>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, Spain, everyone. It's theCUBE live at MWC '23, day three of four days of CUBE coverage. It's like a cannon of CUBE content coming right at you. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. We've got Dell and VMware here. Going to be talking about the ecosystem partnerships and what they're doing to further organizations in the telco industry. Please welcome Jared Woodrey, Director of Partner Engineering Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, OTEL. Odded Solomon is here as well, Director of Product Management, VMware Service Provider and Edge Business Unit at VMware. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome to theCUBE. So Jared, first question for you. Talk about OTEL. I know there's a big announcement this week, but give the audience context and understanding of what OTEL is and how it works. >> Sure. So the Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab is physically located at Round Rock, Texas, it's the heart and soul of it. But this week we also just announced opening up the Cork, Ireland extension of OTEL. The reason for our existence is to to try and make it as easy as possible for both partners and customers to come together and to re-aggregate this disaggregated ecosystem. So that comes with a number of automation tools and basically just giving a known good testing environment so that tests that happen in our lab are as close to real world as they possibly can be and make it as transparent and open as possible for both partners like VMware as well as customers. >> Odded, talk about what you're doing with Dell and OTEL and give us a customer example of maybe one that you're working with or even even mentioning it by a high level descriptor if you have to. >> Yeah. So we provide a telco cloud platform, which is essentially a vertical in VMware. The telco cloud platform is serving network function vendors, such as Ericsson, Nokia, Mavenir, and so on. What we do with Dell as part of this partnership is essentially complementing the platform with some additional functionality that is not coming out of the box. We used to have a data protection in the past, but this is no longer our main business focus. So we do provide APIs that we can expose and work together with Dell PPDM solution so customer can benefit from this and leverage the partnership and have overall solution that is not coming out of the box from VMware. >> I'm curious, from a VMware perspective. VMware is associated often with the V in VMware, virtualization, and we've seen a transition over time between sort of flavors of virtualization and what is the mix currently today in the telecom space between environments that are leveraging what we would think of as more traditional virtualization with full blown Linux, Windows operating systems in a VM versus the world of containerized microservices? What does that mix look like today? Where do you see it going? >> Yeah, so the VMware telco cloud platform exists for about eight years. And the V started around that time. You might heard about open stack in addition to VMware. So this has definitely helped the network equipment providers with virtualizing their network functions. Those are typically VNF, virtualized network functions, inside the VMs. Essentially we have 4G applications, so core applications, EPC, we have IMS. Those are typically, I would say maybe 80 or 90% of the ecosystem right now. 5G is associated with cloud native network functions. So 5G is getting started now, getting deployed. There is an exponential growth on the core side. Now, when we expand towards the edge of the network we see more potential growth. This is 5G ran, we see the vRAN, we see the open RAN, we see early POCs, we see field trials that are starting. We obviously has production customer now. You just spoke to one. So this is really starting, cloud native is really starting I would say about 10 to 20% of the network functions these days are cloud native. >> Jared, question for you. You mentioned data protection, a huge topic there obviously from a security perspective. Data protection used to be the responsibility of the CSPs. You guys are changing that. Can you talk a little bit about how you're doing that and what Dell's play there is? >> Yeah, so PowerProtect Data Management is a product, but it's produced by Dell. So what this does is it enables data protection over virtual cloud as well as the physical infrastructure of specifically in this case of a telecoms ecosystem. So what this does is enables an ability to rapidly redeploy and back up existing configurations all the way up to the TCP and TCA that pulls the basis of our work here with VMware. >> So you've offloaded that responsibility from the CSPs. You freed them from that. >> So the work that we did, honestly was to make sure that we have a very clear and concise and accurate procedures for how to conduct this as well. And to put this through a realistic and real world as if it was in a telecoms own production network, what did that would actually look like, and what it would take to bring it back up as well. So our responsibility is to make sure that when we when we provide these products to the customers that not only do they work exactly as their intended to, but there is also documentation to help support them and to enable them to have their exact specifications met by as well. >> Got it. So talk about a little bit about OTEL expansion into Cork. What you guys are doing together to enable CSPs here in EMEA? >> Yeah, so the reason why we opened up a facility in Cork Island was to give, for an EMEA audience, for an EMEA CSPs and ability to look and feel and touch some of the products that we're working on. It also just facilitates and ease especially for European-based partners to have a chance to very easily come to a lab environment. The difference though, honestly, is the between Round Rock, Texas and Cork Island is that it's virtually an extension of the same thing. Like the physical locations can make it easier to provide access and obviously to showcase the products that we've developed with partners. But the reality is that it's more than just the physical location. It's more about the ability and ease by which customers and partners can access the labs. >> So we should be expecting a lot of Tito's vodka to be consumed in Cork at some point. Might change the national beverage. >> We do need to have some international exchange. >> Yeah, no, that's good to know. Odded, on the VMware side of things. There's a large group of folks who have VMware skillsets. >> Odded: Correct. >> The telecom industry is moving into this world of the kind of agility that those folks are familiar with. How do people come out of the traditional VMware virtualization world and move into that world of cloud native applications and serve the telecom space? What would your recommendation be? If you were speaking at a VMUG, a VMware Users Group meeting with all of your telecom background, what would you share with them that's critical to understand about how telecom is different, or how telecom's spot in its evolution might be different than the traditional IT space? >> So we're talking about the people with the knowledge and the background of. >> Yeah, I'm a V expert, let's say. And I'm looking into the future and I hear that there are 80,000 people in Barcelona at this event, and I hear that Dell is building optimized infrastructure specifically for telecom, and that VMware is involved. And I'm an expert in VMware and I want to be involved. What do I need to do? I know it's a little bit outside of the box question, but especially against the backdrop of economic headwinds globally, there are a lot of people facing transitions. What are your thoughts there? >> So, first of all, we understand the telco requirements, we understand the telco needs, and we make sure that what we learn from the customers, what we learn from the partners is being built into the VMware products. And simplicity is number one thing that is important for us. We want the customer experience, we want the user experience to be the same as they know even though we are transitioning into cloud native networks that require more frequent upgrades and they have more complexity to be honest. And what we do in our vertical inside VMware we are focusing on automation, telco cloud automation, telco cloud service assurance. Think of it as a wrapper around the SDDC stack that we have from VMware that really simplifies the operations for the telcos because it's really a challenge about skillset. You need to be a DevOps, SRE in order to operate these networks. And things are becoming really complex. We simplify it for them with the same VMware experience. We have a very good ability to do that. We sell products in VMware. Unlike our competition that is mostly selling professional services and support, we try to focus more on the products and delivering the value. Of course, we have services offering because telcos requires some customizations, but we do focus on automation simplicity throughout our staff. >> So just follow up. So in other words the investment in education in this VMware ecosystem absolutely can be extended and applied into the telecom world. I think it's an important thing. >> I was going to add to that. Our engagement in OTEL was also something that we created a solutions brief whether we released from Mobile World Congress this week. But in conjunction with that, we also have a white paper coming out that has a much more expansive explanation and documentation of what it was that we accomplished in the work that we've done together. And that's not something that is going to be a one-off thing. This is something that will stay evergreen that we'll continue to expand both the testing scope as well as the documentation for what this solution looks like and how it can be used as well as documentation on for the V experts for how they can then leverage and realize the the potential for what we're creating together. >> Jared, does Dell look at OTEL as having the potential to facilitate the continued evolution of the actual telco industry? And if so, how? >> Well, I mean, it would be a horrible answer if I were to say no to that. >> Right. >> I think, I honestly believe that one of the most difficult things about this idea of having desired ecosystem is not just trying to put it back together, but then also how to give yourself choice. So each time that you build one of those solution sets like that exists as an island out of all the other possibilities that comes with it. And OTEL seeks to not just be able to facilitate building that first solution set. Like that's what solutions engineering can do. And that's generally done relatively protected and internally. The Open Telecom Ecosystem seeks to build that then to also provide the ability to very easily change specific components of that whether that's a hardware component, a NIC, whether a security pass just came out or a change in either TCP or TCA or we talked a little bit about for this specific engagement that it was done on TCP 2.5. >> Odded: Correct. >> Obviously there's already a 2.7 and 3.0 is coming out. It's not like we're going to sit around and write our coattails of what 2.7 has happened. So this isn't intended to be a one and done thing. So when we talk about trying to make that easier and simpler and de-risk all of the risk that comes from trying to put all these things together, it's not just the the one single solution that you built in the lab. It's what's the next one? And how do I optimize this? And I have specific requirements as a CSP, how can I take something you built that doesn't quite match it, but how do I make that adjustment? So that's what we see to do and make it as easy and as painless as possible. >> What's the engagement model with CSPs? Is it led by Dell only, VMware partner? How does that work? >> Yeah, I can take that. So that depends on the customer, but typically customers they want to choose the cloud vendor. So they come to VMware, we want VMware. Typically, they come from the IT side. They said, "Oh, we want to manage the network side of the house the same way as we manage the IT. We don't want to have special skill sets, special teams." So they move from the IT to the network side and they want VMware there. And then obviously they have an RSP process and they have hardware choices. They can go with Dell, they can go with others. We leverage vSphere, other compatibility. So we can be flexible with the customer choice. And then depending on which customer, how large they are, they select the network equipment provider that the runs on top. We position our platform as multi-vendor. So many of them choose multiple network functions providers. So we work with Dell. So assuming that the customer is choosing Dell. We work very closely with them, offering the best solution for the customer. We work with them sometimes to even design the boxes to make sure that it fits their use cases and to make sure that it works properly. So we have a partnership validation certification end-to-end from the applications all the way down to the hardware. >> It's a fascinating place in history to be right now with 5G. Something that a lot of consumers sort of assume. It's like, "Oh, hey, yeah, we're already there. What's the 6G thing going to look like?" Well, wait a minute, we're just at the beginning stages. And so you talk about disaggregation, re-aggregation, or reintegration, the importance of that. Folks like Dell have experience in that space. Folks at VMware have a lot of experience in the virtualization space, but I heard that VMware is being acquired by Broadcom, if it all goes through, of course. You don't need to comment on it. But you mentioned something, SDDC, software-defined data center. That stack is sometimes misunderstood by the public at large and maybe the folks in the EU, I will editorialize for a moment here. It is eliminating capture in a way by larger hyperscale cloud providers. It absolutely introduces more competition into the market space. So it's interesting to hear Broadcom acknowledging that this is part of the future of VMware, no matter what else happens. These capabilities that spill into the telecom space are something that they say they're going to embrace and extend. I think that's important for anyone who's evaluating this if they're concern. Well, wait a minute. Yeah, when I reintegrate, do I want VMware as part of this mix? Is that an unknown? It's pretty clear that that's something that is part of the future of VMware moving forward. That's my personal opinion based on analysis. But you brought up SDDC, so I wanted to mention that. Again, I'm not going to ask you to get into trouble on that at all. What should we be, from a broad perspective, are there any services, outcomes that are going to come out of all of this work? The agility that's being built by you folks and folks in the open world. Are there any specific things that you personally are excited about? Or when we think about consumer devices, getting data, what are the other kinds of things that this facilitates? Anything cool, either one of you. >> So specific use cases? >> Yeah, anything. It's got to be cool though. If it's not cool we're going to ask you to leave. >> All right. I'll take that challenge. (laughs) I think one of the things that is interesting for something like OTEL as an exist, as being an Open Telecom Ecosystem, there are going to be some CSPs that it's very difficult for them to have this optionality existing for themselves. Especially when you start talking about tailoring it for specific CSPs and their needs. One of the things that becomes much more available to some of the smaller CSPs is the ability to leverage OTEL and basically act as one of their pre-production labs. So this would be something that would be very specific to a customer and we would obviously make sure that it's completely isolated but the intention there would be that it would open up the ability for what would normally take a much longer time period for them to receive some of the benefits of some of the changes that are happening within the industry. But they would have immediate benefit by leveraging specifically looking OTEL to provide them some of their solutions. And I know that you were also looking for specific use cases out of it, but like that's a huge deal for a lot of CSPs around the world that don't have the ability to lay out all the different permutations that they are most interested in and start to put each one of those through a test cycle. A specific use cases for what this looks like is honestly the most exciting that I've seen for right now is on the private 5G networks. Specifically within mining industry, we have a, sorry for the audience, but we have a demo at our booth that starts to lay out exactly how it was deployed and kind of the AB of what this looked like before the world of private 5G for this mining company and what it looks like afterwards. And the ability for both safety, as well as operational costs, as well as their ability to obviously do their job better is night and day. It completely opened up a very analog system and opened up to a very digitalized system. And I would be remiss, I didn't also mention OpenBrew, which is also an example in our booth. >> We saw it last night in action. >> We saw it. >> I hope you did. So OpenBrew is small brewery in Northeast America and we basically took a very manual process of checking temperature and pressure on multiple different tanks along the entire brewing process and digitized everything for them. All of that was enabled by a private 5G deployment that's built on Dell hardware. >> You asked for cool. I think we got it. >> Yeah, it's cool. >> Jared: I think beer. >> Cool brew, yes. >> Root beer, I think is trump card there. >> At least for folks from North America, we like our brew cool. >> Exactly. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what Dell, OTEL, and VMware are doing together, what you're enabling CSPs to do and achieve. