New York, he was flyin' to Beijing, he was flyin' to Moscow, he was going all over the world, squeezing himself into these seats. Now, you know, full disclosure, as he got older and had, like, probably 10 million air miles at his disposal, he would upgrade too, occasionally, for those long-haul flights, just 'cause he wanted to be fresh when he would get off the plane. But, yeah, these are legends about Pat that his frugality was just pure legend in the company, he owned this, you know, several versions of that dark blue suit, and that's what you would see him in. He would never deviate from that. And, but, he had his patterns, but he understood the impact those patterns had on his employees and on his customers. >> I wanna get into some of the lessons, because, really, this is what the book is all about, the heart of it. And you mentioned, you know, one, and we're gonna tell from others, but you really gotta stay close to the customer, that was one of the 10 corporate values, and you remember, he used to go to the meetings and he'd sometimes randomly ask people to recite, "What's number eight?" (laughs) And you'd be like, oh, you'd have your cheat sheet there. And so, so, just to give you a sense, this man was an entrepreneur, he started the company in 1964 with a database that he kind of pre-sold, he was kind of the sell, design, build type of mentality, he would pre-sold this thing, and then he started Computerworld in 1967, so it was really only a few years after he launched the company that he started the Computerworld, and other than Data Nation, there was nothing there, huge pent-up demand for that type of publication, and he caught lightning in a bottle, and that's really how he funded, you know, the growth. >> Yeah, oh, no question. Computerworld became, you know, the bible of the industry, it became a cash cow for IDG, you know, but at the time, it's so easy to look in hindsight and say, oh, well, obviously. But when Pat was doing this, one little-known fact is he was an editor at a publication called Computers and Automation that was based in Newton, Massachusetts and he kept that job even after he started IDC, which was the original company in 1964. It was gonna be a research company, and it was doing great, he was seeing the build-up, but it wasn't 'til '67 when he started Computerworld, that he said, "Okay, now this is gonna be a full-time gig for me," and he left the other publication for good. But, you know, he was sorta hedging his bets there for a little while. >> And that's where he really gained respect for what we'll call the 'Chinese Wallet,' the, you know, editorial versus advertising. We're gonna talk about that some more. So I mentioned, 1967, Computerworld. So he launched in 1964, by 1971, he was goin' to Japan, we're gonna talk about the China Stories as well, so, he named the company International Data Corp, where he was at a little spot in Newton, Mass.-- >> Right, right. >> So, he had a vision. You said in your book, you mention, how did this gentleman get it so right for so long? And that really leads to some of the leadership lessons, and one of them in the book was, sort of, have a mission, have a vision, and really, Pat was always talking about information, about information technology, in fact, when Wine for Dummies came out, it kind of created a little friction, that was really off the center. >> Or Wine for Dummies, or Sex for Dummies! >> Yeah, Sex for Dummies, boy, yeah! >> With, that's right, Ruth Westheimer-- >> Dr. Ruth Westheimer. >> But generally speaking, Glenn, he was on that mark, he really didn't deviate from that vision. >> Yeah, no, it was very crucial to the development of the company that he got people to, you know, buy into that mission, because the mission was everything. And he understood, you know, he had the numbers, but he also saw what was happening out there, from the 1960s, when IBM mainframes filled a room, and, you know, only the high priests of data centers could touch them. He had a vision for, you know, what was coming next and he started to understand that there would be many facets to this information about information technology, it wasn't gonna be boring, if anything, it was gonna be the story of our age and he was gonna stick to it and sell it. >> And, you know, timing is everything, but so is, you know, Pat was a workaholic and had an amazing mind, but one of the things I learned from the book, and you said this, Pat Kenealy mentioned it, all American industrial and social revolutions have had a media company linked to them, Crane and automobiles, Penton and energy, McGraw-Hill and aerospace, Annenberg, of course, and TV, and in technology, it was IDG. >> Yeah, he, like I said earlier, he really was a key figure in the development of this industry and it was, you know, one of the key things about that, a lot publications that came and went made the mistake of being platform or, you know, vertical market specific. And if that market changed, and it was inevitably gonna change in high tech, you were done. He never, you know, he never married himself to some specific technology cycle. His idea was the audience was not gonna change, the audience was gonna have to roll with this, so, the company, IDG, would produce publications that got that, you know, Computerworld was actually a little bit late to the PC game, but eventually got into it and we tracked the different cycles, you know, things in tech move in sine waves, they come and go. And Pat never was, you know, flustered by that, he could handle any kind of changes from the mainframes down to the smartphone when it came. And so, that kind of flexibility, and ability to adjust to markets, really was unprecedented in that particular part of the market. >> One of the other lessons in the book, I call it 'nation-building,' and Pat shared with you that, look, that you shared, actually, with your readers, if you wanna do it right, you've gotta be on the ground, you've gotta be there. And the China story is one that I didn't know about how Pat kind of talked his way into China, tell us, give us a little summary of that story. >> Sure, I love that story because it's so Pat. It was 1978, Pat was in Tokyo on a business trip, one of his many business trips, and he was gonna be flying to Moscow for a trade show. And he got a flight that was gonna make a stopover in Beijing, which in those days was called Peking, and was not open to Americans. There were no US and China diplomatic relations then. But Pat had it in mind that he was going to get off that plane in Beijing and see what he could see. So that meant that he had to leave the flight when it landed in Beijing and talk his way through the customs as they were in China at the time with folks in the, wherever, the Quonset hut that served for the airport, speaking no English, and him speaking no Chinese, he somehow convinced these folks to give him a day pass, 'cause he kept saying to them, "I'm only in transit, it's okay!" (laughs) Like, he wasn't coming, you know, to spy on them on them or anything. So here's this massive American businessman in his dark suit, and he somehow gets into downtown Beijing, which at the time was mostly bicycles, very few cars, there were camels walking down the street, they'd come with traders from Mongolia. The people were still wearing the drab outfits from the Mao era, and Pat just spent the whole day wandering around the city, just soaking it in. He was that kind of a world traveler. He loved different cultures, mostly eastern cultures, and he would pop his head into bookstores. And what he saw were people just clamoring to get their hands on anything, a newspaper, a magazine, and it just, it didn't take long for the light bulb to go on and said, this is a market we need to play in. >> He was fascinated with China, I, you know, as an employee and a business P&L manager, I never understood it, I said, you know, the per capita spending on IT in China was like a dollar, you know? >> Right. >> And I remember my lunch with him, my 10-year lunch, he said, "Yeah, but, you know, there's gonna be a huge opportunity there, and yeah, I don't know how we're gonna get the money out, maybe we'll buy a bunch of tea and ship it over, but I'm not worried about that." And, of course, he meets Hugo Shong, which is a huge player in the book, and the home run out of China was, of course, the venture capital, which he started before there was even a stock market, really, to exit in China. >> Right, yeah. No, he was really a visionary, I mean, that word gets tossed around maybe more than it should, but Pat was a bonafide visionary and he saw things in China that were developing that others didn't see, including, for example, his own board, who told him he was crazy because in 1980, he went back to China without telling them and within days he had a meeting with the ministry of technology and set up a joint venture, cost IDG $250,000, and six months later, the first issue of China Computerworld was being published and within a couple of years it was the biggest publication in China. He said, told me at some point that $250,0000 investment turned into $85 million and when he got home, that first trip, the board was furious, they said, "How can you do business with the commies? You're gonna ruin our brand!" And Pat said, "Just, you know, stick with me on this one, you're gonna see." And the venture capital story was just an offshoot, he saw the opportunity in the early '90s, that venture in China could in fact be a huge market, why not help build it? And that's what he did. >> What's your take on, so, IDG sold to, basically, Chinese investors. >> Yeah. >> It's kind of bittersweet, but in the same time, it's symbolic given Pat's love for China and the Chinese people. There's been a little bit of criticism about that, I know that the US government required IDC to spin out its supercomputer division because of concerns there. I'm always teasing Michael Dow that at the next IDG board meeting, those Lenovo numbers, they're gonna look kinda law. (laughs) But what are your, what's your, what are your thoughts on that, in terms of, you know, people criticize China in terms of IP protections, etc. What would Pat have said to that, do you think? >> You know, Pat made 130 trips to China in his life, that's, we calculated at some point that just the air time in planes would have been something like three and a half to four years of his life on planes going to China and back. I think Pat would, today, acknowledge, as he did then, that China has issues, there's not, you can't be that naive. He got that. But he also understood that these were people, at the end of the day, who were thirsty and hungry for information and that they were gonna be a player in the world economy at some point, and that it was crucial for IDG to be at the forefront of that, not just play later, but let's get in early, let's lead the parade. And I think that, you know, some part of him would have been okay with the sale of the company to this conglomerate there, called China Oceanwide. Clearly controversial, I mean, but once Pat died, everyone knew that the company was never gonna be the same with the leader who had been at the helm for 50 years, it was gonna be a tough transition for whoever took over. And I think, you know, it's hard to say, certainly there's criticism of things going on with China. China's gonna be the hot topic page one of the New York Times almost every single day for a long time to come. I think Pat would have said, this was appropriate given my love of China, the kind of return on investment he got from China, I think he would have been okay with it. >> Yeah, and to invoke the Ben Franklin maxim, "Trading partners seldom wage war," and so, you know, I think Pat would have probably looked at it that way, but, huge home run, I mean, I think he was early on into Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and amazing story. I wanna talk about decentralization because that was always something that was just on our minds as employees of IDG, it was keep the corporate staff lean, have a flat organization, if you had eight, 10, 12 direct reports, that was okay, Pat really meant it when he said, "You're the CEO of your own business!" Whether that business was, you know, IDC, big company, or a manager at IDC, where you might have, you know, done tens of millions of dollars, but you felt like a CEO, you were encouraged to try new things, you were encouraged to fail, and fail fast. Their arch nemesis of IDG was Ziff Davis, they were a command and control, sort of Bill Ziff, CMP to a certain extent was kind of the same way out of Manhasset, totally different philosophies and I think Pat never, ever even came close to wavering from that decentralization philosophy, did he? >> No, no, I mean, I think that the story that he told me that I found fascinating was, he didn't have an epiphany that decentralization would be the mechanism for success, it was more that he had started traveling, and when he'd come back to his office, the memos and requests and papers to sign were stacked up two feet high. And he realized that he was holding up the company because he wasn't there to do this and that at some point, he couldn't do it all, it was gonna be too big for that, and that's when the light came on and said this decentralization concept really makes sense for us, if we're gonna be an international company, which clearly was his mission from the beginning, we have to say the people on the ground in those markets are the people who are gonna make the decisions because we can't make 'em from Boston. And I talked to many people who, were, you know, did a trip to Europe, met the folks in