>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and it's ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas, as thCUBE continues our coverage here of Dell Technologies World 2018. So glad to have you along here for our Day Three coverage. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls. It's now a pleasure to welcome David Comroe with us. David is the Senior Director of Client Technology Services at the Wharton School of Business, at the University of Pennsylvania. David, thanks for being with us. >> No problem. Glad to be here. >> Thank for sharing your time with us. First off let's just talk about, about the scope of your work. Again, you take care of all the obviously IT needs for the largest business school faculty in the world. Right? No pressure on you there. But talk about day to day, those responsibilities. >> As you mentioned my title is Senior Director for Client Technology Services. I'm essentially responsible for providing the support and services to four very distinct user groups that we happen to have at a university. That's of course our wonderful faculty, our staff that make everything happen, our incredible students, and of course our alumni group, which is about 100,000 people strong at this point. Just Wharton alums that are again, very important. Give back to the school. Provide mentorship and job opportunities for our graduates. Again very distinct needs for each of those four groups. We provide a high quality, and all the buzzwords. You know, secure, safe, efficient, highly available services to these groups. That's kind of what I do all day. >> One of the cool things, I love acronyms. Not that this industry doesn't have a few, as you know Stu. But WHOOPPEE. I absolutely love making whoopie. But not what you might think. But walk us through that and what it stands for, and what you did in it. It really was groundbreaking. >> You're putting me on the spot with this one. So WHOOPPEE is the Wharton, let's see if I can get this, Online Ordinal Peer Performance Evaluation Engine. One of our incredible faculty, Pete Fader, came up with this idea. It's no secret that grading is kind of bad. Faculty grading students. There's all kinds of challenges. >> It's tedious. >> Well it's tedious. There's inherit biases when you're, the larger the class. And when you have to grade 80 papers, or 100 papers or 200 papers. It's really hard to keep consistency across when your grading paper one through paper 100 through paper 200. Plus when you start divvying up the work between TA's and different faculty teaching the same class. Again fraught with bias. A number of people, again Pet Fader's idea, to come up with basically an algorithm that helps the grading process. And basically what happens is, is students are grading themselves. What we'll do is we'll give them five papers or five projects to grade. And they don't actually grade. All they have to do is rank it. You know, this is the best one. This is number one. This is the worst one. This is number five. And then there's this magic behind the scenes that that runs in our local infrastructure, in our cloud infrastructure. That basically runs an algorithm. And that algorithm is the secret sauce that some of our statistical geniuses at the Wharton school, of which we have many, came up with. And it has all kinds of cool features. You can say, well this batch of five papers might be harder. I might have the five best papers in the class. That's not fair. They still have to rank one the worst. You know, five. You can't say these two are the best. And this one's third. You actually, the students have to read the paper, and just rank it. I like this one the best. I like second, third, fourth, fifth. The algorithm takes into account difficulty of batches of papers. You could literally have the five best or the five worst papers in the class. And that's still going to provide meaningful data to the algorithm. So when you have 50, 100, 500 batches of five. They all start to figure it out. And the algorithm will actually figure out what the best paper is in the class. And what the maybe again at the Wharton. But not so great, greatest paper in the class. >> But not the worst. Just not so great. Again cause our students are brilliant. It basically goes on the fact that if you do a quality paper. If the algorithm says you're the best. Your weight means more than someone who might not have done such a good job on the paper. And you're considered a better grader. And it's weighted towards the better graders. There's all kinds of really cool stuff in there that we think is going to change... Get rid of some of that bias that I spoke about before. And help provide. And the data we've seen is, frankly the students like doing it. They don't like the additional work involved with it. We're seeing some empirical evidence, and some in person interviews. That they're learning more. They're reading five other student's papers. They're getting five other perspectives. They're saying, hey I didn't think about that. Or even, hey they're all wrong here. My paper was much better than theirs. But again that doesn't necessarily matter when we start running the ranks. And we're getting much better, much better grading, which is hard to quantify, but the folks that are on the academic team that are doing that, have some really great data. With the data. Yup, mm-hm. >> David, one of the themes we keep hearing in this show is about transformation. Is change happening? You're talking about IT, how it's working with the business more and more. Bring us inside university life in general and specifically. You work with one of the ancient eight. How does cutting edge technology fit in with - >> That's really interesting. I do have a couple thoughts on that. My boss has a picture in his office, of a Penn classroom from I think it's like 1908 or 1910. And there's literally a bunch of students sitting around. There's a faculty member standing up. And there's a candle-powered projector, which I didn't know is a thing but it's in the picture, projecting an image onto the wall. From over 100 years ago. What's different about our classrooms today? Everything's the same, except the projector's now in LED. Or a L3D projector. We still got people sitting around the room, standing up. I think what we're seeing now in probably the previous ten years from now and to the next ten years is education's probably going to change more in those 20 years than it has in 2,000 years since Socrates was standing around with a stone tablet or whatever they were doing. Things like globalization, online courses, the MOOC space, where Wharton is huge in the MOOC space. Wharton online programs. Where students can take, not even students, anybody! If you're in China or Africa or South America. You can take an introduction to Wharton, introduction to marketing class from a Wharton professor for free. I mean we're a business school. We sell some of that content as well. But you can get verified certificates. We're seeing a lot of stuff change. The students today expect more. We can get into, we won't though, we can get into the whole millennial issue and short attention span and all that kind of stuff. Students today expect their faculty to be technology savvy. They expect content to be online. They expect to use devices. The expect to use... We got tablets, and laptops and phones. They want to be able to consume this content on multiple devices. We're seeing significant transformations in education. Which is, hasn't necessarily changed much in 2,000 years. Or even 200 years, right? So there's that. Speaking specifically about Wharton, one of the things I really thought is interesting, is I've been there 13 years now. When I first started working there, I'm going to make some generalizations here, a lot of our student wanted to go work in iBanking. They wanted to go work for the big banks. They wanted to go work for Goldman Sachs and things like that. In the last five, seven, ten years ago. They wanted to create their own company. Start up their own company. Be entrepreneurial. Have their app. Have their their big idea. Start the next whatever dot com. And be successful that way. Now in the last two or three, four years. We're seeing a lot of our students analytics. We're putting analytics with everything. Companies, businesses, organizations, no matter what you are, we have huge amounts of data available. How can we make meaningful decisions based on that data? Our dean. I guess I can't call him our new dean. He's been there three or four years at this point. Really wants to position Wharton as the analytics school. Every company in the world is trying to hire these kinds of people. There just frankly aren't enough of them out there. The thing we're trying to teach our students is, or one of the many things, is how to analyze data. How to make meaningful decisions based on that data. And of course when you have more data, you need more storage. You need more infrastructure. You need more processing. All the stuff that you know, Dell and Nutanix are providing us, with their hyper convergence infrastructure. Their cloud offerings. Whether private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud. All that kind of stuff is... Positioning us as the analytics school requires a significant amount of technology on the backend. And again working with our trusted partners like Dell and Nutanix we can provide that seamlessly in the backend. They don't necessarily know, is it in our data center? Is it in the cloud? And they don't care. They shouldn't care. But as they're collecting huge amounts of data, running these reports, and creating it, and going back to creating these algorithms that do incredible things. And these secret sauces. We need the infrastructure to run that kind of stuff. That's I think one of the greatest things that Wharton Computing provides the Wharton School of Business, and their business, which is creating and disseminating knowledge. >> David, I think you've encapsulated something that I've been hearing from lot's of users over the last year or so. The vendors sometimes, it's private, it's hybrid, it's public. From the user standpoint it's like, no well we have a cloud strategy that we're working on. Can you bring us inside a little bit? How did you get to where you are today? How do you choose who you're partnering with? What leads to some of those decisions? >> I love the word partner. I hate the word vendor. One of the great things about working at Wharton is, is we get to have these awesome partners. I want someone... When we're going to make an IT spend, we want someone who cares about our business. We don't want somebody who just, will come in, give you a dog and pony show, write us a check. And when you want more stuff call us. We want folks that are going to provide the support. You know, pre-sales during installation. Post-sales when they're coming out with new features. We want them to be invested in what we do. I can truly say that Nutanix is a fantastic partner of ours. Dell-Nutanix are great partners. Dell is a great partner of Wharton and Penn as well. That's what we really look for, is someone who is willing to invest their time, their smart people. Tell us about the new features and functionality that are coming out. Call on us and say, hey how are thing going? It's not just the little things. But those little things really mean a lot to us as we're picking an IT partner. Because when you're working for the best business school in the world. Having the best students, the brightest faculty, the best, hardest working staff. We want to provide them a very, very high quality IT support. We need high quality partners. And not just vendors who care about the transaction. That's really the bottom line for us. When we're choosing our partners. >> When you were talking about analytics, and Wharton being the school of data analytics. What are your measuring sticks? In terms of what are you looking at? You're talking about four very separate groups of constituencies. What are you doing to evaluate your performance? And what's critical? >> I think it all comes down to, what do our business units think about us? We're a service organization. Almost all IT shops are. If the business units aren't successful, they don't need an IT department. If we're not providing them high quality IT services, we're not going to get the best faculty. We're not going to get the brightest students. We're not going to get the alumni engagement. They want to be wowed by their IT support. That's a big part of my job, is providing that quality of support. Helping train. Technology breaks, right? How do you deal with the problem? Nobody runs at rock solid 100% infrastructure. Murphy's Law always comes into play. Problems always happen. How do you deal with the cracks in the armor as they come off? I think that's what our business units want. I think we're fortunate that we're computing. Our team, our staff, our CIO. My colleagues, my peers, my team. Our team, right? They're very well thought of, hopefully, by our clients. And that's how we're measured is by their success. We want to help them, empower them to do their job at the highest level. We are playing in pretty rare air, when it comes to the faculty, staff, students and alumni, that we attract to Penn and Wharton. We want to keep doing that. One of the things I love best, and I tell our wonderful faculty when we meet with them, is don't tell me we did a great job. Here's what I want you to tell me. I want you to say, three years ago I was at, I'm not going to name drop schools, but I was at this school and I asked them to do this thing, that you said, sure, no problem to. And they couldn't do it, wouldn't do it, didn't have the ability, the infrastructure in place to do that. But you guys with a smile on your face just made it happen. Stuff like WHOOPPEE. Stuff like the analytics stuff. All the, tying it back to why we're here today, is our partners and our technology partners that help us provide scalable, flexible solutions. That's how we're measured. >> Higher learning. >> Higher learning, absolutely. >> David, thanks for being with us. >> No problem, it was great. >> David Comroe from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. Back with more live coverage here from Dell Technologies World 2018. Right after this break. You're watching theCUBE.

>>Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's the queue covering IBM edge 2015 brought to you by IBM. >>Hello everyone. Welcome to the cube. I'm John furrier. We are here in Las Vegas for a special presentation inside the cube. A special announcement. We have mayor AC Borden, mayor of Memphis and Jen Crozer who's the vice president at IBM alliances and Alliance. Welcome to the cube. So mayor Memphis, I'll see renounced city, great culture. Um, smarter cities is a big thing right now. So talk about why Memphis, why IBM, why are you here? What's the big announcement? What's happening in Memphis? >>Well, it's a great day for Memphis in addition to the Grizzlies had slipped that in there, but uh, one, uh, of, of, of just the handful of cities that are receiving what are known as IBM smart cities challenge grants, we pick a challenge. We have, uh, they help us come up with a solution to it. And it's not some abstract idea. In our case, it's how do we weed out the non-emergency calls from the true emergency calls and our EMS service? 120,000, over 120,000 calls a year, about 25,000 of them are not truly emergency calls. So what that does is it takes valuable time and resources away from those true emergency, a true emergency calls. It should be attended to on a priority basis. >>So I know that you have a Twitter handle and you've got a lot of followers. Is the tech culture in Memphis emerging describes the folks that they, what's it like in Memphis from a tech perspective? Are there people who have moved over or there's rabbit. I know there's a lot of folks in town really talk about the tech community. >>Even in my generation, I'm on there just to do a little quality checking. Also on a double analysis. I'm still in this from Zinn. Uh, we're one of the three cities that will received the, uh, Twitter grants, which will allow us to access us and get that data there and use it as we make decisions. So that's really going to be unique for Memphis. So yes, Memphis is a up to date. >>Jen, I gotta ask you because one of the things that's near and dear to our heart in the cube is technology for the advancement of better signal, not noise, whether that's society, education, the Twitter data, and we've talked to in heat you saw about this is that it's the signal of the humans. Um, and this notion of smarter cities is bringing technology to impact the human lives, not just making people get an iWatch or what are, there's some real benefits. Talk about the grants, talk about what IBM is doing because this is real important stuff. I mean, smarter planets to marketing slogan, but the end of the day technology can help people and talk about how that's part of the grant and, and why Memphis and what are these guys doing that's unique. That could be a great case study for others. We started building a smarter planet at one of the things we had to think about was what was the acupressure >>points that would have the biggest ripple effects. And it's cities, right? More than half of the world's population lives in cities. And that's growing by a multiplier every day. And so that's where we wanted to start and we've been really gratified when we started smarter cities challenge, which is a pro bono program. Give us your toughest problem. We will send you a team of six IBM executives for three weeks to help you solve it for free. We've had over 600 mayors apply and we've delivered more than 115 teens >>and in Memphis. I got to ask the question about how you look at the, the governing process now with mobile computing, you can hear everything. They're talking back in real time and it might not be as organized. Certainly tweeting all over the place and kind of getting that data is really key. What's your vision >>that that's the key. We know Memphis, we know what information we have with that. We have what in the world do you do with it? So what better partner than IBM? We know Memphis, but IBM knows the world. We're not the only one who's faced this challenge. So with this team of experts, the IBM professionals who will be owned the ground there, they will then say, here's what you have. Here's the best way to use it. Here's what they did in Rome. Here's what they did in Berlin, London, New York or wherever. So the key is not how much information do you have but what in the world can you do with it in real day to day solutions to those everyday problems. And let me point this out. This is much more than just technology with the process we're going to employ in Memphis using nurses perhaps as dispatchers so that they can ask a few more questions when the call comes in are perhaps helping us set up a system in which nurses will go to the homes of the individuals who we call frequent flyers who often call when, it's not true any emergency but this is because life is on the line here and you really have to have the ability to analyze in real time and apply the right solution. >>And this is why IBM's expertise on a worldwide basis is so critical. >>We always talk about, we always talk about two aspects of real time near real time, which is people get today it's close enough, but when you're in a self driving car maybe or an emergency situation, you want real time. So that's really the key here. Yeah, >>that's the gay real time information being employed in a real real life situation. And that's what any emergency call that's. >>So I've got to get under the hood a little bit cause we like to go a little bit into the engine of, of the, of the local environment. I mean it, people who know life today, they got their cell phones, they think it's easy to call nine one one. It's not that easy. You have these old systems and the cell towers are connected to the municipal networks and you've got a lot of volume of calls coming in. That's a challenge for the local, the technology team and with this new system that's going to clear it up. So, so talk how you guys go from this clogged, you know, traffic calls to really segmenting the emergencies from the nonverbal. >>Again, that's another critical point. We're confident this is going to work and it will somewhat declaw if that's a word unclog because I experienced just without the grant shows us that we could weed out so many of the other calls. They will not be coming in to your nine one one. So that's, that's a big, big help right there is to make sure if we could weed out 25,000 calls, which is what we had last year. We're not truly emergency calls, you wouldn't speak in terms of a Claude nine one one system. >>I was talking to a friend, they're like, give me an example of some of this clog networks that I go, well imagine your phone going off a million times a night. The notifications, cause we're in a notification economy that you have to kind of weed through that. So how are you guys using the data? What's the technology? Can you give some specifics to what's being implemented, the team and how the local resources inter interact with IBM? >>Well I think, you know, the mayor's called out this one source of data that he's getting and mayors we know are getting multiple strings. So we have our intelligent operations center that IBM uses to create dashboards for mayors to see real time data about several different industries or sources or areas that are important to them. But I think that your point about the humans talking is a really critical one. And I want to come back to that because it's easy for us to fixate on the technology. And I think one of the things we've seen in this program is the technology enabling city leaders to hear their constituents in new ways, what they're saying and what they're not saying. And also for them to communicate back with them and close the loop on feedback as policies and programs are inactive. And the thing about the presence of IBM is kind of like a good housekeeping. It will open up Memphis to resources from other national groups. As a matter of fact, we're already using funds from another entity to set up our dashboards for performance in all areas, including of the nine one one calls. So IBM is like this huge magnet. But once folks see, Hey, IBM is in there, others who come in and say, we're going to help Memphis as it develops this system. So >>may I have to ask you a question. If as automation and technology helps abstract away a lot of the manual clogged data and understanding the signal from the noise, what's relevant, what's real time, you have a lot more contextual visibility into your environment and the people. How would you envision the future organization of the government and education and, and uh, police, fire, et cetera, working together? What's the preferred future in your mind's eye? As technology rolls out? The preferred future will be >>the, that when we come up with an innovation like this will be a non event. It would just be, it ought to be the order of the day. Uh, government sometimes kind of lags behind. No, we want to get to the point where we're leading. Uh, quite frankly, my vision is that this soon will become a non event. It will become the order of the day. Uh, humans are citizens will not be afraid of, Oh, I bet not call. I'm going to get a computer on the end of the line or they got a gadget down. They're just going to try to innovate me and see if I'm going to say it would be the order of the day. That's, that's what we're working forward and what we are emphasizing here is not what we are taking away but what we are bringing in. Additionally for this technology, we will actually be able to have a good diagnosis, a good case record built on what we call the frequent flyers. We know the people who call every two weeks, but they will feel so much better when two days before they usually call. A nurse will show up and say, came to check on you and that's what's coming out of this will be customers. This will be the new norm >>because is work. This is already that they're happy people, happy customers, happy voters. Hey, you nailed it. Barack Obama had put in for the first time a data scientist on the white house, DJ Patel, a former entrepreneur, former venture capitalist. Data science is a big deal. Now. Um, are you guys seeing that role coming into the local presence as well? Yes, >>and it's so critical to government and the private sector. If you come up with an item that's not reducing the profit margin, you just shut it down. We can't do that in government that week. Every service we provide, we're locked into that. I cannot say, well the police department where we are, we're not breaking even on that. Let's just shut that down. We won't run three shifts. We'll cut out that third shift. So we have a mandate. It's an imperative. What we're doing here is not an option. This is an absolutely essential. >>So you're excited for the grant. What's next after the announcement? What do you guys be doing together? We've got 16 cities around the world who will be getting these teams. So it's time to schedule them and get started and have the grant now, how many mayors applied and what was the numbers again? Over the life of the program, over 600 mayors have applied for this. This year it was just over a hundred and we are sending teams to 16 cities this year. Well, you guys can get that technology go and get some more music pumping through the world. That's a great place and I'll see the technology, help them. This is a citizen. Thanks for, for sharing the great story. Congratulations, mr mayor. Thanks for joining us on the cube. We right back here in Las Vegas. You watching the cube? I'm John. We'll be right back.