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You watching theCUBE live from MWC '23. Day three of our coverage continues right after a short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Another Cube alum joining me on the program next, Sanjay Uppal is here, the SVP and GM of Service Provider and Edge Business at VMware. Sanjay, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming back on the program. >> Oh yeah. Thank you. Thanks Lisa. And thank you to theCube. >> It's great that we're covering VMworld. I can't wait til they're back in person. This is another event that is virtual for obvious reasons. But I wanted to dig into your role and have you really kind of unpack that for us. Your role is the senior vice president and general manager of the Service Provider and Edge Business. Talk to me about that. >> Yeah, it's a bit of a mouthful, but really what we're doing here is recognizing that the world is shifting and a lot of the workloads are moving to the edge. So that's the edge part of my responsibility. And the other part is the service providers. Service provider of course, is the name for facilities based telecom operators, as they used to be called in the past, but simply called service providers today. So putting those two things together because service provider, 5G and the edge all go together. So I'm running that as a business for VMware. >> Got it. Let's get VMware's definition of the edge. I always like to do that because some companies have a slightly different spin on it. What is it to VMware? >> Yeah, so to VMware, the edge is distributed digital infrastructure. Digital infrastructure of course, is the software stack that you need to run the applications on top, and it's for running workloads. Now, the important part here that we're defining is that the workloads can be in what's known as the underlay, which you can think of as the infrastructure that is needed to run 5G and fiber. But the workloads can also be in the overlay, which is where you find software defined RAN, secure access service edge. And the workloads can be at the edge application layer. These are the new class of applications that we'll talk about. So it's for running workloads. And the other important part of it is, it's across a number of locations. This is not just about being in a few handful of data centers. This is about being in hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of locations, which has its own quirks in terms of how that infrastructure should work. And the important point is that the edge is placed close to where the end points are either producing or consuming data. So that's what the edge is, as we define it at VMware. >> Got it. Talk to me about the strategy and the vision that VMware has for edge. >> That's, you know, we're at a very important inflection point in the industry, as far as the edge is concerned. And I just always link it back into what's happening, as an example, in music. So one of my favorite songs from Aerosmith is, "Living on the Edge," and that's literally where we are right now. We're living on the edge and what Aerosmith says is, "We're looking at the world in a different way because things are changing all the way around." Of course, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but our strategy at VMware is to take this living at the edge, which is happening across the board, and to capture it into infrastructure that we're building, come up with a common software stack that will support workloads that are running in the underlay, in the overlay or at the application layer, and support this entirely new class of applications that are coming in. And these applications, to contrast it with what has been happening before, these applications are being built for experiences. And I'll dig into this in a little bit, but really essentially VMware strategy is to come up with that common software stack that is going to be placed at all of these edge locations, sometimes millions of them, for different types of workloads, but the commonality of the stack is important because that is what the service providers and the enterprises use to derive the benefits. >> Being designed for experiences. It's so interesting, because that's what we expect in our personal lives, in our business lives. We want to have good experiences, whether we're ordering something on Amazon or we're trying to collaborate via Slack or something like that. Experience matters. It sounds silly to say, but it's absolutely true. Talk to me about some of the things, the edge being core to customer's future in any industry. >> Yeah. So, you know, from an industry standpoint, we always used to talk about, what are the features of your product and what are the benefits for customers? And then we started seeing an evolution from benefits into, what are the outcomes that the customers want? But now we are getting from outcomes to experiences. And you take, just an example of a retail chain that we're working with, what they want to do is not just simply sell a product to a customer, walks into the store. They want that person to have an excellent experience. And in order to get to that experience, as an example of what would happen is, this person walks into a store. They recognize who that person is, what they had purchased before, they look at what are the likelihood that they want to buy something today? Do I have that thing in my inventory? If I don't, can I manufacture it with my third generation printer that I have over here? The 3D printer that is sitting in the back room. And then, once that is produced in the next few minutes, can they have an experienced in playing a game with the sportsmen of their choice, on this massive screen that's in there? That's experience. That's not just walking into a store, buying a product and walking out. Another experience would be, when you look at healthcare, what's going on right now that when you have a symptom, you go to your doctor to get checked out. But what if your body tells you that there's something that you need to get done? So this entire new class of applications are coming in with sensors that have artificial intelligence in them that are metricating what is happening. And these sensors with that intelligence then get fed into the edge infrastructure, because this is voluminous amount of information. As you can imagine, the amount of metrics that your body needs to track, all this voluminous information needs to get correlated. And then you may need to make an inference about it. Again, that's an experience because you're completely changing the nature of health as this is going about. So in every vertical industry, we have these examples of experiences and what this requires is computation, networking and storage to be pushed all the way into the edge. It requires a network to get this done. It requires connectivity. And it requires, as I've spoken about before, this common software stack that VMware is bringing. >> So talk to me about what's being announced and unveiled at VMworld. >> So what we are announcing very simply is the VMware Edge. And what that VMware Edge is, it comprises three common software stacks at different layers of the stack. So the first thing that we're saying is that we are announcing the VMware Edge compute stack. So this is software that companies can use, ISV's can use, to develop Edge native applications. These are applications that are born at the edge. They're not applications that are necessarily being refactored from somewhere else. And this is stack that is available in very small form factors, all the way to large form factors, and it'S stack that's connected together. As I mentioned before, the numbers of locations are very important. So we are packaging this, we're making it available across the board next week. This is the first part of the announcement. The second part of the announcement is the expansion of our secure access service edge offering. And that expansion includes going from software defined RAN, which was the first and highly successful service to include secure access, cloud web security, and then to follow that on in a multi-services approach and add more services as we go along. And the third piece is to take our Telco cloud platform, we are announcing that that platform is being co-opted to now run at the edge. Now, one very important development in that part, is that we've had our ESXI product, which is very successful in running in the data center, we have an edge ready version for this product. We've made a 10X improvement in the overhead and latency of ESXI. So now it can be deployed in edge locations in very small form factors, and it is absolutely equivalent to bare metal overhead. So now when companies are looking at, is there overhead associated with the ESXI hypervisor? We're saying, no. It's equivalent to bare metal. And all the benefits that you get with deploying ESXI, will now accrue to benefits that you would have at the edge. >> Talk to me about how the events of the past 18 months, we've seen massive acceleration in digital transformation. We've seen, you mentioned the retailer, the retailer is having to be able to massively shift curbside delivery, e-commerce. How have the events of the last 18 months influenced or catalyzed VMware Edge? >> Absolutely. So if you take a step back and think what has happened due to the pandemic, all of us are working from locations that are not, we're not going to some centralized location to our offices. We're actually working from our home edges. We are literally living at the edge when we were working from home. And also when you go to do curbside pickup, you're making a decision right there. You're going to where that edge location is for that retail store. So really to me, what has happened with the pandemic, is emphasized the need for moving computation all the way to the edge. Now you take one use case, work from home itself. Work from home has gone up by, in some cases, 5X to 8X compared to what it was before. And we've seen the network come under tremendous strain because of work from home. We've seen that the user experience, if it's not good, then of course your productivity gets hampered. So work from home is one of those use cases that has been focused on, because of the pandemic, and we've come up with the solution that will help people when they're sitting in their home environment, the kids can do homework, someone can be watching, streaming movie, but the business users still continues to function with full productivity. So it's really emphasizing the need for moving computation all the way out to the edge. >> Yeah. The edge exploded in the last year and a half. I'm going to now rethink, instead of working from home or living at work, living on the edge. So thank you for giving me that idea. That definitely changes how I feel about this room right here. Talk to me about some of the customers, customer examples, customers in terms of their feedback, as VMware has been developing this. I know you're very much a customer centric organization, but what were some of the directions on the influences from the field? >> I think, as far as customers go, they're an integral part of our development process. It's not like we develop a product and then we go sell it to the customer. What we do is, we get the customer to be a part of that process. We figured out what are the issues that the customers are facing in their own business. As an example, when the pandemic hit, in the healthcare space we had one acute care hospital that came to us and said, "well, we can't get enough of the telemedicine done because the radiologists and all are not able to come into the office." Well, we came up with a solution So that radiologist sitting at home can still look at very high definition images as they're talking to their patients. Now, once we develop the first part of the solution, we actually brought the customer in, gave them a prototype. And then I tell my team that when the customer gives feedback, it's like they're handing us a flashlight and that flashlight illuminates the path ahead for us. And so we follow that path that the customer has set based on the technology that we've produced. Our responsibility is to iterate on that technology in a very fast cycle, so that as we get the flashlights, we illuminate the path and that gets to building the product. And then we get the product built and then we have a happy, successful customer with good outcomes and experiences. And in the end, VMware has done something positive, not just in terms of our business, but for the world at large. >> Right. I love that. Handing the customer a flashlight. Another one I'm going to steal from you, Sanjay. Thank you. You've given me two good ones today. And also a different look at Aerosmith, which I probably now won't be able to get that song out of my head. Some of the trends that we've seen, trends over the last 18 months, what are some of the things that you think we've had a lot of acceleration, but there's a lot of positivity that's come from that, that I don't think gets enough coverage. All of the capabilities that we now have. If you take even just the work from home use case that you mentioned, that's going to be persisting for quite some time, some amount of it's going to be permanent. But what are some of the trends that you're seeing now that you think are really going to help facilitate the edge and the compute and the network and customers being able to take advantage of that even faster? >> Yeah. I think that one of the really important changes that has come because of the pandemic is giving customers choice. And as a part of it, VMware is really focused on multicloud. So, the cloud has come in, we had a movement of workloads from the private data center into the public cloud, but now what customers are saying is, we want choice. We want to make sure that this infrastructure is always available to us. So we are focusing from a VMware standpoint on multicloud. Now, what does that mean? It means that it gives customers choice. They can go to different cloud providers, including the private data center and run their applications on top. And this, we think, is here to stay. This is a trend that we think is as important as what's happening in the future of work. Because previously it used to be, we used to think of work as a destination. It's not. It's a workspace right now. People could essentially be working from anywhere. And one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is that, that actually does happen. Human beings, we are flexible enough that we can accommodate to these changes that are coming in. So the future of work is going to be distributed. It's going to be workspaces and not workplaces. And then multicloud and marrying those two things together is what we are focusing on at VMware. >> What are some of the tracks or sessions at VMware where folks can go to learn more about that use case in particular, as well as the VMware Edge and what you're announcing? >> Yeah, so we have some excellent tracks. We have a track about, of course, the distributed edge. We have a track about what's going on with cross-cloud services that we have come up with. We have tracks in terms of what's happening with networking and security, because security obviously goes hand in hand with everything. Zero trust is becoming fundamental in everything that we do. I was talking to one of my customers who owns gas stations, and he was saying, "Sanjay, I have gas stations in places that I would never visit. But there are people who would sit at these gas stations. I still need for them to come into the network, but I can't trust the devices that they're coming in on." So these would be a few of the tracks that I would recommend that people would go and watch. >> Excellent. Yeah. Speaking of zero trust and just the massive changes in the threat landscape in the last year and a half, the things that we've seen with massive rise in ransomware and DDoS attacks and attacks like this becoming a when, not if, kind of a scenario. So everybody needed to ensure that they have, they can trust the people and the devices on the network. Sanjay, thank you so much for joining me, talking to us about VMware Edge. You gave us some great analogies there that I'm going to take forward with me. And I look forward to seeing you, hopefully next year at VMworld, in person. Fingers crossed. >> In-person would be awesome. Thank you so much, Lisa. And thank you to theCube. >> Our pleasure. Sunjay Uppal. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube's coverage of VMworld 2021. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here, remote in Washington, DC, not in Palo Alto, but we're all around the world with theCUBE as we are virtual. We're here recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerating IT modernization) announcements with CUBE alumni Kevin Jackson, Kevin L. Jackson, CEO of GC Global Net. Kevin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> No, thank you very much, John. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. >> It's great to have. You always have great insights. But here, we're recapping the event, Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerator IT modernization). And again, we're seeing this theme constantly now, IT modernization, application modernization. People are now seeing clearly what the pandemic has shown us all that there's a lot of projects that need to be up-leveled or kill. There's a lot of things happening and going on. What's your take of what you heard? >> Well, you know, from a general point of view, organizations can no longer put off this digitalization and the modernization of their IT. Many of these projects have been on a shelf waiting for the right time or, you know, the budget to get right. But when the pandemic hit, everyone found themselves in the virtual world. And one of the most difficult things was how do you make decisions in the virtual world when you can't physically be with someone? How do you have a meeting when you can't shake someone's hand? And they all sort of, you know, stared at each other and virtually, of course, to try to figure this out. And they dusted off all of the technologies they had on the shelf that they were, you know, they were told to use years ago, but just didn't feel that it was right. And now it became necessary. It became the way of life. And the thing that really jumped at me yesterday, well, jumped at me with Launchpad, the Launchpad of the cloud is that Citrix honed in on the key issues with this virtual world. I mean, delivering applications, knowing what the internet state is so that you could select the right sources for information and data. And making security holistic. So you didn't have to, it was no longer sort of this bolted on thing. So, I mean, we are in the virtual world to stay. >> You know, good call out there. Honing in was a good way to put it. One quote I heard from Tim (Minahan) was, you know, he said one thing that's become painfully evident is a lot of companies are going through the pandemic and they're experiencing the criticality of the application experience. And he says, "Application experience is the new currency." Okay, so the pandemic, we all kind of know what's going on there. It's highlighting all the needs. But this idea of an application experience is the new currency is a very interesting comment because, I mean, you nailed it. Everyone's working from home. The whole work is shifting. And the applications, they kind of weren't designed to be this way 100%. >> Right, right. You know, the thing about the old IT was that you would build something and you would deploy it and you would use it for a period of time. You know, a year, two years, three years, and then there would be an upgrade. You would upgrade your hardware, you would upgrade your applications, and then you go through the process again, you know? What was it referred to as, it wasn't modernization, but it was refresh. You know, you would refresh everything. Well today, refresh occurs every day. Sometimes two or three times a day. And you don't even know it's occurring. Especially in the application world, right? I think I was looking at something about Chrome, and I think we're at like Chrome 95. It's like Chrome is updated constantly as a regular course of business. So you have to deploy this, understand when it's going to be deployed, and the customers and users, you can't stop their work. So this whole application delivery and security aspect is completely different than before. That's why this, you know, this intent driven solution that Citrix has come up with is so revolutionary. I mean, by being able to know the real business needs and requirements, and then translating them to real policies that can be enforced, you can really, I guess, project the needs, requirement of the organization anywhere in the world immediately with the applications and with this security platform. >> I want to get your reactions to something because that's right on point there, because when we look at the security piece and the applications you see, okay, your mind goes okay, old IT, new IT. Now with cloud, with the pandemic showing that cloud scale matters, a couple themes have come from that used to be inside the ropes concepts. Virtualization, virtual, and automation. Those two concepts are going mainstream because now automation with data and virtual, virtual work, virtual CUBE, I mean, we're doing virtual interviews. Virtualization is coming here. So building on those things. New things are happening around those two concepts. Automation is becoming much more programmable, much more real time, not just repetitive tasks. Virtual is not just doing virtual work from home. It's integrating that virtual experience into other applications. This requires a whole new organizational structure mindset. What's your thoughts on that? >> Well, one of the things is the whole concept of automation. It used to be a nice to have. Something that you could do maybe to improve your particular process, not all of the processes. And then it became the only way of reacting to reality. Humans, it was no longer possible for humans to recognize a need to change and then execute on that change within the allotted time. So that's why automation became a critical element of every business process. And then it expanded that this automated process needed to be connect and interact with that automated process and the age of the API. And then the organization grew from only relying on itself to relying on its ecosystem. Now an organization had to automate their communications, their integration, the transfer of data and information. So automation is key to business and globalization creates that requirement, or magnifies that requirement. >> One of the things we heard in the event was, obviously Citrix has the experience with virtual apps, virtual desktop, all that stuff, we know that. But as the cloud grows in, they're making a direct statement around Citrix is going to add value on top of the cloud services. Because that's the reality of the hybrid, and now soon to be multi-cloud workflows or architectures. How do you see that evolve? Is that something that's being driven by the cloud or the app experience or both? What's your take on that focus of Citrix taking their concepts and leadership to add value on top of the cloud? >> To be honest, I don't like referring to the cloud. It gives an impression that there's only a single cloud and it's the same no matter what. That couldn't be further from the truth. A typical organization will consume services from three to five cloud service providers. And these providers aren't working with each other. Their services are unique, independent. And it's up to the enterprise to determine which applications and how those applications are presented to their employees. So it's the enterprise that's responsible for the employee experience. Integrating data from one cloud service provider to another cloud service provider within this automated business process or multiple business processes. So I see Citrix is really helping the enterprise to continually monitor performance from these independent cloud service provider and to optimize that experience. You know, the things like, where is the application being consumed for? What is the latency today on the internet? What type of throughput do I need from cloud service provider A versus cloud service provider B? All of this is continually changing. So the it's the enterprise that needs to constantly monitor the performance degradation and look at outages and all of that. So I think, you know, Citrix is on point by understanding that there's no single cloud. Hybrid and multi-cloud is the cloud. It's the real world. >> You know, that's a great call. And I think it's naive for enterprises to think that, you know, Microsoft is sitting there saying hmm, let's figure out a way to really work well with AWS. And vice versa, right? I mean, and you got Google, right? They all have their own specialties. I mean, Amazon web service has got great compliance action going on there. Much back stronger than Microsoft. Microsoft's got much deeper legacy and integration to their base, and Google's doing great with developers. So they're all kind of picking their lanes, but they all exist. So the question in the enterprise is what? Do I, how do I deal with that? And again, this is an opportunity for Citrix, right? So this kind of comes down to the single pane of glass (indistinct) always talks about, or how do I manage this new environment that I need to operate in? Because I will want to take advantage of some of the Google goodness and the Azure and the AWS. But now I got my own on premises. Bare metals grow. You're seeing more bare metal deals going down now because the cloud operations has come on premises. >> Yeah, and in fact, that's hybrid IT, right? I always see that there are an enterprise, when enterprise thinks about modernizing or digitally transforming a business process, you have three options, right? You could put it in your own data center. In fact, building a data center and optimizing a data center for a particular process is the cheapest and most efficient way of executing a business process. But it's only way cheaper and efficient if that process is also stable and consistent. I'll say, but some are like that. But you can also do a managed service provider. But that is a distinctly different approach. And the third option is a cloud service provider. So this is a hybrid IT environment. It's not just cloud. It's sort of, you know, it's not smart to think everything's going to go into the cloud. >> It's distributed computing. We see (indistinct). >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, in today's paperless world, don't you still use a pen and paper and pencil? Yes. The right tool for the right job. So it's hybrid IT. Cloud is not always a perfect thing. And that's something that I believe Citrix has looked at. That interface between the enterprise and all of these choices when it comes to delivering applications, delivering the data, integrating that data, and making it secure. >> And I think that's a winning positioning to have this app experience, the currency narrative, because that ultimately is an outcome that you need to win on. And with the cloud and the cloud scale that goes on with all the multiple services now available, the company's business model is app driven, right? That's their application. So I love that, and I love that narrative. Also like this idea of app delivering security. It's kind of in the weeds a little bit, but it highlights this hybrid IT concept you were saying. So I got to ask you as the expert in the industry in this area, you know, as you have intent, what do they call it? Intent driven solution for app delivering security. Self healing, continuous optimization, et cetera, et cetera. The KPIs are changing, right? So I want to get your thoughts on that. Because now, as IT shifts to be much faster, whether it's security teams or IT teams to service that DevOps speed, shifting left everyone talks about, what's the KPIs that are changing? What is the new KPIs that the managers and people can work through as a north star or just tactically? What's your thoughts? >> Well, actually, every KPI has to relate to either the customer experience or the employee experience, and sometimes even more important, your business partner experience. That's the integration of these business processes. And one of the most important aspects that people really don't think about is the API, the application programming interface. You know, you think about software applications and you think about hardware, but how is this hardware deployed? How do you deploy and expand the number of servers based upon more usage from your customer? It's via the API. You manage the customer experience via APIs. You manage your ability to interact with your business partners through the API, their experience. You manage how efficient and effective your employees are through their experience with the IT and the applications through the API. So it's all about that, you know, that experience. Everybody yells customer experience, but it's also your employee experience and your partner experience. So that depends upon this integrated holistic approach to applications and the API security. The web app, the management of bots, and the protection of your APIs. >> Yeah, that really nailed it. I think the position is good. You know, if you can get faster app delivery, keep the security in line, and not bolt it on after the fact and reduce costs, that's a winning formula. And obviously, stitching together the service layer of app and software for all the cloud services is really key. I got to ask you though, Kevin, since you and I have riffed on theCUBE about this before, more importantly now than ever with the pandemic, look at the work edge. People working at home and what's causing the office spaces changing. The entire network architecture. I mean, I was talking to a big enterprise that said, oh yeah, we had, you know, the network for the commercial and the network for dial up now 100% provisioned for everyone at home. The radical change to the structural interface has completely changed the game. What is your view on this? I mean, give us your, where does it go? What happens next? >> So it's not what's next, it's where we are right now. And you need to be able to be, work from anywhere at any time across multiple devices. And on top of that, you have to be able to adapt to constant change in both the devices, the applications, the environment, and a business model. I did a interview with Citrix, actually, from an RV in the middle of a park, right? And it's like, we did video, we did it live. I think it was through LinkedIn live. But I mean, you need to be able to do anything from anywhere. And the enterprise needs to support that business imperative. So I think that's key. It's it's not the future, it's the today. >> I mean, the final question I have for you is, okay, is the frog in the boiling water? At what point does the CIO and the IT leaders, I mean, their minds are probably blown. I can only imagine. The conversations I've been having, it's been, you know, be agile, do it in the cloud, do it at speed, fix the security, programmable infrastructure. What? How fast can I run? This is the management challenge. How are people dealing with this when you talk to them? >> First of all, the IT professional needs to focus on the business needs, the business requirements, the business key performance indicators, not technology, and a business ROI. The CIO has to be right there in the C sweep of understanding what's needed by the business. And there also has to be an expert in being able to translate these business KPIs into IT requirements, all right? And understanding that all of this is going to be within a realm of constant change. So the CIO, the CTO, and the IT professional needs to realize their key deliverable is business performance. >> Kevin, great insight. Loved having you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate your time highlighting and recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud announcements. Accelerating IT modernization can't go fast enough. People, they want to go faster. >> Faster, faster, yes. >> So great stuff. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. I really enjoyed it. >> Okay, it's theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Hello, my name is Petar Bojovic, director of technology infrastructure from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. I have been with this organization for over three years and I own system engineering across private and public cloud, virtualization, OS, backup, storage, OpenShift platform, and automation. I have been implementing significant change improving our operating model since I arrived. Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina is transforming healthcare by changing the current model. We are focusing on something called value-based healthcare. Traditionally, healthcare model is typically a fee for service or capitated approach in which providers are paid based on the amount of health care services they deliver. Fee for service versus outcome. So when you go to a doctor and you do an office visit, they charge you for every item that they see you with. Based on that, they send that to my organization to adjudicate those claims. Value-based healthcare, on the other hand is a healthcare delivery model in which providers, including hospitals and physicians, are paid based on patient health outcomes. The value in value-based healthcare is derived from measuring health outcomes against the cost of delivering those outcomes. Well, we want to do the same and derive value out of IT as well. Significant value can be attained through automation on all levels. Just like most journeys, mine began with motivation. Let's talk about how I got here, how did I get started and how you can do it too. But first let's talk about Ansible. The automation engine is designed to provide an easy, reusable and platform-independent vehicle to automate complex and repetitive tasks. First off, Ansible is an open-source tool. It is very simple to use and set up. Even better, it's extremely powerful and flexible. You can orchestrate the entire application environment, no matter where it's deployed. You can also customize it based on your needs. Back in 2018, we had to build 150 jump server VMs in under 24 hours. Well, we leveraged some of the cobbled automation tools and scripts to get this done within that timeline. Without leveraging these tools and automation, this would have taken at least a week to facilitate the build. So a couple key takeaways from that exercise. Number one, this was awesome. All right, number two. We saw amazing potential in automation. Number three, we ran into network and other related build issues. Number four, we were unsure what to do next and where to focus within the realm of automation. So fast forward to May, 2019. My infrastructure engineering team introduced infrastructure automation software, you guessed it, Ansible to Blue Cross North Carolina to reduce overall IT costs, increase agility, productivity, and delivery while reducing delays and reliance on outside managed service providers or those repetitive manual tasks. So in the past, to provision a single server or virtual machine would take a minimum of 10 business days. That's not the overall process. That is just the deployment, would take 10 business days and over 20 hours of work, resulting in a cost of approximately $3,300 in charges per build. That's over $3,000 per build per server. However, with the automation platform provided by Ansible, this effort was significantly reduced. Reduced to under one business day, a half-hour worth of work and zero managed service provider charges. Let's fast forward a bit, to middle to late 2019. Blue Cross North Carolina decided to re-host the Facets application platform in-house within our co-locations. Well, Facets is a claim adjudication platform. After a medical claim is submitted, the insurance company Blue Cross determines their financial responsibility for the payment to the provider. This process is referred to as claims adjudication. Blue Cross was faced with the requirement to create roughly 1000 virtual machines as quickly as possible across all regions. Development, tests, training, QA, UAT, P stage, a staging environment, production, NDR. Well, our current managed service provider projected requiring 12 dedicated staff members and 16 weeks to process this request. Nope. There had to be a better way. By leveraging automation, the existing infrastructure engineering team was able to successfully provision all the required servers across three business days, in a total of 16 hours as well as nine weeks ahead of the project plan schedule, resulting in a cost avoidance of over $850,000. That's amazing, isn't it? Well, since then, the infrastructure engineering team has continued to use automation to assist teams both inside and outside of IT by reducing hours spent on repetitive tasks. Automation has increased the speed and accuracy of account creation, security hardening, and remediations, environment-wide configuration changes and software agent installations, just to name a few. This implementation had a significant positive impact on cost savings and cost avoidance and how quickly we can deliver and deploy infrastructure for projects. How were we able to implement this meaningful change? Well, I'll tell you, we started to evangelize and convert those naysayers to the wonderful world of automation. "Automate everything" was our mantra, even automate the automation. We'll eventually get there. It took a top-down approach to really accelerate use and adoptions. I spoke to anyone and everyone I could, my VP did the same, and even my CIO, Jo Abernathy. She started touting how important automation will be to the organization, its value, and how we can stay competitive and deploy faster and deliver at the speed of innovation. Wow, just wow. With a top-down approach for automation, we are empowering teams throughout the business to focus on those areas that are ripe for automation. Repetitive mundane tasks, those that are time delays are ideal candidates and allow these teams to focus on their core workload, versus time spent on those repetitive tasks. We are flaunting our automation successes within IT infrastructure to other departments in IT and the business at large. These conversations are opening up new possibilities to empower team members to leverage automation to deploy and deliver more quickly to meet the demand of enterprise projects and initiatives. Since its inception, the team has delivered on every project request ahead of schedule for infrastructure build, think about that. Every project request has been delivered ahead of schedule from an infrastructure perspective. That's fantastic. Well, automation is not new to the company, my company, nor yours. There's many tools, we use scripting, there's a lot available, but with Ansible and the way we've been able to implement it and make meaningful impact quickly, is new to the industry. We have been able to automate and reap significant cost avoidance in a short amount of time. Other similarly-sized companies are leveraging the same tool for longer and are not able to accomplish as much as we did in a short of time. We had motivation. Since starting this initiative, we are averaging cost avoidances in excess of $250,000 monthly. As difficult as it is to implement something new in most companies, the team implemented this capability and way of thinking within months. The sheer dedication to the business objective and the can-do attitude allowed us to be extremely successful. Thank you very much for your time and allowing me to tell my story.