London, met the folks in Munich, and they said to a person, you know, it was so ahead of its time, today it just seems obvious, but in the 1960s, early '70s, it was really not a, you know, a regular leadership tenet in most companies. The command and control that you talked about was the way that you did business. >> And, you know, they both worked, but, you know, from a cultural standpoint, clearly IDG and IDC have had staying power, and he had the three-quarter rule, you talked about it in your book, if you missed your numbers three quarters in a row, you were in trouble. >> Right. >> You know, one quarter, hey, let's talk, two quarters, we maybe make some changes, three quarters, you're gone. >> Right. >> And so, as I said, if you were makin' your numbers, you had wide latitude. One of the things you didn't have latitude on was I'll call it 'pay to play,' you know, crossing that line between editorial and advertising. And Pat would, I remember I was at a meeting one time, I'm sorry to tell these stories, but-- >> That's okay. (laughs) >> But we were at an offsite meeting at a woods meeting and, you know, they give you a exercise, go off and tell us what the customer wants. Bill Laberis, who's the editor-in-chief at Computerworld at the time, said, "Who's the customer?" And Pat said, "That's a great question! To the publisher, it's the advertiser. To you, Bill, and the editorial staff, it's the reader. And both are equally important." And Pat would never allow the editorial to be compromised by the advertiser. >> Yeah, no, he, there was a clear barrier between church and state in that company and he, you know, consistently backed editorial on that issue because, you know, keep in mind when we started then, and I was, you know, a journalist hoping to, you know, change the world, the trade press then was considered, like, a little below the mainstream business press. The trade press had a reputation for being a little too cozy with the advertisers, so, and Pat said early on, "We can't do that, because everything we have, our product is built, the brand is built on integrity. And if the reader doesn't believe that what we're reporting is actually true and factual and unbiased, we're gonna lose to the advertisers in the long run anyway." So he was clear that that had to be the case and time and again, there would be conflict that would come up, it was just, as you just described it, the publishers, the sales guys, they wanted to bring in money, and if it, you know, occasionally, hey, we could nudge the editor of this particular publication, "Take it a little bit easier on this vendor because they're gonna advertise big with us," Pat just would always back the editor and say, "That's not gonna happen." And it caused, you know, friction for sure, but he was unwavering in his support. >> Well, it's interesting because, you know, Macworld, I think, is an interesting case study because there were sort of some backroom dealings and Pat maneuvered to be able to get the Macworld, you know, brand, the license for that. >> Right. >> But it caused friction between Steve Jobs and the writers of Macworld, they would write something that Steve Jobs, who was a control freak, couldn't control! >> Yeah. (laughs) >> And he regretted giving IDG the license. >> Yeah, yeah, he once said that was the worst decision he ever made was to give the license to Pat to, you know, Macworlld was published on the day that Mac was introduced in 1984, that was the deal that they had and it was, what Jobs forgot was how important it was to the development of that product to have a whole magazine devoted to it on day one, and a really good magazine that, you know, a lot of people still lament the glory days of Macworld. But yeah, he was, he and Steve Jobs did not get along, and I think that almost says a lot more about Jobs because Pat pretty much got along with everybody. >> That church and state dynamic seems to be changing, across the industry, I mean, in tech journalism, there aren't any more tech journalists in the United States, I mean, I'm overstating that, but there are far fewer than there were when we were at IDG. You're seeing all kinds of publications and media companies struggling, you know, Kara Swisher, who's the greatest journalist, and Walt Mossberg, in the tech industry, try to make it, you know, on their own, and they couldn't. So, those lines are somewhat blurring, not that Kara Swisher is blurring those lines, she's, you know, I think, very, very solid in that regard, but it seems like the business model is changing. As an observer of the markets, what do you think's happening in the publishing world? >> Well, I, you know, as a journalist, I'm sort of aghast at what's goin' on these days, a lot of my, I've been around a long time, and seeing former colleagues who are no longer in journalism because the jobs just started drying up is, it's a scary prospect, you know, unlike being the enemy of the people, the first amendment is pretty important to the future of the democracy, so to see these, you know, cutbacks and newspapers going out of business is difficult. At the same time, the internet was inevitable and it was going to change that dynamic dramatically, so how does that play out? Well, the problem is, anybody can post anything they want on social media and call it news, and the challenge is to maintain some level of integrity in the kind of reporting that you do, and it's more important now than ever, so I think that, you know, somebody like Pat would be an important figure if he was still around, in trying to keep that going. >> Well, Facebook and Google have cut the heart out of, you know, a lot of the business models of many media companies, and you're seeing sort of a pendulum swing back to nonprofits, which, I understand, speaking of folks back in the mid to early 1900s, nonprofits were the way in which, you know, journalism got funded, you know, maybe it's billionaires buying things like the Washington Post that help fund it, but clearly the model's shifting and it's somewhat unclear, you know, what's happening there. I wanted to talk about another lesson, which, Pat was the head cheerleader. So, I remember, it was kind of just after we started, the Computerworld's 20th anniversary, and they hired the marching band and they walked Pat and Mary Dolaher walked from 5 Speen Street, you know, IDG headquarters, they walked to Computerworld, which was up Old, I guess Old Connecticut Path, or maybe it was-- >> It was actually on Route 30-- >> Route 30 at the time, yeah. And Pat was dressed up as the drum major and Mary as well, (laughs) and he would do crazy things like that, he'd jump out of a plane with IDG is number one again, he'd post a, you know, a flag in Antarctica, IDG is number one again! It was just a, it was an amazing dynamic that he had, always cheering people on. >> Yeah, he was, he was, when he called himself the CEO, the Chief Encouragement Officer, you mentioned earlier the Good News notes. Everyone who worked there, at some point received this 8x10" piece of paper with a rainbow logo on it and it said, "Good News!" And there was a personal note from Pat McGovern, out of the blue, totally unexpected, to thank you and congratulate you on some bit of work, whatever it was, if you were a reporter, some article you wrote, if you were a sales guy, a sale that you made, and people all over the world would get these from him and put them up in their cubicles because it was like a badge of honor to have them, and people, I still have 'em, (laughs) you know, in a folder somewhere. And he was just unrelenting in supporting the people who worked there, and it was, the impact of that is something you can't put a price tag on, it's just, it stays with people for all their lives, people who have left there and gone on to four or five different jobs always think fondly back to the days at IDG and having, knowing that the CEO had your back in that manner. >> The legend of, and the legacy of Patrick J. McGovern is not just in IDG and IDC, which you were interested in in your book, I mean, you weren't at IDC, I was, and I was started when I saw the sort of downturn and then now it's very, very successful company, you know, whatever, $3-400 million, throwin' off a lot of profits, just to decide, I worked for every single CEO at IDC with the exception of Pat McGovern, and now, Kirk Campbell, the current CEO, is moving on Crawford del Prete's moving into the role of president, it's just a matter of time before he gets CEO, so I will, and I hired Crawford-- >> Oh, you did? (laughs) >> So, I've worked for and/or hired every CEO of IDC except for Pat McGovern, so, but, the legacy goes beyond IDG and IDC, great brands. The McGovern Brain Institute, 350 million, is that right? >> That's right. >> He dedicated to studying, you know, the human brain, he and Lore, very much involved. >> Yup. >> Typical of Pat, he wasn't just, "Hey, here's the check," and disappear. He was goin' in, "Hey, I have some ideas"-- >> Oh yeah. >> Talk about that a little. >> Yeah, well, this was a guy who spent his whole life fascinated by the human brain and the impact technology would have on the human brain, so when he had enough money, he and Lore, in 2000, gave a $350 million gift to MIT to create the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. At the time, the largest academic gift ever given to any university. And, as you said, Pat wasn't a guy who was gonna write a check and leave and wave goodbye. Pat was involved from day one. He and Lore would come and sit in day-long seminars listening to researchers talk about about the most esoteric research going on, and he would take notes, and he wasn't a brain scientist, but he wanted to know more, and he would talk to researchers, he would send Good News notes to them, just like he did with IDG, and it had same impact. People said, "This guy is a serious supporter here, he's not just showin' up with a checkbook." Bob Desimone, who's the director of the Brain Institute, just marveled at this guy's energy level, that he would come in and for days, just sit there and listen and take it all in. And it just, it was an indicator of what kind of person he was, this insatiable curiosity to learn more and more about the world. And he wanted his legacy to be this intersection of technology and brain research, he felt that this institute could cure all sorts of brain-related diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. And it would then just make a better future for mankind, and as corny as that might sound, that was really the motivator for Pat McGovern. >> Well, it's funny that you mention the word corny, 'cause a lot of people saw Pat as somewhat corny, but, as you got to know him, you're like, wow, he really means this, he loves his company, the company was his extended family. When Pat met his untimely demise, we held a crowd chat, crowdchat.net/thankspat, and there's a voting mechanism in there, and the number one vote was from Paul Gillen, who posted, "Leo Durocher said that nice guys finish last, Pat McGovern proved that wrong." >> Yeah. >> And I think that's very true and, again, awesome legacy. What number book is this for you? You've written a lot of books. >> This is number 13. >> 13, well, congratulations, lucky 13. >> Thank you. >> The book is Fast Forward-- >> Future Forward. >> I'm sorry, Future Forward! (laughs) Future Forward by Glenn Rifkin. Check out, there's a link in the YouTube down below, check that out and there's some additional information there. Glenn, congratulations on getting the book done, and thanks so much for-- >> Thank you for having me, this is great, really enjoyed it. It's always good to chat with another former IDGer who gets it. (laughs) >> Brought back a lot of memories, so, again, thanks for writing the book. All right, thanks for watching, everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. You're watchin' theCube. (electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, CUBE nation, I'm Sam Kahane. Thanks for watching the CUBE. Due to popular demand from the community, I will be interviewing the legendary Stu Miniman, here today. He is S-T-U on Twitter. Stu and I are going to be digging in to the 2019 predictions, and also recapping 2018 for you here. So, Stu, let's get into it a little bit. 2018, can you set the stage? How many events did you go to? How many interviews did you conduct? >> Boy, Sam, it's tough to look back. We did so much with the CUBE this year. I, personally, did over 20 shows, and somewhere between 400 and 450 interviews, out of, we as a team did over a 100 shows, over 2000 interviews. So, really great to be in the community, and immerse ourselves, drink from the fire hose, and some of the data. (laughs) >> So, over 400 interviews this year, that's amazing. What about some of the key learnings from 2018? Yeah, Sam,my premise when I'm going out is, how are we maturing? My background, as you know, Sam, I'm an infrastructure guy. My early training was in networking. I worked on virtualization, and I've been riding this wave of cloud for about the last 10 years. So, about two years ago, it was, software companies, how are they living in these public clouds? Amazon, of course, the dominant player in the marketplace, but we know it will be a multi-cloud world. And the update, for 2018, is we've gone from, how do I live in those public clouds, to how are we maturing? We call it hybrid clouds, or multi-cloud, but living between these worlds. We saw the rise in Kubernetes, as a piece of it, but customers have lots of environments, and how they get their arms around that, is a serious challenge out there, today. So, how are the suppliers and