>> Narrator: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (intro music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to "theCUBE's" day three coverage of MWC23. Lisa Martin here in Spain, Barcelona, Spain with Dave Nicholson. We're going to have a really interesting conversation next. We're going to really dig into MWC, it's history, where it's going, some of the controversy here. Please welcome our guests. We have Jim Harris, International Best Selling Author of "Blindsided." And Carolina Milanese is here, President and Principle Analyst of creative strategies. Welcome to "theCUBE" guys. Thank you. >> Thanks. So great to be here. >> So this is day three. 80,000 people or so. You guys have a a lot of history up at this event. Caroline, I want to start with you. Talk a little bit about that. This obviously the biggest one in, in quite a few years. People are ready to be back, but there's been some, a lot of news here, but some controversy going on. Give us the history, and your perspective on some of the news that's coming out from this week's event. >> It feels like a very different show. I don't know if I would say growing up show, because we are still talking about networks and mobility, but there's so much more now around what the networks actually empower, versus the network themselves. And a little bit of maybe that's where some of the controversy is coming from, carriers still trying to find their identity, right, of, of what their role is in all there is to do with a connected world. I go back a long way. I go back to when Mobile World Congress was called, was actually called GSM, and it was in Khan. So, you know, we went from France to Spain. But just looking at the last full Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona, in pre-pandemic to now, very different show. We went from a show that was very much focused on mobility and smartphones, to a show that was all about cars. You know, we had cars everywhere, 'cause we were talking about smart cities and connected cars, to now a show this year that is very much focused on B2B. And so a lot of companies that are here to either work with the carriers, or also talk about sustainability for instance, or enable what is the next future evolution of computing with XR and VR. >> So Jim, talk to us a little bit about your background. You, I was doing a little sleuthing on you. You're really focusing on disruptive innovation. We talk about disruption a lot in different industries. We're seeing a lot of disruption in telco. We're seeing a lot of frenemies going on. Give us your thoughts about what you're seeing at this year's event. >> Well, there's some really exciting things. I listened to the keynote from Orange's CEO, and she was complaining that 55% of the traffic on her network is from five companies. And then the CEO of Deutsche Telecom got up, and he was complaining that 60% of the traffic on his network is from six entities. So do you think they coordinated pre, pre-show? But really what they're saying is, these OTT, you know, Netflix and YouTube, they should be paying us for access. Now, this is killer funny. The front page today of the show, "Daily," the CO-CEO of Netflix says, "Hey, we make less profit than the telcos, "so you should be paying us, "not the other way around." You know, we spend half of the money we make just on developing content. So, this is really interesting. The orange CEO said, "We're not challenging net neutrality. "We don't want more taxes." But boom. So this is disruptive. Huge pressure. 67% of all mobile traffic is video, right? So it's a big hog bandwidth wise. So how are they going to do this? Now, I look at it, and the business model for the, the telcos, is really selling sim cards and smartphones. But for every dollar of revenue there, there's five plus dollars in apps, and consulting and everything else. So really, but look at how they're structured. They can't, you know, take somebody who talks to the public and sells sim cards, and turn 'em in, turn 'em in to an app developer. So how are they going to square this circle? So I see some, they're being disrupted because they're sticking to what they've historically done. >> But it's interesting because at the end of the day, the conversation that we are having right now is the conversation that we had 10 years ago, where carriers don't want to just be a dumb pipe, right? And that's what they are now returning to. They tried to be media as well, but that didn't work out for most carriers, right? It is a little bit better in the US. We've seen, you know, some success there. But, but here has been more difficult. And I think that's the, the concern, that even for the next, you know, evolution, that's the, their role. >> So how do they, how do they balance this dumb pipe idea, with the fact that if you make the toll high enough, being a dumb pipe is actually a pretty good job. You know, sit back, collect check, go to the beach, right? So where, where, where, where does this end up? >> Well, I think what's going to happen is, if you see five to 15 X the revenue on top of a pipe, you know, the hyperscalers are going to start going after the business. The consulting companies like PWC, McKinsey, the app developers, they're... So how do you engage those communities as a telco to get more revenue? I think this is a question that they really need to look at. But we tend to stick within our existing business model. I'll just give you one stat that blows me away. Uber is worth more than every taxi cab company in North America added together. And so the taxi industry owns billions in assets in cars and limousines. Uber doesn't own a single vehicle. So having a widely distributed app, is a huge multiplier on valuation. And I look to a company like Safari in Kenya, which developed M-Pesa, which Pesa means mo, it's mobile money in Swahili. And 25% of the country's GDP is facilitated by M-Pesa. And that's not even on smartphones. They're feature phones, Nokia phones. I call them dumb phones, but Nokia would call them "feature phones." >> Yeah. >> So think about that. Like 25, now transactions are very small, and the cut is tiny. But when you're facilitating 25% of a country's GDP, >> Yeah. >> Tiny, over billions of transactions is huge. But that's not the way telcos have historically thought or worked. And so M-Pesa and Safari shows the way forward. What do you think on that? >> I, I think that the experience, and what they can layer on top from a services perspective, especially in the private sector, is also important. I don't, I never believe that a carrier, given how they operate, is the best media company in the world, right? It is a very different world. But I do think that there's opportunity, first of all, to, to actually tell their story in a different way. If you're thinking about everything that a network actually empowers, there's a, there's a lot there. There's a lot that is good for us as, as society. There's a lot that is good for business. What can they do to start talking about differently about their services, and then layer on top of what they offer? A better way to actually bring together private and public network. It's not all about cellular, wifi and cellular coming together. We're talking a lot about satellite here as well. So, there's definitely more there about quality of service. Is, is there though, almost a biological inevitability that prevents companies from being able to navigate that divide? >> Hmm. >> Look at, look at when, when, when we went from high definition 720P, very exciting, 1080P, 4K. Everybody ran out and got a 4K TV. Well where was the, where was the best 4K content coming from? It wasn't, it wasn't the networks, it wasn't your cable operator, it was YouTube. It was YouTube. If you had suggested that 10 years before, that that would happen, people would think that you were crazy. Is it possible for folks who are now leading their companies, getting up on stage, and daring to say, "This content's coming over, "and I want to charge you more "for using my pipes." It's like, "Really? Is that your vision? "That's the vision that you want to share with us here?" I hear the sound of dead people walking- (laughing) when I hear comments like that. And so, you know, my students at Wharton in the CTO program, who are constantly looking at this concept of disruption, would hear that and go, "Ooh, gee, did the board hear what that person said?" I, you know, am I being too critical of people who could crush me like a bug? (laughing) >> I mean, it's better that they ask the people with money than not consumers to pay, right? 'Cause we've been through a phase where the carriers were actually asking for more money depending on critical things. Like for instance, if you're doing business email, then were going to charge you more than if you were a consumer. Or if you were watching video, they would charge you more for that. Then they understood that a consumer would walk away and go somewhere else. So they stopped doing that. But to your point, I think, and, and very much to what you focus from a disruption perspective, look at what Chat GTP and what Microsoft has been doing. Not much talk about this here at the show, which is interesting, but the idea that now as a consumer, I can ask new Bing to get me the 10 best restaurants in Barcelona, and I no longer go to Yelp, or all the other businesses where I was going to before, to get their recommendation, what happens to them? You're, you're moving away, and you're taking eyeballs away from those websites. And, and I think that, that you know, your point is exactly right. That it's, it's about how, from a revenue perspective, you are spending a lot of money to facilitate somebody else, and what's in it for you? >> Yeah. And to be clear, consumers pay for everything. >> Always. Always. (laughs) >> Taxpayers and consumers always pay for everything. So there is no, "Well, we're going to make them pay, so you don't have to pay." >> And if you are not paying, you are the product. Exactly. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Carolina, talk a little bit about what you're seeing at the event from some of the infrastructure players, the hyperscalers, obviously a lot of enterprise focus here at this event. What are some of the things that you're seeing? Are you impressed with, with their focus in telco, their focus to partner, build an ecosystem? What are you seeing? >> I'm seeing also talk about sustainability, and enabling telco to be more sustainable. You know, there, there's a couple of things that are a little bit different from the US where I live, which is that telcos in Europe, have put money into sustainability through bonds. And so they use the money that they then get from the bonds that they create, to, to supply or to fuel their innovation in sustainability. And so there's a dollar amount on sustainability. There's also an opportunity obviously from a growth perspective. And there's a risk mitigation, right? Especially in Europe, more and more you're going to be evaluated based on how sustainable you are. So there are a lot of companies here, if you're thinking about the Ciscos of the world. Dell, IBM all talking about sustainability and how to help carriers measure, and then obviously be more sustainable with their consumption and, and power. >> Going to be interesting to see where that goes over the years, as we talk to, every company we talk to at whatever show, has an ESG sustainability initiative, and only, well, many of them only want to work with other companies who have the same types of initiative. So a lot of, great that there's focus on sustainability, but hopefully we'll see more action down the road. Wanted to ask you about your book, "Blind," the name is interesting, "Blindsided." >> Well, I just want to tag on to this. >> Sure. >> One of the most exciting things for me is fast charging technology. And Shalmie, cell phone, or a smartphone maker from China, just announced yesterday, a smartphone that charges from 0 to 100% in five minutes. Now this is using GAN FEST technology. And the leader in the market is a company called Navitas. And this has profound implications. You know, it starts with the smartphone, right? But then it moves to the laptops. And then it'll move to EV's. So, as we electrify the $10 trillion a year transportation industry, there's a huge opportunity. People want charging faster. There's also a sustainability story that, to Carolina's point, that it uses less electricity. So, if we electrify the grid in order to support transportation, like the Tesla Semi's coming out, there are huge demands over a period. We need energy efficiency technologies, like this GAN FEST technology. So to me, this is humongous. And it, we only see it here in the show, in Shalmie, saying, "Five minutes." And everybody, the consumers go, "Oh, that's cool." But let's look at the bigger story, which is electrifying transportation globally. And this is going to be big. >> Yeah. And, and to, and to double click on that a little bit, to be clear, when we talk about fast charging today, typically it's taking the battery from a, not a zero state of charge, but a relatively low state of charge to 80%. >> Yep. >> Then it tapers off dramatically. And that translates into less range in an EV, less usable time on any other device, and there's that whole linkage between the power in, and the battery's ability to be charged, and how much is usable. And from a sustainability perspective, we are going to have an avalanche of batteries going into secondary use cases over time. >> They don't get tossed into landfills contrary to what people might think. >> Yep. >> In fact, they are used in a variety of ways after their primary lifespan. But that, that is, that in and of itself is a revolutionary thing. I'm interested in each of your thoughts on the China factor. Glaringly absent here, from my perspective, as sort of an Apple fanboy, where are they? Why aren't they talking about their... They must, they must feel like, "Well we just don't need to." >> We don't need to. We just don't need to. >> Absolutely. >> And then you walk around and you see these, these company names that are often anglicized, and you don't necessarily immediately associate them with China, but it's like, "Wait a minute, "that looks better than what I have, "and I'm not allowed to have access to that thing." What happens in the future there geopolitically? >> It's a pretty big question for- >> Its is. >> For a short little tech show. (Caroline laughs) But what happens as we move forward? When is the entire world going to be able to leverage in a secure way, some of the stuff that's coming out of, if they're not the largest economy in the world yet, they shortly will be. >> What's the story there? >> Well, it's interesting that you mentioned First Apple that has never had a presence at Mobile World Congress. And fun enough, I'm part of the GSMA judges for the GLOMO Awards, and last night I gave out Best Mobile Phone for last year, and it was to the iPhone4 Team Pro. and best disruptive technology, which was for the satellite function feature on, on the new iPhone. So, Apple might not be here, but they are. >> Okay. >> And, and so that's the first thing. And they are as far as being top of mind to every competitor in the smartphone market still. So a lot of the things that, even from a design perspective that you see on some of the Chinese brands, really remind you of, of Apple. What is interesting for me, is how there wouldn't be, with the exception of Samsung and Motorola, there's no one else here that is non-Chinese from a smartphone point of view. So that's in itself, is something that changed dramatically over the years, especially for somebody like me that still remember Nokia being the number one in the market. >> Huh. >> So. >> Guys, we could continue this conversation. We are unfortunately out of time. But thank you so much for joining Dave and me, talking about your perspectives on the event, the industry, the disruptive forces. It's going to be really interesting to see where it goes. 'Cause at the end of the day, it's the consumers that just want to make sure I can connect wherever I am 24 by seven, and it just needs to work. Thank you so much for your insights. >> Thank you. >> Lisa, it's been great. Dave, great. It's a pleasure. >> Our pleasure. For our guests, and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching, "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage coming to you day three of our coverage of MWC 23. Stick around. Our next guest joins us momentarily. (outro music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright upbeat music plays) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of MWC '23, my name is Dave Vellante. Just left a meeting with the CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins, to meet with Jeetu Patel, who's our Executive Vice President and General Manager of security and collaboration at Cisco. Good to see you. >> You never leave a meeting with Chuck Robbins to meet with Jeetu Patel. >> Well, I did. >> That's a bad idea. >> Walked right out. I said, hey, I got an interview to do, right? So, and I'm excited about this. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. >> So, I mean you run such an important part of the business. I mean, obviously the collaboration business but also security. So many changes going on in the security market. Maybe we could start there. I mean, there hasn't been a ton of security talk here Jeetu, because I think it's almost assumed. It was 45 minutes into the keynote yesterday before anybody even mentioned security. >> Huh. >> Right? And so, but it's the most important topic in the enterprise IT world. And obviously is important here. So why is it you think that it's not the first topic that people mention. >> You know, it's a complicated subject area and it's intimidating. And actually that's one of the things that the industry screwed up on. Where we need to simplify security so it actually gets to be relatable for every person on the planet. But, if you think about what's happening in security, it's not just important for business it's critical infrastructure that if you had a breach, you know lives are cost now. Because hospitals could go down, your water supply could go down, your electricity could go down. And so it's one of these things that we have to take pretty seriously. And, it's 51% of all breaches happen because of negligence, not because of malicious intent. >> It's that low. Interesting. I always- >> Someone else told me the same thing, that they though it'd be higher, yeah. >> I always say bad user behavior is going to trump good security every time. >> Every single time. >> You can't beat it. But, you know, it's funny- >> Jeetu: Every single time. >> Back, the earlier part of last decade, you could see that security was becoming a board level issue. It became, it was on the agenda every quarter. And, I remember doing some research at the time, and I asked, I was interviewing Robert Gates, former Defense Secretary, and I asked him, yeah, but we're getting attacked but don't we have the best offense? Can't we have the best technology? He said, yeah but we have so much critical infrastructure the risks to United States are higher. So we have to be careful about how we use security as an offensive weapon, you know? And now you're seeing the future of war involves security and what's going on in Ukraine. It's a whole different ballgame. >> It is, and the scales always tip towards the adversary, not towards the defender, because you have to be right every single time. They have to be right once. >> Yeah. And, to the other point, about bad user behavior. It's going now beyond the board level, to it's everybody's responsibility. >> That's right. >> And everybody's sort of aware of it, everybody's been hacked. And, that's where it being such a complicated topic is problematic. >> It is, and it's actually, what got us this far will not get us to where we need to get to if we don't simplify security radically. You know? The experience has to be almost invisible. And what used to be the case was sophistication had to get to a certain level, for efficacy to go up. But now, that sophistication has turned to complexity. And there's an inverse relationship between complexity and efficacy. So the simpler you make security, the more effective it gets. And so I'll give you an example. We have this great kind of innovation we've done around passwordless, right? Everyone hates passwords. You shouldn't have passwords in 2023. But, when you get to passwordless security, not only do you reduce a whole lot of friction for the user, you actually make the system safer. And that's what you need to do, is you have to make it simpler while making it more effective. And, I think that's what the future is going to hold. >> Yeah, and CISOs tell me that they're, you know zero trust before the pandemic was like, yeah, yeah zero trust. And now it's like a mandate. >> Yeah. >> Every CISO you talk to says, yes we're implementing a zero trust architecture. And a big part of that is that, if they can confirm zero trust, they can get to market a lot faster with revenue generating or critical projects. And many projects as we know are being pushed back, >> Yeah. >> you know? 'Cause of the macro. But, projects that drive revenue and value they want to accelerate, and a zero trust confirmation allows people to rubber stamp it and go faster. >> And the whole concept of zero trust is least privileged access, right? But what we want to make sure that we get to is continuous assessment of least privileged access, not just a one time at login. >> Dave: 'Cause things change so frequently. >> So, for example, if you happen to be someone that's logged into the system and now you start doing some anomalous behavior that doesn't sound like Dave, we want to be able to intercept, not just do it at the time that you're authenticating Dave to come in. >> So you guys got a good business. I mentioned the macro before. >> Yeah. >> The big theme is consolidating redundant vendors. So a company with a portfolio like Cisco's obviously has an advantage there. You know, you guys had great earnings. Palo Alto is another company that can consolidate. Tom Gillis, great pickup. Guy's amazing, you know? >> Love Tom. >> Great respect. Just had a little webinar session with him, where he was geeking out with the analyst and so- >> Yeah, yeah. >> Learned a lot there. Now you guys have some news, at the event event with Mercedes? >> We do. >> Take us through that, and I want to get your take on hybrid work and what's happening there. But what's going on with Mercedes? >> Yeah so look, it all actually stems from the hybrid work story, which is the future is going to be hybrid, people are going to work in mixed mode. Sometimes you'll be in the office, sometimes at home, sometimes somewhere in the middle. One of the places that people are working more and more from is their cars. And connected cars are getting to be a reality. And in fact, cars sometimes become an extension of your home office. And many a times I have found myself in a parking lot, because I didn't have enough time to get home and I was in a parking lot taking a conference call. And so we've made that section easier, because we have now partnered with Mercedes. And they aren't the first partner, but they're a very important partner where we are going to have Webex available, through the connected car, natively in Mercedes. >> Ah, okay. So I could take a call, I can do it all the time. I find good service, pull over, got to take the meeting. >> Yeah. >> I don't want to be driving. I got to concentrate. >> That's right. >> You know, or sometimes, I'll have the picture on and it's not good. >> That's right. >> Okay, so it'll be through the console, and all through the internet? >> It'll be through the console. And many people ask me like, how's safety going to work over that? Because you don't want to do video calls while you're driving. Exactly right. So when you're driving, the video automatically turns off. And you'll have audio going on, just like a conference call. But the moment you stop and put it in park, you can have video turned on. >> Now, of course the whole hybrid work trend, we, seems like a long time ago but it doesn't, you know? And it's really changed the security dynamic as well, didn't it? >> It has, it has. >> I mean, immediately you had to go protect new endpoints. And those changes, I felt at the time, were permanent. And I think it's still the case, but there's an equilibrium now happening. People as they come back to the office, you see a number of companies are mandating back to work. Maybe the central offices, or the headquarters, were underfunded. So what's going on out there in terms of that balance? >> Well firstly, there's no unanimous consensus on the way that the future is going to be, except that it's going to be hybrid. And the reason I say that is some companies mandate two days a week, some companies mandate five days a week, some companies don't mandate at all. Some companies are completely remote. But whatever way you go, you want to make sure that regardless of where you're working from, people can have an inclusive experience. You know? And, when they have that experience, you want to be able to work from a managed device or an unmanaged device, from a corporate network or from a Starbucks, from on the road or stationary. And whenever you do any of those things, we want to make sure that security is always handled, and you don't have to worry about that. And so the way that we say it is the company that created the VPN, which is Cisco, is the one that's going to kill it. Because what we'll do is we'll make it simple enough so that you don't, you as a user, never have to worry about what connection you're going to use to dial in to what app. You will have one, seamless way to dial into any application, public application, private application, or directly to the internet. >> Yeah, I got a love, hate with my VPN. I mean, it's protecting me, but it's in the way a lot. >> It's going to be simple as ever. >> Do you have kids? >> I do, I have a 12 year old daughter. >> Okay, so not quite high school age yet. She will be shortly. >> No, but she's already, I'm not looking forward to high school days, because she has a very, very strong sense of debate and she wins 90% of the arguments. >> So when my kids were that age, I've got four kids, but the local high school banned Wikipedia, they can't use Wikipedia for research. Many colleges, I presume high schools as well, they're banning Chat GPT, can't use it. Now at the same time, I saw recently on Medium a Wharton school professor said he's mandating Chat GPT to teach his students how to prompt in progressively more sophisticated prompts, because the future is interacting with machines. You know, they say in five years we're all going to be interacting in some way, shape, or form with AI. Maybe we already are. What's the intersection between AI and security? >> So a couple very, very consequential things. So firstly on Chat GPT, the next generation skill is going to be to learn how to go out and have the right questions to ask, which is the prompt revolution that we see going on right now. But if you think about what's happening in security, and there's a few areas which are, firstly 3,500 hundred vendors in this space. On average, most companies have 50 to 70 vendors in security. Not a single vendor owns more than 10% of the market. You take out a couple vendors, no one owns more than 5%. Highly fractured market. That's a problem. Because it's untenable for companies to go out and manage 70 policy engines. And going out and making sure that there's no contention. So as you move forward, one of the things that Chat GPT will be really good for is it's fundamentally going to change user experiences, for how software gets built. Because rather than it being point and click, it's going to be I'm going to provide an instruction and it's going to tell me what to do in natural language. Imagine Dave, when you joined a company if someone said, hey give Dave all the permissions that he needs as a direct report to Chuck. And instantly you would get all of the permissions. And it would actually show up in a screen that says, do you approve? And if you hit approve, you're done. The interfaces of the future will get more natural language kind of dominated. The other area that you'll see is the sophistication of attacks and the surface area of attacks is increasing quite exponentially. And we no longer can handle this with human scale. You have to handle it in machine scale. So detecting breaches, making sure that you can effectively and quickly respond in real time to the breaches, and remediate those breaches, is all going to happen through AI and machine learning. >> So, I agree. I mean, just like Amazon turned the data center into an API, I think we're now going to be interfacing with technology through human language. >> That's right. >> I mean I think it's a really interesting point you're making. Now, from a security standpoint as well, I mean, the state of the art today in my email is be careful, this person's outside your organization. I'm like, yeah I