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Oh, good afternoon and welcome back as we continue our coverage live here on the cue from Mosconi North in beautiful San Francisco. Clouds of melted away In a way, of course, we're still talking about hybrid Multi. They're not going anywhere. In fact, there are very much entrenched into this show. John Wall's Justin Warren. Glad to have You with us. Joined now by Kevin Chats. Camera. Who's the vice president of Product management Enterprise and SP Solutions of Dental Technologies. Kevin. Good to see you again, sir. Nice to see you, too. Two shots in one week on the Q. We love that and Wait Holmes, who's the director of technical product management at Veum? Where? Wade, Good to see you this afternoon. >> But if you also >> so this this is kind of your party here, VM where? I mean, just give me your impression so far. First off, just kind of what you're sensing that the vibe here of the show and, ah, the kind of work that you're getting done. >> So the vibe here is excitement. I mean, I think everyone's excited about a lot of the announcements around either probably Pacific and how we're redefining the V's Fair platform and Tan Xue and now these capabilities on how these capabilities are going to be able to enhance our capabilities of our cloud provider partners. So I'm part of our club fighter salt for business unit, who specifically makes products and solutions for our cloud provider V, C P P program. And I think couldn't beam or excitement. And they've been a crescendo the past few years and be anywhere and b m world. And I think this has been one of the best ever. >> If the waves hitting the shore big time now. So you you talk about cloud providers about service providers. I mean, one of the same. Or Or how do you guys define that now? Or how do you separate that? >> Yeah, I think these terms are largely used interchangeably. To a large degree, I think if we look att at the cloud industry in the provider industry over the last several years, maybe about 5 to 7 years ago, there was a belief from every single cloud provider that they needed to build a scaled platform like a W s like Microsoft Azure like Google Compute. And that they were all in the business of a race to building the most robust, most scalable, most feature rich, most differentiated cloud that was largely erased the bottom from an economics perspective. And I think just about all of all of the service providers and now these cloud providers that we work with have really moved to a different model. What they've recognized is first off. The race to the hyper scale is not a profitable business that you want to race against. Number two. Ah, the transition for large enterprise I t small enterprise medium business to the cloud is so complex that it's not a game of building clouds and not a game of building platforms. It's a game of building practices at this point and cloud providers or building practices that allow them to find their own niche and differentiation off differentiated offerings. Whether that be on Prem Private Cloud hosted Private Cloud and then partnering with the hyper scale er's for the massively scaled multi tenant cloud world. And when we start to realize that this managed offering these cloud practices are there to help the enterprise and small medium business in their transition to the public cloud in transition to cloud and moving towards more managed I t offerings. What we're finding is the reemergence of these cloud providers in a meaningful way, starting to bridge the gap of skill, set, mismatches and expertise. Mismatches at Enterprise I t just doesn't have to embrace cloud technology. >> Yeah, for a long time there, there was the cloud Geraghty, who were saying that the public cloud is the only way this is gonna happen. Everything's going to be there. And some some of us I would count myself among them was a little bit skeptical about that. That approach to things and a lot of it with a lot of the pressure on on service providers was you don't even bother getting into the cloud business. Just shut up shop and go home. This is never going to be a good idea for you to compete in this at all. And it sounds like that that some of these providers have actually gone. You know what we've We've got a viable business here. There are customers here who need things done that we do really well that are not available out in public Cloud. So what are some of the things that some of the things that you're hearing from these cloud cloud providers, that that they are finding from customers that they value, that they not finding anywhere else? >> So I grew 100% that the club wider there, find their business is still growing, and it's due to their expertise. Is Kevin said, that the building practices they understand enterprise customers? Veum, Where business? They understand the platform that they're running the enterprise and are able to provide additional differentiated service's while leverage in the technology that the enterprise they're utilizing in their own data centers. So it's able to pride value out of service is with the same platform that air using in their own premises and providing those capability of same platform in a cloud model. So, given a pragmatic way for enterprises to be able to migrate to a cloud in a hybrid cloud, >> are there specific practices you noticing that is that kind of stand out as being particularly common? >> Yeah, s so I think that through the answer is yes, right? And the answer is that vertical expertise is king here, right? Understanding the industries in which the cloud platforms get deployed and how those industries consume. Resource is the use cases. How they monetize their business is key for success. But I think that what we where we've lived over the last several years is that the building blocks for all of these vertical industries, the only uniform way you had to do it was with the massively scaled public cloud providers. The hyper scale er's what we're doing now, Adele Technologies Cloud is we're enabling a consistent set of building blocks for all of these vertical industries that all of these vertical X three experts in the vertical industries across the cloud providers can then bring a common building block and go address the complex problems of building the use cases, building the monetization models, building the differentiated feature set. >> So I mean, can you give me an example? I mean, what you talking about? It's like if you're going about health care versus transportation versus manufacturing, some things that were going to a different way, we're going to slice this That's right. It's a different >> set of ecosystem partners. It's a different set of vertical applications, a different set of problems. It's different set of monetization models across the board, right? You know, retail has very specific requirements around Leighton See sensitivity and the need to be able to address micro transactions. Security capabilities of those transactions or what not, Health care is governed by hip on various other legislative. When you build in Europe, you have, ah, various data protection and privacy implications to keep in mind. It's right, so all of this is not typically available in public Cloud Public Cloud is built for a lowest common denominator. One size fits all, and then you come bring differentiation. On top of that now is enterprise. I T organizations start to migrate their workloads to Public Cloud. They're looking for consistency in terms of how they've lived before and how they work before how they've operated before. How do they migrate those applications, right? It's not I'm building everything natively for public cloud is that I have an entire set of applications that were designed in my enterprise i d environment that I just want to find a new way to operate in VM wears a consistent abstraction. Layers is really the path forward, So DT Cloud on Deli emcee and TT Cloud leveraging the public cloud providers in the V M wear abstraction with both feet spheres. Well, it's vey cloud foundations, eyes really a commonality that they can now the uses a foundational building block for all their service is >> yes. So where one of the things that a lot of customers have invested over a decade or Maur envy em where? And they have a lot of processes and tools and skills that they have invested in. And it sounds like for some of these cloud providers specializing in a particular industry, that there's a risk there that you will end up with building blocks that, yes, they're customized for one particular thing. But now I have to operate them a little bit differently. And now I've got a lot of different ways of doing things, and particularly as a provider, then that that adds cost. And I want to try to get some of those costs out there because they think that influences my margin. So is the choice. Of'em were one way of dealing with that because I can maintain that same consistent way of managing things. >> Absolutely. And that's key to some of the work that VM wear and Dell has been working together on two. Allow for Kevin Mention, Adele Technology Cloud Platform, which the baseline of that is being more cloud foundation. So been ableto have that homogeneous operational model, and Mona's data plane set is the same V sphere and XXV sand based originality perspective. So the operational model, whether it's in the providers infrastructure or whether it's on premises within enterprise is similar. >> And I think there's even 1/3 vector to this, which is, um, yeah, one public cloud provider is not gonna win. All of the public cloud providers are going to exist, and the scale of a Microsoft azure and the scale of an AWS on a scale of a Google compute put them in position to continue to lead this industry forward. And it's it's difficult to bet on one horse, right? So the GMC model on the DT Cloud model allows us to be able to scale across all of these different cloud providers and as an enterprise organization that's making specific decisions based on region or based on other financials that some of these workloads are going to say in AWS, and some of them are going to sit in Microsoft Azure, etcetera, etcetera is a common abstraction across all of them. >> But at that point, I mean the fact that you're talking about, um, vertical practices, right? Verticals having practices that might be unique to their particular industry. And now you're talking about them deciding that they might all flowed work Thio, maybe an azure. Maybe in Google. Maybe I'd be it. Whatever, Um, I mean multiple complexities for you in dealing with that because you're gonna be the translator, right? You've got to be. You've got to be multi lingual, not only within in the cloud world, but also in a vertical world too. Right? So tough road for you guys to provide that kind of flexibility and that kind of knowledge. >> Oh, I mean, that's the key to the software and solutions that GM was providing and allowing for solutions and sat space capabilities to provide a modernise, softer, defined capabilities across clouds or a and be able to manage things across, such as cost in via cloud health and other manage service's capabilities by our software platform and then be ableto have this. These capabilities in the Bean Imlay consumed by providers and turnkey fashion by utilizing del technologies, bx rail are and VCF one VX rail and having us all package together, and so that providers no longer have to focus on building a core infrastructure. But they're now able to focus on that integration layer. Focus on the additional higher level service is that are able to stitch together the use this multi cloud environment >> decision logic that our customers have. It's just so complex, and I think that the message that we've heard loud and clear from them is that they feel like once they're in particular ecosystem, they're locked into that ecosystem. And the more that we can do that give them flexibility to bring these ecosystems together and leverage the benefits and the capabilities and the regional and geo location of just about all the different ecosystems that exists and build their own ecosystems. On top of that, especially if you're a cloud provider, is really what they're looking to do. And when the foundational building blocks all look different, the integration look different the automation look different. The orchestration look different in the storage. Later look different. It's just It was impossible, right? It's really on us to provide an abstraction to make that easy for them to accomplish their business. >> Consistent foundation is critical, and that's what we're bringing through the cloud provider today. >> One thing that has changed from from technology of 12 12 15 20 years ago is the consumption model that cloud has provided. S. So what are you seeing around service providers, providing that pretty much you have to provide if your cloud provided you have to provide some kind of consumption model because that's what people have in their minds when they think about about Cloud it is. It's not just about the technology side of things. Actually, we're out the business operations about, you know, the financing and the funding models of things. What are you seeing with the cloud providers and service providers? How are they changing the way that they allow people to finance the buy of this infrastructure? >> So that's one of the pieces that, in being where Rendell is working together to allow for not just software, which through the visa program all of our software solutions are consumed through a subscription like model. So it's pay as you go, but also be able to consume hardware and consume the turnkey patches package so that VCF on Vieques rail and the Cloud Provider platform can be consumed in a pay as you go subscription model, which is a way that providers want to be able to then provides software and capabilities to their enterprise customers. >> Have they completely changed across to being purely consumption? Or do we still have a lot of industries that preferred by things that with Catholics >> it would be fantastic if the world converged on one answer? Everything is always easier when there's one answer. But I think, ah, one of the things we recognize is that, ah, and it's true and technology. It's true in business models. It's true. In operational models, there's never in. It's never just a or answer right. It's always an end, and there's a need for us to embrace multiple different models in order to meet the needs of our customers. And even a single service provider will find particular areas that they wanted, consumption based model and others that they realize that it's a well entrenched business for them, and the risk is a little bit lower, and they're willing to take on that risk and look at a Cap IX base model right there. Certainly financial implications to both an Op X and the Catholics model. There's tax implications, and you know where. We're still a little bit all over the map in terms of their preferences. >> Hopefully, we'll see that shake out a little bit and we'll have some standard patents to match the practices that will just make it a little bit easier to design the solution. >> I think the Saturn standard pattern that I expect to emerge is that we have to do everything >> for everyone >> in every way that they want to see. >> Oh, you left there, Kevin. I can't imagine that being too difficult. Everything. Everyone it all at every time. That's right. All right. Hey, thanks for the time of and the discussion and good luck with handling that. I know. That's a that's a big lift on. I know we're joking, but, uh, it's a great world for you. Certainly exciting time. And we thank you for your time here. >> Thank you. Thank you guys appreciate the time. >> I appreciate being World 2019. Coverage continues right here on the Cube. We're live and we're in San Francisco.