communities, and the systems integration, helping customers with this really challenging new environment, that we have today. >> I'd love to hear any OMG moments from you. What surprised you the most this year? >> It's interesting, when I wanna think about some of the big moves in the industry, I mean, we had the largest software acquisition in tech history. IBM, the company you used to work for, Sam, buying Red Hat, a company I've worked with, for about 20 years, for 34 billion dollars. I mean, Red Hat has been the poster child for open source, and the exemplar of that. It was something that was like, wow, this is a big deal. We've been talking for a long time, how important developers are, and how important open source is, and there's nothing like seeing Big Blue, a 107-year-old company, putting in huge dollars, to really, not just validate, cause IBM's been working in open source, working with Linux for a long time, but how important this is to the future. And that sits right at that core of that multi-cloud world. Red Hat wants to position itself to live in a lot of those environments, not just for Linux, but the Middleware, Kubernetes is a big play. We saw a number of acquisitions in the space there. Red Hat bought CoreOS for $250 million. VMware bought Heptio, and was kind of surprised, at the sticker shock, $550 million. Great team, we know the Heptio team well. We talked to them, some of the core people, back when they were at Google. But, some big dollars are being thrown around, in this space, and, as you said, the big one in the world is Amazon. One of the stories that everybody tracked all year was the whole hq2 thing. It kind of struck me as funny, as Amazon is in Seattle. I actually got to visit Seattle, for the first time, this year, and somebody told me, if you look at the top 50 companies that have employees in Seattle, of course, Amazon is number one, but you need to take number two through 43, and add them together, to make them as big as Amazon. Here in Boston, there's a new facility going up, with 5,000 employees. I know they're going to have 25,000 in Long Island City, right in the Queens, in New York City, as well as Crystal City, right outside of DC, 25,000. But, the realization is that, of course, Amazon's going to have data centers, in pretty much every country, and they're going to have employees all around the world. This doesn't just stay to the US, but Amazon, overall. So, Amazon, just a massive employer. I know so many people who have joined them. (laughs) Some that have left them. But, almost everything that I talk about, tends to come back to Amazon, and what there are doing, or how people are trying to compete, or live in that ecosystem. >> You're always talking to the community. What are some of the hottest topics you're hearing out there? >> So, living in this new world, how are we dealing with developers? A story that I really liked, my networking background, the Cisco DevNet team, led by Suzie Wee, is a really phenomenal example, and one of my favorite interviews of the year. I actually got to talk to Suzie twice this year. We've known her for many years. She got promoted to be a Senior Vice President, which is a great validation, but what she built is a community from the ground up. It took about four years to build this platform, and it's not about, "Oh, we have some products, and developers love it.", but it's the marketplace that they live in, really do have builders there. It's the most exciting piece of what's happening at Cisco. My first show for 2019 will be back at Cisco, live in Barcelona, and Cisco going through this massive transformation, to be the dominant networking company. When they talk about their future, it is as a software company. That actually, it blew my mind, Sam. You know, Cisco is the networking company. When they say, "When you think of us, "five to ten years from now, "you won't think of us as a networking company. "You'll think of us as a software company." That's massive. They were one of the four horsemen of the internet era. And, if Cisco is making that change, everything changes. IBM, people said if they don't make this move for Red Hat, is there danger in the future? So, everything is changing so fast, it is one of the things that everybody tries to sort out and deal with. I've got some thoughts on that, which I'm sure we'll get to later on. >> (laughs) As is Suzie Wee one of your top interviews of 2018, could you give your top three interviews? >> First of all, my favorite, Sam, is always when I get to talk to the practitioners. A few of the practitioners I love talking to, at the Nutanix show in New Orleans this year, I talked to Vijay Luthra, with Northern Trust. My co-host of the show was Keith Townsend. Keith, Chicago guy, said, "Northern Trust is one "of the most conservative financial companies", and they are all-in on containerization, modernized their application. It is great to see a financial company that is driving that kind of change. That's kind of a theme I think you'll see, Sam. Another, one, was actually funny enough, Another Nutanix show, at London, had the Manchester City Council. So, the government, what they're doing, how they're driving change, what they're doing with their digital transformation, how they're thinking of IOT. Some of my favorite interviews I've done the last few years, have been in the government, because you don't think of government as innovating, but, they're usually resource-constrained. They have a lot of constituencies, and therefore, they need to do this. The Amazon public sector show was super-impressive. Everything from, I interviewed a person from the White House Historical Society. They brought on Jackie O's original guidebook, of being able to tour the White House. So, some really cool human interest, but it's all a digital platform on Amazon. What Amazon is doing in all of the industry-specific areas, is really impressive. Some of these smaller shows that we've done, are super-impressive. Another small show, that really impressed me, is UiPath, robotic process automation, or RPA, been called the gateway drug to AI, really phenomenal. I've got some background in operations, and one of the users on the program was talking about how you could get that process to somewhere around 97 to 98% compliance, and standardize, but when they put in RPA, they get it to a full six sigma, which is like 99.999%, and usually, that's something that just humans can't do. They can't just take the variation out of a process, with people involved. And, this has been the promise of automation, and it's a theme. One of my favorite questions, this year, has been, we've been talking about things like automation, and intelligence in systems, for decades, but, now, with the advent of AI machine learning, we can argue whether these things are actually artificial intelligence, in what they are learning, but the programming and learning models, that can be set up and trained, and what they can do on their own, are super-impressive, and really poised to take the industry to the next level. >> So, I wanna fast forward to 2019, but before we do so, anything else that people need to know about 2018? >> 2018, Sam, it's this hybrid multi-cloud world. The relationship that I think we spend the most time talking about, is we talked a lot about Amazon, but, VMware. VMware now has over 600,000 customers, and that partnership with VMware is really interesting. The warning, of course, is that Amazon is learning a lot from Vmware, When we joke with my friends, we say, "Okay, you've learned a lot from them means that "maybe I don't need them in the long term." But in the short term, great move for VMware, where they've solidified their position with customers. Customers feel happy as to where they live, in that multi-cloud environment, and I guess we throw out these terms like hybrid, and multi, and things like that, but when I talk to users, they're just figuring out their digital transformation. They're worried about their business. Yes, they're doing cloud, so sassify what you can, put in the public cloud what makes sense, and modernize. Beware of lift and shift, it's really not the answer. It could be a piece of the overall puzzle, to be able to modernize and pull things apart. An area, I always try to keep ahead of what the next bleeding-edge thing is, Sam. A thing I've been looking at, deeply, the last two years, has been serverless. Serverless is phenomenal. It could just disrupt everything we're talking about, and, Amazon, of course, has the lead there. So, it was kind of an undercurrent discussion at the KubeCon Show, that we were just at. Final thing, things are changing all the time, Sam, and it is impossible for anybody to keep up on all of it. I get the chance to talk to some of the most brilliant people, at some of the most amazing companies, and even those, you know, the PhD's, the people inventing stuff, they're like, "I can't keep up with what's going on at my company, "let alone what's going on in the industry." So, that's the wrong thing. Of course, one of the things we helped to do, is to extract the signal from the noise, help people distill that. We put it into video, we put it into articles, we put it into podcasts, to help you understand some of the basics, and where you might wanna go to learn more. So, we're all swimming in this. You know, the only constant, Sam, in the industry is change. >> Absolutely. (laughing in unison) >> So, things are changing. The whole landscape, as you said, is changing. Going into 2019, what should people expect? Any predictions from you? Any big mergers and acquisitions you might see? >> It's amazing, Sam. The analogy I always use is, when you have the hundred year flood, you always say, "Oh gosh, we got through it, "and we should be okay." No, no, no, the concern is, if you have the hundred year flood, or the big earthquake, the chances are that you're going to have maybe something of the same magnitude, might even be more or less, but rather soon. A couple of years ago, Dell bought EMC, largest acquisition in tech history. We spent a lot of time analyzing it. By the way, Dell's gonna go public, December 28. Interesting move, billions of dollars. As Larry Ellison said, "Michael Dell, "he's no dummy when it comes to money.' He is going to make, personally, billions of dollars off of this transaction, and, overall, looks good for the Dell technologies family, as they're doing. So, that acquisition, the Red Hat acquisition, yeah, we're probably gonna see a 10-to-20 billion dollar acquisition this year. I'm not sure who it is. There's a lot of tech IPOs on the horizon. The data protection space is one that we've kept a close eye on. From what I hear, Zeam, who does over a billion dollars a year, not looking to go public. Rubrik, on the other hand, somewhere in the north of 200 million dollars worth of revenue, I kind of remember 200, 250 in run rate, right now, likely going to go public in 2019. Could somebody sweep in, and buy them before they go public? Absolutely. Now, I don't think Rubrik's looking to be acquired. In that space, you've got Rubrik, you've got Cohesity, you've got a whole lot of players, that it has been a little bit frothy, I guess you'd say. But, customers are looking for a change in how they're doing things, because their environments are changing. They've got lots of stuff in sass, gotta protect that data. They've got things all over the cloud, and that data issue is core. When we actually did our predictions for 2018, data was at the center of everything, when I talked about Wikibon. It was just talking to Peter Burris and David Floyer, and they said there is some hesitancy in the enterprise, like, I'm using Salesforce, I'm using Workday I'm using ServiceNow. We hear all the things about Facebook giving my data away, Google, maybe the wrong people own data, there's that concern I want to pull things back. I always bristle a little bit, when you talk about things like repatriation, and "I'm not gonna trust the cloud." Look, the public clouds are more secure, than my data centers are in general, and they're changing and updating much faster. One of the biggest things we have, in IT, is that I put something in, and making changes is tough. Change, as we said, is the only thing constant. It was something I wrote about. Red Hat, actually, is a company that has dealt with a lot of change. Anybody that sells anything with Linux, or Kubernetes, there are so many changes happening, on not only weekly, but a daily basis, that they help bring a little bit of order, and adult supervision, to what most people would say is chaos out there. That's the kind of thing we need more in the industry, is I need to be able to manage that change. A line I've used many times is, you don't go into a company and say, "Hey, what version of Azure are you running?" You're running whatever Microsoft says is the latest and greatest. You don't have to worry about Patch Tuesday, or 08. I've got that things that's gonna slow down my system for awhile. Microsoft needs to make that invisible to me. They do make that thing invisible to me. So does Amazon, so does Google. >> What's your number one company to watch, this upcoming year. Is it Amazon, Sam? Look, Amazon is the company at the center of it all. Their ecosystem is amazing. While Amazon adds more in revenue, than the number two infrastructure player does in revenue. So, look, in the cloud space, it is not only Amazon's world. There definitely is a multi-cloud world. I went to the Microsoft show for the first time, this year, and Microsoft's super-impressive. They focus on your business applications, and their customers love it. Office 365 really helped