know. So it's a good warning sign, but it's really not automated in any way. So two part question. One is, can AI help? You know, with the phishing, obviously it can, but the bad guys have AI too. >> Yeah. >> And they're probably going to be smarter than I am about using it. >> Yeah, and by the way, Talos is our kind of threat detection and response >> Yes. >> kind of engine. And, they had a great kind of piece that came out recently where they talked about this, where Chat GPT, there is going to be more sophistication of the folks that are the bad actors, the adversaries in using Chat GPT to have more sophisticated phishing attacks. But today it's not something that is fundamentally something that we can't handle just yet. But you still need to do the basic hygiene. That's more important. Over time, what you will see is attacks will get more bespoke. And in order, they'll get more sophisticated. And, you will need to have better mechanisms to know that this was actually not a human being writing that to you, but it was actually a machine pretending to be a human being writing something to you. And that you'll have to be more clever about it. >> Oh interesting. >> And so, you will see attacks get more bespoke and we'll have to get smarter and smarter about it. >> The other thing I wanted to ask you before we close is you're right on. I mean you take the top security vendors and they got a single digit market share. And it's like it's untenable for organizations, just far too many tools. We have a partner at ETR, they do quarterly survey research and one of the things they do is survey emerging technology companies. And when we look at in the security sector just the number of emerging technology companies that are focused on cybersecurity is as many as there are out there already. And so, there's got to be consolidation. Maybe that's through M & A. I mean, what do you think happens? Are company's going to go out of business? There's going to be a lot of M & A? You've seen a lot of companies go private. You know, the big PE companies are sucking up all these security companies and may be ready to spit 'em out and go back public. How do you see the landscape? You guys are obviously an inquisitive company. What are your thoughts on that? >> I think there will be a little bit of everything. But the biggest change that you'll see is a shift that's going to happen with an integrated platform, rather than point solution vendors. So what's going to happen is the market's going to consolidate towards very few, less than a half a dozen, integrated platforms. We believe Cisco is going to be one. Microsoft will be one. There'll be others over there. But these, this platform will essentially be able to provide a unified kind of policy engine across a multitude of different services to protect multiple different entities within the organization. And, what we found is that platform will also be something that'll provide, through APIs, the ability for third parties to be able to get their technology incorporated in, and their telemetry ingested. So we certainly intend to do that. We don't believe, we are not arrogant enough to think that every single new innovation will be built by us. When there's someone else who has built that, we want to make sure that we can ingest that telemetry as well, because the real enemy is not the competitor. The real enemy is the adversary. And we all have to get together, so that we can keep humanity safe. >> Do you think there's been enough collaboration in the industry? I mean- >> Jeetu: Not nearly enough. >> We've seen companies, security companies try to monetize private data before, instead of maybe sharing it with competitors. And so I think the industry can do better there. >> Well I think the industry can do better. And we have this concept called the security poverty line. And the security poverty line is the companies that fall below the security poverty line don't have either the influence or the resources or the know how to keep themselves safe. And when they go unsafe, everyone else that communicates with them also gets that exposure. So it is in our collective interest for all of us to make sure that we come together. And, even if Palo Alto might be a competitor of ours, we want to make sure that we invite them to say, let's make sure that we can actually exchange telemetry between our companies. And we'll continue to do that with as many companies that are out there, because actually that's better for the market, that's better for the world. >> The enemy of the enemy is my friend, kind of thing. >> That's right. >> Now, as it relates to, because you're right. I mean I, I see companies coming up, oh, we do IOT security. I'm like, okay, but what about cloud security? Do you that too? Oh no, that's somebody else. But, so that's another stove pipe. >> That's a huge, huge advantage of coming with someone like Cisco. Because we actually have the entire spectrum, and the broadest portfolio in the industry of anyone else. From the user, to the device, to the network, to the applications, we provide the entire end-to-end story for security, which then has the least amount of cracks that you can actually go out and penetrate through. The biggest challenges that happen in security is you've got way too many policy engines with way too much contention between the policies from these different systems. And eventually there's a collision course. Whereas with us, you've actually got a broad portfolio that operates as one platform. >> We were talking about the cloud guys earlier. You mentioned Microsoft. They're obviously a big competitor in the security space. >> Jeetu: But also a great partner. >> So that's right. To my opinion, the cloud has been awesome as a first line of defense if you will. But the shared responsibility model it's different for each cloud, right? So, do you feel that those guys are working together or will work together to actually improve? 'Cause I don't see that yet. >> Yeah so if you think about, this is where we feel like we have a structural advantage in this, because what does a company like Cisco become in the future? I think as the world goes multicloud and hybrid cloud, what'll end up happening is there needs to be a way, today all the CSPs provide everything from storage to computer network, to security, in their own stack. If we can abstract networking and security above them, so that we can acquire and steer any and all traffic with our service providers and steer it to any of those CSPs, and make sure that the security policy transcends those clouds, you would actually be able to have the public cloud economics without the public cloud lock-in. >> That's what we call super cloud Jeetu. It's securing the super cloud. >> Yeah. >> Hey, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Really appreciate you coming on our editorial program. >> Such a pleasure. >> All right, great to see you again. >> Cheers. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante with David Nicholson and Lisa Martin. We'll be back, right after this short break from MWC '23 live, in the Fira, in Barcelona. (bright music resumes) (music fades out)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright upbeat music) >> Good morning everyone. Welcome to theCUBE. We are live at MWC '23 in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm going to have a great conversation next with our esteemed CUBE analyst, Dave Nicholson. Dave, great to have you here. Great to be working this event with you. >> Good to be here with you, Lisa. >> So there are, good to be here with you and about 80,000 people. >> Dave: That's right. >> Virtually and and physically. And it's jammed in, and this is the most jammed show I've seen in years. >> Dave: It's crazy. >> So much going on in the telecom industry. What are some of your expectations for what you're going to hear and see at this year's event? >> So, I expect to hear a lot about 5G. Specifically 5G private networks, and the disaggregation of the hardware and software stacks that have driven telecom for decades. So we're at this transition into 5G. From a consumer perspective, we feel like, oh well 5G has been around for years. In terms of where it's actually been deployed, we're just at the beginning stages of that. >> Right, right. Talk about the changing of the stack. You know, the disaggregation. Why now is it too late? And what are the advantages? That it's going to enable telcos to move faster, I imagine? >> Yeah, so it's really analogous to what we see in the general IT industry that we cover so much. The move to cloud, sometimes you're gaining performance. You're always gaining agility and flexibility. A big concern of the legacy telecom providers is going to be maintaining availability, reliability against a backdrop of increasing agility in the direction that they want to go. So that's going to be the conversation. It's going to be the old school folks, who are interested in maintaining primarily availability and performance, excuse me, contrasted with the open source, OpenStack providers, who are going to be saying, hey this is a path to the future. Without that path to the future, things will stagnate. >> Talk about some of those OpenStack providers. I imagine those are some of the folks that we know quite well? >> Sure, sure. Yeah, so someone like Dell, for example. They're perfectly positioned at this sort of crossroads, because Dell has been creating "cloud stacks," that will live sometimes on-premises. And those stacks of infrastructure, based on cots, commercial off-the-shelf components, integrated within an ecosystem can live at the edge, at literally the base of transmitter towers. So when you think about this whole concept of RAN or a radio access network, think of a cellular tower with an antenna and a transmitter. The transmitter might live on that tower, or it might live in pieces at the base of the tower. But there's always at that base of the tower, forget about the acronyms, it's a box of stuff, teleco stuff. All of these things historically have been integrated into single packages. >> Right. >> For good reason. >> Right. >> Think back to a mainframe, where it was utterly, absolutely reliable. We moved, in the general IT space, from the era of the mainframe to the world of client server, through virtualization, containerization. That exact transition is happening in the world of telecom right now. >> Why is it finally happening now? It seems a bit late, given that in our consumer lives, we have this expectation that we could be mobile 24 by seven. >> Right. Well it's because, first of all, we get mad if a call doesn't go through. How often, when you make, when you try to make a cellular call or when you try to send a text, how often does it not work? >> I can count on one hand. >> Right, rarely. >> Right. >> Now, you may be in an area that has spotty coverage. But when you're in an area where you have coverage it just works all of the time. And you expect it to work all of the time. And the miracle of the services that have been delivered to us over the last decade has really kind of blunted the need for next generation stuff. Well, we're at this transition point. And 5G as a technology enables so much more bandwidth. Think of it as, you know, throughput bandwidth latency. It allows the kind of performance characteristics so that things can be delivered that couldn't be delivered in the past. Virtual reality, augmented reality. We're already seeing you know 4K data streams to our phones. So, it's sort of lagged because of our expectations for absolute, rock solid, reliability. >> Yeah. >> The technology is ahead of that area now. And so this question is how do you navigate from utter reliability to awesome openness without sacrificing performance and reliability? >> Well, and also from a stack perspective, from looking at desegregation, and the opportunities there are for the telcos, but also the public cloud providers, are they friends, are they foes? What's the relationship like? >> They're going to be frenemies. >> Lisa: Frenemies? >> Yeah, coopetition is going to be the word of the day again. Yeah because when you think of a cloud, most people automatically think off-premises. >> Lisa: Yes. >> Maybe they even think automatically you know, hyper scale or Azure, GCP, AWS. In this case, it really is a question of cloud as an operating model. Cloud facilitating agility, cloud adopting cloud native architecture from a software perspective, so that you can rapidly deploy net new capabilities into an environment. You can't do that with proprietary closed systems that might use a waterfall development process and take years to develop. You and I have covered the Kubernetes world pretty closely. And what's the big thing that we hear constantly? The hunger, the thirst for human resources, >> Right. >> people who can actually work in this world of containerization. >> Yes, yes. >> Well guess what? In the macroeconomic environment, a lot of folks in the IT space have recently been disrupted. This is a place to look, if you have that skillset. Look at the telecom space, because they need people who are forward thinking in the era of cloud. But this concept of cloud is really, it's going to be, the telcos are both competing and partnering with what we think of as the traditional, hyper scale public cloud providers. >> And what do you think, one of the things that we know at MWC '23 is virtually every industry is represented here. Every vertical is here, whether it's a sports arena, or a retail outlet, or a manufacturer. Every organization, every industry needs to have networks that deliver what they need to do but also enable them to move faster and deliver what the end user wants. What are some of the industries that you think are really ripe for this disruption? And the ability to use private 5G networks, for example? >> Well, so it's interesting, you mentioned private 5G networks. I think a good example of the transition that's underway is this, the move to 4K video. So, you get a high definition television. The first time you see a 720p TV, it's like oh my gosh, amazing. Then we get 1080p, then it's 4K. People get 4K TVs, they bring them home, and there's no content. >> No. >> The first content, was it from your cable provider? No. >> Yeah. >> Was it over the air? ABC, NBC, CBS? No, it was YouTube. YouTube delivered the first reliable 4K content, over the internet. Similarly, everything comes to us now to our mobile devices. So we're not accessing the world around us so much from a desktop or even a laptop. It's mobile. So if you want to communicate with a customer, it's mobile. If you're creating a private 5G network, you now are standing something up that is net new in a greenfield environment. And you can deploy agility and functionality that the large scale telecom providers can't, because of the massive investment they might need. So the irony is, you have a factory that sits on 20 acres and you have folks traveling around, if you create a private 5G network, it might become, it might be more feature rich than what your employees are used to being able to access through their personal mobile devices. >> Wow. >> Yeah, because you're starting net new, you have the luxury of starting greenfield, as opposed to the responsibility and legacy for supporting a massive system that exists already. >> So then, what's in it for the existing incumbent telcos from an advantage opportunity perspective? Because you mentioned frenemies, coopetition. >> Right. >> There's irony there, as you talked about. >> Right, well you could look at it as either opportunity or headache. And it's both. Because they have very, very real SLAs that they need to meet. >> Right. >> Very, very real expectations that have been set in terms of reliability, availability, and performance. So they can't slip off of that. Making that transition is, I think going to be driven by economics, because the idea of having things be open means that there's competition for every part of the stack. There will be a critical role for integration vendors. Folks like Dell, and the ecosystems that they're creating around this will be critical, because often you would prefer to have one back to pat or one throat to choke instead of many. So, you still want to have that centralized entity to go to when something goes wrong. >> Right. >> Or when you want to implement something new. So, for the incumbents, it's a classic example of what you do in the face of disruption. How do you leverage technology? In my role as adjunct faculty at the Wharton CTO Academy, we talk about the CTO mindset. And the idea that your role is to leverage technology, in the service of your organization's mission, whatever that organization and mission is. So from a telecom provider perspective, they need to stay on top of this. >> Yes. >> Or they will be disrupted. >> Right. >> It's fascinating to think of how this disruption's taking place. >> Lisa: They have no choice, if they want to survive. >> No, yeah they have no choice. >> Lisa: In the next few years. >> They have no choice, but they'll come along, kicking and screaming. I'm sure if you had someone sitting here in the industry, they'd say, well, no, no, no, no, no. >> Yeah, of course. >> We love it! It's like, yeah, well but you're going to have to make some painful changes to adopt these things. >> What are some of the opportunities for those folks like Dell that you mentioned, in terms of coming in, being able to disrupt that stack, open things up? Great opportunities for the Dells, and other similar organizations to really start gaining a bigger foothold in the telecom industry, I imagine. >> Well, I look at it through the lens of sort of traditional IT and the transitions that we've been watching for the last couple of decades. It's exactly the same. I mean you, there is a parallel. It is like coming out of the mainframe era to the client server era. So, you know, we went in that transition, it was mainframe operating systems, very, very closed systems to more slightly opened. You know, the worlds of SUN and SGI and HP, and the likes, transitioned to kind of Microsoft based software running with like Dell hardware. >> Yeah. >> And, that stack is now getting deployed into one of the remaining legacy environments which is the telco space. So, the opportunity for Dell is pretty massive because on some fronts they're competing with the move to proper off-premises public cloud. >> Right. >> In this case, they are the future for telecom as opposed to sort of representing legacy, compared to some of the other cloud opportunities that are out there. >> So ultimately, what does a modern telecom network look like? I imagine, cloud native? Distributed? >> Yeah, yeah. So, traditionally, like I said, you've got the tower and the transmitters and the computer hardware that's running it. Those are then networked together. So you can sort of think of it as leaves on a twig, on a branch, on a tree. Eventually it gets into a core network, where there is terrestrial line communication and or communication up to satellites. And that's all been humming along just fine, making the transition from 3G to 4G to 5G. But, the real transition from a cloud perspective is this idea that you're taking these proprietary systems, disaggrevating, disaggrevating them and disaggregating them, carving them up into pieces where now you're introducing virtualization. So there's a VMware play here. Some things are virtualized using that stack. I think more often we're going to be talking about containerized and truly cloud native stacks. So instead of having the proprietary stack, where all the hardware and software is designed together. Now you're going to have Dell servers running some execution layer, orchestration layer, for cloud native, containerized applications and microservices. And that's the way things are going to be developed. >> And who, from a stakeholder perspective is involved here? 'Cause one of the things that I'm hearing is with this disaggregation of the staff, which is a huge change, what you're articulated, that's already happened at enterprise IT, change management is a hard thing to do. If they want to be successful, and well not just survive, they want to thrive. I'm just imagining, who are the stakeholders that are involved in having to push those incumbents to make these decisions, to move faster, to become agile, to compete. >> So, I remember when VMware had the problem that anytime they suggested introducing a hypervisor to to virtualize a physical machine and then run software on top or an operating system on top, and then applications, the big question the customer would have was, well is Microsoft going to support that? What if I can't get support from Microsoft? I dunno if I can do this. Within about a year of those conversations taking place, the question was, can I run this in my production environment? So it was, can I get support in my test environment too? Can I please run this in production? >> Yeah. >> And so, there are folks in the kind of legacy telecom world who are going to be afraid. It's, whatever the dynamic is, there is a no one ever got fired for buying from fill in the blank >> Exactly, yep. >> in the telecom space. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Because they would buy a consolidated, aggregated stack. >> Right. >> And, if something went wrong they could say, boom, blame you. And yeah, that stack doesn't lend itself to the kind of pace of change. >> Right. >> So it doesn't necessarily need the same kind of change management. Or at least it's very, very centralized. >> Okay. Okay. >> We're getting into the brave new world of things where if you let them spin out of control, you can have big problems. And that's where the folks like Dell come in, to make sure that yes, disaggregated, yes best of commercial off-the-shelf stuff, but also the best in terms of performance and reliability and availability. >> Yeah. >> So, that's the execution part, you must execute flawlessly. >> It sounds like from a thematic perspective, the theme of MWC '23 is velocity. But it seems like an underlying theme under that, or maybe an overlying theme is disruption. It's going to be so interesting, we're only on day one. We just started our coverage. Four days of wall to wall coverage on theCUBE. Excited to hear what you're excited about, what you learn over the next few days. We get to host some segments together. >> Yeah. >> But it seems like disruption is the overall theme. And it's going to be so interesting to see how this industry evolves, what the opportunities are, what the coopetition opportunities are. We're going to be learning a lot this week. I'm excited. >> Yeah, and what's fascinating to me about this whole thing is we talk about this, all of this tumultuous, disruptive stuff that's happening. For the average consumer, they're never going to be aware of it. >> Nope. >> Dave: They're just going to see services piled on top of services. >> Which is what we want. >> There are billions of people with mobile devices and the hundreds of billions, I don't know, trillions I guess at some point of connected devices at the edge. >> Lisa: Yes, yes. >> The whole concept of the internet of things. We'll sort of be blissfully unaware of what's happening at the middle. But there's a lot of action there. So we're going to be focusing on that action that's going on. In, you know, in in the middle of it. >> Yeah. >> But there's also some cool consumer stuff out here. >> There is. >> I know I'm going to be checking out the augmented reality and virtual reality stuff. >> Yeah, yeah. Well it's all about that customer experience. We expect things right away, 24/7, wherever we are in the world. And it's enabling that to make that happen. >> Yeah. >> Dave, thank you so much for really sharing what you think you're excited about for the event and some of the trends in telecom. It sounds like it's such an interesting time to be unpacking this. >> It's going to be a great week. >> It is going to be a great week. All right, for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, covering day one of MWC '23. Stick around. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute. (bright music resumes) (music fades out)

>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Cubes Live here in Dallas, Texas. I'm John Ferer, host of the Cube, Three days of wall to wall coverage. Of course, we've got the three fabulous guests here, myself, Savannah, Peterson. S look wonderful. >>Thank you. Jong on. I, I feel lucky to play the part here with my 10 gallon hat. >>Dave Nicholson, who's the analyst uncovering all the Dell Supercomputing, hpe all the technology is changing the game. Dave, you look great. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks, John. I appreciate >>It. All right, so, so, so you look good. So we're in Dallas, Texas is a trade show conference. I don't know what you'd call this these days, but thousands of booths are here. What's the take here? Why supercomputing 22? What's the big deal? >>Well, the big deal is dramatic incremental progress in terms of supercomputing capability. So what this conference represents is the leading edge in what it can deliver to the world. We're talking about scale that is impossible to comprehend with the human brain, but you can toss out facts and figures like performance measured in ex flops, millions of CPU cores working together, thousands of kilowatts of power required to power these systems. And I think what makes this, what makes this show unique is that it's not just a bunch of vendors, but it's academia. It's PhD candidates coming and looking for companies that they might work with. So it's a very, very different vibe here. >>Savannah, we were talking last night before we were setting up our agenda for it to drill down on this week. And you know, you were, by the way, that looks great. I mean, I wish I had one. >>We'll get you one by the end of the show, >>John. Don't worry. You know, Texas is always big in Texas and that's the, the thing here, but Supercomputing seems like that had a lull for a while. Yeah, it seems like it's gonna explode and you get a chance to review the papers, take a look at it. You, you're a, I won't say closet hardware nerd, but that's your roots. >>Yeah, yeah. Very openly hardware nerd. And, and I'm excited because I, we saw a lot of hype around quantum and around AI five, 10 years ago, but we weren't seeing the application at scale and we also weren't seeing, quite frankly, the hardware wasn't ready to power these types of endeavors at scale. Whereas now, you know, we've got, we've got air cooling, we've got liquid cooling, we've got multiple GPU's. Dell was just showing me all eight of theirs that they put in their beautiful million dollar piece of equipment, which is extremely impressive for folks to run complex calculations. And, but what I'm excited about with all the, I love when we fuse business and academia together, I think that that doesn't happen very often. I've been impressed. I mean, when I walked in today, right away, I'm sure y'all can't see this at home just yet, but we'll try and give you a feel over the course of the next few days. This conference is huge. This >>Is, yeah, it is >>Way bigger than I was expecting, You know, a lot larger than where we just were in Detroit. And, and I love it because we've got the people that are literally inventing the calculations that will determine a lot of our future from sequencing our genome to powering our weather forecasting, as well as all of the companies that create the hardware and the software that's gonna actually support that. Those algorithms and >>Those, and, and the science and the engineering involved has just been going on since 1988. This conference, this trade show going on since 1988, which is, it, it passes the test of time and now the future with all the new use cases emerging from the compute and supercomputing architectures out there, it's from cradle to grave. If you're, if you're in this business, you, you're in school all the way through the industry, it doesn't seem to stop that, that university student side of it. I mean that whole student section here. So you don't see that very often in some of these tech shows, like from students to boardroom. >>Yeah. I actually brought the super computer from 1988 with me in my pocket. And I'm not sure that I'm even joking. I this may have as much processing power, certainly as much storage with one terabyte on board. I sprung for the one terabyte folks. But it is mind boggling the amount of compute power we're, we're talking about. When you dig below the surface, which we'll be doing in the coming days, you see things like leaping from P C I E, you know, gen four to gen five, and the increase that that gives us in, in terms of capabilities for plugging into the motherboard and accessing the CPU complex and on and on and on. But, but you know, something Savannah alluded to, we're talking about the leading edge of what is possible from a humanity perspective. 