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and, their ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas, for AWS, Amazon Web Services, re:Invent, 2018. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, our sixth year covering this event. We've been to all the re:Invents, except for the original one, watched the progress of cloud computing. And it's a lot of new things happening, more compute, more power. We're here with our special guest, RaeJeanne Skillern, who's also known as RJ inside Intel. Vice-President of Data Center Group and the General Manager of the Cloud Service Provider Platform Group at Intel. Good to see you again. >> Nice to see you again. >> The headline on silkenangle dot com right now, "In a blockbuster move, "Amazon jumps into data center with both feet". Which really validates kind of some of the commentary we've been seeing in the queue for many, many years. And our analysts and you guys are involved in the Data Center. Data Center's still going to be a big part of computing. It's not going away. That's your business. >> Yes. >> And the cloud service provider, which is also growing. So, take a minute. >> It is growing, I've been personally covering the public cloud at Intel for a decade. And, when I started I'm not sure I had any concept how big this was going to be. And the one thing that I'm positive about, is we're just still at the beginning. Because every use case you see, all the development, all the IOT, all the business transformation, we're just starting, right. This is a good place to be, but there's more coming. And, if I look at just 2018, I'm a little competitive at work, but we were to proud to announce earlier this year, the end of the summer, that the cloud is now 43% of the Data Center Group's revenue. So, coming from when I started, 10% or something like that little, now to be the number one contributor. And, we, in the first half of the year, had a 43% a year revenue growth. This industry is booming. And I wish I could say it was my hard doing, but I mean, if you come to an event like this, you know why it's growing. >> And the cham is increasing in the total market availability with the cloud, is requiring more and more horsepower. >> Yes. >> You've got IOT Edge, you've got the Data Center, you got the cloud, and software is being written, specifically to take advantage of something. So, huge market opportunity, still. >> Yes. >> What are some of the innovations? Take us through a little bit of your mindset on how you guys are attacking this growth, surface area of the market, starting to see specialized things, general purpose, compute is not going away, storage, networking, still very important. You've got FTGAs out there. I mean, amazing amount of opportunities, with innovations. >> You know, you hit so much of it, and I really agree with some of the comments you made. It started off for us, with silicon technology. But, what a lot of people don't know is, we have core computes, network, storage, FPGAs, purpose built accelerators, and we can create custom aesics for any one of our customers. We also have a unique ability to not only just customize, uniquely, but you talked about the many different use cases from Edge to Data Center, it's because every workload demands a different set of technology capability. If you want true optimization at the TCO, per TCO level. And so that's why it's so important for us to work with customers like Amazon, not just to customize one SKU, but many SKUs. We are, and I was surprised at this number, out of our latest Xeon processor, the Intel Xeon scalable processors, there's actually 54 instances, on just that one CPU generation alone, and 51 of those, are from a custom CPU, that were tailored for unique workloads and instance types. So, that's part of it, but you also talked about the software. And, that's another thing, I think people think Intel's the hardware company. OK, we make hardware, we're a huge software company, thousands of engineers. And, what I love about my job, is I built a team and call them the Cloud Ninjas, but they're software and hardware engineers, that go onsite with customers. They, whether it's performance tuning and optimization, or we are co-creating cloud services. New cloud services, with our customers, that innovation, up and down the stack, that's where real innovation can happen. Two heads together, not just one. (laughs) >> So the cloud is now the number one consumer of your technologies. >> Yes. >> There are a lot of misconceptions early on about the cloud. Everybody thought, okay, the cloud is going to be just one big cloud. It's actually quite diverse. It's global in scale, it's a services business, which has always been sort of fragmented and global, despite Amazon's dominance in infrastructure service. The Data Center itself, the players are kind of consolidating, which is kind of interesting. So, how has cloud affected the way in which you guys look at the market, go to market, everybody else thought everything was going to be standard off the shelf components, in the early days of cloud. >> No. >> Now you're driving towards customization. >> No. >> So what's happening there, what are the big ideas. >> I think we've learned a lot along the way, you're right. One of the things, I mean, these cloud service providers are pushing me off the road map. They want more than we can deliver, so that's where we bring so much at hand to do about it. But, I'd say while a lot of big players are getting bigger, the market is still really in a healthy way diversified. The Super Seven, as we call them, the world's largest, they're growing fast, about 35% around the world. The next wave around the world are growing almost as fast, about 25, 27%. Consumer SAS, has been, Twitters, and Facebooks, and Ubers, right, has been a large part of the cloud. It's now 50/50 with business. And they're both growing at the same categories going forwards, so you're going to see the diversity. Not just big players, but also small. Not just consumers, but business services. And then that's spanning a lot of global growth, and a lot of, if you see the wall of logos in any Amazon presentation, it's because they have partners all over the world. >> RaeJeanne, I want to get your perspective. I talked about this a couple years ago on theCUBE, about the power law of distribution of cloud providers, the top of the head is the big guys, then kind of narrows down. But then I was predicting a cloud service provider market was going to expand and I want to get your thoughts cause that's kind of happening now, you're kind of saying. But I want to get specific on this. You got core cloud, Amazon's of the world. Then you've got hybrid cloud, kind of Data Center. Then you've got the business cloud, business SAS. >> Business SAS. >> Sales force, Twitter, you mentioned those guys. >> Uh huh. >> They run clouds. Enterprises are now going to be cloudified, with commonality. >> Multi-cloud road. >> This is changing the nature of the business. Do you see it that way, talk about this business cloud, it's not competing with core cloud, it's just an expansionary. >> It's so interesting because there is certainly some competition or cannibalization within the cloud. But what I tend to see is, whichever part of this, because you'll hear a Business SAS company, some of it's running in the cloud, some of it's running on their own premises. They're doing that for a reason and both are growing. And then you talk about infrastructure service, but what really happens, especially we another rise moves their business into the cloud, there is just some part of it, just moved A to B, but what we're finding is about 30% of it is TAM expansive, because there are things when you move to an Amazon, or you move to another cloud service provider, take a mature SAS provider, they're just things that they can do that you never would have been able to do in your own IT shop. So, that's driving TAM expansion on top of it. That's also creating a lot of new market entry points, for new businesses to come in and innovate around. Security offerings, verticalized offerings, geo-based specialized offerings. So, yes, there's some friendly competition, but even when I ask somebody who would say, they might be the little challenger to a big infrastructure service player, they say but you know what, we actually get so much business by working with them too, it's hard for me to say, are they competition or a partner, right. That's the industry we live in. >> Co-creation, you mentioned that earlier, a big part of it. >> And the other big TAM expander is you've got the data, you've got AI, machine learning. >> Yes. >> You've got the cloud for scale and then you've got Edge. >> Yeah. >> These are not, it's not a zero sum game, where you're moving stuff from the Data Center into the cloud, these are all incremental. >> New. All new. >> So what are you seeing there? >> Yeah, I'm really excited about the Edge. For me, it kind of feels like that next, uncharted frontier, everybody's investing, everybody's doing amazing things. We're getting the 5G out, we're getting better technologies, we're learning how to store data, and move it faster, quicker, and cheaper. We're getting set up, but the use cases are just yet to be really fully defined. And I'll be honest, when I look at my market modeling, over the next five to 10 years, I always put a little disclaimer, this does not comprehend what's going to happen when billions of devices come online, when we activate. So I think when people say, it's a cloud, it's been going so fast it's going to just slow down. Why? Because innovation's not stopping. >> I think you hit the nail on a point we try to clarify on theCUBE here, is that a lot of people are misunderstanding what a cloud is, and about cloud service providers. As it grows, it's a rising tide floats all boats, so everyone tries to squint through, they're winning and a market share there. It's a different game changing, so that's a great point. I want to, as we get ready to end this segment here, give you a chance to talk about the relationship with Intel. You guys, again, cloud service provider is growing. Big part of your business. But you guys have been working with Amazon, for a long time, talk about the relationship between Intel and AWS. >> Yeah it is, it's a privilege, to be able to. The folks at a company like Amazon, and specifically the ones at Amazon I work with, they have the ability, obviously, to track some of the most amazing talent in the industry. And these people move fast. And, they have a lot of choice. You can either be there with them, ahead of them, and do the customization and differentiate them, and give them what they need. Or, they're going to leave you in the dust. So, I'd like to say we have a great partnership, because they've given us the honor over 12 years. We have so many, from the Data Center, to the Edge, the car, the racer car, deep lines. So many things we're doing together, Stage Maker, Machine and Deep Learning. But it's a, if we slow down, even for a bit, we're going to get left behind. So my job is to just keep running and trying to get ahead of them. And every time I think I get there, they come and poof. But, we're working together. It's a great, challenging partnership. But one that I can guarantee there's better innovation, from Intel, coming out of it, because of getting the opportunity to work with Amazon. >> And you guys are contributing to them too. It's a good win, win scenario. >> I believe so. They've said some really nice things about us, so, about our processing technologies. Our products, seven generations of our products, we're in every availability zone, every instance frame. We've got a great position. >> Well, congratulations on the business performance, I love the Cloud Service Provider expansion, love the Data Center focus, that's really relevant. And acknowledging by Amazon, that's good news to see. And, just stuff. Thank you guys for your partnership with theCUBE. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Here at theCUBE, Intel Cube. Intel is a big sponsor of theCUBE, we really appreciate that. I'm John with Dave Vallante. Stay with us for more AWS coverage re:Invent, our sixth year in a row, covering all the action. All the value being created. Stay tuned for more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Serices, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Good to have you back here on The Cube as we continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent day one. We're here for all three days so we have probably about three dozen guests lined up here in this particular Cube set and really a delight to be here once again. Our seventh time at this show. I'm John Walls with Justin Warren. We're now joined by Milos Marjanovic who is vice president of product management at Zayo. Milos, good to see you sir. >> Good to see you too, thanks for having us. >> You bet, and Kevin Sheehan, who's the chief technology officer at Ciena. Kevin, how are you sir? >> Very good, thank you. >> Good. >> Nice to be here. >> Let's talk about your respective companies first. Just to let folks who are watching know what you do and then what do you do together? So Milos, first off tell us a little bit about Zayo. >> Sure, so Zayo is a communications infrastructure provider. Primarily we own and operate fiber-optic networks. Now, we're here to exhibit a product called CloudLink which specializes in getting people into the cloud by bypassing the public internet. So there's some inherent values associated with that. Because we operate at the infrastructure layer, as you get up the stack and you add on software and other solutions on top of that, partners like Ciena are important for us to have more holistic solutions for our customers that want to go into AWS. >> And so, Kevin, yeah when do you come into the picture? >> Yeah, so Ciena, our DNA, we're about 20 years old as a public company. And we've become known as being the best at moving bits across the globe in terms of whether it's for your mobile phone, your iPad, whatever data is moving around the world. And then over the past five or six years we've dove in in a big way into automating the movement of those bits with software, open software, open software platforms. And that's really, with Zayo we're partnered both on moving bits and at automating the movement of the bits as well. >> Interesting. Yeah 'cause moving data around is actually really, really hard and getting that data where you need it to be, when you need it to be there is one of the really intractable problems of the multi-cloud era. So explain a bit more about how it is that you are actually helping customers to do that 'cause everyone's been struggling with this for quite some time. What's the secret? >> So yeah, I can take the first part of that anyway. So you kind of hit it, it is difficult. And I think ubiquity is key. So having a presence where our customers are. So with our fiber-optic network we have over a thousand data centers on our network. So customers that might have had a private cloud solution within a data center that are either in a hybrid model or looking to move holistically into the public cloud, it's kind of like, who are they looking to to help solve for them for their connectivity needs? And that's where Zayo I think is uniquely positioned. Their expectations and being in the public cloud is such that automation, efficiency, things like scalability is also very critical. So that's not just within the cloud environment, it has to extend to on-prem services as well. And that's really where we come in. So we want to maintain that user experience end-to-end for customers where they can log into a portal on our end, configure a connection in real-time and have that turn up, all the way up into their VPC environment with AWS. >> Right. >> Yeah and I think it's fairly complex to tie network services to cloud-based services. And then if you look at enterprise customers that have cloud services today, about 60% of them that have services now have services from more than one cloud service provider. And that's where it gets exponentially more complex and really where automation has a big play. So if you're an enterprise customer of Zayo for example, and you want to have certain types of cloud services from one service provider, maybe AWS and other types of cloud services from a different cloud service provider, you want the ability to move as, in an agile way as possible between service providers and ideally without having people involved in the middle and having it be a very slow and cumbersome process. So software automation really enables the multi-cloud experience for enterprise customers. >> Doing that at scale, as you say, any kind of complex environment or at any kind of scale, it needs to be automated for it to be repeatable and reliable and make sure that it actually works every time. So as a lot of engineering goes into making that work seamlessly, could you give us a bit of a flavor for what it is about the technology that you've created here that actually makes that work nicely and neatly across all these different environments? >> Yeah, so this is where Zayo, as I said, you know, we're an infrastructure provider and we rely on partners like Ciena to deliver some of that automation, at least parts of it. So one of the demos we recently did, we did a proof of concept where a user could log in to our e-commerce platform, it's called Tranzact with Zayo, they can configure a service, a solution end-to-end. So that's the e-commerce, the quote standpoint, and then we have open APIs between that platform and our SDN layer which is powered by Blue Planet with Ciena. And that rides across our infrastructure and so connectivity is configured on the network layer and then open APIs are on the back end with AWS to help provision it into the actual hyperscale environment as well. >> Yeah, so Milos mentioned the open API, so really to be successful at automating multiple platforms like this between multiple service providers, the foundation is open APIs that have to be able to talk to everything in an open way and in a predictable way, especially when things go wrong. So it's one thing to provision when everything's okay but when things start to go wrong you have to be able to adapt the network and adapt the services to things as they go wrong. So we have that built into our platform and fortunately events like this continue to promote openness of APIs. And then on top of Blue Planet, in addition to working with open APIs, we've become very good at creating an open dev-ops environment. So that in a true partnership with Zayo and Ciena, Zayo can go in and actually participate in the journey and actually create the software inside of our scalable infrastructure in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors. >> So what kind of an impact are you having on your customers if you're providing this multi-cloud connectivity or at least giving them confidence, I assume, to make different kinds of decisions, right? Now all of a sudden they have an opportunity to expand an operation or take on something new because you're giving them confidence that you can pull this off. Is that, are you seeing that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we were recently announced, we were awarded rather, a Direct Connect Network Competency Partnership with AWS and so I think that award isn't necessarily