move everybody towards sass, in a big way, and it's a big service industry. Microsoft's been a phenomenal turnaround story, the last couple of years. Definitely want to dig in more with that ecosystem, in 2019 and beyond. But, Amazon, you know, we could do more shows of the CUBE, in 2019, than we did our first couple of years. They have, of course, Amazon re:Invent, our biggest show of the year, but their second year, it's about 20 shows, that they do, and we're increasing those. I've been to the New York City Summit, and the San Francisco Summit. I've already mentioned their Public Sector Summit. Really, really, really good ecosystems, phenomenal users, and I already told you how I feel about talking to users. It's great to hear what they're doing, and those customers are moving things around. Google, love doing the Google show. We'll be back there in April. Diane Greene is one of the big guests of the year, for us this year. I was sorry to miss it in person, 'cause I actually have some background. I worked with Diane. Back before EMC bought VMware. I had the pleasure of working with Vmware, when they were, like, a hundred person company. Sam, one of the things, I look back at my career, and I'm still a little bit agog. I mean, I was in my mid-20s, working in this little company, of about 100 people, signed an NDA, started working with them, and that's VMware, with 600,000 customers. I've watched their ascendancy. It's been one of the pleasures of my career. There's small ones, heck. Nutanix I've mentioned a couple of times. I started working them when they were real small. They have over a billion in revenue. New Cure, since the early days. Some companies have done really well. The cloud is really the center of gravity of what I watch. Edge computing we got into a bit. I'm surprised we got almost 20 minutes into this conversation, without mentioning it. That, the whole IOT space, and edge computing, really interesting. We did a fun show with PTC, here in Boston. Got to talk to the father of AI, the father of virtual reality. It's like all these technologies, many of which have been bouncing around for a couple of decades. How are they gonna become real? We've got a fun virtual reality place right next door. The guy running the cameras for us is a huge VR enthusiast. How much will those take the next step? And, how much are things stalling out? I worry, was having conversations. Autonomous vehicles, we're even looking at the space. Been talking about it. Will it really start to accelerate? Or have we hit road blocks, and it's gonna get delayed. Some of these are technologies, some of these are policies in place, in governments and the like, and that's still one of the things that slows down crowded options. You know, GDPR was the big discussion, leading into the beginning of 2018. Now, we barely talk about it. There's more regulations coming, in California and the like, but we do need to worry about some of those macro-economical and political things that sometimes get in the way, of some of the technology pieces. >> I'd love to put something out into the universe, here. If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be? Let's see if we can make it happen. It's amazing to me, Sam, some of the interviews we've done. I got a one-on-one with Michael Dell this year. It was phenomenal, Michael was one. It took us about three or four years before we got Michael on the program, the first time. Now, we have him two or three times a year. Really, to get to talk to him. There is the founder culture John Furrier always talks about. Some of these founders are very different. Michael, amazing, got to speak to him a couple of times. There's something that makes him special, and there's a reason why he's a billionaire, and he's done very well for himself. So, that was one. Furrier also interviewed John Chambers, who is one of the big gets I was looking at. I was jealous that I wasn't able to get there. I got to interview one of my favorite authors this year, Walter Isaacson, at the shows. When I look at, Elon Musk, of course, as a technologist, is, I'm amazed. I read his bio, I've heard some phenomenal interviews with him. Kara Swisher did a phenomenal sit-down on her podcast with him. Even the 60 Minutes interview was decent this year. >> The Joe Rogan one was great >> Yeah, so, you'd want to be able to sit down. I wouldn't expect Elon to be a 15-minute, rapid-fire conversation, like we usually have. But, we do some longer forms, sit down. So he would be one. Andrew Jassy, we've interviewed a number of times now. Phenomenal. We've got to get Bezos on the program. Some of the big tech players out there. Look, Larry Ellison's another one that we haven't had on the program. We've had Mark Hurd on the program, We've had lots of the Oracle executives. Oracle's one that you don't count out. They still have so many customers, and have strong power in new issues, So there are some big names. I do love some of the authors, that we've had on the program, some thought leaders in the space. Every time we go to a show, it's like, I was a little disappointed I didn't get to interview Jane Goodall, when she was at a show. Things like that. So, we ask, and never know when you can get 'em. A lot of times, it's individual stories of the users, which are phenomenal, and there's just thousands of good stories. That's why we go to some small shows, and make sure we always have some editorial coverage. So that, if their customers are comfortable sharing their story, that's the foundation our research was founded on. Peers sharing with their peers. Some of the most powerful stories of change, and taking advantage of new technologies, and really transforming, not just business, but health care and finance, and government. There's so much opportunity for innovation, and drivers in the marketplace today. >> Stu, I love it. Thanks for wrapping up 2018 for us, and giving us the predictions. CUBE nation, you heard it here. We gotta get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison on the CUBE this year. We could use your help. Stu, thank you, and CUBE nation, thank you for watching. (electronic techno music)

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group welcome back I'm Stu minimun and you're watching the cube at wtg transform 2018 happy to welcome to the program two gentlemen from the Boston Architectural College to my left is Carl Jasperson who is the systems administrator and to his left is Jason O'Brien who's the director of IT gentlemen thanks so much for joining us thank you for having us all right so Jason why don't we start with you help us power up this conversation to tell us a little bit about the college so Boston Architectural college we started in the late 1800s it's a small design at school and we offer programs in landscape interior and traditional architecture yeah so I love that to talk to a little bit more about you know that the charter of the school and how IT fits into that so we we are a mission of the schools to provide excellent education to a diverse population technology factors in is very important and over the last ten years the Carll I've been at the school technology has use has increased immensely our students are using it more and more every year and meeting those needs has become you know difficult and it's a challenge we we strive to achieve every year well Design Thinking is is so important these days I I studied engineering as an undergrad in which I've learned more about design one of my favorite authors so I have an interview about a month ago Walter Isaacson you know the ones he studies are the ones that can take that design thinking and technology and bring them together Carles bring us up to speed on from from the IT standpoint you know how big of a team do you have what are you involved with I said you know things have been changing over the last few years yeah so I mean we've got Jason in addition to running the department he runs our online learning system I'm responsible for all the backend its infrastructure servers networking backup virtualization we recently hired a junior systems administrator to help me out we've got a web guy we've got a DBA to the woodshop is under IT because we have a fabrication guy so 3d printing laser cutting we have the help desk and the help desk manager who also does our purchasing and she and I will take escalations so it's there's not a lot of crossover you know skill crossover in the group but we managed to keep everything going yeah but as you said they've been you know woodworking not something you think of in Italy as you know an IT thing IT an OT or you know really converging a lot when you talk about manufacturing as you know we talk about sensors and IOT it's it's hitting everywhere yeah for us you know 3d printing and laser cutting and we also have a CNC router they all started as experiments at the school and have turned into a major factor in for our students it's a resource that they demand and the increasing use every single year and how we meet those demands is is becoming tricky to accomplish in our you know we're in the Back Bay real estate is very expensive and we have to make our space do amazing things Jason that's great points I mean I've talked to lots of higher education and even you talk to the K 2 through 12 it was you know what mobility has had a huge impact you know therefore stresses and strains on wireless you know how do I get devices into the classroom how do I manage it I had gentleman from bu who's here at the show last year we were talking a lot about MOOCs so you know it's that that role of i TS but it's expanding but luckily they're throwing way more money at you I'm sure well we've been flat headcount over the last eight years we lost someone last year and gain someone this year so you know we we basically have to do more with less every year like most IT departments so you know we've we redesign our spaces periodically to meet those our students needs you know and turn returning what was labs just computer labs into more flexible space where students are can move the tables around and you the computers are available sometimes there we have high end alien wares in a in a cabinet they pull out news or they can use it to make models we have they can put up their designs on a 3d TV they're using VR headsets to walk around their own designs it's really fascinating where the technologies okay I wish we could spend more time anywhere in VR stuff and everything like that our production crews gamers my son's into this stuff but but Karl I'm hearing things like space constrained we need to do more with less we need to simplify this environment wow that seems like a really good set up for kind of infrastructure modernization so how long have you guys been there about 10 years right yeah so it's a change don't want one in ten years so walk us back 10 years ago and give us that point when you went to modernize yeah well when we started there's no virtualization 3 server racks in a room in the basement for 10 years that we've been there there's been water in that room twice so that always gave us the warm fuzzies you're saying it wasn't water cooling I mean no we tried for that but it didn't you know it didn't work out last year we moved to Colo facility in Summerville so and by the time we did that move yeah we did we started virtualization with VMware like three five within a year or two of me starting and the racks got you know less and less full and now in the fall we rolled out VX rail and we're in a single rack in a data center and there's I think three physical servers in that rack that aren't the VX rail at this point so it's it's consolidation power savings stuffs in a much better physical location than it used to be moving that server room out we were able to free up that space for you know the students to be able to have it's a it's a meditation space now so it's it's been really interesting kind of going through all that great what I wanted you know we don't have a ton of time but let's talk about that VX rail was your team were you looking for HCI was it you know just time for a server refresh you know what what kind of led to that was there a specific application that you started with so this event two years ago we saw Brian from bu give this presentation on their tan and that really turns us on to the whole hyper-converged option we we worked with Winslow we actually talked to another vendor and we looked at Nutanix we looked at pivot three we looked at rolling our own you know visa non FX 2 and after kind of comparing everything and seeing the pros and cons VX rail made the most sense from management perspective and a price perspective our old cluster was coming up on the five-year mark things were going out of warranty we had ecologic sand with 7200 rpm drives one gig I scuzzy just flow for most of its life we were just doing lightweight servers and applications two years ago we needed to virtualize our database server and we threw her Knicks in there with 800 gig on VM e drives and that was a great stopgap but you know we we needed something more permanent more robust - that's how we got to be X ray from a management standpoint the hyper-converged model gave us more flexibility it's easier to expand and since we're small we're not talking about you know racks and racks working together ryote you started with just three hosts so from a overview standpoint it's easy for us as we grow to just add another node and we get the compute we get the storage and we get the memory all at once as an expansion so it's the model is just fantastic for our workload that we put on it we've got like 70 servers in there the only stuff