1%. And, and so I'd like to get into, you know, as we're we're talking to some of the experts that we'll get a chance to talk to, I'd like to get their view on what the future holds and whether we can simply grow through quantitative increases in compute power, or if the real promise is out there in the land of quantum computing, are we all sort of hanging our hats, our large 10 gallon hats? >>If that's yes. Our hats, if we're hanging our hats on that, that that's when truly we'll be able to tease insight out of chaos. I'd like to hear from some of the real experts on that subject. >>I'm glad you brought that up, cuz I'm personally pretty pumped about quantum computing, but I've seen it sit in this hype stage for quite a while and I'm ready for the application. So I'm curious to hear >>What our experts, That's an awesome, that would be, I think that would be an awesome bumper sticker. Frankly. Savannah, I'm pumped, I'm pumped about quantum computing. Who is this person? Who is this person? >>I wanna see it first. Did someone show me it? >>Yeah, yeah. 400 qubits I think was the latest IBM announcement, which, which means something. I'll pretend like I completely understand what it means. >>Tell us what that means, David. >>Well, well, so, so Savannah, let me man explain it to you. Yeah, >>Let's >>Hear it. So, so it's basically, it's, you know, in conventional computing you can either, you can either be on or off zero or one in quantum computing, you can be both, neither or all of the above. That's, that's, that's, that's the depth to which I can go. I >>Like that. That was actually a succinct, as humanly possible >>Really sounds like a Ponzi scheme to me. I, I'm not sure if I, >>Well, let's get into some of the thoughts that you guys have on some of the papers. We saw Savannah and Dave, your perspective on this whole next level kind of expansion with supercomputing and super cloud and super apps will do for this next gen. What use cases are kind of shining out of this, because, you know, it used to be you were limited by how much gear you had stacked up, how big the server could be, the supercomputer. Now you've got large scale cloud computing, you got the ability to have different subsystems like advances in networking. So you're seeing a new architectural, almost bigger. Super computing isn't just a machine, it's a collection of machines, It's a collection of Yeah. Of other stuff. What's your thoughts on these, this architecture and then the use cases that are gonna emerge that were not getable before? >>So in the past, you, you talk about, you know, 1988 and, and you know, let's say a decade ago, the race was to assemble enough compute power to be able to do things quickly enough to be practical. So we knew that if we applied software to hardware, we could get an answer to a problem because we were asking very, very specific questions. And how quickly we got the answer would determine whether it was practical to pursue it or not. So if something took a day instead of a month, okay, fantastic. But now we've reached this critical mass. You could argue when that happened, but definitely I think we're there where things like artificial intelligence and machine learning are the core of what we're doing. We're not just simply asking systems to deliver defined answers. We're asking them to learn from their experiences, starts getting a little spooky, and we're asking them to tease insights out in a way that we haven't figured out. >>So we're saying give us the insight. We're not telling the system specifically how to give us that insight. So I think that's, that's the fundamental difference that's the frontier, is, you know, you're gonna hear a lot about AI and ml and then if you retreat back a bit from Supercomputing, you're in the realm of high performance computing, which is sort of junior version of supercomputing. It's instead of the billion dollar system, it's the system that, you know, schlubs like, like, like, like Facebook or AWS might be able to afford, you know, maybe a hundred million dollars for a system casual, just, just sort of casual kind of thing next to the coffee table in the living room. But I think that's really gonna be the talk. So that's a huge tent when you talk about AI and ml. Yeah, >>I I, I totally agree. We're having some of the conversations that we've had for a long time about AI and bias. I saw a lot of the papers were looking at that. I think that's what's gonna be really interesting to me, what's most exciting about this is how are we pulling together all of this on a global scale. So I'm excited to see how supercomputing impacts climate change, our ability to monitor environmental conditions around the globe and different governments and bodies can all combine. And all of this information can be going into a central brain and learning from it and figuring out how we can make the world a better place. We're learning about the body. There's a lot of people doing molecular biology and sequencing of the genome here. We've got, there's, there's, It's just, it's very, I I don't think a lot of people realize that supercomputing pretty much touches every aspect of our >>Lives. I mean, we've had it, we've had it for a while. I think cloud computing took a lot of the attention, given that that brought in massive capabilities, a lot of agility. And I think what's interesting here at this show, if you look at, you know, what's going on from the guess, like I said, from the dorm room to the boardroom, everyone's here, but you look at what's actually going on above the hardware, CNCF is here. They have a booth, the whole cloud native software business. It's gonna be interesting to see how the software business takes advantage of totally. How these architectures, because let's face it, I've never heard a developer pointer say, I wanna run on slower hardware. So no one wants that. So now if you abstract away the hardware, as we know with, with cloud computing and DevOps cloud on premises and Edge, David, this is like, this is again, nirvana for the industry because you want, it's an exciting thing, the fastest possible compute system for the software. >>Yeah, yeah. >>I I, at the end of the day, that's what we're talking >>About. So I asked, I asked the, the gift question to my Wharton students this morning on a call, and I, you know, I asked specifically if, if I could give you something that was the result of super computing's amazing nature, what would it be? Would it be personalized therapeutics in healthcare? Would it be something related to climate? Being able to figure out exactly what we can do. There's a whole range of possibilities. And what's interesting is >>What were some of the answers? >>So, so, so a lot of the answers, a lot of the answers came down to, to two categories and it was really, it was healthcare and climate. Yeah. A lot of, a lot of understanding and of course, and of course a lot of jokes about how eventually supercomputers will determine that. The problem is people, >>It's people. Yeah, no. So I knew you were headed there, >>But >>Don't people just want custom jeans? Yeah. >>Or, well, so one of the, one of the good ones though was, >>Was also that >>While we're >>Here, a person from a company who shall not be named said, oh, advertising, it was the, it was the what if you could predict with a high degree of certainty that when you sent someone an email saying, Hey, do you wanna buy this? They would say, Well, yeah, I do. Dramatically lowering the cost of acquisition for an individual customer as an example. Those are the kinds of breakthroughs that will transform how we live. Because all of a sudden, industries are completely disrupted, disrupted, not necessarily directly related to supercomputing, but you think about automating the entire fleet of, of, of trucks in, in North America. What does that do to people who currently drive those trucks? Yeah, so there are, there are societal questions at hand that I don't necessarily know the academics are, are, are considering when they're thinking what's possible. >>Well, I think, I think the point about the ad thing brings up the whole cultural shift that's going on from the old generation of, Hey, let's use our best minds in the industry to figure out how to place an ad at the right place in the right pixel, at the right time. Versus solving real problems like climate change our, you know, culture and society and get us getting along as a country and world water sustainability fires in California. Yeah, I mean, come on. >>There's a lot. So I, I gotta say, I was curious when you were playing with your pocket computer there and talking about the terabyte that you have inside. So back in 1988 when Supercomputing started, the first show was in Orlando. It was actually the same four days that we're here right now. I was born in 1988 if we're just talking about how great 1988 is. And so I guess I, >>I was born, So were we Savannah? So were we >>The era of, I think I was in third grade at that time. >>We won't tell, we won't say what you told me earlier about 1988 for you. But that said, so 1988 was when Steve Jobs released the next computer. He was out of Apple at that time. Yeah, that's right. >>Eight >>Megabytes of Ram. >>It's called the Cube. I think >>It's respectable. That's all it was called. It was, it was, it was, it was the cube, which is pretty, pretty exciting. But when we were looking at, yeah, on the supercomputing side, your phone would've been about, is a capable, >>So where will we be in 20 years? It's amazing >>What we gonna, >>Will our holograms be here instead of us physically sitting, sitting at the table? I don't know. >>Well, it's gonna be very interesting to see how the global ecosystem evolves. It used to be very nationalistic culture with computing. I think, I think we're gonna see global, you know, flattening of culture relative to computing. I think space will be a, a massive hopeful, massive discussion. I think software and automation will be at levels we don't even see. So I think software, to me, I'm looking at, that's the enablement of this supercomputing show. In terms of the next five years, what are they gonna do to enable more faster intelligent horsepower? And, and what does that look like? Is it, it used to be simple processor, more processors, more threads, multicores, and then stuff around it. I think this is where I think it's gonna shift to more network computing, network processing, edge latency, physics is involved. I mean, every, everything you can squeeze out of the physics will be Yeah. Interesting to watch. Well, when >>We, when we, when we peel back the cover on the actual pieces of hardware that are driving this revolution, parallelizing, you know, of workloads is critical to this. It's what super computing consists of. There's no such thing as a supercomputer sitting by itself on a table. Even the million dollar system from Dell, which is crazy when you hear Dell and million dollar system. >>And it's still there too, >>Right? Just, just hanging out. Yeah. But, but it's all about the interconnect. When you want to take advantage of parallel processing, you have to have software that can leverage all of the resources and connectivity becomes increasingly important. I think that's gonna be a thread that we're gonna see throughout the next few days with the, with the, you know, the motherboards, for lack of a lack of a better term, allowing faster access to memory, faster access to cpu, gpu, dpu, networking, storage devices, plugging in those all work together. But increasingly it's that connectivity layer that's critically important. Questions of InfiniBand versus ethernet. Our DMA over converged ethernet as an example, a lot of these architectural decisions are gonna be based on power cooling, dead city. So lot of details behind the scenes to make the magic happen. I >>Think the power is gonna be, you know, thinking 20 years out, hopefully everything here is powered sustainably 20 years from now because power pull, I mean these, the more exciting things going on in your supercomputer. The power suck is massive. That when we were talking to Dell, they were saying that's one of the biggest problems, >>Concerns, that's gonna their customers and that's gonna play into sustainability. So a lot of great guests, we got folks from Dell and the industry, a lot of the manufacturers, a lot of the hardware software experts gonna come on and share what's going on. You know, we did a, we did a post why hardware matters a few months ago, Dave. Everyone's like, well it does now more than ever. So we're gonna get into it here at Supercomputing 22, where the hardware matters. Faster power, as we say for the applications. Mr. Cube, moving back with more live coverage. Stay with us back.

(upbeat music) >> The market for enterprise servers is large and it generates well north of $100 billion in annual revenue, and it's growing consistently in the mid to high single digit range. Right now, like many segments, the market for servers is, it's like slingshotting, right? Organizations, they've been replenishing their install bases and upgrading, especially at HQs coming out of the isolation economy. But the macro headwinds, as we've reported, are impacting all segments of the market. CIOs, you know, they're tapping the brakes a little bit, sometimes quite a bit and being cautious with both capital expenditures and discretionary opex, particularly in the cloud. They're dialing it down and just being a little bit more, you know, cautious. The market for enterprise servers, it's dominated as you know, by x86 based systems with an increasingly large contribution coming from alternatives like ARM and NVIDIA. Intel, of course, is the largest supplier, but AMD has been incredibly successful competing with Intel because of its focus, it's got an outsourced manufacturing model and its innovation and very solid execution. Intel's frequent delays with its next generation Sapphire Rapid CPUs, now slated for January 2023 have created an opportunity for AMD, specifically AMD's next generation EPYC CPUs codenamed Genoa will offer as many as 96 Zen 4 cores per CPU when it launches later on this month. Observers can expect really three classes of Genoa. There's a standard Zen 4 compute platform for general purpose workloads, there's a compute density optimized Zen 4 package and then a cache optimized version for data intensive workloads. Indeed, the makers of enterprise servers are responding to customer requirements for more diversity and server platforms to handle different workloads, especially those high performance data-oriented workloads that are being driven by AI and machine learning and high performance computing, HPC needs. OEMs like Dell, they're going to be tapping these innovations and try to get to the market early. Dell, in particular, will be using these systems as the basis for its next generation Gen 16 servers, which are going to bring new capabilities to the market. Now, of course, Dell is not alone, there's got other OEM, you've got HPE, Lenovo, you've got ODMs, you've got the cloud players, they're all going to be looking to keep pace with the market. Now, the other big trend that we've seen in the market is the way customers are thinking about or should be thinking about performance. No longer is the clock speed of the CPU the soul and most indicative performance metric. There's much more emphasis in innovation around all those supporting components in a system, specifically the parts of the system that take advantage, for example, of faster bus speeds. We're talking about things like network interface cards and RAID controllers and memories and other peripheral devices that in combination with microprocessors, determine how well systems can perform and those kind of things around compute operations, IO and other critical tasks. Now, the combinatorial factors ultimately determine the overall performance of the system and how well suited a particular server is to handling different workloads. So we're seeing OEMs like Dell, they're building flexibility into their offerings and putting out products in their portfolios that can meet the changing needs of their customers. Welcome to our ongoing series where we investigate the critical question, does hardware matter? My name is Dave Vellante, and with me today to discuss these trends and the things that you should know about for the next generation of server architectures is former CTO from Oracle and EMC and adjunct faculty and Wharton CTO Academy, David Nicholson. Dave, always great to have you on "theCUBE." Thanks for making some time with me. >> Yeah, of course, Dave, great to be here. >> All right, so you heard my little spiel in the intro, that summary, >> Yeah. >> Was it accurate? What would you add? What do people need to know? >> Yeah, no, no, no, 100% accurate, but you know, I'm a resident nerd, so just, you know, some kind of clarification. If we think of things like microprocessor release cycles, it's always going to be characterized as rolling thunder. I think 2023 in particular is going to be this constant release cycle that we're going to see. You mentioned the, (clears throat) excuse me, general processors with 96 cores, shortly after the 96 core release, we'll see that 128 core release that you referenced in terms of compute density. And then, we can talk about what it means in terms of, you know, nanometers and performance per core and everything else. But yeah, no, that's the main thing I would say, is just people shouldn't look at this like a new car's being released on Saturday. This is going to happen over the next 18 months, really. >> All right, so to that point, you think about Dell's next generation systems, they're going to be featuring these new AMD processes, but to your point, when you think about performance claims, in this industry, it's a moving target. It's that, you call it a rolling thunder. So what does that game of hopscotch, if you will, look like? How do you see it unfolding over the next 12 to 18 months? >> So out of the gate, you know, slated as of right now for a November 10th release, AMD's going to be first to market with, you know, everyone will argue, but first to market with five nanometer technology in production systems, 96 cores. What's important though is, those microprocessors are going to be resident on motherboards from Dell that feature things like PCIe 5.0 technology. So everything surrounding the microprocessor complex is faster. Again, going back to this idea of rolling thunder, we expect the Gen 16 PowerEdge servers from Dell to similarly be rolled out in stages with initial releases that will address certain specific kinds of workloads and follow on releases with a variety of systems configured in a variety of ways. >> So I appreciate you painting a picture. Let's kind of stay inside under the hood, if we can, >> Sure. >> And share with us what we should know about these kind of next generation CPUs. How are companies like Dell going to be configuring them? How important are clock speeds and core counts in these new systems? And what about, you mentioned motherboards, what about next gen motherboards? You mentioned PCIe Gen 5, where does that fit in? So take us inside deeper into the system, please. >> Yeah, so if you will, you know, if you will join me for a moment, let's crack open the box and look inside. It's not just microprocessors. Like I said, they're plugged into a bus architecture that interconnect. How quickly that interconnect performs is critical. Now, I'm going to give you a statistic that doesn't require a PhD to understand. When we go from PCIe Gen 4 to Gen 5, which is going to be featured in all of these systems, we double the performance. So just, you can write that down, two, 2X. The performance is doubled, but the numbers are pretty staggering in terms of giga transactions per second, 128 gigabytes per second of aggregate bandwidth on the motherboard. Again, doubling when going from 4th Gen to 5th Gen. But the reality is, most users of these systems are still on PCIe Gen 3 based systems. So for them, just from a bus architecture perspective, you're doing a 4X or 8X leap in performance, and then all of the peripherals that plug into that faster bus are faster, whether it's RAID control cards from RAID controllers or storage controllers or network interface cards. Companies like Broadcom come to mind. All of their components are leapfrogging their prior generation to fit into this ecosystem. >> So I wonder if we could stay with PCIe for a moment and, you know, just understand what Gen 5 brings. You said, you know, 2X, I think we're talking bandwidth here. Is there a latency impact? You know, why does this matter? And just, you know, this premise that these other components increasingly matter more, Which components of the system are we talking about that can actually take advantage of PCIe Gen 5? >> Pretty much all of them, Dave. So whether it's memory plugged in or network interface cards, so communication to the outside world, which computer servers tend to want to do in 2022, controllers that are attached to internal and external storage devices. All of them benefit from this enhancement and performance. And it's, you know, PCI express performance is measured in essentially bandwidth and throughput in the sense of the numbers of transactions per second that you can do. It's mind numbing, I want to say it's 32 giga transfers per second. And then in terms of bandwidth, again, across the lanes that are available, 128 gigabytes per second. I'm going to have to check if it's gigabits or gigabytes. It's a massive number. And again, it's double what PCIe 4 is before. So what does that mean? Just like the advances in microprocessor technology, you can consolidate massive amounts of work into a much smaller footprint. That's critical because everything in that server is consuming power. So when you look at next generation hardware that's driven by things like AMD Genoa or you know, the EPYC processors, the Zen with the Z4 microprocessors, for every dollar that you're spending on power and equipment and everything else, you're getting far greater return on your investment. Now, I need to say that we anticipate that these individual servers, if you're out shopping for a server, and that's a very nebulous term because they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, I think there's going to be a little bit of sticker shock at first until you run the numbers. People will look at an individual server and they'll say, wow, this is expensive and the peripherals, the things that are going into those slots are more expensive, but you're getting more bang for your buck. You're getting much more consolidation, lower power usage and for every dollar, you're getting a greater amount of performance and transactions, which translates up the stack through the application layer and, you know, out to the end user's desire to get work done. >> So I want to come back to that, but let me stay on performance for a minute. You know, we all used to be, when you'd go buy a new PC, you'd be like, what's the clock speed of that? And so, when you think about performance of a system today and how measurements are changing, how should customers think about performance in these next gen systems? And where does that, again, where does that supporting ecosystem play? >> So if you are really into the speeds and feeds and what's under the covers, from an academic perspective, you can go in and you can look at the die size that was used to create the microprocessors, the clock speeds, how many cores there are, but really, the answer is look at the benchmarks that are created through testing, especially from third party organizations that test these things for workloads that you intend to use these servers for. So if you are looking to support something like a high performance environment for artificial intelligence or machine learning, look at the benchmarks as they're recorded, as they're delivered by the entire system. So it's not just about the core. So yeah, it's interesting to look at clock speeds to kind of compare where we are with regards to Moore's Law. Have we been able to continue to track along that path? We know there are physical limitations to Moore's Law from an individual microprocessor perspective, but none of that really matters. What really matters is what can this system that I'm buying deliver in terms of application performance and user requirement performance? So that's what I'd say you want to look for. >> So I presume we're going to see these benchmarks at some point, I'm hoping we can, I'm hoping we can have you back on to talk about them. Is that something that we can expect in the future? >> Yeah, 100%, 100%. Dell, and I'm sure other companies, are furiously working away to demonstrate the advantages of this next gen architecture. If I had to guess, I would say that we are going to see quite a few world records set because of the combination of things, like faster network interface cards, faster storage cards, faster memory, more memory, faster cache, more cache, along with the enhanced microprocessors that are going to be delivered. And you mentioned this is, you know, AMD is sort of starting off this season of rolling thunder and in a few months, we'll start getting the initial entries from Intel also, and we'll be able to compare where they fit in with what AMD is offering. I'd expect OEMs like Dell to have, you know, a portfolio of products that highlight the advantages of each processor's set. >> Yeah, I talked in my open Dave about the diversity of workloads. What are some of those emerging workloads and how will companies like Dell address them in your view? >> So a lot of the applications that are going to be supported are what we think of as legacy application environments. A lot of Oracle databases, workloads associated with ERP, all of those things are just going to get better bang for their buck from a compute perspective. But what we're going to be hearing a lot about and what the future really holds for us that's exciting is this arena of artificial intelligence and machine learning. These next gen platforms offer performance that allows us to do things in areas like natural language processing that we just couldn't do before cost effectively. So I think the next few years are going to see a lot of advances in AI and ML that will be debated in the larger culture and that will excite a lot of computer scientists. So that's it, AI/ML are going to be the big buzzwords moving forward. >> So Dave, you talked earlier about this, some people might have sticker shocks. So some of the infrastructure pros that are watching this might be, oh, okay, I'm going to have to pitch this, especially in this, you know, tough macro environment. I'm going to have to sell this to my CIO, my CFO. So what does this all mean? You know, if they're going to have to pay more, how is it going to affect TCO? How would you pitch that to your management? >> As long as you stay away from per unit cost, you're fine. And again, we don't have necessarily, or I don't have necessarily insider access to street pricing on next gen servers yet, but what I do know from examining what the component suppliers tell us is that, these systems are going to be significantly more expensive on a per unit basis. But what does that mean? If the server that you're used to buying for five bucks is now 10 bucks, but it's doing five times as much work, it's a great deal, and anyone who looks at it and says, 10 bucks? It used to only be five bucks, well, the ROI and the TCO, that's where all of this really needs to be measured and a huge part of that is going to be power consumption. And along with the performance tests that we expect to see coming out imminently, we should also be expecting to see some of those ROI metrics, especially around power consumption. So I don't think it's going to be a problem moving forward, but there will be some sticker shock. I imagine you're going to be able to go in and configure a very, very expensive, fully loaded system on some of these configurators online over the next year. >> So it's consolidation, which means you could do more with less. It's going to be, or more with the same, it's going to be lower power, less cooling, less floor space and lower management overhead, which is kind of now you get into staff, so you're going to have to sort of identify how the staff can be productive in other areas. You're probably not going to fire people hopefully. But yeah, it sounds like it's going to be a really consolidation play. I talked at the open about Intel and AMD and Intel coming out with Sapphire Rapids, you know, of course it's been well documented, it's late but they're now scheduled for January. Pat Gelsinger's talked about this, and of course they're going to try to leapfrog AMD and then AMD is going to respond, you talked about this earlier, so that game is going to continue. How long do you think this cycle will last? >> Forever. (laughs) It's just that, there will be periods of excitement like we're going to experience over at least the next year and then there will be a lull and then there will be a period of excitement. But along the way, we've got lurkers who are trying to disrupt this market completely. You know, specifically you think about ARM where the original design point was, okay, you're powered by a battery, you have to fit in someone's pocket. You can't catch on fire and burn their leg. That's sort of the requirement, as opposed to the, you know, the x86 model, which is okay, you have a data center with a raised floor and you have a nuclear power plant down the street. So don't worry about it. As long as an 18-wheeler can get it to where it needs to be, we'll be okay. And so, you would think that over time, ARM is going to creep up as all destructive technologies do, and we've seen that, we've definitely seen that. But I would argue that we haven't seen it happen as quickly as maybe some of us expected. And then you've got NVIDIA kind of off to the side starting out, you know, heavy in the GPU space saying, hey, you know what, you can use the stuff we build for a whole lot of really cool new stuff. So they're running in a different direction, sort of gnawing at the traditional x86 vendors certainly. >> Yes, so I'm glad- >> That's going to be forever. >> I'm glad you brought up ARM and NVIDIA, I think, but you know, maybe it hasn't happened as quickly as many thought, although there's clearly pockets and examples where it is taking shape. But this to me, Dave, talks to the supporting cast. It's not just about the microprocessor unit anymore, specifically, you know, generally, but specifically the x86. It's the supporting, it's the CPU, the NPU, the XPU, if you will, but also all those surrounding components that, to your earlier point, are taking advantage of the faster bus speeds. >> Yeah, no, 100%. You know, look at it this way. A server used to be measured, well, they still are, you know, how many U of rack space does it take up? You had pizza box servers with a physical enclosure. Increasingly, you have the concept of a server in quotes being the aggregation of components that are all plugged together that share maybe a bus architecture. But those things are all connected internally and externally, especially externally, whether it's external storage, certainly networks. You talk about HPC, it's just not one server. It's hundreds or thousands of servers. So you could argue that we are in the era of connectivity and the real critical changes that we're going to see with these next generation server platforms are really centered on the bus architecture, PCIe 5, and the things that get plugged into those slots. So if you're looking at 25 gig or 100 gig NICs and what that means from a performance and/or consolidation perspective, or things like RDMA over Converged Ethernet, what that means for connecting systems, those factors will be at least as important as the microprocessor complexes. I imagine IT professionals going out and making the decision, okay, we're going to buy these systems with these microprocessors, with this number of cores in memory. Okay, great. But the real work starts when you start talking about connecting all of them together. What does that look like? So yeah, the definition of what constitutes a server and what's critically important I think has definitely changed. >> Dave, let's wrap. What can our audience expect in the future? You talked earlier about you're going to be able to get benchmarks, so that we can quantify these innovations that we've been talking about, bring us home. >> Yeah, I'm looking forward to taking a solid look at some of the performance benchmarking that's going to come out, these legitimate attempts to set world records and those questions about ROI and TCO. I want solid information about what my dollar is getting me. I think it helps the server vendors to be able to express that in a concrete way because our understanding is these things on a per unit basis are going to be more expensive and you're going to have to justify them. So that's really what, it's the details that are going to come the day of the launch and in subsequent weeks. So I think we're going to be busy for the next year focusing on a lot of hardware that, yes, does matter. So, you know, hang on, it's going to be a fun ride. >> All right, Dave, we're going to leave it there. Thanks you so much, my friend. Appreciate you coming on. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Okay, and don't forget to check out the special website that we've set up for this ongoing series. Go to doeshardwarematter.com and you'll see commentary from industry leaders, we got analysts on there, technical experts from all over the world. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, covering Coupa Insp!re 2022. theCUBE is really happy to be here at this event. About 2,500 folks are here, which is great to see. I have two guests from Microsoft with me. Please, welcome Jonathan Allen, the director of global network modeling design and planning, and Cassie Wang, senior global network model and design engineer. Guys, thanks so much for joining me today. >> No problem. Thanks Lisa for having us. >> Thank you. >> So let's talk about what's going on at Microsoft, the Microsoft supply chain. Supply chain is a term that's on everyone's lips these days for some interesting reason, but talk to me a little bit about the Microsoft supply chain and how does it scale to meet the needs of business? >> Yeah, Lisa, it's really an interesting design at Microsoft. When you look at all the products we service, from Xbox consoles, controllers, Xbox games, Xbox Live cards, service devices for retail customers, for consumer customers and commercial customers. And then the way we go to market through distributors, retailers, and direct to consumer homes, we have to have a supply chain that actually executes across all the products and customer needs based on seasonality. When you think about our products, Xbox console heavy Christmas, heavy consumer, heavy retail commercial devices for service, heavy quarter ends, heavy periods of time back to school. So, we have to have a supply chain that effectively works across all of our products, all of our customers, and all the differences analogies that we have to manage. >> And do so globally? >> And do so globally. >> So talk to me about the transformation. That's a word that we talk a lot about digital transformation, right? >> Yes. >> Before COVID, now we've seen the acceleration of digital transformation during COVID, we've seen challenges with the supply chain. Talk to me about Microsoft supply chain journey from a digitalization perspective, what you guys have gone through. >> Yeah, absolutely. Data is the key. And I have a philosophy which is around managing a business by facts and figures. And so, when Cassie first came on about a year and a half ago, our focus was on digitizing our supply chain. So how do you take our physical supply chain, digitize it in a way that you have a digital mapping and a duplication of what's happening physically in a digital way across the supply chain. So about every single day, we're grabbing in about 500 gigabytes of data, that then allows us to understand the physical and the virtual world of our supply chain, to understand how it's moving, how it's executing and how it's delivering. As for example, we were able to, when the war began in Ukraine, to understand where our trains were, how they were moving, and if they were continuing to move versus stopping. On the second side, we're leveraging that data now to make decisions about where our supply chain is today, which is really focused in the changing environments that are real time occurring. That's driving opportunities, whether it's about reducing carbon, whether it's driving cost down or whether it's servicing the customers to make real time decisions, while at the same time planning for three to five years out based on our growth, our projections, and making sure we'll have the right infrastructure partner supply chain in place to service with those changes in growth. >> Basically you need a crystal ball? >> Basically. >> Essentially? >> Yes. >> And Cassie, it sounds like from what Jonathan just said, you joined the team during the pandemic? >> Yes. >> So, during a time of massive change? >> Fully remote, yeah. Talk to me a little bit about that and some of the opportunities that you saw in helping the supply chain modernization. >> Yeah, definitely. So when I joined Microsoft, it's great time. And it's all the risks and challenges and dynamic changing environment that's really involved. So we spent a long time, like from the time I joined Microsoft, we spent the time to set up this digital chain of our supply chain. So really to transform what is happening physically to how do we see it digitally. So just to bring the visibility of the supply chain. So the great thing is we are able to leverage the tool from Coupa, the digital transformation and also supply chain design optimization tool to help us really build the digital twin, and also the model for Microsoft device supply chain. >> Now, interesting comment. So when I met Casie, the first time I met her, was in person when I interviewed her. Second time I met her in person was here at Coupa, and I was afraid I wouldn't recognize her. (all laughing) >> Of course, challenges of last year. Talk to me about speaking of challenges, talk to me about some of the challenges that Microsoft saw and said, "We need a partner like Coupa to help us eliminate these challenges. We don't have time. Real time is no longer nice to have. We've got to be able to transform, so we have that visibility in real time." >> Absolutely. When you think about time, time and decisions, overnight, cities get locked down in China, cities get locked down in Europe. And if you wait days or wait hours, that could be the difference between product on a boat, product on a plane, or product not arriving to support your customer needs. >> Right. And then the question is knowing that with that real time, how are you making decisions real time to change, to alternate airports? Making changes on the products you're making to make sure that, I was making this but now I should make this, because I have a risk of getting product to show. >> And you've got to do all that with very limited amount of time. And of course, cause there's the consumer. I mean, we think about the Microsoft on the business side but the consumer side, you mentioned some of the consumer products you don't offend the Xbox, the service consumers. One of the things that was really in short supply during the pandemic and probably still is to some degree, is patience. >> Yes. >> The consumer experience is so critical for a brand. >> Correct. >> And as is the employee experience. >> Yes. >> Talk to me a little bit about, from a supply chain digitization perspective, what was some of the executive sponsorships? Who were some of those executive sponsors that were involved in going, "Yeah, we need to move in this direction with Coupa, and it's got to be now."? >> The real supporter behind that is, my manager, Jeff Davidson, and then his leader, which is Donna Wharton, where they are truly about what are we doing next? How are we going to leverage the tools and the capabilities that are provided by others that allow us to do our job? So let's be clear on, let's use those that are designed to do what they're supposed to do, and then build where we need to. And that was the big difference, the digitization of the data, create the data, create the information so that we could then leverage the tools to create the information, right? And that information is then about bringing the facts, the information and the data forward, to have very fact-based conversations, which is back to manage the business by facts and figures. >> Right. Well, Cassie, one of the things that we've also learned in the last couple years, is that every company is a data company. If they're not a data company they're probably not going to be around. I even think of my grocery store and all that data that they have on me to be able to surface up. What did I buy last time, and I want to buy that again? Talk to me a little bit about why was Coupa the right choice to help facilitate this data strategy so that the visibility and the supply chain and the ability to tweak things on demand is there? >> Yeah. So, the main stuff that we are leveraging from Coupa are the data group and also the supply chain group. So data group enable us to really, for the people who do not have a intensive data manipulation backgrounds, they can use data group very straightfowardly to work on the data so they can build, they can grab the data transactional level and aggregate to the leadership level to see data in different aspects, tell the trends to get the key information. So that's the power of getting the massive data on a level that's like everybody can say, "Oh, wow! This is what it means." And another is definitely leveraging the data to get into a model, which is what we just talked about, the digital twin of our physical supply chain. So, we are able to like make analysis based on very easy design, like sensitive analysis, what-if analysis, to test out what our future supply chain can be. And what is the cost benefits? What is all the impacts on the on the lead times? On the carbons? So, yeah. So that's the power of leveraging the data. >> Speaking of carbons, how is Microsoft working towards being carbon negative, zero waste? What's some of the things that are going on there from a corporate responsibility perspective? >> Yeah, that's a really important one. As known about two years ago, we came out with a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030. >> 2030. >> And so, the company as a whole is doing massive initiatives from different groups, but specifically in supply chain, we're constantly focusing on cutting our carbon footprint, whether it's the way we're making the products and designing the products, whether it's the way that we're designing our warehouses. So for example, just recently, we launched a Carbon Neutral DC in Europe, which is all solar panel based. We're about to do that as well in one of our US operations. We're working on other things that allow us to think about alternative pallets that eliminate the weight of wood, to a much lighter pallet that has a huge carbon reduction when you think about shipping things via the air and the carbon impact there. So, everything that we work on is really around three things; service, cost and sustainability. And our biggest objective is really taking all three of those objectives and trying to bring them closer to each other so that the decisions aren't as large against each other when you make one versus the other. That's our objective. So, how do we continue to move that ball forward, challenge the paradigms of the old, that we're so accustomed to and really move forward to changing? >> How does Coupa help with that? >> Oh, I can't say that, yeah. >> Yeah, so one of the actual dimensions, Microsoft our goal is to achieve carbon neutral by 2030. So traditionally, the trade off might be between cost and service, right? >> Okay. And now, the carbon is the most important priority. So the trade off, the balance, are between cost, service, time and carbon. So one of the great thing that Coupa can help us is in the network modeling. There is actually objective for lowering the carbon emissions. So that can be the top priority that you wanted to solve through your network modeling like in parallel to cost, to service. So you can just like very straightforwardly put more weight into carbon when you're making your decisions, like that can be a higher penalty cost when you have more carbon emissions. It's like a very straightforward way to translate the carbon goal into some quantifiable goal into the modeling and data. >> Jonathan, I'm curious from a Microsoft strategic partnership perspective, how important is it from Microsoft to partner with companies that have that strong commitment to help facilitate being carbon neutral by 2030, having a strong ESG initiative? >> It's critical. Microsoft for the most part is an outsourced supply chain in which we measure partners across the network. We have our partners run our distribution and centers, we have outsource manufacturing, we have outsourced logistics. And it's important that we're working with them about what their plans are, because they're just simply an extension of the Microsoft supply chain. >> Right. >> Right. They're not not just companies we work with, they're companies we partner with, to think about how can we change the future? What are the alternatives that we can do? How do we think about alternative fuels? How do we think about alternative shipping ways? How do we think about creating density in the network? So one of the biggest things when you really think about optimization is really around creating deensity. How do I create more with less, and make sure I'm taking, for every dollar spent, for every shipment made, I maximize it to its fullest, and leave no waste behind it? That's the goal. And so, partners challenging us is probably the most important piece because they're on the front line. They actually see our shipments, they see our loads, they see the work we're doing and how it's translating to their environment. And it's important that they give us that hard feedback back that allows us know where we're not meeting the bar. >> Got it. Cassie, you guys are giving a presentation in about a couple of hours. Talk to me about some of the things that the audience, like if you had to summarize the top three takeaways that the audience is going to learn from the top, what would they be? >> I think the first is sustainability. So we want everybody to know that this is the key mission for Microsoft. That's one of the priorities for the next eight years for Microsoft to achieve. And the second is just how Coupa can help us achieve that goal. And how do we leverage the the applications, the tools, the cutting edge technologies for us to achieve a sweet balance between sustainability and technology supplychain? >> I think one of the greatest things about conferences like this, is that Coupa is great with that customer centricity, is it the opportunity to hear from the voice of the customer? What challenges you had? Why you chose Coupa? How you resolved them? And that crystal ball that you talked about in terms of where we're going from here. I think that there's so much value. I'm sure in what you're going to share today with the audience. Jonathan, last question for you, for other folks in any industry that are about to embark on, or are in the midst of a supply chain, digital transformation, what's your advice? What recommendations would you give? >> For me, it's really about two things. First and foremost is about creating data. Focus on data, not an answer, not a conversation. What is the information that you require? And then the second piece about that is then how do you make sure you stitch it together? And how you create, whether it's manufacturing data, whether it's purchase order data, whether it's sales order data, whether it's shipment data, whatever it is, making sure that you can stitch end-to-end together, because each individual decision by itself, may be right, but could be wrong, because ultimately, it's about the decision for the whole, not the decision for the one. And then making sure you focus on the cultural change, which is around, it's just not my area, it's just not my thing, it's about the end, it's about the planet, it's about Microsoft, it's about the customer, it's about the future, and making sure you're really really focused on making that change, right? Not my change. >> Right, and Rob Bernstein even alluded to that a little bit this morning in his keynote talking about one of the things that Coupa breaks is silos. >> Yes. >> Organizations that, cause to your point, something might be really good for sales or operations, but not good for marketing or logistics, for example, need to be able to have that visibility across, but also another thing that Coupa is famous for is collaboration. >> Correct. >> Being able to enable that collaboration across lines of business, across teams, across partners. >> Yep. And an important statement of that is, when you think about change, think of it like a stream, right? Streams, they create pathways with persistence. When you believe in something and you're truly behind it, just stay the path, right? There'll be a time and a place, cause sometimes the decisions just aren't now, but they will become. There's a lot of things that, for example, myself and Cassie are constantly working on, that might not be right now, but they will be right in the future. And it takes sometimes, just the right opportunity, the right situation, but the key is making ysure you understand those things so when those opportunities present themselves, you can just step in. >> Yep. Another thing we've learned, I think in the last two years, I'm losing count, is it's not a matter of if, but when. >> Correct. >> And you can apply that general statement to pretty much anything these days. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking about Microsoft's transformation of the supply chain, the digital twin that you've created. Have a great time in your session. I'm sure folks are going to learn a lot from you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, my pleasure. For Jonathan Allen and Cassie Wang, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the the CUBE's coverage of Coupa Insp!re 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around, be right back with my next guest. (upbeat msuic)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE we're in our Palo Alto studio, it's still 2020, we're still gettin' through the COVID crisis and we're still reaching out to our community really to talk to leaders who have lead through difficult times, led through transitions, and really go out to the experts and get some advice from people who have been around the block a few times, and I'm really, really excited to have one of my all time favorite business executives joining us, I haven't talked to him in years and years and almost decades, David Pottruck is joining us, he is formerly the CEO of Schwab, how he kind of made his name, now he's an author, he's teaching at the Wharton School, he's a New York Times best selling author and he's also the chairman of Red Eagle Ventures, David, great to see you. >> Thanks, Jeff, it's good to be with you today. >> Absolutely, so before we get in, just to check in, how are you doing, how are you gettin' through 2020, I can't believe we're already on the backside of this crazy year. >> Well, it's been a pretty challenging year as you know, and we've seen companies learn to operate in a virtual world. Zoom has been one of the huge beneficiaries, but technology companies in general, the whole FAANG group of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and such, they've all benefited from people getting more virtual, and one of the non profits I'm involved with sends out videos to schools on social and emotional learning and that's seen a big uptick. So, the world is changing, and changing in very substantial ways, and I don't think we'll ever go back to the way it was in total, we will go back to having face to face meetings, of course, but I do think that operating virtually and doing more things remotely, remote business meetings over zoom are going to be a fixed part of the future, >> Right, right. >> At least in my opinion. >> So, the reason I wanted to reach out to you is you've managed through some crazy transitions and some crazy disruptions back in the day and for a lot of the young people that don't remember, there was a time before we did everything online. There was a time where you had a broker and you called him on the phone and you paid a pretty big price based on a percentage of the transactions. You were at Schwab in the late 90s when this new thing called the internet came along, and these new things called internet only businesses to compete with you, I wonder if you can kind of take us back as you started to see some of these new kinds of threats, coming not necessarily from people that you recognize from up and down the street, but people who are coming over horizons that you've never ever seen before. And how did you start to get a feel for hmm, the landscapes a changin'. >> You know it's really funny to look back that there actually was a day when something called the internet didn't exist. And, there was no connectivity, there was no internet. We were, of course, at that time a telephone based brokerage firm, what used to be called discount brokers. We don't use that phrase very much anymore at Schwab, but, we were a telephone based discount broker, and the internet popped up and started becoming commercialized, and some online only brokerage firms popped up. And these firms didn't have call centers, they didn't have branch offices, if you wanted to do a trade you did it over your computer, online, and the pricing was dramatically less. To give you some idea, to buy 100 shares of IBM, Merrill Lynch would have charged you $250, for that one trade, Schwab would have charged you $80 and E-Trade would have charged you $25. So, we were much cheaper than Merrill Lynch, but E-Trade was much cheaper than us. So, we were, at the time, we were worried about is there enough security on the internet, can we do trades. We have a reputation to protect, a brand new company they don't have a reputation to protect, we have customer security, we have a reputation to protect. Well, we started doing online trades, and the way we did it was we gave all of our customers a 20% discount on our normal pricing, so instead of charging 80-something dollars, you paid something like $60. So, it was a nice discount, customers liked it, they were doing online trades, and we're seeing that is just taking off, it's getting huge, and we're getting great press, the analysts love it, Wall Street loves it, we're a public company and it's going great, but of course at the same time I'm getting, a basket full of letters and emails from our customers saying "why can't you do trades for $25 like E-Trade? Why are they able to do an online trade for $25 and you're charging $65? I thought you stood for value, I thought you guys wanted to be the best value for the money." So, I'm in this dilemma where Wall Street doesn't see these letters, they don't get reported, I see them, and there dozens and then hundreds, and then thousands. >> Wow. >> We had millions of customers, so to get a thousand letters or emails in a month that's very possible. And so I go to Chuck with this and I said you know, I think we need to make a change because no great company was built on the back of unhappy customers. >> Right, right. But you know, it's so funny, not funny, I'm sure it was a huge challenge in the moment, but you know, Clayton Christensen's another one of my favorite business leaders and why I like him so much, and rest in peace he passed earlier this year, is his very simple statement in "The Innovator's Dilemma" that smart people making sound business decisions based on their customer feedback will always miss discontinuous change. You were right in the middle of this thing and you had to get discontinuous change and it's funny, you've mentioned quite a bit in some of your other conversations about looking for faint signals, well this was not a faint signal, this was pretty much, sounds like came up and banged you over the head. So, how do you make and convince the rest of the people of the team that this is kind of a short-term pain but it's a long-term gain, really thinking about this long-term relationship with our customers, even though it's going to cost us on a per transaction basis in the short-term. >> Well, I had our financial staff run some models, and show me what would be the impact if we reduced our pricing from 60 something dollars a trade to $29 a trade, and the assumption of more and more trades moving to the internet. We also had a model into that the fact that people trade a little more when prices go down, costs go down cause I don't have the cost of someone answering the telephone, so there were some benefits, and I had to run the math to understand how long would it take us to go through the trough to get to the other side. A big important part of this is modeling the numbers. You don't just make this decision as a public company and just hope for the best >> Jeff: Right. >> You need to model it out, you need to run math and say how long will it take, what do we have to assume, what do we need to do, what costs do we need to cut, how are we going to protect ourselves as best as we can? And we knew that the math said that our profitability will go down 25% when we make this change of internet pricing, and we expected that Wall Street would be so upset, because they didn't see this coming, no analyst saw this coming cause they don't know about complaint letters I'm getting, so, analysts would be upset and the stock would go down 40%, going to your board and telling them you want approval for a 25% reduction in profits and a 40% reduction in your stock price is not what you want to do as a CEO, you don't want to go to your board with that and when they ask you, well how sure are you that we're going to climb out of this, you say it's going to take 18 months, what if it takes three years, you know, I was, I didn't see the choice we had, honestly, in my heart, you don't build a great company with an increasing number of