just given out at random, if you will. So us being able to earn the trust of AWS and that being visible to our customers is certainly a value prop in gaining users' trust. That also opens the door for us to springboard in other value-ad solutions for our customers to have more of a turnkey approach. We talk a lot about automation, security, ease of use. That needs to continue to extend. That's a value that AWS holds dear and they expect their partners to have that same approach to the solutions as well. >> So what are you looking for at this show as a signal for where the industry is heading? You mentioned open APIs. We're seeing a lot of conversation about more openness and accepting the idea that there might be other possibilities for deployment other than just one cloud. What else are you expecting to see at this show that will signal where the industry is moving? >> Well of course huge movement to the cloud. Enterprise customers moving more and more to the cloud. You know, if you came here a few years ago things were centered around certain singular applications. And now when you walk around this show floor, pretty much anything under the sun is tied directly into the cloud and some things you never really imagined to be there this quickly. So I think, you know, openness absolutely, but then more and more movement to the cloud and then having the multi-cloud choice, multi-cloud service provider choice for the end customers. >> Yeah, and just to add to that, it's all underpinned by massive workloads as AI, ML, 5G kind of take hold and really are more broadly adopted, that is a lot of data that is moving around. So having that underpinned by a strong network backbone that has high throughput performance, things of that nature, is going to be critical to get data from the cloud to where the eyeballs are, where the users are. >> Do you think enterprises are moving everything truly into the cloud, or are they doing more of a hybrid approach? Where they're having some stuff go to the cloud, some things stay on their own premises, some things actually move out to the edge? Where do you see the enterprises moving? >> Yeah I think it depends on the application. So there's certainly some applications, depending on the type of enterprise, that are best if they're kept inside the four walls of the enterprise, and then they'll go with a hybrid approach. But you know, I think whenever possible the scale and the economics that can be reached if it's truly put into the cloud, you know, definitely pays for itself very quickly. >> Yeah I completely agree with that. I think a hybrid approach is probably going to exist into the future. Now, how that's split 70/30, 80/20, whatever that might be is yet to be determined. But as Kevin mentioned, the scalability in the public cloud ecosystem, and frankly, the immense resources that AWS is putting into some of their products that you can bolt on to kind of vanilla solutions that customers are coming in with, is very difficult to replicate. So I think the scale within the public sphere is going to be quicker, but hybrid will always exist I think. >> Before we cut you loose, what do you want to take away from here? From AWS re:Invent, from the show itself? Go back to Raleigh, head back to Denver, what is it that you take in your hip pocket that you think you can put to practice? >> I think for me it's seeing real time the rate of change that's going on inside of the industry. The thing that we've learned over the past five years or so is that, it's very hard to predict the rate of change that we're living in, right? And we're not even in, for example, a 5G world yet. But we're right on the precipice of it and I think what we're learning and what we're taking away and putting into practice is that the network really has to be as adaptive as possible because it's so hard to predict the amount of change that's coming and when the change is coming. You just know it is coming and you will have to adapt to the change. >> Yeah, and keying off the open APIs, I mean, we're not here to be vendors only. We're not here to be just partners or customers. We want to be all three. And I think the lines that used to divide that I think are now blurring. And the folks that are exhibiting here, including ourselves, I think fall into probably all three categories. And just seeing that ecosystem evolve over time, those lines will continue to blur. >> Well gentlemen, thank you both for taking the time to be here. I know you've got a lot of activity going on this week. Good luck with that, and again, we appreciate the time. >> Thanks so much. >> Thank you. Great to be here. >> Milos and Kevin. Good deal. Back with more here from AWS re:Invent. We are live on The Cube. (futuristic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE. We are live at VMworld 2018. Day one, VMware's 20th anniversary. I am Lisa Martin, very excited to be joined by Dave Vellante. Hey, Dave! >> Hey, Lisa, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, too. We are welcoming back to theCUBE, an alumni, Geoff Waters, the VP of Global Cloud Sales for Vmware, hi, Geoff. >> Hi, great to be here, guys. Last year, we talked about the buzz, VMware getting the buzz back. Boy, this is a sonic boom this year. >> Yeah, it's a lot of buzz. >> Superpower infused. And we've also got David Wigglesworth, the Chief Revenue Officer for OVH. David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, both of you, Dave and Lisa. >> So, I have to ask first, do you have the VMware tattoo that Pat Gelsinger sported this morning? >> I don't have VMware, but I do have OVHcloud. Okay, so, speaking of OVH, David give our viewers an overview of what you guys are doing and what momentum you have created with VMware. >> Yeah, you know, it's an exciting time for us, especially to be here, as a Global Diamond sponsor, right? This is our second year, as OVHcloud, to be here. Last year, when we came, it was right after the vCloud Air acquisition of the asset from Vmware. Which is where our partnership just continued to grow more and more. And, so, for the last year, what we've been doing is we've really been focusing on deploying our data centers here, as well as getting our products ready to go to market. I always joke that OVHcloud is, probably, the best-kept secret in the US because that, when we acquired vCloud Air's assets, is when we kind of launched in the US. But, as Geoff can tell you in a few minutes, we've been a partner with VMware for years, right? And it's been really exciting. >> Yeah, I wonder if you could talk about that, Geoff, a little bit, I mean, the signal on vCloud Air early on, you guys kept having to tune the radio station, so to speak. >> Yep. >> Yep. >> And then, boom, finally it hit the OVH acquisition and then AWS deal, of course, IBM and other cloud service providers. Talk about how that all came about, and the track that you're on now. >> Yes, so, I mean, we've been partnering with OVH for actually nine years, I went back and I researched it. >> Did you? >> Yeah, back in Europe. So, they've actually been a seven-time Service Provider of the Year award winner. So, our relationship with OVH is nothing new. And we've been working with them for years. The other thing is the breadth of the portfolio adoption, the full SDDC stack, so not just vSphere, NSX, vSAN, the entire stack. So, you know, OVH is right in the forefront of our overall cloud strategy, and it has been for years. >> Yeah, and as a global infrastructure provider, we have almost a million 500 thousand customers, in 138 different countries. We have 28 data centers, three here in North America. We've got the breadth to go to the market in a big way. So, it's exciting to be here. >> So, lay out the options that you have for OVH customers. What services can they get from you? What are the platforms? >> No, it's a great question. So, obviously, have a very purpose-felt solution built on VMware, right, with our Hybrid Private Cloud. It's all built on the SDDC stack. So vSphere, vSAN, NSX, everything that Geoff mentioned. We also offer a bare metal solution. And then we also have a public cloud offering that's built on our relationship that we have with OpenStack. So, we give our customers three different choices on what they want to go to the market with. >> So, what do you make of, what's the AWS-VMware partnership mean for OVH? How do you guys take advantage of that? >> Well, I mean, you know, look. I think Pat, in his keynote this morning, talked about that eight out of every 10 customers is using cloud today, multi-cloud strategy. The average large customer is using, what did he say, eight clouds? >> Yep. >> He said that they're forecasting that there would be 10 clouds by the end of 2019. I'd like to take one of those two spots, if you don't mind. So, no, we think there's huge opportunity. I mean, Amazon's built a business on, and has created kind of the standard. We think there's plenty of room to play in a very large market. >> Well, the services market has always been highly fragmented. >> Yep. >> And it's always been local in nature. Maybe not as to the degree and scale, but, so, you've got, what did you say, a million and a half customers? >> Globally. >> So what are they telling you about their cloud strategy? >> Well, what our customers are asking for is they're asking for agility. They're looking for low cost. You know, we announced a partner program earlier this morning, where we're launching that. And our partners are coming to us saying, David, give us choice, give us flexibility, and help us save a little bit of money. I mean, all of our partners are dealing with margin erosion, as well as everybody else in the industry. So, if we can come to market and actually help them go acquire a customer, and help them do that in a way that's cost-effective, they're very excited about that. >> So, what's the conversation that you're having with customers? You know, we were, a lot of press, a lot of news came out this morning. A lot of great announcements made by Pat and team on stage. Customers talking about migrating from on-prem to the cloud, from public back to on-premises, for security compliance reasons. What are some of the things that you guys are hearing from customers, when you're having those business-level discussions about being able to execute a successful cloud strategy? >> You want to hit that first, and I'll come over. >> Go ahead. Well, I can. So, what our customers are talking about is simplicity. One of the things that we're excited to work about, to work with VMware on, is that our customers, when they move their solution on-prem to our hybrid cloud, they use the exact same resources that they use on-prem today. They don't have to go hire new people. It's all of the exact same economics that they've built to an on-prem solution, is in their off-prem solution with OVHcloud. That's what makes this so unique, right? I mean, look, part of the vCloud Air acquisition, what are we doing? We're migrating VMware customers, right, that are using VMware technology, that we're setting on vCloud Air into OVH data centers, using VMware technology to do it. And, so, it's. >> Just to add to that, the beauty is reducing day two complexity onto the operations, day two operations. So, instead of customers having to build out all themselves and integrating it, OVH is doing that already. Right out of the gate, in a hosted managed environment. >> That's because it is a like to like homogeneous, and you guys have laid that vision out years ago. >> Yep, yep. >> We sure did. >> When Maritz was running the company. But how does that actually manifest itself? So, a customer says, look, I'm sick of the heavy lifting, I want to get to the cloud. Alright, so they come to you guys, what are the steps that they take to get there? >> Well, there's, you know, the first thing you'll do is you'll sit down with the client. And some clients know exactly what they want to do and how they want to do it. And some customers say, hey, I think I need to be in the cloud, please help me. So we'll have that conversation, right, first of all. Yeah, exactly, it's from A to Z, soup to nuts, whatever you want to say. So, you know, a lot times we'll sit down and we'll walk them through that journey to the cloud. And then, once we determine what applications or workloads we want to move, then we'll back into, okay, well here's the best way to move that, right, and whatever technologies we then decide to do. And if it's vSphere based, it makes it real simple, right? >> And you hit the nail on the head. It starts with the application. It's always about the application. What is the end goal? Right, once you identify that, you start looking at the use cases, a lot of it's app migration, a lot of data center evacuation. A lot of these data centers, as the different leases are coming up, they want to get out of there. Right, and that's the opportunity to then have the discussion. There's also tools that we got. HDX, which allows for bulk migration of workloads and it reduces, you know, the complexity of going to another cloud and another hypervisor from, like, years down to months and weeks. We've had some customers that have done that, migrated hundreds of VMs over a weekend. >> Oh sure. And we're in the process of that right now. >> So, go ahead, please. >> Oh, thank you, I was going to say, could you give us an example of a customer, whether they're in Europe, where you guys have really had a lot success, or here in the Americas, that have really demonstrated substantial business outcomes, revenue, et cetera, leveraging the joint service? >> Well, sure, I mean, you know, we've got customers both in the U.S. and in EMEA, but, you know, I'm thinking about a customer in particular that's based in the U.K.. That, they're a MNA company, right? And, at one time, they had 97 data centers that they were trying to manage. The complexity of that. And, so, they originally went to vCloud Air because they were like, help us with this complexity, we're built on VMware, but we've got to close these data centers, right, we need to go to more of an asset-like model, and we need to be able to manage it effectively with the staff that I have that's already overworked. So that's how we won them as a client with vCloud Air. What's exciting is, is when we come in and we start talking about what we're doing with OVH, and some of the new technology that we're building, on the VMware stack, right, plus the fact that we own our own network. I don't charge ingress and egress charges, right. A lot of the things that we do, We've got 33 points of presence, you know, globally. Then we start having a conversation and they're like, listen I already had a great solution in vCloud Air on VMware, now I've got that on steroids. I've got the benefit of both companies coming together for a solution for my client. >> So how do you get the data from point A to point B? Do you back up the Chevy truck and load it on? >> You can do it that way. >> You talked about your network. What's the kind of best practice? >> Yeah, so the best practice is to come in and understand the actual environment we're working with. What is the tolerance to take that workload up or down? But, if we use technology like HDX, I don't have to take that workload down at all. I'm able to basically, essentially, and don't let me get over my skis, VMware guy, but I am going to essentially do a Vmotion over my network, right, no cost to the customer, into my data center, and the customer can continue to use the app while that's happening. >> And the time that takes is a function of, obviously, the volume of the data, >> Sure, of course. The bandwidth. >> The number of VMs, the complexity of that. >> So you'll schedule that out over a period of, what, days, weeks, months? >> Exactly Years, even, I mean, maybe not years but, maybe I have a multi-year strategy, right? So that's how you're seeing people do it? It's sort of a planned approach. >> Weeks and months is sort of. >> I would say, typically. >> It's project based, yeah. >> So, within months, I can get an entire data center from my on-premises into your platform. Is that a fair statement? >> And if you ever wanted to bring it back, we can do that real easy too. >> You see that happening? >> We see customers moving workloads back and forth, it depends on seasonality. I mean, you take the retail industry, right? There's a lot of times where, during the retail industry, they'll send things to us, they'll flip it around, and, after the holidays are over, they'll bring there on-prem or what have you. >> And, more importantly, I think having network access back into the on-prem data center, with HDX, allows you to have a network connection. So it does need a talk back. The whole workload may not move back, but you need to have communications back into the network. And that's what HDX, their technology, allows. >> Right. >> So it allows me to leave whatever component of my workload I want to keep there. >> Yep, that's right. >> When I'm talking to each other. >> That's right. >> Okay, so for years at VMware, we heard this theme, any app, any workload, really anywhere in the world. >> Exactly. >> Now, you guys, right, you guys have an open source based public cloud. Vmware, obviously, like, hey, some of these cloud native apps, we'd like a piece of that action. You hear Pat talking about Kubernetes and containers. So what's that conversation like, between you guys, I mean you want some of that, right? Are you talking about Edge? Is that more integration? You guys got some work to do there to really compete in the that space? >> Well, I mean, it's your solution. But I'll start off of on the Edge. So, the announcement on Edge today, I don't know if you guys have heard it yet, but really exciting. We've actually announced a lot of different solutions around automation of the data center. I mean, this whole cloud operations is becoming sort of a major problem, as we have eight to 10 global service providers in most enterprises. So, reducing the complexity of that down is incredibly important. All the pieces that we're announcing, a VMware as a service, we're going to roll to our service providers in a managed service environment. So all these new technologies that we just announced, right, David and OVH are going to get access to that and have the same capability. >> That's right. >> I'll let you guys speak, specifically on your OpenStack. >> Well, I mean, listen, the beautiful thing about OpenStack is it's open, right, so, I mean, it doesn't really matter what cloud's out there, we can interface with it, right? So, that's the beauty of it, right? And it doesn't change at all the way that we go to