that's not in there yet is our student file server and exchange and they're going in there in the next six months yeah yeah good great and that's so so it sounds like you're real happy with the solution you've been with Dell for four years so from an Operations standpoint was there you know a lot of steep learning curve or was this pretty straightforward and very easy I mean I was I was already really familiar with the VMware piece going into this so that you know that wasn't a big deal we were already on Ruby sphere 6 and we started in the it's row of B so 6px role manager is it's kind of a stupid easy interface you know you can go in you can see are there alerts is there an update you know can it see my hardware is all that good there's not a whole lot to learn from there if we were doing V San on our own my understanding is that some a lot more complicated to stand up once you have it going you're good until you try to make a change so the VX rail manager extract abstracts all that away and just kind of gives you the the VMware experience that you're used to yeah any commentary on the economic service you know we actually found it was very interesting because our original assessment of our own needs were there was no way we could afford all flash and we started we focused exclusively on hybrid solutions and after a certain point we saw I think a presentation from Rick on the external platform and we saw the VX rail as inline dedupe and compression with the all flash and we thought wait maybe we could make this work with all flash and so we actually had a very slight reduction in RAW storage in our new platform but the percentage that we're actually consuming is far less than on our old platform simply because of those gains and it is the performance is far far faster and it's a we've just been very pleased with the implementation from a cost perspective the all-flash VX rail came in under the hybrid pivot 3 and the hybrid Nutanix products so you know we it was a huge win from that perspective we were shocked we could be able to do it thrilled with it ok final word it sounds like you're real happy with the solution when it smoothly operates well economics were good what final takeaways would you give for your peers I mean I'd say the implementation was you know the VX rail platform the the installation is as advertised it was it's basically a wizard that walks you through the installation process the very few minor issues we encountered the winslow team and the is EMC no support support people had no problem solving for us it was really a pretty easy migration to the new platform and we were able to do it with essentially zero downtime yeah awesome well gentlemen thanks so much for joining that's the promise is to get that easy button for IT HD I definitely helping to move in that direction next time we'll get to talk a little bit more about cloud and everything like that be back with lots more coverage here from wtg transform 2018 I'm Stu minimun thanks for watching the Q

(electronic music) - Welcome to theCube Insights. A podcast that is typically taken from Siliconangle media's theCube interviews, where we share the best of our teams insights from all events we go to and from time to time we want to be able to extract some of our learnings when we're back at the ranch. Joining me for this segment is co-founder, co-CEO, benevolent dictator of a community, my boss, Dave Vellante. - Hey Stu. - Dave. Good to see you dressed down. - Yeah, well. Podcast, right? We got toys, props and no tie. - Yeah, I love seeing this ... we were just talking, John Furrier, who we could really make a claim to say we wouldn't have the state of podcasting today, definitely in tech, if it wasn't for what John had done back in the day with PodTech and it's one of those things, we've talked about podcasts for years but I'd gotten feedback from the community that said, "Wow, you guys have grown and go to so many shows that we want to listen to you guys as to: what was interesting at this show, what did you guys take out of it, what cool people did you interview?" We said, "Well, of course all over youtube, our website thecube.net but it made a lot of sense to put them in podcast form because podcasts have had a great renaissance over the last couple of years. - Yeah, and it's pretty straight forward, as Stu, for us to do this because virtually every show we do, even if it's a sponsor show, we do our own independent analysis upfront and at the tail end, a lot of our people in our community said, "We listen to that, to get the low down on the show and get your unfiltered opinion." And so, why not? - Yeah, Dave. Great point. I love, from when I first came on board, you always said, "Stu, speak your mind. Say what the community; what are the users saying? What does everybody talk about?" As I always say, if there is an elephant in the room we want to put it on the table and take a bite out it. And even, yes, we get sponsored by the companies to be there. We're fully transparent as to who pays us. But from the first Cube event, at the end of the day, where after keynote, we're gonna tell you exactly what we think and we're always welcome for debate. For people to come back, push on what we're saying and help bring us more data because at the end of the day, data and what's actually happening in the world will help shape our opinions and help us move in the direction where we think things should go. - I think the other thing is too, is a lot of folks ask us to come in and talk to them about what we've learned over the past year, the past six months. This is a great way for us to just hit the podcast and just go through, and this is what I do, just go through some of the shows that I wasn't able to attend and see what the other hosts were saying. So, how do you find these things? - Yeah, so first of all, great. theCube insights is the branding we have on it. We're on iTunes, We're on Spotify, We're on Google Play, Buzzsprout's what we use to be able to get it out there. It's an RSS on wikibon.com. I will embed them every once in a while or link to them. We plan to put them out, on average, it's once a week. We wanna have that regular cadence Typically on Thursday from a show that we've been out the spring season is really busy, so we've often been doing two a week at this point, but regular cadence, just podcasts are often a little tough to Google for so if you go into your favorite player and look at thecube insights and if you can't find it just hit you, me, somebody on the team up. - So you just searched thecube insights in one of those players? - Yeah absolutely, I've been sitting with a lot of people and right now it's been word of mouth, this is the first time we're actually really explaining what we're doing but thecube one word, insights is the second word I found it real quick in iTunes I find it in Google Play, Spotify is great for that and or your favorite podcast player Let us know if we're not there. - So maybe talk about some of the things we're seeing. - Yeah absolutely - The last few months. - So, right when we're here, what are our key learning? So for the last year or two Dave, I've really been helping look at the companies that are in this space, How are they dealing with multi cloud? And the refinement I've had in 2018 right now is that multi cloud or hybrid cloud seems to be, where everyone's Landing up and part of it is that everything in IT is heterogeneous but when I talk about a software company, really, where is their strength? are they an infrastructure company that really is trying to modernize what's happening in the data center are they born with cloud are they helping there? or are they really a software that can live in SAAS, in private cloud and public cloud? I kinda picture a company and where's their center of gravity? Do they lean very heavily towards private cloud, and they say public cloud it's too expensive and it's hard and You're gonna lose your job over it or are they somebody that's in the public cloud saying: there's nothing that should live in the data center and you should be a 100% public cloud, go adopt severless and it's great and the reality is that customers use a lot of these tools, lots of SAAS, multiple public Cloud for what they're doing and absolutely their stuff that's living in the data center And will continue for a long time. what do you see in it Dave? - My sort of takeaway in the last several months, half a year, a year is we used to talk about cloud big data, mobile and social as the forward drivers. I feel like it's kinda been there done that, That's getting a little bit long in the tooth and I think there's like the 3DS now, it's digital transformation, it's data first, is sort of the second D and disruption is the 3rd D And I think if you check on one of the podcast we did on scene digital, with David Michella. I think he did a really of laying out how the industry is changing there's a whole new set of words coming in, we're moving beyond that cloud big data, social mobile era into an era that's really defined by this matrix that he talks about. So check that out I won't go into it in detail here but at the top of that matrix is machine intelligence or what people call AI. And it's powering virtually everything and it's been embedded in all types of different applications and you clearly see that to the extent that organizations are able to Leverage the services, those digital services in that matrix, which are all about data, they're driving change. So it's digital transformation actually is real, data first really means You gotta put data at the core of your enterprise and if you look at the top five companies in terms of market cap the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons, the Microsofts Etc. Those top five companies are really data first. But People sometimes call data-driven, and then disruption everywhere, one of my favorite disruptions scenarios is of course crypto and blockchain And of course I have my book "The Enigma war" which is all about crypto, cryptography and we're seeing just massive Innovation going on as a result of both blockchain and crypto economics, so we've been really excited to cover, I think we've done eight or nine shows this year on crypto and blockchain. - Yeah it's an interesting one Dave because absolutely when you mention cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, there's still a lot of people in the room that look at you, Come on, there's crazy folks and it's money, it's speculation and it's ridiculous. What does that have to do with technology? But we've been covering for a couple of years now, the hyper ledger and some of these underlying pieces. You and I both watch Silicon Valley and I thought they actually did a really good job this year talking about the new distributed internet and how we're gonna build these things and that's really underneath one of the things that these technologies are building towards. - Well the internet was originally conceived as this decentralized network and well it physically is a decentralized network, it's owned essentially controlled by an oligopoly of behemoths and so what I've learned about cryptocurrency is that internet was built on protocols that were funded by the government and university collaboration so for instance SMTP Gmail's built on SMTP (mumbles) TCPIP, DNS Etc. Are all protocols that were funded essentially by the government, Linux itself came out of universities early developers didn't get paid for developing the technologies there and what happened after the big giants co-opted those protocols and basically now run the internet, development in those protocol stopped. Well Bitcoin and Ethereum and all these other protocols that are been developed around tokens, are driving innovation and building out really a new decentralized internet. So there's tons of innovation and funding going on, that I think people overlook the mainstream media talks all about fraud and these ICO's that are BS Etc. And there's certainly a lot of that it's the Wild West right now. But there's really a lot of high quality innovation going on, hard to tell what's gonna last and what's gonna fizzle but I guarantee there's some tech that's being developed that will stay the course. - Yeah I love....I believe you've read the Nick Carr book "The Shallows", Dave. He really talked about when we built the internet, there's two things one is like a push information, And that easy but building community and being able to share is really tough. I actually saw at an innovation conference I went to, the guy that created the pop-up ad like comes and he apologizes greatly, he said "I did a horrible horrible thing to the internet". - Yeah he did - Because I helped make it easier to have ads be how we monetize things, and the idea around the internet originally was how do I do micropayments? how do I really incent people to share? and that's one of the things we're looking at. - Ad base business models have an inherent incentive for large organizations that are centralized to basically co-opt our data and do onerous things with them And that's clearly what's happened. users wanna take back control of their data and so you're seeing this, they call it a Matrix. Silicon Valley I think you're right did a good job of laying that out, the show was actually sometimes half amazingly accurate and so a lot of development going on there. Anywhere you see a centralized, so called trusted third-party where they're a gatekeeper and they're adjudicating essentially. That's where crypto and token economics is really attacking, it's the confluence of software engineering, Cryptography and game theory. This is the other beautiful