unhappy customers. I didn't think we had a choice, and Clayton Christensen was one of the consultants that I used to help me think all this through because it was really hard to make this change, Jeff, because we were doing so well. >> Right. >> Ostensibly, we were killing it. >> Right, so it's interesting, I wonder if you could contrast it to what's happening say now with COVID, right, it was this, didn't sneak up on anyone, it was a really kind of a light switch moment in mid-March where suddenly everyone has to work from home, all your digital transformation initiatives are now put on fast forward, but we still have this situation where there's a variety of potential outcomes and timing that's really hard to gauge, so when you're thinking about managing through change within perfect information and you almost have kind of will we go back to normal, will we stay where we are or some spectrum in between, how do you help people think about how they should come up with contingency plans and think about managing through a number of options with imperfect information and really kind of no clear line, you said you had an 18 month ROI that the analytics point to, we're not really sure how long this thing is going to go and what it's going to look like when we get to the other side. >> Well, I think there's two issues there, one of them is how we get through this pandemic period. Until we get to, there's three things we need, we need inexpensive testing that is not done by a professional that we can do at home to see if we're safe. That's number one. Number two, we need a treatment that helps us get through this and get to the other side without dying, we need the fatality rate to even drop further. And number three we need a vaccine. So those are the three things that we need, that the world is working on all three of those, and my guess is that in the first half of 2021 we will have all three of those, we'll have all three of those and this will be a thing, basically, a thing of the past. >> Jeff: Right. >> So, but I don't think the world goes back, to exactly the way it was. People have learned they can have very effective meetings without everybody flying to Chicago, or New York, or Las Angeles, they can do it over Zoom, that doesn't mean meetings go away, but I think they're going to go down in numbers and more online things are going to happen. More people are going to be working from home at least part of the week. It's going to be different. >> Yeah. >> Those CEO's who sit in a somewhat of an ivory tower and get numbers fed to them from their financial staff, and they're not out talking to customers directly, people look at that as anecdotal information, I think it's more important than that, I think you need to see the passion behind the voice and the eyeballs of some of your best customers to understand what's going on with them, and a lot of CEO's don't actually do that. >> Right. You've made a really interesting comment in another interview that you did earlier, and you talked about the high gain questions. And one of the challenges of all CEO's is nobody wants to be the one that tells his CEO bad news, whether that be someone on your staff, whether that be some lower level person who's on the front lines and really knows there's some broken things, or whether it's a good customer as you said and kind of a social setting, how you doin', oh we love you, blah blah blah. But as a CEO you really have stressed that that is really some important hard to find, and hard to filter information up to the executive suite, so what were some of the tips and tricks you used to make sure that people either A. weren't afraid to tell you bad news, and B. that you could kind of go out and sniff it out a little bit more creatively than just kind of waiting for it to come through in the weekly reports. >> Well, obviously, you know, I think all kinds of executives get out and they talk to their customers on a regular basis, they're out and they're talking to them, the problem with those kind of discussions are no one wants to be disrespectful, people want to be nice in those meetings by and large, and you ask questions "how are we doing" "oh you guys are doing great", meanwhile the guy who tells you you're doing great is also looking at some newer technology that might replace you. (laughs) So that kind of question doesn't get you very far. So what we used to do, to be quite specific, is that we used to do a monthly luncheon where I had 12 of my mostly top executives but some people a level or two down, 12 Schwab people with 24 customers. And so they were tables of six, two of us, four customers, and we had a theme that we would talk through and the themes were always around things of, if you had to pick out three things we don't do well, what would they be? Give the customer permission to be comfortable being critical. What are the three things that you've heard about our customers, our competitors doing, that are better than us? What are the things that we need to change to make you even more delighted? You need to ask those kinds of high gain questions where there's no polite answer, the customer is permitted and given the opportunity to answer in a truthful and critical fashion. >> That's a great lesson, as you said give them permission and give them the format and the forum to say some of those things so that you get some of that information. Another great leadership principle that you shared many times, I want to dig into a little bit is kind of motivation verses inspiration. And that those are often confused, but very different concepts in the way that you lead people. I wonder if you can dig in a little bit on your philosophy on those two things. >> Sure, you know it's funny, those terms motivation and inspiration are used almost interchangeably as if they're the same thing. And they're not. Motivation is fundamental in business, and it's the exchange of behaviors for rewards. I was a psychology major in college, this was one of the things we learned about the exchange of behaviors for rewards and that's motivation. Inspiration on the other hand, is the effort to make people want to do something for, not for rewards that are tangible, but to be part of something great. We want you to be part of a movement, we want you to be part of something special, something that's going to change the world for the better and trying to get your employees to buy into this notion that we are on a mission and that mission is to make the world a somewhat better place, it doesn't mean we don't make money, of course we make money, but we're also out for more than a financial bottom line, we're out for a bottom line that's great for customers and maybe pretty great for employees as well. >> So it's interesting, cause you've seen 'em right, you've been in finance for ever, it's always about the shareholders, you've talked about the stock price a number of times in terms of a measure, but it seems more purposed led or purpose forward organizations now are more appealing to the younger generation, I think the search for a little bit more meaning in our day to day job and what that company is all about seems to have elevated over the last several years and taken a higher role in what they used to call triple line accounting, is it not only your shareholders who always are at the top of the list and have been traditionally, but your customers, your employee, and more and more your community and even the environment. Have you seen the swing towards, it's not just about shareholder value? >> Well, not on Wall Street. (laughs) I think, Wall Street is about money, and the people who go to work on Wall Street, and the way Wall Street operates, it's measured in dollars and cents and share price and profits and distributions to private equity partners and so forth, it's a numbers game and it is a profit game on Wall Street, we should be honest about that, it is what it is. >> Jeff: Sure. >> And, I have yet to see the Wall Street firm that is talking about triple bottom lines cause that just doesn't happen very much on Wall Street, it doesn't happen from my perspective, it almost doesn't happen at all. But there are other companies where they do talk about a more triple bottom line, and I think as a leader if you want to be that kind of company and you want to be that kind of leader you have to be comfortable talking about that, and not feel embarrassed by it, not feel that oh, that's too airy fairy, that's too goody two shoes. If you really believe that our goal is to have a triple bottom line, profitability, great for employees, and great for customers and the world at large, then as a leader you need to talk about that. You need to be willing to stand up and have those kinds of conversations and let yourself be challenged by perhaps the press, employees, shareholders, who think that that's not a good strategy. I believe that in many cases that's a great strategy because on a long-term basis you don't want every employee in your company, and all of your senior executives to basically be up for sale, that if a bigger job comes in with a bigger compensation, they're out the door. You're looking for loyalty, you're looking for buy in, for participation, for wanting to give every bit of themselves for the mission of the company. And as the CEO, if you want to take that path, you got to be willing to put yourself out there and talk about it and suffer the slings and arrows from those who don't believe that that's the best path for the company. >> Right, right. Well and that's another thing that you've talked about quite often, is really that the company feeds off the passion of the CEO, and the CEO has to have that passion because they're lookin', they're watchin', they're lookin' at your moves, they're lookin' at what you say, they're lookin' at your body language, they're lookin' at everything that you do. And I think within the context of these transitions and these difficult times, you have another great line that you've used a number of times, which is: "You need to have a perception of momentum." I love that line, so everyone needs to think that we're on the right path, we're not there yet, I feel it, he looks like he feels it, he looks like he's confident, so now I'm confident and I'm going to jump in and help be part of this change process. You've seen that time and time. >> Well, momentum is a tricky thing, you can have momentum and not have the perception of momentum. Because if you're doing a turn around, what often happens is in the early stages of the turn around, the numbers start to change but they're small, and you really haven't seen, it's not as steep. The turn around doesn't go steep, the turn around goes and builds slowly. And, what you need to be measuring in the beginning, are kind of the inputs and behaviors rather than the outputs, sales and profits. Those take longer. But you need to build belief, you need to build buy in, because it can take a long time before things start getting better and you don't want your best people to wonder whether this is the right move, should I be looking for another job, so, you have to build the perception of momentum even as you're building the reality of momentum. >> Right, right. So another thing we cover a lot of tech conferences, obviously, Cloud and AI, machine learning are hot things. But, you know, it always goes back to the big three. It's the technology, okay, but it's also people, and more importantly I think that gets left out is process. So, when you're thinking about, you know you're management is, and again, especially through a transition or a difficult time or some unknown and choppy waters, how do you think about those three, prioritizing those three and organizing those three between people, process and technology? >> Okay, well, you know always looking for technology that can be implemented to give you productivity, better customer service, you need to be monitoring what you're competitors are doing, and be looking out, sometimes at the bleeding edge, where you don't need to implement those kinds of changes right away, but you need to know where you want to go down the road, so you have some sense of that. As far as process goes, your processes are both a strength and a weakness because the strength of how well you run your processes today is also how hard they're going to be to change tomorrow. You know, companies are built for predictability, reliability, risk minimization, and all of your processes are built for those things. But those are also the things that are the opposite of big breakthrough changes. So you need to be thinking about, all right, are we strengthening our processes but also, if we have a change coming that's going to require a change of some of those processes, how is that going to get in our way and how are we going to get past that? >> Jeff: Right. >> I've left people for the last because to me that's the heart and soul of a successful executive. One person never gets everything done, it's all about the quality of your team. You've got to be a recruiter, you've got to be always on the look out for new talent that can help your company, and you've got to be thinking about how you're going to recruit that talent. You have to be a magnet for talent. When I sit on boards and I talk to the CEOs, I ask them, what are you doing to be a magnet for talent? What does that mean? What are you doing for great people to want to work for you? For you, and your company, what are you doing, how are you reinvesting in people, how are you putting time and energy in their professional development, in their growth? How are you getting to know them? How are you understanding their ambitions, their hopes and desires for the future? How much time and effort do you spend on that? And that's all part of having people not leave, everyone, in a way you can look at the world and think everyone is for sale. But you want people that are not for sale, that are committed to you and committed to the mission and in today's world where everything seems so fluid, I know my ideas about this probably seem very old and perhaps out of date, but I still believe in them with all my heart, that you want people that are committed to you and what we are accomplishing together. And you have to be reinforcing that with your words, and even more importantly with your actions. >> Yeah, I think it goes back to your inspiration, people are much more motivated by inspiration than just collecting a paycheck or getting a compensation back for what they're doing, which is a great segue to the last topic I wanted to cover with you, and I remember this, we had dinner, I think it was 1996 at the Wharton's Zweig Series, and you were such a phenomenal speaker, and I remember asking you the question and I remember your answer, and I've repeated it ad nauseam for the last 20 years. I said, "David, you're such a great speaker, why, how?" And you were so matter of fact in that you just said "hey, it's an important part of my job, I treat it as a skill, I hired a coach, I practiced like I would do any other skill", and why that's such a powerful story is you clearly are in a position of power, you could clearly have a crazy ego that got in the way of such a matter of fact accomplishment of these tasks and all the PR people I talk to and they hear this story "oh my gosh, we got to get him talking to my executives" because so many people let ego get in the way of what is really an important task for a CEO and a leader which is communication and you recognize that early on and really went after it to make sure that you were very good at this very important task. >> Well, what happened to me, I got lucky, I got lucky. When I got promoted to be the CEO of Schwab, I knew I was going to have to do a lot more public speaking and I already thought I was pretty good at being a public speaker, but I thought I needed to fine tune my messaging, I needed to get it better. So, I looked around and I got some referrals and I hired a guy that I thought was going to be a speech writer for me, that would help craft the message. And, we had our first meeting, and we're talking about an upcoming speech and he says to me things like, "Well, Dave, I want to know more about your life. Tell me how you grew up, tell me what you're proudest moments were, I want to learn about you." And I said to him, "Terry, I'm not looking for a biographer, I want a speech writer, I need a guy that can help me craft my message." And he said, "Well, Dave, that's not how I do things. I need to know who you are, I need to know what your passions are and where they come from so that we can give a message that has more than just words it has meaning, it has your passion built into it, that's what we need to do." And that's what Terry taught me, was that it's not just the words, it's also the passion, energy, and meaning and connection behind the words. And I want to mention one other thing that I think is very important. When people talk about being really good communicators, they often talk about speaking. They don't focus on listening. And listening is a tremendously important skill. So for example, you give a speech, you're the CEO or Senior Executive, you give a speech, do you stay there and do you do a Q+A session? The Q+A session can even be more important than the speech sometimes, because all the employees know that the speech is something that was pre-arranged, it's not on the cuff, it's something that's been thought about and prepared. But the questions and answers are authentic and in the moment. People are clamoring for authentic leadership. That Q+A session, where you're listening for the question and maybe the question behind the question. So you're not just trying to get through them as fast as you can, but you're trying to really answer and listen for the question and the question behind the question. And then answer those from the heart with passion, and that's how you will score the most points with your audience. >> That's great. And then who knows what comes from it, in getting ready for this I came across your blog post talking about Gopi Kallayil a mutual friend at Wharton who reached out to you after that same dinner, and you were happy enough, or you were kind enough to respond and grow a friendship and a relationship that again is lasted for decades. So that's such an important message to listen, as somebody said right, "God gave you two ears and one mouth should try to use them in that ratio." (laughs) Well David, thank you so much for taking some time, again I think these are really trying times in leadership, I think it's really an opportunity for great leaders to shine and those that don't there's really no place to hide. So I really appreciate you sharing your insight and taking a few minutes with us. >> Thanks, Jeff, I hope all the people that follow you and listen to your broadcasts learn something today and come away with some benefit from this time we've spent together. >> Undoubtedly, undoubtedly. Well, thanks again. All right, he's Dave Pottruck, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're at Oracle Park, recently AT&T Park just renamed, it's a beautiful day. Home of San Francisco Giants, they're on the road, we're here at a pretty interesting event, it's called Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day, brought together coalition of about 100 startups. 25 of them are giving demos today on technology as it relates to sports but even more importantly, that can then be used in others beyond sports. We're excited to have an athlete on, not just another tech, crazy guy. He's Brendan Harris, he's an athlete and resident at SeventySix Capital. Brendan, thanks for stopping by. >> Thanks for having me. >> So what is that, I've heard principles and entrepreneur residence\\\, what does a athlete residence do? >> It is essentially a play on the entrepreneuring residence. I was introduced to SeventySix Capital, I finished playing at 15 and I was doing my MBA at Wharton and in Philly, and got introduced to Wayne and the guys at SeventySix and they are kind of putting together an athlete venture group where they're bringing in a lot of athletes that want to be investors and kind of providing them access to deal flow. And then also leveraging their social capitals, so, he was kind of tickled when he coined the term athlete in residence and threw it on my business card and that's where we're at. >> Right so I'm just curious, your perspective as an athlete as you look around at all the technology that's going into sports, right. Kind of the big categories are that which helps the players play better, there's that which helps the people run the teams better, and then there's that which is really kind of part of the fan experience, I mean, you actually had to go down and try to put wood on a ball coming at you 90 plus miles an hour, all this other stuff, do you see it as interesting, is it a distraction, is it entertaining? How do you look at from an athlete's perspective? >> So, yeah, so a lot to impact, so, first of all, I have this equal view of fascination and frustration where a lot of this wasn't around when I was playing, certainly from the field, now we're taking in things like recovery and rest and sleep, but I think players and me personally, are fascinated with how can we improve on field performance and I think baseball's such an imperfect game and you fail so often. Being able to turn things that were previously subjective and apply data and tech to make them objective and give you answers, I think it's fascinating. The ways that we can use data to kind of promote performance and health and all those things are very fascinating. So from a player's point of view, we are all about it but at the same time, I think this is why I've loved to get into sports tech is there's a lot of data that's just noise that's coming in and things and so the tough part is kind of weeding through and what is actionable info and what can actually help improve beyond field performance and then, along with that, we want to feel the product on the field, but also what what the services for the consumer and the fans are and how can we improve that and then engage them because certainly sports are a part of the culture and part of life now and it's fascinating, these fans want to know more and more and more, certainly what's going on and it's been a great journey. >> Right so on the fan experience specifically, we've been here a number of years, Bill Styles' a good friend of mine, and another Wharton grad. And talking about high density WiFi and the app on your phone and food delivered to your seat, I mean as an athlete on the field, do you look at kind of of all these things as a distraction, do you appreciate it's more competitive environment these days in terms of people's attention and kind of that entertainment dollar but I would imagine from the between the lines it looks like, hey, the game's down here people. >> Yeah. (laughing) It's been interesting because one of the problems major league baseball's been trying to address is pace of games right? And if you really look at the data, they're not that much longer. What's different, we're wired differently, right? So our attention spans are shorter and we're constantly addicted to our technology. So these guys like Bill, are trying to leverage that and try to have your food delivered and try to increase the social component, increase the value in the in-venue experience so that you're not only watching the game but you're social enjoying it at the same time and kind of filling those gaps. A lot of it is, yes, and I think, there has been balls flying into the stands since baseball's been playing but the need to put the netting up has come a lot of times because nobody's watching. Some people aren't, not nobody, but a lot of people aren't watching the games are getting hit with a lot of these foul balls. So there's that component, where there's some unbelievable things are going off on the sides but it's baseball still going to be kind of very similar within the confines of lines. >> The other piece that I find really interesting on the data side right, is there's so much data, right? There's data, data, data. Obviously baseball's built on data and arguments about data and conversations about data. But now it's kind of gone to this next gen with wins over replacement and all these other things, but sometimes it's funny to me. It feels like they're forgetting the object of the game is to win the game and it feels like sometimes the metadata has now become more important than the data. Did you win or lose and it's not necessarily being used as a predictor for future performance but it's almost like a stand alone game in and of itself. We forget the object is to win the game and win a championship, not to have the highest award number. Do you sense that frustration, does that sound like something you see-- >> Yeah, I think what you're getting into a lot of times is how are we making decisions, right and in the game a lot of times people forget that human beings are out there performing and so I think that's how we've gotten into Moneyball 2.0 when looking at development. Certainly mental health in focus and game preparation have come into play more and you're seeing some managers, Mickey Callaway just came out said 80% of my distances go against the data which I thought was a little bit interesting but so there is that fine line where you have to filter in what's noise and what's actionable and at the same time, allow your managers and your decision makers some flexibility to go with they're there in the heat of the battle and they kind of of know their guys and they know the human element that's involved. It's an interesting balancing act. >> Right so from your new job and your new role, what are some of the things you hope to see today, what are somethings that you're excited about from an investor and in having played the game as well as looking forward to the evolution of sports? >> Two things, specifically how the, I'm certainly biased to the performance on the field, and the human element and certainly, everybody wants workout secrets and I don't feel like it's, whether it's athletes or the kind of weekend warrior or people that are senior citizens. I don't think it's as simple as, this is work and you should do this, it's a very personalized experience now and I think some of this personalized digital fitness is fascinating to me and then how it relates to and how your body relates to your diet, your nutrition, your sleep, your recovery, I think all those are fascinating that advances that I want to look into more. And then second is, as I kind of mentioned, is the fan engagement aspect and how do we drive those fans, that digital, and make it actionable and monetized, right. So that you have your fans that are following your Facebook, your Twitter, and all those things and so how do you, not only engage them but collect that data and then kind of personalize that experience, engage your fan in a way that can kind of grow your brand. It will be interesting to me. >> Really interesting to have your perspective and I'm sure it will be a great day and you'll see all kind of crazy stuff. So thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Yeah, anytime, thanks for having me. >> All right, he's Brendan, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We are at Oracle Park in San Francisco, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering a ws public sector summit I wrote to you by Amazon Web services. Welcome >> back, everyone. You are watching the Cube and we are here in our nation's capital at the A. W s Public sector summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Night hosting alongside John Furrier. We're joining Cuba LEM Doug Van Dyke, CEO of Inquisitor to our show. Thanks so much for coming back on. >> Well, thank you for having me back. It's good to be here. >> So as I said, You're a Cuba LEM. You're also a nails on alum. And there's a story there, so >> we'll just do a quick rehash of last year. So I started a day ws in 2,012 with the federal business helped the federal business grow started. The eight of US nonprofit Vertical was invited by John and in stew last year to be on the Cube. The video is a great discussion. The video is seen by some of our best partners and inquisitor who happens to be one of the best partners that I had in public sector. We started some discussions and later I was hired to be the CEO. So, John, >> thank you. I didn't know this was >> going to be a career opportunity >> for you. You're the one who's got the jobs. You through the interviews? Well, political, absolutely appreciated community. Great to have you on. Good. Thank you. Thank you for meeting with Theresa. You've known Therese for many, many years. Microsoft Public Sector Game is certainly on fire. You got Andy chassis on the fireside chat. Kind of bring in. You see the frustration like he's got problems and he's never known any for many, many years. For him to be that animated with his opinion means that it's critical more more than ever. Now, where is public sector opportunity right now? Because it seems to be clouds validated, are we? There is just a turning moment for the whole public sector community, >> yet