market. It's just, really, we're giving the customers choice. What do you want? And it depends on the app, right? That's what's beautiful about it, is when we've sit down and meet with customers or partners, it's, like, what do you want to do, what workload would you want to move? And we've got choice for you. >> Yeah, I remember when we talked to Pat about this, years ago, when OpenStack was kind of the hot new toy, and he said, OpenStack, we like OpenStack, that's cool, we'll embrace it, no problem, and we're like, really? Yeah, I mean, that's kind of exactly what's happened. I mean, you're seeing the same thing with Kubernetes, and containers, and the like. But, again, you guys still got some work to do to really earn their business for those types of workloads, and I presume you're hard at work. >> We are. I don't know if you wanted to hit on some of the announcements that you. >> Yeah, I'd love to. >> Yeah, let's do that. >> So, the real thing I'm excited about is this morning we announced the announcement of our partner program at OVHcloud. It's an exciting day for us on that because, if you'll remember a few minutes ago, I was talking about all of the things we've been doing for the last year, right, getting our data centers ready, and, also, building out our product stack to be able to go to market, and migrating our customers. Well, the fourth thing we were doing, for the last nine to 12 months, is we've been meeting with partners. And I'm fortunate, from my years at EMC-Vmware, and my team, we have a lot of relationships out there. And so we were able to go meet with these partners and say, listen, here's what we're thinking, what do you guys think, what are you looking for, right? We've got all these big players out there, obviously we know all the names, but what differentiation could we bring to your business to help you go grow revenue? And, you know, they came back to us and they said, Wiggs, what we really want to be able to do is we want to be able to come in slowly, expand that as much as we can, make big commitments, make small commitments, we want the ability to be agile, we want to be able to, help us figure out a way that we can save money and worry about that. Help us resolve that issue of that margin erosion. That's a big thing that a lot of the channel's dealing with today. And, so, that's what we did. We came up with a program of four different levels, right? You can dip your toe in, and with a very minimum commitment, the higher commitment you make, not only do you get a better price, but you also get a ton of support on the backend. So, I actually come in and work with you on your messaging. I have sales teams that can actually go out and help them sell the solution, with us as the infrastructure layer in the underpinning, right, and, so far, it's been really good. >> So these are, don't hate me for saying this, these are sort of traditional box sellers, now trying to transform their business, right, and add more value, or their value added supply. Maybe they're SAP. >> Well, you've got manage service providers. You've got manage service providers. >> Okay, so hosting. >> You've got the SI's and the OS's, right? So, you know, some of these guys they either want a private label, right? Or white label your solution? Some guys just want to go to mark up their solution and they just need an asset like model, right? They're just exhausted with, you know, investing in infrastructure, right? So, they're like, "Listen >> And bodies. >> And body, you take that over and let us worry about that. >> You see, from VMware's perspective, that's exactly what we're seeing. We've got an ecosystem of 42 hundred global service providers. They build their own data centers, have a VMwares based hosted solution of some type. A lot of different flavors. They want to get out of the hardware space and out of the data center management space. This is why it's a great solution for OVH, they want to focus on, and, again, we call this asset light, they want to focus on high margin trusted value. Things that they're good at, where they can make a lot of money. >> Which is what? Like, I always see there's a consulting piece up front, security. >> It could be security specialist. >> Yep, security security services. >> Patching monitor, you know, automation, migration services, I mean, the exact discussion we just talked about, right? Customers need that journey. So OVH abstracts a way, the need to do hardware, and that allows them to go focus on the rich or higher margin services that they offer. >> And how are they making it sticky? Because, obviously, they want that, right? So what do you see there and how are you helping them? >> I think anytime you're adding a value added service, if you add that value it is sticky, right? >> Yeah. >> I mean, for an example, to help our relationship with Vmware, and just how strong it is, you know, FusionStormers was one of the partners that we had announced today, right? And they had a quote in there. And I was just sitting in Pat's keynote, next to our customer. You know, and I'm like, so, you know, I get this, it makes sense, you're looking for this, you know, infrastructure as a service play. He's like, David, what we're trying to do is help our customers that love the VMware stack, we're trying to help them to get to the Cloud, right? They don't care about the infrastructure, all they want is great service, right, and great support. And he said, that's my secret sauce, that I am able to offer that. And he goes, you guys handle the infrastructure. He said, it's perfect. >> Last question, David, for you. What are people going to be able to see and feel and touch at the OVH booth here at VMWorld? >> Oh, that's a great question. So, you're going to be able to go over, and you're going to be able to learn about some of our other announcements, with VMwares. Specifically, around what we're doing on the whole SCDC as a stack, right? In the VMware Cloud foundation, and the announcement we had on that this morning. Or, actually, I think that was Friday. You're actually going to be able to go over and they'll pull up and they'll show you some demos, and be able to see the technology live. I think they have a show every hour, and you go over there. And if you go over, you might win a Yeti mug. I think they're giving a Yeti mug to whoever pays the most attention. (Lisa and Dave ooh) So, go over there and learn about that. >> Can always use another Yeti, yeah, I love the Yeti. >> Yeah >> You can't have too many Yeti's. >> Does it come with caffeine? Because that, I'm all over it. >> No, well, we'll leave it clean, yes, maybe caffeine. >> Okay, awesome. David, Geoff, thanks so much for joining Dave and me this morning. >> Thank you so much, we really enjoyed it. >> You're watching theCUBE, live from VMWorld 2018. Day one, Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante, stick around, we'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage at Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando, Florida. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman co-hosting with me this week for three days of wall to wall coverage. Our next guest is Todd Nightingale, who is the Senior Vice President, General Manager of the Meraki team in Cisco. Welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you so much. I'm honored to be here. >> So obviously day one, we got three days. The keynote kicked off pretty interesting putting a stake in the ground. It's not a new stake, but really amplified by CEO of Cisco Chuck Robbins said, "Look at the old architecture "is changing to a new architecture." We've been talking about this for multiple years, no perimeter, new things are changing, changing the nature of networks. I asked you in 2017 in May about more devices. He actually said a number, is millions and hundreds of millions of new devices and connections constantly coming on. So obviously you're at Cisco, you see all that data, but you nailed it. The network needs to be stable. They need to be programmable. This is really kinda where your mission is. Talk about what's changed since 2017 and now with the new reinvention of the architecture, how do you fit into that, how does Meraki fit into that? >> Yeah, I think the industry has really started to realize a lot of these trends. IoT was kind of a future back then. Now it feels pervasive. Everything I look at is connected. My door locks, my toaster oven, my refrigerator, and people are starting to see the impact of that. We're not talking about onboarding two or three devices per user, but dozen or more devices and we'll have entire sites with dramatically, dramatically more devices, hundreds of devices for every one person and that IoT world is real and a lot of vendors, I think, are trying to catch up to that, but Cisco really took an early view at this and they were able to like build and work on this intent based network was really designed for this of modern era networking. For years we've been working on that at Cisco and I think it shows, right, that vision that Chuck laid out for us drives home this idea of massively scalable networks that are secure as a foundation and that they have a cloud focus. It's a multi-cloud world. These are gonna be connected networks. Last time I was here we talked a little bit about SD-WAN in particular and routing, I think that that's a lot of change here too is 'cause now that we know that most of our devices, most of our traffic's going in the cloud, SD-WAN when it's so much more important, right? >> It's real too, I mean right now SD-WAN is exploding in growth, use cases are growing. What does that mean? What does that mean for customers? You look back, SD-WAN was the promise, was the holy land. Everyone's talking SD-WAN and then, but now it's really real. It's happening. >> Yeah. >> Big time, your thoughts? >> I think SD-WAN is just the future of routing. It is the way we will, it's the way we'll get on the internet from here on in and really, I'm glad to see that all the vendors are looking at bringing more than one type of WAN offering whether it be LTE or broadband or MPLS, but I believe and I think at Meraki we believe that true SD-WAN should be about the idea that you bring whatever internet connection you can get, MPLS, LTE, broadband, whatever, and the SD-WAN technology should provide to you the absolute best application experience without any intervention, without any assistance, right? It should be intelligent enough, we should have an intelligent enough system for it to take any connection it can and give you the best, the best application performance and I do believe that's the, really the future of SD-WAN, that's how we build our SD-WAN products at Meraki. >> You know, Todd, security of course is hugely important. For those those to travel a lot it seems like I, every, I'm constantly getting warnings, like don't like Log into your hotel WiFi, don't, don't do this. You talk about creating pervasive security everywhere. How are we doing and how do we get better? >> Yeah, people say a lot of security is about training the user. We should do better than that, right? And simplicity is the key. If we can make the systems incredibly simple for users to use securely, then we don't have to spend nearly as much time training them to be secure. And I think that that's what we see as consumers, is constant fraud alerts and best practices and don't open that email and do open this email, but we can expect more from our technology. It can be more intelligent and it can be simpler and it can make it easy for us to stay secure. And that's how we focus, really, the security portfolio at Meraki not just in our MX platform, our security appliance, but across all of our products. I mean, just embedding best in class encryption, best in class mobile device management, policy protection across all our products. The simpler you make it the more likely we are that people are really using all of it, right? And being as secure as they can be. >> Just to follow up on that, in the keynote this morning, Chuck Robbins was talking about how cloud was supposed to be this promise of simple, but now it's multi-apps. And you know how many different SaaS providers, I've got multiple public clouds, it's not getting any simpler. You talk about the vision for the network, I should be able to take all of them and put them together, so will it really be simple or will Cisco be able to just weave together all of these various options? >> Yeah, I think Chuck really has it right here. I remember when everyone talked about the cloud as this thing that would be infinitely simple and now whenever I talk to a startup getting started, the very first thing they have to buy, even before they figure out what CRM they're gonna use or sales force or whatever, the first thing they try to figure out is first we need a single sign on multi-cloud authentication solution. We're like, "That is not simple." That's the first thing that you have to think about and it's not simple. Yeah, we got, I think we got away from that as different cloud solutions became so prolific, there was no real best practice and best standards, and especially as we start to try to connect these enterprise sites into these clouds, that's what really makes them sort of, makes the multi-cloud world complex, and it's that connection where I think Cisco's gonna drive the most value. It's about bringing all of our physical sites to the cloud in the most secure way and the most performant way. >> And the developers who had Greenfield or startups they have to worry about that existing complexity in the cloud, so that's an obvious check for the cloud, but also the developers, their roles are changing I wanna get into that with you because we saw people playing with the Meraki switches at the last DevNet Create, but before we get into that I wanna ask you, just to get it on the record, explain to the folks out there that haven't gotten the update on Meraki, what is the Meraki team doing? What is it? What are you guys focused on? What's your mission for Meraki? Take a minute to say, just put that out there. >> Sure, yeah, our mission at Meraki is to simplify powerful technology so passionate people can focus on their true mission, whether that mission is technology for education or retail or hospitality. They shouldn't spend all their time just building the most sophisticated three tier switching network or whatever. They should spend their time really focused on their true mission and we can we can let them do that by taking this powerful technology at Cisco and making it simple. >> And it's software, hardware, what's the product? >> Exactly, yeah. And so my aspiration is to do that for all IT infrastructure so for IT shops that wanna focus on technology for their mission, I wanna try to make kind of keeping the lights on, making their basic technology work as simple as possible. And so we have WiFi and switching. We have SD-WAN routing and a security appliance. We have mobile device management. And we have actual surveillance and security cameras, which more and more are being used for IoT cameras. And all of this is all managed from Meraki's dashboard from a single native cloud experience. So we sell the hardware, of course, but our flagship product is the cloud itself, Meraki Dashboard and it gives you that true 100% native cloud management experience, single pane of glass, and most importantly, simplicity value proposition. It is the simplest to manage, simplest to monitor IT system in the world. >> And that's the cloud operation, that's the scale that kind of ties into the themes? >> Absolutely. >> Okay, now switching gears I wanna get your thoughts on this vision I've been hearing about, this 80/20. What is this 80/20 rule that you have? Could you just take a minute to explain what it is, why is it important, and where's the relevance and impact for enterprises? >> Sure, yeah the Meraki 80/20 rule if you're a developer at Meraki, software developer, and the day you get to Meraki we tell you our development principles and one of them, a bit of an important one, is our 80/20 rule so we build a pretty broad portfolio at Meraki, wireless switching, routing, all this network stuff and with that we wanna be, in the areas that we compete, we wanna be a complete solution for our customers. But we realized that's impossible, right? So the way we sort of guide our engineers is say, we want you to be a complete solution for 80% of the customers, right? And for a lot of smaller businesses and schools and even government agencies, that's great. That's great. For those customers Meraki is a very complete solution. It has every function they would ever want. But I don't want my engineering team scrambling around trying to build every vertical specific feature in the world this healthcare feature, that retail feature, this hospitality feature. So instead, the Meraki 80/20 rule says, for those last 20% of customers, especially the biggest, most sophisticated customers, for them, the Meraki 80% is probably gonna be only part of the total solution and we open up our platform. We open up all of our APIs using things like Cisco DevNet and we bring in a world, a universe of developers both our customers who actually have developers and can develop to our platform as well as all of our technology partners who build these applications on top and that 80/20 rule, really is how our engineers decide what to build and what to open up through the APIs and how to build this kind of ecosystem of development partners that expand ours. >> So the 20% you're enabling, because what I think I hear you saying is that 20% of those clients, customers are gonna have full stack engineering staffs. They're gonna have maybe complexity that might have to figure out in those APIs is where you guys wanna keep that open, but not predicate certain things, is that right? >> Yeah, well, I think the 20% come in two categories. There's the group that builds so they have like a full stack engineering team and they can build their own custom application for hotel management or for university student enablement or whatever it is, but then there's another group, they buy, right, so they want something very retail specific, but instead of trying to build it, they buy it from a partner. We have tons of application development partners who built on top of the Meraki API and they have awesome solutions. And you can check them all out on DevNet or on Meraki.IO. >> Todd, looking forward a little bit, there's a lot of discussion around 5G and what that will mean for network connectivity. I was joking with you before we started. Some people are like, "Well, hey, we won't even need WiFi "in the