thing about crypto is that there is alignment of incentives between the investor, the entrepreneur, the customer and the product community. and so right now everybody is winning, maybe it's a bubble but usually when these bubbles burst something lives on, i got some beautiful tulips in my front yard. - Yeah so I love getting Insight into the things that you've been thinking of, John Furrier, the team, Peter Borus, our whole analyst team. Let's bring it back to thecube for a second Dave, we've done a ton of interviews I'm almost up to 200 views this year we did 1600 as a team last year. I'll mention two because one, I was absolutely giddy and you helped me get this interview, Walter isaacson at The Dell Show, One of my favorite authors I'm working through his DaVinci book right now which is amazing he talks about how a humanities and technology, the Marrying of that. Of course a lot of people read the Steve Jobs interview, I love the Einstein book that he did, the innovators. But if you listen to the Michael Dell interview that I did and then the Walter isaacson I think he might be working on a biography of Michael Dell, which i've talk to a lot of people, and they're like i'd love to read that. He's brilliant, amazing guy I can't tell you how many people have stopped me and said I listened to that Michael Dell interview. The other one, Customers. Love talking about customers especially people that they're chewing glass, they're breaking down new barriers. Key Toms and I interviewed It was Vijay Luthra from Northern trust. Kissed a chicago guy And he's like "this is one of the oldest and most conservative financial institutions out there". And they're actually gonna be on the stage at DockerCon talking about containers they're playing with severless technology, how the financial institutions get involved in the data economy, Leverage this kind of environment while still maintaining security so it was one that I really enjoyed. How about...... what's jumped out of you in all your years? - (Mumbles) reminds me of the quote (mumbles) software is eating the world, well data is eating software so every company is.... it reminds me of the NASDAQ interview that I did Recently and all we talked about, we didn't talk about their IT, we talked about how they're pointing their technology to help other exchanges get launched around the world and so it's a classic case of procurer of technology now becoming a seller of technology, and we've seen that everywhere. I think what's gonna be interesting Stu is AI, I think that more AI is gonna be bought, than built by these companies and that's how they will close the gap, I don't think the average everyday global 2000 company is gonna be an AI innovator in terms of what they develop, I think how they apply it is where the Innovation is gonna be. - Yeah Dave we had this discussion when it was (mumbles) It was the practitioners that will Leverage this will make a whole lot more money than the people that made it. - We're certainly seeing that. - Yeah I saw.....I said like Linux became pervasive, it took RedHat a long time to become a billion dollar company, because the open stack go along way there. Any final thoughts you wanna go on Dave? - Well so yeah, check out thecube.net, check out thecube insights, find that on whatever your favorite podcast player is, we're gonna be all over the place thecube.net will tell you where we're gonna be obviously, siliconangle.com, wikibon.com for all the research. - Alright and be sure to hit us up on Twitter if you have questions. He's D Villante on twitter, Angus stu S-T-U, Furrier is @Furrier, Peter Borus is PL Borus on twitter, Our whole team. wikibon.com for the research, siliconangle.com for the news and of course thecube.net for all the video. - And @ TheCube - And @TheCube of course on Twitter for our main feed And we're also up on Instagram now, so check out thecube signal on one word, give you a little bit of behind the scenes fun our phenomenal production team help to bring the buzz and the energy for all the things we do so for Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for listening to this special episode of thecube insights. 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>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you buy Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE's Media Production of theCUBE, live here from Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, and I have the distinct pleasure of welcoming Walter Isaacson to our program. Author, podcaster, I read every biography that you publish. I listen to every podcast, so thank you. So, Walter, this is a conference of geeks, you know? And I say that lovingly, 14 thousand people. They love technology; they love ideas. You have the chance to study and research some of the, you know, most brilliant minds, that we've had the last couple hundred years. Where do you get your inspiration from? >> You know, I love the fact that the most creative of people, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Einstein, Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, Ada Lovelace, whomever they may be, all love the humanities and the science. They stand at that intersection of sort of liberal acts technology, and that's so important in today's world. We can have enormous amounts of data, and the question is, how do you connect humans to it? How do you add the human factor? And so, that's where I get my inspiration, from people who stand at that interaction of humanities and technology. >> Yeah, one of my favorite books of yours is the Innovators. You talked about history, and there's things that we've been looking at or trying. When you talk about forecasting or predicting something, sometimes we have great ideas, but if I take us, you know, decades or longer to get there, any kind of, you know, big inspirations? What do you say to people that work in the tech world, just how they should think about things like that? >> Well, first of all, things happen sometimes slower than you expect, until that inflection point, when they happen faster than you expect. >> It's like going broke, you know? It happens really slow, and then it happens fast. >> I guess we shouldn't say that in Vegas, here where we are for this conference, but I think that the main thing to do is to be one of those people that has an intuitive feel for how humans are going to find a product or service to be transformative to them. And, you know, we didn't know we needed a thousand songs in our pocket till the iPod came along. You know, likewise, we didn't know we needed transistors until somebody invented the transistor radio, and we could take it along with us. So, what turns us on? What makes us human? >> Yeah, so many things out there. You've been not only writing; you're doing podcasts now. What do you think of kind of the state of content? People say sometimes nobody reads anymore. You do hard research, a team of people. What's your thoughts about content these days? >> Well, I think the business model for journalism and production of content has been decimated at times, partly because it's all ad-driven in terms of journalism and, you know, video, and we need to get back to a time when people valued content and are willing to have a direct relationship with the content provider. About 80% of the revenue now for, say, reported or journalistic content does either the Google, Facebook, Instagram, some aggregator, so I think we have to look at the next way of finding micro-payment subscription models that work in addition to the advertising-driven model. >> Yeah, there's so many people sometimes, they look at all of this change, and they get kind of pessimistic. You know, we're going to have the AI apocalypse, or the robots are going to take over. Shows like here we're, that technology is, I say, by definition, are positive about technology. When I read your writings, you seem to have a very positive outcome. >> Oh, I'm definitely optimistic about where technology takes us. You know, I write in the Innovators, begin with Ada Lovelace, who was Lord Byron's daughter. Her father was a lud eyed, you know, defended the followers of Ned Lot, who was smashing the looms of England, thinking that technology would put people out of work. But Ada was somebody who said, "I get it. The punch card's telling those looms how to do patterns could make a calculating machine be able to do numbers, as well as words, as well as pictures." She envisioned the computer, and the notion of technology increases the number of people in the textile industry in England in the 19th century. And the computer has led to so many more jobs than its destroyed, so I think technology will always augment human creativity, not destroy it. >> So, last thing I wanted to ask you, Walter, is, we're here at Dell Technologies World. 34 years ago, Michael Dell started this. And he's a special individual. We've had the opportunity to talk to him, get to know him. I've told people that, you know, inside the company, if you reach out to him, he actually will respond. He seems very special in today's day in age. You've got background with Michael. Tell me, how do you-? >> I think it practically begins with his parents, his late mother and his father, you know, his father's still alive. Care a lot about education; care a lot about creativity. Deeply humane in the sense that they love all of society, human civil discourse, and that's why there's a humanity I see that Michael Dell is able to embed in his products, whether it's a Dell laptop I always use or the new servers, and Dell EMC, which enables people across platforms to say, "How do we collaborate; how do we be creative?" >> All right, well, Walter, I just say thank you so much. A pleasure having you on the program. And you've been watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. Always check out thecube.net for all of our broadcasts, and we also, like Walter, have a podcast. Check it out on iTunes. >> Walter: Thank you, Stu. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its The Cube, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. (soft electronic music) >> Welcome to The Cube's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman And this is the second of three days of wall to wall coverage we have here at The Sands convention center and I am thrilled to welcome to the program, back to the program, Michael Dell, who is the CEO of Dell Technologies. Michael thank you so much for having us here and thanks for joining us on The Cube. >> Oh, great to be here. Thank you guys for all the great coverage. You always do a wonderful job getting into the technical details and kind of exploring everything in depth and we appreciate you and your team being here. >> Well thanks so much. You started off the keynote talking about the platform for the possible, said it was 34 years in the making. Now this is my 15th year at the show formally known as EMC World. I'd attended the Dell Show for a number of years, so tell us, start with what's really different now about the company's all together, it's renamed now, Dell Technologies World. Why is this the platform for the possible? >> I'm kind of amazed and inspired when I step back and look at what our customers are doing with our technology and we have hundreds of technical sessions here where we get in depth as we've always done at, historically, EMC World, but we're also taking a broader view and saying, "Hey, what's this really all about?" What's the impact on the world? This was one of the motivations for bringing together Dell and EMC and VMWare, and Pivotal and the whole family and it's working. So we're telling the story through the eyes of our customers and it is really an amazing time when you think about what's going on in the world. We have this incredible platform that's been built over the last 30 years, but now there are all these new enabling technologies that are going to take it much further and the domain of information technology is not the IT department anymore and we're seeing that in a big way, so it's a super exciting time and obviously we think we're a unique company across digital transformation, IT, workforce security and it's working. So it's all good, Stu. >> Michael, one of the great lines we liked in the keynote was today we'll have the most change that you've ever had in your life, but compared to what we'll see tomorrow, it's going to keep changing faster. When I look at the Dell Technologies family, I know a lot has changed. Pivotal just went through an IPO. I have to imagine the tax laws changing in the recent administration has impact. What's changed since the day one decision to purchase EMC, the largest merger in technology history to today, maybe give us a little bit of insight as to what's happening inside the family that's different. >> You know, there've been a lot of reports about the tax law. That actually was not much of a change. Kind of inconsequential change. It's very good for the broader industry growth and kind of broader economic growth and we're quite excited about that and so I see it as a net positive. You know, when we step back and go back a little bit in time here to 2009 when Joe and I first talked about this idea, 2008-2009. Wasn't the right time, financial crisis. We re-started it in 2014, announced it in 2015. Here we are four years after we had the last set of initial discussions and it's all come together very well. Look, I mean, the revenues are much stronger that we thought. Business is excellent. The demand is very strong. There's a portfolio effect. I think you're seeing increasing integration of the family of businesses, particularly with VMware and Dell EMC and