we're so we're absolutely seeing that and inquisitive fact inquisitor. One of the things I like most about inquisitor is it is focused exclusively on the public sector, so our background is in education. If you know, a student is graduating from high school now and applying to one of the many colleges and universities they use the common application We worked with the common app to help build that system that graduating students can apply to multiple universities as opposed to when I was a graduating high school student, had to fill out the form, send in a check, wait for it to come back in the mail. Now that's all done online. You can apply to multiple colleges at the same time. So I look at that as one of the first innovations that happened in the public sector on a ws inquisitor was a part of it. It was one of the things that attracted me to inquisitor, but the innovations that was in two thousand 92 1,010 it was the beginning. We are just hitting that hockey stick that Andy has talked about in public sector, where you know, the federal business. You talked a little bit about the Intel business and how when the agency moved onto a ws, it really validated security. I think we've seen the government go in. I think we've seen education and nonprofits, so I think this is the time that public sector is really going to take off in the clouds >> about the company that you're leading is the chief now, and the product is using common app. You tell what the common app that my high school's graduates had to fill out. Okay, it's send okay. Is that it? >> That's it. That's it. So I >> got some issues with this thing. >> So follow up that was >> definitely on love on different you. Heavy lifting when filling out applications. Automate is great, but it increases the MAWR schools you can apply to, so creates more inbound applications to schools. It does. I'm sure there's some challenges there that's on the horizon with you guys is solving them that creates more. I won't say span because this legit, but a lot of schools are like people throwing in 17 applications now. 20 applications. >> Well, it's automated. I >> mean technology. So, yes, there's more automation, but there's more background. There's more data and these surgeries going on database decision. So sure we'll let me start with inquisitor. You asked about inquisitive 2,000 to quiz it's started and doing application development. It was in two thousand nine that we really saw the light to move Teo a Ws, and it was through the work that we were doing with the common app that we realised the scale of handling all these applications, that the paper based way isn't an easier. In fact, it really restricts the number of colleges that students can apply, and it restricts the number of applicants that colleges get. So with more students applying to more universities and universities receiving more applications, they can be really selective. They have more data sources, more information aboutthe people. They're going to bring on and have a very inclusive and representative university. We have students applying from China and Europe, too, United States University. So we're getting a lot of diversity, and I think you know, there's probably a little bit more volume, but that's what technology >> today is the first digital data. So that's why I appreciate that. But there's gotta be more automation machine learning going in because now you have a relationship with a student and a school. What, what's next? What happens next? >> Well, it's so Sky's the limit, and you can do once you've got data. So data reporting is basically limited by the quality of the input data. So you have more students applying with more background information, and you could get really personal. So we helped a large Ivy League university in the Northeast migrate all into a ws. And this was after we worked with common app to build the common application way helped this university migrate all into a ws and we realized that there were benefits and challenges along the way. Some of the challenges we saw were repeatable, so we built a proprietary product called Sky Map. And what sky map does is it helps the full migration. So it integrates with your discovery applications like a risk network. It integrates with a ws cloud endure and we were working with cloud endure before a ws acquired them. So we have a p I's there, it manages the whole migration. And your question was, you get all this information about an organization's infrastructure, what do you do with it? Will use the next up is a M l. So we've used some of the higher level services that a bit Amazon Web services has with artificial intelligence. We were using Lambda Server lis and we could go there because I think that's and you've >> got to hand over their 80 must educate. >> Oh, yeah, >> you know, you're great. Get a common app over there. Any university coming soon >> I would Did he mention that I saw he was >> on the show before? >> And I just think that it was You got a huge inbound educational thing going on. So education seems to be a big part of the whole themes here. >> Well, that's our legacy, and we're working with a lot of universities were seeing. So you asked, Where is the cloud going? And in the future, we're seeing large universities move all in on a WS because of they're going to get more flexibility. The costs are going to go down. They're going to have more information on the students. They're going to be able to provide better learning. >> When you're talking to your client of this this big Ivy league in the Northeast, what are its pain points? Because I mean, college admissions is a controversial topic in the United States, and its been there's been scandal this year. What? When? When you were talking with this company and they said, Well, we want to do this. But what was the problem they were trying to solve? I mean, what what were they? What were their pain points. >> Well, one of the first pain points is they were located in a major city and their data center was in the major city. And this is expensive real estate. And so to use expensive real estate that you for date us, you know, for servers, etcetera for data center instead of using it for education is a cost to the university. So very simply put, moving out of that data center opening that space up for education and moving into a ws cloud saved it gave them more space for education. It helped them with cost avoidance, and way had a bunch of lessons learned along the way. So way at the time could move about five servers a week, which may seem like a good number. But now, with the automation that we get through sky map our product, we're working with the large a group of private universities as well as Wharton University. And with this large group of private universities, we found we could do on average over 20 the best week we had 37 servers migrate, hire >> a housefly. They like to be on the cutting edge, but still there public sector. Where's the modernisation Progress on that? Because now you're you've been on both sides of the table. You were Amazon Web services. Now years leading is the CEO of this company in higher ed. How's that modernization going? What's your perspective? What's your observation around? >> Sure, So you know. First of all, I had the opportunity to go work it with the university that's local here last week. And what I love seeing is with this access to the cloud you've got, everyone in the university now has access to nearly unlimited resource is for education. They were staffing their own help desk with their students. And I love seeing that kind of experience being brought from, You know, someone who used to be an IT professional is now being brought down to a student because of thes new technologies are so readily accessible to everybody. >> So so what's that? Tell us some other things that you're seeing that you're hearing. They're they're exciting innovations to you in the in the sector. >> Yeah, well, another opportunity that were working with is we worked with the Small Business Administration, and that was pretty rewarding. For us is a small business and three of the applications that we worked on their were. So we are a small a day, and it used to take our founder TC Ratna pur e about two months. Oh, and we had to hire an outside consultant to apply for our small business accreditation. So he was doing the paperwork and all the, you know, the old school application certification. After we built this application with the Small Business Administration, it took him several hours. He did it by himself. We applied. Got the accreditation. So thes modernizations air happening both in universities as well as in the federal government. >> So what's your business plan? You're the CEO now. What's the company's plan? Which your goals. >> So there's so many things I could talk about ill talk about one or two. We see in the next 1 2 3 to 5 years in public sector that these organizations are going to migrate all in on the cloud. And so we're building up a group. That's what Sky map is mainly addressing is way. Want to make sure that organizations are able tto orchestrate their move to the cloud and we're using? We're going to start exposing the tool that we use for our own internal resource is we're gonna start exposing that, leaving that with universities in the federal government and anyone else who's willing to use it to help them get all in on the cloud. Then we think there's probably going to be a wave where they're trying. Teo, learn the cloud and howto operate It will help them is a manage service provider. And then where I'm excited is you go to server lists and I mentioned were already using Lambda for our sky map product that we see in the future after the M S P V organisations. They're going to be servant lis and they'll be running into no ops environments. >> The classic example of sometimes you your business evolves areas you don't know based off on the wave You're on you guys, we're very proficient at migrating We are now You got sky map which is you're gonna take that those learnings and pay it forward bringing >> that are bringing them to the market that >> we don't have to do that themselves by build kind of thing. >> Well, and it's a little bit like you're doing here, John. And what a ws >> is the only one I get up. I tell everybody that, like >> a ws did eight of us start is away for Amazon to manage their internal servers. And, you know, eventually they realized everyone else in the market can use thes same innovations that they've got. And, >> well, I think this proves the point that if you assassin based model with open AP eyes, you Khun offer and pretty much anything is a service. If you get the speed and agility equation right, someone might say why she is not a court company. Why should I buy? I'll just use that service. I hope so. It's the sad, small hopes up. >> Yeah, and sorry. >> I was going to say you were on the inside. Now you're on the outside of that. This conference. What are your impressions? What are you What kind of conversations are you having that you are going to take back to inquisitor and say, Hey, I learned this at the summit. Are these people over here working on something cool? We got to get this in >> here. Well, it's been really fun for me is a change of perspective. For the last seven years, I've been helping plan and organize the event. Make sure it >> goes off this time. I'm a guest. You know, e I look a little bit >> more relaxed than last year is because, you know, I'm a guest now, but the takeaways are really You know, the innovation is continuing at A W s. And, you know, as a partner of Amazon Web services, I've got to make sure that my team and I stay up to date with all of the services that are being released and simplify those. And, like John was asking earlier, you know, make sure that there's a strategy for migration support and then continuing to re factor what they're doing. >> Well, congratulations on the new job. Get a great tale. When, with cloud growth adoption just early days, public sector continuing toe astonished with numbers. Next, she'll be 38,000 people. A lawsuit is like reinvent size, only 30,000 people. >> This is huge. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm sure you guys are enjoying it as well. >> Yeah, I know. It's been great, Doug. Thanks so much for returning to the Q B. I your two time >> alone. Thank you. Thank >> you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from the Amazon, Uh, a ws public sector, something coming up in just a little bit.

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the you covering your red have some twenty nineteen rots. You buy bread hat. >> Good to have you back here on the Cube as we continue our coverage. Live at the Red Had Summit twenty nineteen, Day three of our coverage with you since Tuesday. And now it's just fresh off the keynote stage, joining stew, Minutemen and myself. Chris. Right? VP and chief technology officer at Red Hat. Good job there, Chris. Thanks for being with us this morning. Yeah. >> Thank you. Glad to be here. >> Great. Right? Among your central things, you talked about this, this new cycle of innovation and those components and how they're integrating to create all these great opportunities. So if you would just share for those with those at home who didn't have an opportunity to see the keynote this morning, it's what you were talking about. I don't think they play together. And where that lies with red hat. Yeah, you bet. >> So, I think an important first kind of concept is a lot of what we're doing. Is lane a foundation or a platform? Mean red hats focuses in the platform space. So we think of it as building this platform upon which you build an innovate. And so what we're seeing is a critical part of the future is data. So we're calling it a Kino data centric. It's the data centric economy. Along with that is machine learning. So all the intelligence that comes, what do you dividing? The insights you're grabbing from that data. It introduces some interesting challenges data and privacy and what we do with that data, I mean, we're all personally aware of this. You see the Cambridge Analytica stuff, and you know, we all have concerns about our own data when you combine all of us together techniques for how we can create insights from data without compromising privacy. We're really pushing the envelope into full distributed systems, EJ deployments, data coming from everywhere and the insights that go along with that. So it's really exciting time built on a consistent platform like lycopene shift. >> So, Chris, I always loved getting to dig in with you because that big trend of distributed systems is something that you know we've been working on for quite a long time. But, you know, we fully agree. You said data at the center of everything and that roll of even more distributed system. You know, the multi cloud world. You know, customers have their stuff everywhere and getting their arms around that, managing it, being about leverage and take advantage. That data is super challenging. So you know where where, you know, help us understand some of the areas that red hat in the communities are looking to solve those problems, you know, where are we and what's going well and what's still left to work on. >> Well, there's a couple of different aspect. So number one we're building these big, complex systems. Distributed systems are challenging distribute systems, engineers, air really solving harder problems. And we have to make that accessible to everybody operations teams. And it's one of the things that I think the cloud taught us when you sort of outsource your operations is somebody else. You get this encapsulated operational excellence. We need to bring that to wherever your work clothes are running. And so we talked a lot about a I ops, how you harness the value of data that's coming out of this complex infrastructure, feed it through models and gain insights, and then predict and really Ultimately, we're looking at autonomic computing how we can create autonomous clouds, things that really are operating themselves as much as possible with minimal human intervention. So we get massive scale. I think that's one of the key pieces. The other one really talking about a different audience. The developers. So developers air trying to incorporate similar types of intelligence into their applications were making recommendations. You're tryingto personalize applications for end users. They need easy access to that data. They need easy access to train models. So how do we do that? How do we make that challenging data scientist centric workflow accessible to developers? >> Yeah, just some of the challenges out there. I think about, you know, ten, fifteen years ago, you talk to people, it was like, Well, I had my central source of truth and it was a database. And you talk to most companies now and it's like, Well, I've got a least a dozen different database and you know, my all my different flavors of them and whether in the cloud or whether I have them in my environment, you know, things like a ops trying to help people get involved with them. You talked a little bit in your keynote about some of the partners that you're working on. So how do you, you know, bring these together and simplify them when they're getting, you know, even more and more fragmented? >> Well, it's part of the >> challenge of innovation. I mean, I think there's a there's a natural cycle. Creativity spawns new ideas. New ideas are encapsulated in projects, so there's a wave of expansion in any kind of new technology time frame. And then there's ultimately, you see some contraction as we get really clear winners and the best ideas and in the container orchestration space communities is a great example of that. We had a lot of proliferation of different ways of doing it. Today we're consolidating as an industry around Cooper Netease. So what we're doing is building a platform, building a rich ecosystem around that platform and bringing our partners in who have specific solutions. They look at whether it's the top side of the house, talking to the operations teams or whether it's giving developers easy access to data and training models through some partners that we had today, like perceptive labs and each to a A I this partnership. Bringing it to a common platform, I think, is a critical part of helping the industry move forward and ultimately will see where these best of breed tools come into play. >> Here, uh, you know, maybe help a little bit with with in terms of practical application, you got, you know, open source where you've got this community development going on and then people customized based on their individual needs all well, great, right? How does the inverse happen? Where somebody who does some custom ization and comes up with a revelation of some kind and that applies back to the general community. And we can think of a time where maybe something I'm thinking like Boston children, their imaging, that hospital we saw actually related to another industry somehow and gave them an ah ha moment that maybe they weren't expecting an open source. Roy was the driver that >> Yeah, I think what we showed today were some examples of what If you distill it down to the core, there's some common patterns. There's data, they're streaming data. There's the data processing, and there's a connection of that processed data or train model to an application. So we've been building an open source project called Open Data Hub, where we can bring people together to collaborate on what are the tools that we need to be in this stack of this kind of framework or stack And and then, as we do, that we're talking to banks. They're looking at any money laundering and fraud detection. We're talking to these hospitals that were looking at completely different use cases like HC Healthcare, which is taking data to reduce the amount of time nurses need to spend, gathering information from patients and clearly identify Septus sepsis concerns totally different applications, similar framework. And so getting that industry level collaboration, I think is the key, and that having common platforms and common tools and a place to rally around these bigger problems is exactly how we do that through open source. >> So Lynn exits and an interesting place in the stack is you talked about the one commonality and everything like that. But we're actually at a time where the proliferation of what's happen to get the hardware level is something that you know of an infrastructure and harbor guy by background, and it was like, Oh, I thought We're going to homogenize everything, standardize everything, and it's like, Oh, you're showing off Colin video stuff. And when we're doing all these pieces there, there's all these. You know, new things, Every been things you know you work from the mainframe through the latest armed processors. Give us a little insight as to how your team's geeking out, making sure that they provide that commonality yet can take advantage of some of the cool, awesome stuff that's out there that's enabling that next wave of innovation. >> Yeah, so I share that infrastructure geek nous with you. So I'm so stoked the word that we're in this cycle of harbor innovation, I'll say something that maybe you sounds controversial if we go back in time just five years or a little, a little more. The focus was around cloud computing and bringing massive number of APS to the cloud, and the cloud had kind of a T shirt size, small, medium, large view of the world of computer. It created this notion that Khun computers homogenous. It's a lie. If you go today to a cloud provider and count the number of different machine types they have or instance types it's It's not just three, it's a big number. And those air all specialized. It's for Io throughput. It's for storage acceleration. It's big memory, you know. It's all these different use cases that are required for the full set of applications. Maybe you get the eighty percent in a common core, but there's a whole bunch of specific use cases that require performance optimization that are unique. And what we're seeing, I think, is Moore's law. The laws of physics are kind of colliding a little bit, and the way to get increased acceleration is through specialized hardware. So we see things like TP use from Google. We see until doing deal boost. We've got GPS and even F p G A s and the operating system is there TIO give a consistent application run time while enabling all those hardware components and bringing it all together so the applications can leverage the performance acceleration without having to be tied directly to it. >> Yeah, you actually think you wrote about that right now, one of your a block post that came about how hardware plays this hugely important role. You also talked about innovation and change happening incrementally and And that's not how we kind of think about like big Banks, right? Yeah. Wow, this is But you pointed out in the open source, it really is step by step by step. Which way? Think about disruption is being very dramatic. And there's nothing sexy about step by step. Yeah, that's how we get to Yeah, disruption. I kind of >> hate this innovation, disruption and their buzz words. On the one hand, that's what captures attention. It's not necessarily clear what they mean. I like the idea that, you know, in open source, we do every day, incremental improvements. And it's the culmination of all these improvements over time that unlock new opportunities. And people ask me all the time, where is the future? What do we do and what's going on? You know, we're kind of doing the same thing we've been doing for a long time. You think about micro services as a way to encapsulate functionality, share and reuse with other developers. Well, object oriented programming decades ago was really tryingto tryingto established that same capability for developers. So, you know, the technologies change we're building on our history were always incrementally improving. You bring it all together. And yes, occasionally you can apply that in a business case that totally disrupts an industry and changes the game. But I really wanted encourage people to think about what are the incremental changes you can make to create something fundamentally new. >> All right, I need to poke it that a little bit, Chris, because there's one thing you know, I looked back in my career and look back a decade or two decades. We used to talk about things like intelligence and automation. Those have been around my entire career. Yeah, you look it today, though, you talk about intelligence and talk about automation, it's not what we were doing, you know, just the amount of degrees, what we're having there. It is like if we'd looked at it before, it was like, Oh, my gosh, science fiction's here so, you know, way sometimes lose when we're doing step by step, that something's there making step function, improvements. And now the massive compact, massive changes. So love your opinions there. >> Yeah, well, I think it's a combination, so I talk about the perpetual pursuit of excellence. So you pick up, pick a field, you know, we're talking about management. We got data and how you apply that data. We've been working towards autonomic computing for decades. Concepts and research are old, the details and the technologies and the tools that we have today are quite different. But I'm not. You know, I'm not sure that that's always a major step function. I think part of that is this incremental change. And you look at the number for the amount of kind of processing power and in the GPU today No, this is a problem that that industry has been working on for quite a long time. At some point, we realize, Hey, the vector processing capabilities in the GPU really, really suit the machine learning matrix multiplication world real world news case. So that was a fundamental shift which unlocked a whole bunch of opportunity in terms of how we harness data and turn it into knowledge. >> Yes. So are there any areas that you look at? Now that we've been working at that, you feel we're kind of getting to those tipping points or the thie waves of technology or coming together to really enable Cem Cem massive change? >> I do think our ability to move data around, like generate data. For one thing, move data around efficiently, have access to it from a processing capability. And turning that into ah, >> model >> has so fundamentally changed in the past couple of decades that we are tapping into the next generation of what's possible and things like having this. This holy grail of a self healing, self optimizing, self driving cluster is not as science fiction as it felt twenty years ago. It's >> kind of exciting. You talk about you've been there in the past, the president, but there is very much a place in the future, right? And how would that future looks like just from from again? That aye aye perspective. It's a little scary, sometimes through to some people. So how are you going about, I guess, working with your partners to bring them along and accept certain notions that maybe five six years ago I've been a little tough to swallow or Teo feel comfortable with? >> Yeah, well, there's a couple of different dimensions there. One is, uh, finding tasks that air computers are great at that augment tasks that humans were great at and the example we had today. I love the example, which was, Let's have computers, crunch numbers and nurses do what they do best, which is provide care and empathy for the patients. So it's not taking the nurse's job away. In fact, is taking the part that is drudgery ITT's computation >> and you forget what was the >> call it machine enhanced human intelligence right on a couple of different ways of looking at that, with the idea that we're not necessarily trying to eliminate humans out of the loop. We're trying to get humans to do what they do best and take away the drudgery that computers air awesome at repetitive tasks. Big number crunching. I think that's one piece. The other pieces really, from that developer point of view, how do you make it easily accessible? And then the one step that needs to come after that is understanding the black box. What happens inside the machine learning model? How is it creating the insights that it's creating and there's definitely work to be done there? There's work that's already underway. Tto help understand? Uh, the that's really what's behind the inside so that we don't just trust, which can create some problems when we're introducing data that itself might already be biased. Then we assumed because we gave data to a computer which is seemingly unbiased, it's going to give us an unbiased result, right? Garbage in garbage out. >> So we got really thoughtful >> about what the models are and what the data is that we're feeding >> It makes perfect sense it. Thanks for the time. Good job on the keynote stage again this morning. I know you've got a busy afternoon scheduled as well, so yeah, I will let you. We'Ll cut you loose. But thank you again. Always good to see you. >> Yeah. I always enjoy being here >> right at that's right. Joining us from red hat back with Wharton Red Hat Summit forty nineteen. You're watching live here on the Cube?

live from London England it's the cube covering dot next conference Europe 2018 brought to you by Nutanix hi and welcome back on with you pissed car and I'm Stu Mittleman and welcome to the CTO segment at Nutanix next 2018 welcome back to the program to my right is Vinnie Gill who's the CTO of cloud services and to his right is Rajeev Murray ani not very honest I mean you know the CTO of cloud platforms a gentleman thanks so much for joining us again thanks dude for having us being back all right rajiv and Binny mechanics it's been kind of busy since last time we've chatted AOS got really a file system rewrite there's been some M&A integration going on as well as organic activity so you know I love talking the CTO is just if you can bring us inside a little bit you know what's been happening what your team's been working on some of the hard challenges I mean things like page be nested hypervisor on top of DCP you know these are some hard challenge getting ready for nvme over fabric you know so some real you know massive things that happen underneath the cover as well as some new products so didn't want to start with you it's tough yeah you know what I'm keeping you to your team busy oh the teams have been quite busy especially you know once you have you know more than 10,000 customers and a product that's earning a lot of revenue coming in and at the same time you have to change the dark surfer preparing for the next generation so it's a lot of work I mean if you're starting from scratch it's much easier whether you know we've had a lot of experience bringing in new capabilities making it transparent to the customer one-click upgrade is really important for us so learning from the past we have been able to rewrite the engine the storage in a way that customers wouldn't notice but it's gonna run just faster you know kudos to the team that they've pulled it off and it goes across the board when we are acquiring new companies that come into the fold of the Nutanix family the whole idea is to make it look seamless to the customer because that's one thing that you know customers know us for like hey is the willit have neutronic simplicity so a lot of learnings we have created some thumb rules to guide people coming in and those are working fine for us and there's you know a method to the madness over here there is in the end one vision that we want to provide a true hybrid cloud experience to our users do that we feel you're the first start by building the best private cloud you can't have hybrid without private and to do that we need to have an infrastructure that actually works for private cloud so we start with HCI as an initial platform we build on top of that with private cloud features and not just still a networking compute and storage like in the past but more platform services like era and carbon and so on and then once we have that we can then layer on the new hybrid cloud services so even though it looks like getting a lot of things it's all guided by that one region so tell me you know that hybrid that hybrid cloud vision you know where doesn't lead us doesn't lead us to you know the public cloud in the end does it lead us to a new 10x cloud where where does that help customers go towards well the way I look at it is that it doesn't lead to any one place it leads to multiple clouds there'll be private clouds of the edge clouds distributed clouds big central public clouds the important thing is can you move applications and data between between flowers and analogy I use is you know 20 years ago if you if you were writing applications to Solaris you were pretty much locked into Sun if you go by writing applications for hp-ux you were pretty much locked into into HP once Linux came along and made it possible to write applications for any x86 everywhere got independence from from from underlying hardware and the same thing will happen with cloud today you have to write applications for Amazon for GCP for Asha who can build an operating system that actually commoditize is all that that makes it possible for you to run on any cloud with the same set of applications so that kind of sounds to me like you're you know doing V motion and H a India res but then you know for a new generation of technologies well not be motion across clouds is of course the goal it is the goal but it's not just enough to move the applications around data around you have to move the management plan has to be the same so the lot more to it than just simply copying by it's across maybe you want to add to it yeah I mean basically adding to what Rajeev said if you ask where will hybrid cloud lead I think it leads to a dispersed cloud you know some of it was also mentioned by readers in the keynote which is you know this big monolithic cloud concept has to atomize into much smaller pieces and distributed and that's what's going to happen but you start with solving it at the hybrid and at least solve it for two and from two you go to many and that's what's really exciting yeah it's a really good point then I want you to help expand on that a little I I think back to companies that don't portfolios and you look at it and say okay well I product a B and C and boy I I don't know how to use those together because they for an inner basis and how do I work them together today you know I think micro-services architecture I think about api's pulling everything together what are those guiding principles that you give internally to teams to make sure that I can use the pieces that I want they work all together they work with you know there's really broad ecosystem you have and all these multi cloud environments so you know as much effort we put in building architecture for the product design I mean we have to put the same amount in terms of how is it going to be consumed by the customer in just having a long portfolio is no longer what customers are looking for looking for simplicity so to your point one of the things we are really careful about is especially when we are acquiring technology in organically is how do you make sure identity and billing is it's the same right that's the most important thing so you don't have to login once in this product once natural basic stuff but if you get it you know right it's just delightful the other thing is about experience developer experience and user experiences these are the two other out of the four factors user experiences around like do I have to learn this again like if you look at companies like Apple I mean if I've used the Mac use they try to make it very similar such that even a two-year-old can figure out how to use it and we would like to say that if you have been an IT industry for two years you should be able to use any Nutanix product and developer experience is around api's we have a standard that we have Jade version three intent full api is and that is creating a standardization across you saw a little bit of the opening the demo today there you know I went through calm and epoch and flow and prison throw all from one pane of glass it didn't look like four different products in fact why not mentioned there were four different products it probably wouldn't have been obvious that they were and that's important to us keeping that experience seamless is very important and that comes at a cost I mean it's we could have released it as soon as we acquired some of these things and punted it on to the customer to figure out how these pieces come together but we know our customers have a higher expectation from us so we take the time and from from that perspective you know as a as a user you know I'm used to working with different types of clouds public private I wrote anything in between and the amount of interfaces I have to touch to get you know something working to get a series of products to to align to do what I wanted to do that's becoming such a difficult task that you know having a single interface or having a familiar interface would actually help in that so maybe you can talk a little while use that UI to go into the public clamor into the hybrid cloud as well to make you know that experience easier as well talk about a couple of things one whenever there's a proliferation of technologies and you're trying to glue it together I mean single pane of glass is one thing that people talk about I think that's not the most important thing I mean obviously it's a requirement it's a necessary condition not a sufficient one to make it sufficient you also have to bring in opinion into the design and the opinion is where we are taking some decisions for the customer where you know the customer would care about learning about those things and that's where no tonics will come in and through our best practices we put our opinion in the design of the product so that the number of decision points where the customer is minimize and that's how you basically start consuming this diversity out there at the end of the day for the business the only two things matter that business logic and business data infrastructure is sitting in the middle lights it's like a necessary evil so you know if we can hide it and make it seamless you know customers really happy about it can you talk about that the feedback loop you have with customers things are changing very fast you know it's hard for anybody to keep up you know this week even you know hoot anacs has a lot of announcements that I'm sure will take people all the time to there how do you get the feedback loop to customers to make sure your your they're getting what they need from to understand your products and your understanding where they are in their journey and you know mature the product line yeah I mean we have a whole bunch of channels we have we just had a customer advisory board yesterday you know invite customers and have a really deep intimate conversation and frank conversation you know what's working for you what's not working we have our engineering team on slack channels and whatsapp channels with our customers especially the customers who are really you know they complain about a product and they have opinions amenity so we just try to short-circuit this thing and then it's all about empathy so getting a team note here the customers just absolutely retrieve I definitely want your pin but just feedback actually I talked to a few customers and they said I don't know how Nutanix does it but for a company their size I feel like I get personal attention in touch points so congratulations it's good the stuff you saw today is a direct result of the feedback the grouping of products into core essentials and enterprise kind of also reflects the customer journey a lot of customers start with us for with the core once they get used to that get their sense as far as build a true private cloud and only then they started looking at multi cloud so right products for the right customer it's something that we are taking very very seriously at this point so I want to dive into that you know right product right customer so one of the announcements you made is carbon had kubernetes as as a manager platform so what customers do you do you service with that product how do you go into customers like that and how do you help them kubernetes is one of the most fastest growing technologies in the IT space that we have seen in the in the recent years and a lot of our customers I would say especially this year we have seen they have developers using containers and they are at a point where they're trying to decide how can I put it in production a production has a many requirements their carbon is being used by our customers who are trying to see how they'll put containers into production and what we are doing with carbon is we providing native kubernetes api Zsasz is there an open source but we're solving the heart problems of upgrades scale out high availability troubleshooting these mundane things that you know usually people don't want to do and that's where we come in and help so I've seen customers use our storage volumes for even databases containerized to stateless things it's all across the board but still early years I mean for this kind of ecosystem but it's headed into you know it's going to be the future you know one of the things I found really interesting to watch is over the last two decades we've talked about intelligence and automation in infrastructure but really things are happening fast now when you talk about you know whether a I or ml there's really things that are creating some intelligence that it's not like oh I created some script and it does something but you know it's working well I know there's a number of places that that fits into your portfolio maybe maybe prism X play it would seem to get some good resonance and cheers from the audience because maybe they've all played with you know the you know if TTT so start from there and how do you think about the AI in ml space yeah so we we look at you know computing evolving from manual mostly manual in the past to more automated but really you want to get to this autonomous computing that that sort of talked about so you know think of it as you know causes to be really difficult to drive in the past it used to require knowing how the carburetors work and cleaning them out once in a while to the point where maybe 15 years ago pretty much didn't know anything about the internals of a car but you could drive it was reliable it would work which is probably where we are today in IT but the real goal is to get as an autonomous computing the self-driving cars at Tesla Google now where you don't even have to be paying attention at the car will just drive itself yeah I have TTT and the x-play stuff that we have as a step in that direction it's obviously very early but it's the beginning of a journey where you can then start taking feedback loops learning what works modeling that out and extending capabilities on your own and that is something we'll be looking at over the next few years and you know it's something where I don't think it's it's not cute and that's why it needs to be done it's actually required you know if you look at Moore's law it applies to machines so every year you will have double the number of course and you know the same dollar can buy more if you look at humans that's not true I mean ever here then you're only getting more expensive in fact lower for customers here say talent is scarce so just by that definition you see machines are growing and the people who manage the machines are shrinking or you know static so you have to put in a layer of the machine which is smart in the in the between in between of the human and the large form of machines and that if you don't do it there is no data center so it's inevitable and you'll see this happen more and more so that kind of sounds like you're you know positioning your portfolio in a way that you enable the IT of people to not care about infrastructure as much anymore but help you know the their employer their customer do other stuff so how does your portfolio relate to the freeing up of time for those employees for those jobs personnel people some of it is just goes back to the poor design principle I would go to them basic you know how do we how do we start as a company we're looking at storage and they were dual controller a and B a ties B is running but guess what I'm worried that B will also die is the same age so I have to run to fix a run to fix a is my weekend and the night wasted if I had n one dies fine of it's a capacity problem so that goes to the core like how do we design things that are scale out and web scale we talked about so everything that we do including now prism central scale out I have to rush to go fix things hardware will always fail right and that's you know it permeates in the entire organization in terms of how we design things and then on top of that you can add automation and machine intelligence and all that but fundamentally it goes to engineering when you talk about we talked about earlier in the discussion kind of the rewrite that went on for emerging applications and emerging technologies I guess what's exciting you these days you know the industry of the Hall containers you know we looked at you know Flash technology containerization you know I looked at Nutanix when it first came out as was you know some of these waves coming together hyper scale and software-defined and flash all kind of with a perfect storm for the original generation what what are what are those next waves coming together that that you think will you know have a massive impact on the industry a lot of innovation going on on every layer of the stack I mean if we start with the hardware it's been coming for a while but it's almost here now the whole concept of having persistent memory essentially dims blocks having memory that can persist across reboots and we byte addressable so this is a big difference for the storage market right we've always had block addressable story let's become flight addressable paradigms of computing will change and Wharton's will change how we write programs will change so there's a whole big wave coming and getting prepared for that was very important for you yeah and if I control into that a little bit cuz you know what I thought about you know before it was I had you know like like pull of storage and my full of compute and I had my networking and well you know what your solution is I just have a pool of infrastructure but I need specific data in specific places and latency is really important you know Amazon just announced do you know a new compute instance with hundred gigabit networking for you know the same type of application we're talking about Hana and persistent memory and the like so do we not think of it as a pool anymore it's a here you know metadata and data are gonna get more localized so how should we think of your infrastructure going forward you should think of it as a fool we should worry about making it all all work well and that's that that is essentially our job if we can succeed at that then you would never have to think about it as well this particular you know storage is allocated with this particular application at this current time it's up to us to make that happen as applications are running from your direction you feel you know absolutely another thing that's happening in IT in the in the space of compute is the upper limit of this pool is being hidden right so for example in the old days those discs then there was a virtual disc but it had a capacity and you would format it when you look at s3 doesn't have a capacity you don't format it that's what's and that's more to application design when you don't think about the capacity of the pool that you're using that's the direction where we need to go and hide all this right Amina so just-in-time purchase of the next hardware that you need to get but the developer does not see the upper limit well retrieving Binnie thank you so much for sharing all that this Congrats on all the progress and look forward to what were you gonna bring on down lives down the road thanks to you for you piss car I'm Stu minimun lot more coverage here and Nutanix dot next London 2018 thanks for watching

>> From Phoenix, Arizona, The Cube at Catalyst Conference. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. (upbeat techno music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girl's in Tech Catalyst Conference on the fourth year of the conference, about 400 people here, wanted to come down, get a feel for what's going on. Seems to be something about Phoenix and women in tech, because we were here two years ago at the Grace Hopper Conference, the first time we ever covered that event with Telle Whitney and Marie Klawe, et cetera. So, we're excited to be back, and with our next guest, Scarlett Spring, president and chief commercial officer of VisionGate. Welcome, Scarlett. >> Thank you, and welcome back to Phoenix. >> Absolutely, thank you. So for those that aren't familiar with VisionGate, give us a little 411 on the company. >> Absolutely, so VisionGate is a medical device company, launching an in-vitro diagnostic tool for noninvasive, early detection of lung cancer, and, as of this year, January, we now have licensed in a drug which could treat even the pre-cancerous condition before you would get lung cancer, called dysplasia of the lung. >> Okay, so you said a whole lot there. >> Exactly. >> A lot of words. So let's go through that sentence one more time, a little bit slower, so it's-- >> It's a medical-- >> It's noninvasive. >> Yeah, so we're a medical device company, so there's a hardware component to the company. There's a software component to the company, because we're in-vitro diagnostic, meaning we have an assay, and that's a noninvasive test for lung cancer, so it's a sputum test. >> What does that mean, a sputum test? >> If you give us a deep cough, from the cells of your lungs, not saliva which would come from your oral cavity but a deep cough from your lung, our device can look at those cells and make a determination whether there are abnormal cells, thus leading to think that there would be cancer cells. >> And how would that process of trying to determine whether you have cancer or not happen without your technology? >> There isn't a test, today. >> There's no test? >> Right. Sputum has been looked at manually by putting your deep cough on a glass slide since the 1930s, and there's so much variation in data, because it's like finding a needle in the haystack, because when you give a cough, you cough up about four million cells, give or take a million. So for a human to do that, exactly that's it. It's extremely laborious, it's not cost effective, and, once again, you're looking for a handful of cells which would be diagnostic, because most of what's coming out of your lungs is saliva and white cells, because obviously it's trying to kill anything that's in there. >> Right, so in terms of the way the technology works, so is it kind of advanced, kind of pattern recognition? What is trying to do-- >> Perfect. That is a perfect question. It is exactly. Our innovation is we use machine recognition technology, and we look at the morphology of a cell. What does that mean? That means the cellular features, because cell features of a cancer cell look very different from a normal cell, and you can train a computer through a series of algorithms to recognize those differences, very similar to what a human being does. So in essence, we put a pathologist in a box, and we have trained thousands and thousands, like 250,000 cells has gone into training this classifier, and some of the world's best pathologists and cytopathologists have actually trained our machine. >> And the fact that you chose to go after lung cancer, it sounds like this would work, because you're basically looking for anomalies. >> That's exactly right. >> It sounds like that would work for lots-- >> It does. >> Of different things. >> You're exactly right. Once we can train this algorithm to actually look at other cancer types, so we're still in our kind of late stage startup phase, but we already have proof of concept work that is looking in urine for bladder cancer, looking at blood for circulating tumor cells, adenocarcinoma of the esophagus by being able to get some of the cells extracted. What we're trying to do is look at noninvasive ways, because today you want to make sure that you're being cost-effective, so that's the easiest way that you could get a cell, but you could use more invasive techniques to get a cell. For instance, like a pancreatic cancer. That would kind of be a real opportunity. Some conversations that we're having with clinical collaborators, that would inquire at least an upper GI where you would go into the stomach, poke the wall to try to get a specimen. What I tell individuals is if you get us a cell, we can create the classifier to ascertain whether it's normal or abnormal. >> And, the end goal is to just come up with more kind of regular routine with your checkup process that you're testing for these cancers to get out ahead of the curve. >> Jeff, it is all about early detection. Unfortunately, most of our cost today happen toward the end of the disease cycle. If we could invert that and actually have better early detection tools, not only would we save lives, but downstream it would be a tremendous cost saving just to the healthcare system. >> Right, very interesting work. >> Thank you. >> And have you always been involved in-- >> Well, it's interesting, I have 19 years of big pharma experience, so I actually started with Merck which became AstraMerck, AstraZeneca. So I had 19 years of continuous service, and I launched Prilosec in 1989 and then had the pleasure of continuing my pharma career with some terrific products, you know, Nexium, the oncology division there at AstraZeneca. So, oncology did grab me, and I've been very passionate about that since the late 1990s, early 2000s. >> Does it ever just crush you though that it's oncology, that it's cancer? I always think of the saints that are in these wards that are dealing with this everyday. >> You're right, particularly at AstraZeneca, we had breast cancer, prostate cancer and lung cancer products, and one of the things that every October during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I would get out in the field and go and be with our sales representatives, and it never got far from me that at the end there was a patient that was receiving therapy and the tremendous impact that your body goes through. So, we can never forget that at the end of all that we're doing is. there's a patient. We're trying to save a life, and the work matters. >> Yeah, and it's a person, right not only-- >> That's a person. >> A patient, but it's a person. >> It's a person. >> A mom, a sister. >> I don't think any of probably even watching this today has not been somehow impacted by cancer. >> Yeah, crazy, so let's shift gears. Get off the cancer for a minute. You had a presentation here at the-- >> I did. >> Conference. How to fly in the face of adversity. So for the folks unfortunately that couldn't make it to Phoenix today, what's it all about? >> Well, flying in the face of adversity, my workshop is going to talk about three layers. Raising money for a startup that has a big idea, and I think just by the brief introduction I gave you to VisionGate, it's a game changing kind of idea. Secondly, how do you go from startup to scale up? And lastly, how are you as a leader, thinking about your brand and how it aligns with the mission of your company? And there isn't any given week and maybe even any give day that I don't balance those three things, whether I'm trying to raise money, because we're still not revenue generating yet, whether I'm scaling the company, because we've grown just 40% since, call it Thanksgiving of last year, to thinking about what's my responsibility being here today, because the girls that are here are just starting their careers in technology, and by them, they will be the leaders of tomorrow. So, I think it's going to be a great topic. I'm actually going to allow the audience to do some prioritization, which one of these do you want to talk about, and we're going to walk through some exercises of doing that. >> It's interesting, many moons ago, I was involved in a speaker series at Wharton, and we had David Pottruck on. He's the former CEO of Schwab, Schwab's right hand guy, really articulate speaker, phenomenal speaker, and we had dinner with him afterwards. I asked him, I said why are you such a good speaker, and he goes, you know, I practice a lot. As a senior executive of a company, all you do is communicate. You communicate to your investors. You communicate to your employees. You communicate to your customers. That's pretty much what your job is, and so I took it as a serious thing, and I hired coaches, and I practiced. And now I'm pretty good at it, so it's interesting that you tie that back that building your own personal brand and getting that out there and how important that is to really helping the development, and the movement and the success of your company. >> It's true, and if you think about your brand, if you do it from being a self-centered or trying to have it being inward focused, you're going to probably end up in the wrong place, but if you do it thinking about how you would market a brand, what are the traits, the attributes that I have, that I want to be known for, and then that I want to try to nurture. And what it really comes down to is helping someone tap into their authenticity and their reputational power. What do you want to be known for? >> That's interesting I was just thinking as you were talking to get someone the nuggets, but that is a great nugget. What do you want to be known for? And to put the consciously out front. And I do think too that the world has shifted, in kind of the sharing world that we live in. It used to be power was in retention, holding. You had your stack of business cards. You'd never let those things out of your sight. You change companies, you take your Rolodex with you. Now, it's very different. The power comes, actually, from sharing. The more you share, the more you help others, actually the more influence and power that you get. >> And that's actually some of the very things that we'll be talking about is whether you are just starting your career, whether you are looking to get a promotion and move up within your own company, whether you are toward the end of your career and looking to transition to boards or advisory boards or be more connected to something that you're passionate about. In that, what are the things that you're known for that make you valuable? Is it that you're going to take on extra projects at work and kind of get known for someone who brings solutions to the table or is the person who's going to have the uncomfortable conversation, you know, the conversation that needs to be had in the room, but you're able to do it in a way that isn't polarizing, but brings everybody in to go, oh my gosh, you just articulated what needed to be said, and that created some sort of positive change. I want to get at those things today in our workshop, and it should be fun. >> That's just phenomenal, the way you summed that up so succinctly. You know, there's a lot of places that you can add value in the way that you work and the tasks that you chose to add on and to be known for doing some of the dirty work, doing some of the ugly stuff and helping the whole organization get over that hurdle. Scarlett, sounds like it's going to be a great session. Unfortunately, we'll be here doing more interviews, which is not unfortunately. We love being here to do interviews, but sounds like you're going to have a lot of fun. Good luck with it. >> I appreciate it. Thank you so much for the time. >> Absolutely and-- >> Come back to Phoenix again! >> Good luck with VisionGate. >> Absolutely. >> So when is your next hurdle with VisionGate? When's your next kind of trial? I know these medical ones take a while. >> It is true, so we've got a couple things that are going on right now. Hopefully, there'll be a screening opportunity coming to you soon, and we're getting our drug into phase three trials. >> All right, Scarlett, again thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Absolutely, I'm Jeff Frick. It's Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. You're watching The Cube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)