Pivotal. And the relevance of what we are doing has never been greater and so we're able to have conversations with companies that are very different that we had before. At the same time this is occurring, the business leaders and the chief executives of companies are waking up to the power of technology, whether it's because of some new disruptor showing up or because they realize that they have to change and evolve. Used to be it was just us folks in the tech world that were in this fast changing world where everything was moving very quickly and we used to, when people wanted to come work for us, we'd say, "Hey, how do you like it when things change? "How are you dealing with ambiguity?" If they didn't like it, we'd say, "Yeah, you probably shouldn't come work here "because you won't be happy "if things are changing all the time." It's like that in every business now and, like you said, it's only going to get faster. >> Right. So, wondering if, you look at the portfolio, Michael. One of the things since the EMC acquisition and it's a pretty broad portfolio. There's some streamlining that I understand's happening. How do you balance the streamlining with the breadth of portfolio, make sure you're reaching the customers? >> There's absolutely some kind of simplification and optimization of the expansive set of capabilities we have. We also have some incredible platforms and so what you want to do is rally around the platforms and that's exactly what we're doing, so you'll see us not only create a very seamless and logical path for every customer, but rally around the winning platforms and you already detect that as a theme here at Dell Technologies World and it's going well. >> When you look at your overall portfolio, wonder if you could talk to some of the macroeconomic things happening, on margins that are happening. If Dave Alonte was here, are we talking a half of your business is client. You've got the ISG portfolio. That transformation of when Dell went private and now bringing EMC in, which allows you to change things. How do you look at that and what does Dell look like when you get to, say, the 2020, 2030? >> You know, right now it looks great and I think it'll look even better in 2020. What I see is we have positioned ourself as the essential infrastructure company and there's a massive infrastructure build-out and it's on the edge, it's a distributed core, and it's the cloud, and cloud is not just the public cloud and everybody's kind of figured that out now. We were saying it before it was cool, So if I think about the different businesses, you know Pivotal's doing great and we don't need to say too much about that because it just went public and we're in a bit of a quiet period, but the Pivotal business is a great business. VMware is doing fabulously well. Pat did a great job yesterday with the keynote and I think if you watch the keynote, you see, wow, Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, VMware, really, really working together at a very deep level. And then you go into our client business. Client business is growing really fast, but not as fast as our data center business. The data center business is growing even faster, so we're gaining share. You'll see it in the first quarter. We'll gain share in storage, we'll gain share in servers, we'll gain share in clients, and there's a portfolio effect where customers look across everything that we're doing and they say, "Yeah, I don't really want "to deal with 25 little companies. "I want to have a bigger relationship "with Dell Technologies." So bringing everything together, putting real effort behind these big platforms that we have, and look, we've got some big new initiatives. NSX, network virtualization. You know I'm a big believer in that and I think this is ultimately bigger than server virtualization and we're in an ideal position with our open networking and VMware NSX to drive that forward. >> Michael, both Allison and Jeff brought some great customer stories up on stage. One of the things sometimes you hear out there it's like, well, Dell, they're just an infrastructure company, and infrastructure, you know, I care about my data, I care about my applications. What's the role of infrastructure and maybe give us, what does infrastructure mean to you when we talk about those digital transformations that you're helping your customers through? >> Well you sort of go back to what's the plot here? And the plot is better outcomes, results, and success for a business. Well how do you do that? Well you do that with data, right? And people talk about clouds. Well what are clouds? The clouds are built on infrastructure. It's a bit like the internet. 20 years ago we'd say, hey we have the internet, we have the internet product strategy, Vice President of the internet, internet product division. Where's all that now? It's just everywhere. Cloud, AI, very, very similar. At the core of all this is the data and the computer science. You want to have artificial intelligence machine learning? Got to have data, so that's infrastructure. AI is eating software and software is eating hardware, but AI doesn't run on software. Software doesn't run on software. Software runs on hardware, so you got to put it all together, right? And that's exactly what we do. >> Alright, Michael what learnings have you had going through this? I know there was a lot of planning. We talked to Howard yesterday, talking about some of the cultures coming together, the big survey they did that like the top five things across everybody. It was like, not only were the top five things in agreement, but even the order was in agreement, but have to imagine that there were some things, bringing these large companies together. I might notice that in the keynote so far it's been all people that came from the Dell side that are up on stage. PowerMax Bob I know is from the EMC side, but mostly from the Dell side. What have you learned so far? How have some of those cultural pieces come together and how do you keep a quite large organization rallying and focused around what's an ever-changing and broad portfolio? >> You know, it's been a lot of fun, first of all to have so many unbelievably talented people join our company and that was a real delight because there's just a wealth of enormously talented people now in our company. Over-communicating, listening, getting to know them, understanding their point of view, and ultimately creating a shared vision and an aspiring vision for what we want to do in the future. And then, of course, when you're winning, everybody sees it and everybody's excited and they want to be part of it and they're engaged and it's working. So, certainly during the period before the integration and still today, we're in the business of technology and we've got products and services, but ultimately it's a people business right? And the talent comes in and walks out every single day, so you got to keep them engaged, excited, and fortunately we're doing that. And we're adding a lot more, so we need a few more thousand sales people, so if you're really talented and you know how to sell stuff, come join us at Dell Technologies, because we're hiring more sales people. >> Well Michael, I think you're going to get calls there. On a personal note, I've been watching on social media. Everybody's really, you give your time back. You spend time. I know something you really enjoy is speaking to people, understanding what's going on, getting into it, and for someone, Michael you created all of this and you've been there, just giving your time and getting involved is impressive. I've read like every book that Walter Isaacson's done. We're going to see a biography from him about you some time in the future or? >> Well look, I think if you're honored enough to have a biography by Walter Isaacson, that's pretty good. I'll leave that to him. He's a great one for sure. Look, I mean, I just think this is my job right? (laughs) Our job is to be with our customers, be with our people, learn, listen. That's how we become a better company and I wouldn't know what else to do if I wasn't doing that. >> Yeah. One of the things in your keynote you spoke about is helping customers, making it real. Like in Jeff's keynote, it was that the business and the IT are becoming one and the same. Maybe if you, do you have any good customer stories or how are you helping customers making it real? >> Yeah I think this topic of change management is really important because let's say you're a customer and you come to Dell Technologies World and you see this amazing, dizzying array of new things and you're like, "Wow, that sounds great but how do I do it?" And so, I'll give you one story. We met with a large, rather large company, and they had a situation where for any number of reasons, the IT environment was sort of put on hold for a couple of years. There were things going on around them that were beyond their control. They just really couldn't do anything, so the environment very quickly atrophied and they wanted very quickly to get up to speed and needed a lot of help and so we pulled in our professional services team. Make no mistake, we're not trying to replace Accenture or TCS or something, but a thin layer of architecture consulting to very quickly help them map out what the new architecture should look like and then go make it happen. And of course, we have lots of partners all over the world that also are engaged in helping that happen. But we're very aware that change management is a big topic for a lot of our customers and we're spending a lot of time on how do we make it easier, so make these more ready-made solutions for the fast track to the modern data center, like the VX Rack, VX Rail, V Block Solution. >> Yeah, we touched on it briefly, but that concept of change, when I talk to customers, one of the challenges they have is they learn about something, they get ramped on it. By the time they've rolled it out, there's something else that it's like, oh wait, maybe I should have waited. It used to be, oh geez, I should have started that project two years ago and now it feels like, wait, maybe I should wait another year because things are changing so fast, economics are changing. How do you work with customers and, internally, how does the team manage this just unprecedented rate of change? >> I think there's a pretty massive movement going on across organizations to be more agile and it kind of started in software development, some technical organizations, but now you're seeing it spread. We're certainly working as a company to do more and more of that and I think we're living in a very dynamic world. First we had the internet and all the things that that brought. Now we have the 5G and the block chain and autonomous computing and all kinds of new things that are being explored out there and so we have to be highly adaptable and flexible. I think companies that aren't able to do that are going to have a problem. We are in a way blessed that we grew up in a world where if we didn't do that, we'd have been out of business a long time ago. >> Michael, you mentioned crypto. We've talked to the VMware and Dell EMC teams that are starting to look at those technologies, do some of the underlying things, but you're a big investor. You've made some big things, everything from, I think about the radio frequencies in the sports arena. What do you think of this whole crypto, Bitcoin, all that. What's your take on that from a personal side? >> Well look, as a personal investor, I have almost none of my money in cryptocurrency, so I'll be clear about that. I'm a massive believer in distributed computing and block chain, but I don't have a lot of my money, or really, in anything to speak of in cryptocurrency, so maybe I'm missing out on the next great investment opportunity. Don't really know. I guess we'll find out, but big believer in distributed computing and block chain. >> Yeah I think you'll be doing okay either way, Michael. Want to give you the-- >> It's worked out pretty well so far, so I'm... >> (laughs) Want to give you the final world. There's so much here, over 14,000 people, lots of tracks. I've been talking to all my friends. It's a great nerd fest as I think some people have said, so always geeking out. Give us a final takeaway, what you hope people walk away, and what maybe they understand Dell Technologies a little better about than they might not have in the past? >> Well first, very grateful for our customers, for the trust they place in us. It's really gratifying to see how the Dell Technologies capabilities have resonated, and look, I think a lot of people are a bit surprised at all the capability we have across the company. That's really the purpose of this event is to bring it all together, explain the capabilities we have. We want them to engage in the hundreds of technical sessions that we have, but still come away with, I wish I could have gone to some more, right? And so we have all those online and for us this is also big ears. We're listening and we're learning. We're hearing from our customers and we're going to go take that back and bring the next set of innovations and we want to be the trusted partner for our customers. We think there's never been a better time to be doing what we're doing and there's a business investment cycle that's technology-led that's very powerful and there's no company on the planet that has the capabilities Dell Technologies has across all the four transformations. >> All right, well Michael Dell, thank you so much for joining us here. Really appreciate getting to talk with you and getting to cover this event. We have two more days full of live coverage here from Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman And you're watching The Cube. Thanks Michael. >> Michael: Great, thanks Stu. (soft electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Dell Technologies World. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, break it all down. Stu, this is our ninth year at Dell, EMC, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies World. >> Yeah, I mean Dave, and Old EMC World was one of the first places I met you. I think it was like 2008 or something like that. There was like a little blogger lounge. >> Yeah, this is 15 for you, I think it's 11 or 12 for me. >> Stu: Yeah. >> So it's been quite a run. I mean you remember the early days of this event. It was really a technical show. And I think that's probably why it's had such staying power. Because the roots are embedded in technology, but wow what a long way we've come. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, Dave, theCUBE, oh my god, I can't believe, double set here. We were looking at photos of us shoved in the corner with horrible lighting and no good cameras, and we've got a massive crew here. You're always looking sharp as usual, Dave. >> Thank you Stu. (laughing) >> Yeah, I mean gosh, that first year, I was wearing a vendor polo. (laughing) No hoodies back then. I wear a hoodie some now. But it's interesting for me, especially, since I spent 10 years working at EMC. I've been at Dell World for four or five years, kind of the mash up of those two is the biggest tech merger we've been covering since it was announced. This show has a lot of Dell overtones. So you and I have been that, Dell World was originally that CIO event. You had people like Bill Clinton and Elon Musk up onstage here. At this show we've got people like Walter Isaacson up onstage, I love reading his books, listen to the podcast. >> Dave: Andy McAfee. >> Andy McAfee, who you and I have interviewed a few times, talking about the second machine age, so some of those kind of high-level business issues as opposed to the deep in the portfolio, Dave Donatelli upstage walking through 37 different product announcements. >> So back then did you have hair or was this... >> Yeah, come on Dave, I was, when I started at EMC I was 7 foot tall and had hair. You know, the years of tech beat me down. >> So let's look at this merger, Stu. We go back, we've said, you and I have talked about this a lot. It was inevitable. You had Amazon coming in hard, driving margins of the enterprise down. Something had to happen to HPE, something had to happen to EMC, these infrastructure companies, and we said at the time that what we were going to see is 19% gross margin company married to the 16% gross margins company, come somewhere together in the low 30s gross margin. That's exactly what we've seen. The thing that's a little bit surprising to me is we've seen growth out of Dell. I've seen a lot of growth out of many enterprise infrastructure companies that are large and incumbents. Obviously people like Pure Storage grow very quickly. But at the time the merger we pinned them at slow 70s and they're now $80 billion, and we want to break that down a little bit. But did the growth surprise you? Particularly the client side grew. And the storage side declined multiplicitously. >> Dave, as you've been breaking down and I've been watching you, half of their business is the client side, and when they call out 21 consecutive quarters of growth, well if half the business has grown, that's good. And VMWare, doing well. We just interviewed Pac Elsinger. You know, VMWare's clicking well, integrating with the cloud. There's a lot of change there. Just one quick thing, talk about EMC. For me, one of the saving graces for EMC is they never bought a large services organization. You know, back in the day it was like, oh they were going to buy Accenture. There were some of these things. You look at the companies that have 100,000 services people, they're having to trim down, they're having to spin things out. You know the Dell spin merge, is Dell did spin off per row. So, while there have been some consolidation and some reductions since Dell and EMC have come together, you know, overall they're growing, there's good, there's new areas that they're putting R and D together. >> Just to give our audiences a little sort of overview in case you're not that familiar with what Dell has become, Dell Technologies, I mean, essentially you're looking at an $80 billion business. The core client side and infrastructure of the enterprise side comprised about 69 billion. VMWare's almost 8 billion, and then other, you know RSA, and well, whatever was back then pivotal before the IPO, etc., you know, Dell Financial, etc., was about 3 billion. That gets you to 80 billion. As you said, the client side is about half of the business. It's growing very nicely at about 7% a year, and it's about five and a half, 5.6% operating income. The ISG business, which is the core of, the classic EMC, all the server stuff, all the networking stuff. It's about, let's see 30.7 billion, almost 31 billion. The servers and networking side are growing at 20% a year. The storage is declining quite significantly. Double digits, they're sort of moderating that decline. And it's a higher percentage operating income, as percentage of revenue about 7%. You'd like to see that significantly higher. Now you go to VMWare, right? VMWare is 10% of the company's revenue but it accounts for half of the company's operating cash flow because it's margins, operating margins, are way up, high 20s, low 30s-- >> Yeah, I mean Dave, it was, I remember VM World, I think it was two years ago, I went to Michael, I'm like, "Michael, people think you're going to sell that off." And he was just foaming at the mouth. He's like, "They're stupid, they don't understand math." >> Dave: Well why would he? >> You know VMWare absolutely-- >> I mean, there's a 35% operating margin business, I mean it's a fantastic business. >> Dave, to be honest, everybody watching, is VMWare went through a little bit of a downturn. You know, the show two years ago wasn't great. >> Dave: Okay, right. >> But you know, NSX is now cooking, vSAN's doing great. There's lots of good areas that they have there. And the cloud picture. I mean turn back three years ago, Dave, VMWare was making statements like, when the old bookseller wins we're losing. EMC on their side was kind of trying to play a little bit with public cloud, but it was well understood in the field, public cloud is your enemy. And the market has matured. It understood that companies are figuring out their cloud strategy and their application and data strategy. And it's not a winner take all, zero sum game, everything goes to one of the top three or four public cloud players. >> So I got to ask you, so you feel as though that's sustainable, right? 'Cause I got to say, if I were AWS I would be looking at this saying this awesome. I need to get into the enterprise. I got to deal with the number one enterprise infrastructure player in VMWare in terms of its brand and its presence. I mean half a million customers, I think, is the number. I'm very excited. The flip side of that is the reality is, that deal for VMWare has been a huge tailwind for them. So help us square that circle. >> Yeah, and Dave, it's nuanced and complicated. Because when I talk to service providers, when I talk to the channel partners here with VMWare and with Dell, they're all starting to work more and more with VMWare. So you know, short-term, next two to three years, I think there's a great tailwind for VMWare to get involved here, but my concern is long term that people get on Amazon and they say, this is great and look at all these services and all of these things, maybe I don't need to pay for my server virtualization anymore. Maybe I don't need some of those pieces. What do I need in my data to center, sure I'll continue, but it's slowly declining like you mentioned. Storage is on a bit of a decline overall. So it's death by 1000 cuts. It is that replacement. For me it's always watching that data and that applications. It is tough, like super tough. David Floyer always say migrations, don't do 'em. You're going to go through so much pain, especially things like database migrations. But it is something that's happening. It's going to take the next five to 10 years as we look at these shifts. People are building new apps all the time. That tends to favor the public clouds, and there's so much happening in that space, but you know, the whole Dell family including Pivotal and VMWare, Virtustream, RSA, there are places where they win and still do well because, remember of course, none of these companies, it's not like they have 75% market share. So you know, if you ask Michael Dell, number one thing is he wants to take market share from HPE, and if he continues to take some of their market share it can help offset some of the things that he's losing to the public cloud. >> And well you have to take market share in a market that's not growing that fast. But you know, as we say on theCUBE many times, these disruptions are not binary, right? We still have mainframes for example. In fact, they're helping their tailwind for IBM right now. So you can put forth a scenario where yeah, a lot of these cloud native apps are going to be built in AWS and a lot of VMWare customers are going to do that, but as we often say, organizations can't just take their data and stuff it into the cloud, the public cloud, right? They've got to bring the cloud operating model to their data, to their business. We ask Pat, is it just use case specific, the Amazon Cloud and IBM I guess as well, or is it really bringing that cloud experience. And you know, he definitively said it's both, and I presume you buy that? >> Yeah, and I mean, Dave I listened to Michael DEll's keynote, and he said their goal is to integrate from the edge to the multi-cloud world. There's things that I want to understand this week. You know, I talked to some of my, you know, the real pellor heads here, that do really advanced type of technology. There are sessions here on containers. There's probably people talking about serverless here at the show. So they're looking at those next generation things, especially the VMWare side of the house is there. At the edge, you and I got to hear really the IoT strategy that Dell laid out towards the end of last year. Edge, absolutely huge opportunity, and there is no clear leader today because it's very early here, so how real are some of these opportunities to really expand beyond the traditional market because look, Dell's doing great in servers, that's the core of their business. It's the main driver for a lot of it, and you know, as Michael's happy to say, he said, "You know, hey, the PCs "and laptops are still doing well "two decades after IBM called it the post PC world." >> Thank goodness for client side. I mean that has been the savior here. What do you think, I mean you were at EMC for a number of years. What do you think happened to the storage side? That was a surprise to me because EMC is very rarely, if ever, a lost share in storage. They've either held share or bumped it up, doing acquisitions and so forth. But you had kind of Tucci with his hand at the wheel, doing tuck-in acquisitions, really focused on maintaining that share. Do you think it was just the disruption of the merger? Was it just inevitable that you had just the storage business getting too long in the tooth? What happened? >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, and there are so many things. Everything from the quarter shifted. So you know, it was going to take the end of quarter, which EMC always had a huge hockey stick on, shifted by a month. So some of it it was just financial where it landed up in the quarter, some of the big shifts that are happening in the market. EMC was very early on flash and did well in it, and they've got the VMAX and they've got the XtremeIO, and they're doing well there, but there's lots of competition there. Hyperconverge, once again, Dell and EMC doing great there. But there are some of these macroshifts and clouds eating away at it. So I don't have a single answer. There's so many different pieces. You know, storage has always been a knife fight. One of the things I want to understand this week, Dave, is the old EMC, well, we're going to have nine or 17 different products, and they'll all overlap. You wonder if Dell is, I really expect that Michael Dell, Jeff Clarke are going to streamline that portfolio. Profitability, make sure that they're getting the market share that they need because the old model might have worked in a growing market, but in a flat to slightly negative market it's not going to make much sense. >> And you already said that, I mean you made the point, Michael's keynote, the keynotes generally this morning, no question had Michael's fingerprint on them. That's much more like a Dell World than a traditional EMC World. We had Jeremy and Jonathan coming out on motorcycles and all kinds of crazy stuff. You know, much more staid. I think conservative, sending a message of steady. We're here for you to support your digital transformation. We are your infrastructure partner, so I mean, I think it's clear who's running the company. Alright, Stu, well, looking forward to this week. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage, double CUBE sets, check out thecube.net for all the live coverage. Check out siliconangle.com, wikibon.com as well for all the research. We'll be back right after this short break. We're live at Dell Technologies World 2018.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)