future because 5G's just gonna plaster the globe "with infinite bandwidth and will be lovely." So what's your take? >> Oh, I'll tell you. I'm super excited about 5G. So we think about 5G a lot as like the next generation of cellular connectivity, but the standard goes far, far beyond that. In fact, it gives a pretty prescriptive, and I hope, I hope this will really come true, it gives a pretty prescriptive recipe for how WiFi can be part of the 5G network. And finally, we'll be able to get all of these indoor networks unified on a single technology, but bringing all of those service provider, Authentication Service Provider Services, we're starting to see that with service providers who support voice over WiFi, right? But I think we're gonna see a whole universe of far more integration and really far more seamless service provider connectivity once 5G and all of the hooks into the WiFi network really start to work. We used to call this the Hotspot 2.0 and I'll be honest with you, I think they're gonna call it Hotspot 3.0. (laughing) But I think 5G is really gonna be the time when we start to see it really, really in action. >> The conductivity piece is critical for IoT. We're seeing machine learning and AI be critical. What's your vision for how machine learning and artificial intelligence is gonna bring in to impact smart cities, smart homes, because as you get to that next step-- >> Yeah. >> I got the connectivity, got the pervasiveness. Now I need application, I need security. I need to have a clean user experience. What's the thoughts on how Meraki is gonna deliver that? What's your vision? >> Yeah, look, there are times when the machines are gonna do better than the people and I think we all, with varying degrees of comfort, are gonna come to this realization, right? And the network is one great example, like we just released Meraki Wireless Health and Meraki Insight and these are both assurance products that are designed around an AI core. The machines are gonna be better at scrolling through radius logs and SNMP traps and all kinds of different data to find those anomalies to see what's going wrong. And we should expect them to do that. We should not do that stuff anymore. The system, the cloud, the Meraki Dashboard can do the heavy lifting for us, it can help diagnose when we're sick and help prescribe the cure because that type of AI is gonna have a far better understanding of all of that information, that massive amount of data that you have to sort through to come up to the right conclusions, but for smart cities, and I am super excited about that space. I mean, we launched this camera portfolio and we've been driving a ton of machine learning into it right now and I got to watch the cameras like learn how to count human beings using machine learning, and it's amazing. >> Mind blowing. >> It is mind blowing to see machine learning at work, especially in the learning phase, and now that this technology can be put in the hands of Meraki customers which is so easy to deploy and takes like, it just is for everyone now. It's not just for the people with massive data centers, GPU farms, and all that stuff. Anyone can deploy this and we can track people using cameras. I think it's finally gotten to the point where it's like, okay, we can realize maybe human beings shouldn't be staring at camera feeds all day. The machines will be better at that for us and that's I really think just the beginning, counting people, understanding where your traffic is, where there's congestion, having the cities start to become smarter over time I think the only gonna, It's only gonna make us all-- >> It augments the reality of having a human do it, but humans still might be involved. Todd, thanks for spending the time. I know you're super busy here at the conference. Thanks for coming on. I wanna get final question for you, kinda end the segment. Take a step back and kinda think about the customer interactions you've had with your customers. Share some anecdotes. People watch say, "Hey, this Meraki thing, "I wanna get to know more of it. "This sounds cool." They might be, wanna kick the tires, might wanna jump headfirst into the deep end and explore. Share some anecdotal feedback you've heard. What are people saying? What our customers saying? "Man that's the best thing since sliced bread." I mean what are some of the things that you've heard from customers? Share a few sound bites of customer reactions after using Meraki. >> It's funny I met with a Fortune 500 company this morning and they deployed Meraki at all their branches, like a full stack Meraki site, and he said in his entire time at that company, he's only been hugged after one project and it was for bringing Meraki to the company. And I think people are really reacting to this idea that powerful technology can be simple. And if you do that, your team can be freed up to do what they really want and your users can be cared for actually at a higher level, right? And simplicity unlocks that. We've had customers who are shocked at how wide the SD-WAN deployments are in Meraki, how dense the auditorium and even stadium WiFi is. I was just talking to a customer right out here who's really blown away by how much of the portfolio, how much the technology's opened up using the APIs that we're teaching folks about a DevNet right now. And I guess my only, just thinking back to when we spoke last which is like a year and two months ago, I can't believe it's only been that short of time. It's only been a year because where Meraki's come in the last year, I guess the only thing I'd ask for your audience is, hey, give it give it a look. >> And you're giving away free switches here too. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Gotta get your hands on Todd. Thanks and congratulations on your success, making things easy, reducing the steps it takes to do stuff and it's really good business model. >> Yeah, thank you. Simplicity is great, guys. >> Alright, Todd. He's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Meraki team. Really changing the game. Cloud scale, cloud simplicity, running workloads and data across the cloud native and on-site on-premise activity. It's theCUBE here, bringing all the action in Orlando. We've got a bit more, stay with us after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Had SUMMIT 2018, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here in San Francisco at Red Hat SUMMIT 2018. I'm John Furrier with my co-host John Troyer. Our next guest is Arkady Kanevsky, Ph.D, Director Software Development at Dell EMC, Service Provider Business Unit. Thanks for joining us, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me here. >> So we were just talking before we came on, obviously great, we're in the middle of the open here in the hall, in Moscone West. But you guys have a definition of service providers. It's very broad. It's obviously Dell EMC, you guys, Dell's tons of equipment that they sell, providing a lot of the equipment What does that, just take a quick second to describe who you guys are targeting, and your role here at Red Hat SUMMIT? >> Sure so we are a small portion within the Dell EMC portfolio and the organization I am in specifically creating a target and a solution for service providers. The service provider, you know the probably best known service providers are telecommunication service providers, AT&T, Verizon, Telestrom, you know all over the world. Very highly regulated areas, and have been around forever, and they are going through the major transformation right now from the 4G to 5G, network age, and so on. But we are also covering the much larger set of the providers. If you can think of the hosted service provider, managed service providers, those are the people who either have as a core of their business, providing the services for their customers. If you can think of the eBay, or Amazon, or Google, they have the services which are, they're running public cloud or not a public cloud for general sense, but for specific purpose which they're delivering, SalesForce, >> Yeah everyone's a service provider. If they're using cloud, they're some sort of service provider right? >> If they're delivering they're volume through the service, then they are the service providers. If you are, you know you have the businesses which are still doing the business the way they were doing before. Banks are not really service providers. They are not them, and yes they communicate with their customers through the portals, but that's not the purpose of their business. >> It's great now in 2018, we are gettin' some clarity on cloud right. We thought maybe it was all into public, now we see that actually there's a lot of use cases for smaller public clouds, hybrid clouds, private clouds depending on peoples needs. I'm curious how the service provider world, specifically like the MSBs, and the telcos of the world, are looking at how, what kinds of clouds they're going to provide, and maybe also how they partner with the bigger clouds. >> So there is a different angle there. So people, a lot of the work being done in a public cloud, initially when they try to do the development of their new application because it's the easiest way for them to do it, but once you hit the next level and you need to deliver it as a service in a special and more regulated environment, where we have certain strict security requirement. You want to protect access to the data. A lot of the time they kind of do the hybrid, go on the hybrid model because it's much more, they have better control of what they're doing. I mean some of the announcement and some of the demos, we showed that today in the keynote today and two days ago, we're clearly demonstrating this kind of approach. So we are partnering with Red Hat over developing the optimized platforms for the development and operation of those applications. All the way from RHEL Linux layer all the way up to OpenShift and beyond? >> All the way, we announced on Monday that we have our seventh joint version of Red Hat OpenStack already bundled. This is the first one where we start providing the workload optimized host, such that customer can choose to optimize from the hardware, to the operating system, to the OpenStack for their specific workload. We have a profile, pre-defined profile for NFE and we have a pre-defined profile for web based application, and of course it's open sourced, and extendible, flexible, and provide what customer expecting for their own use cases. >> How 'about the relationship between Dell, now Dell EMC, now Dell Technologies, and a variety of other things, the relationship with Red Hat. How long, how many years, how deep? How would you describe the relationship time-wise, and just duration, and depth? >> Very happy to, so we start our relationship 18 years ago, in 2001 was the first release of the laptops and the servers with a pre-installed program that on the factory, and Dell, at that time Dell was OEMing that solution for the customers. Over the years since that we started developing more and more solutions for different customer domain. We have HPC based solution, again URL based. We have SAP, we have Oracle, and variety of different Hadoop Open, Hadoop variation of the Hadoop, again on the base RHEL platforms. And most recently the OpenStack over the last five years. At the Dell Technology World last week, we announced all of the OpenShift on bare metal as a joint solution between the two companies. We have the OpenShift on OpenStack which we announced two years ago, still supportable and delivered to our customers. So the goal for us is to provide the flexibility and choices for the customers. >> What's the unique value for customers that you guys bring to the table? What's the unique value with the Red Hat relationship that's the most important? >> So the most important is the robustness of the integrated solutions, and the two companies together standing behind them. So they can go either to Red Hat or to Dell EMC and we together delivering of the solution. It is robust, it is still open and flexible, but it is also optimized all the way from hardware to the top layer of the software for their use cases. >> So customers are concerned, obviously we saw Spectre bug, and all this stuff going on with security. Red Hat customers, they're not micro-coders, I mean they have to upgrade. You guys have to take that responsibility at the hardware level, and some great certification, we know that. Going forward as the stacks become robust from, you know down to the chip level, up through applications, well you've got DevOps, you've got all these cool things happening. How are you guys keeping up with the pace to mitigate security risks and continuing the partnership? What's the story of the customer? What should they know about that particular piece? >> So obviously we are taking care of security on multiple layers from the micro-code, as you pointed out, in the solution partnering not only with Red Hat but with Intel and the hardware vendors to ensure that all of the mitigated, mitigation factors are put into place for security. But most importantly we are providing the tooling to make the benching and fixes in automated way without any disruption to the workloads which customer are running. Or minimizing the disruption for the workload so you can do all of your securities updates and for that matter, upgrades of the solution in such a way that you're minimizing the disruption for your customers. >> Okay so security, obviously hugely important. One of the themes of this event has been talking to the IT audience about kind of up-leveling digital, but you can call it digital transformation, but actually bringing more business value, and that's been really well received here as you realize all the demos, faster time to market, more business value, faster time to value. So as you talk with the customers here, and service providers. What are they asking you as a director of the software stack that has to, that you could look at as just the bottom of the stack, but in fact is hugely important to what they're doing. So what are you having to provide from the Dell side to help that acceleration? >> So the most important thing that our customer looking for is partnership. They're looking for us working with Intel, with Red Hat, and with partners specific to their area, to do together integration, and so we can provide the support and lifecyle of the solutions. >> John T: You're part of the rubber hits the road. They buy the unit, and the system, and the software from you. It better be all integrated and work. >> Correct, so again they go on this Oz with Red Hat because they want to have a flexibility so they can add more things, but what they're looking for, especially teleco providers, they would like Oz to partner all the way down to the next level-up with NFE lenders. The people who are providing them virtualized functions, so they can bring that to the solution and have level of confidence and you know peace of mind, that all of those pieces have been integrated together, validated together, and we have a continuous program where we take care of them of the full upgrade and lifecyle of not individual pieces, but the whole thing. >> Once your customers know about your relationship with Red Hat, want to get to the end of the statement, which is really even important. 'Cause I think this is important. We're seeing more and more security go from chip, to the OS, to the application layer. There's going to be more and more of that, and you got to evolve your relationship and technology. >> Yes. >> What should they know about Dell, Dell Technologies, Dell EMC, Dell proper and that's most important for them to understand, what you guys do for customers. >> So one of the most important things to understand, now we are Dell Technology. We have been Dell Technology for about a year and a lot of the integration pieces start being mature and now we can have a joint integrate solution. One of the big piece of the Dell Technology portfolio is RSA. They're probably the oldest and the most established security company in the world. And we are getting more and more integration of their tool sets into various solutions across the board. And that probably is the unique value which we as a Dell Technology can provide because we have individual pieces which are leaders in their specific field and we can put all of those pieces together to have the value to the customers through one place. >> That's exciting, well thanks for coming on and sharing the insight. We love Michael Dell, been a big fan, and Michael's been on theCUBE many times. He listens, he's probably watching right now. Hey Michael, how are you? Sorry I missed Dell EMC World, or Dell World, but John was there with Stu. Great to have you on. We've seen continuous success and a lot of skeptics on that merger, or the mergers, or the whole thing, and Pivotal just went public. Things are happening. >> Definitely, exciting time to live in. >> Yeah, thanks for coming on. More live coverage here in San Francisco at Red Hat SUMMIT 2018. I'm John Furrier, John Troyer, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018 here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Kevin Shatzkamer, who's the Vice President of Service Provider Strategy and Solutions with Dell EMC. Kevin thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, so first time on the program, give us a little bit about your background, you know, what brought you to the Dell family of technical companies. >> Sure, absolutely. I've been in the service provider industry, supporting and working with service providers, about 20 years, working in areas first at the launch of 2G mobile data services, 3G, 4G. Now, we're at the advent of 5G. And during the entire time what we've continued to witness is this continued move away from proprietary more towards open technologies, obviously moving away from proprietary hardware appliances more towards X86-based appliances. The networking stacks moving more and more open in the last 18 months. During my journey here at Dell EMC, it was an opportunity to really come in and recognize Dell EMC and Dell Technologies family of companies as the foundational technologies for how we watch the telco industry really transform itself and start to embrace IT transformation into their own operations. >> Yeah, that's a great background. Keith and I had a great discussion with Tom Burns talking about networking. We've been watching the open networking feeds, but we haven't gotten into all the G's as much. Explain to our audience, we've got Interrupt down the street, we've done coverage of Mobile World Congress, but 5G, some of the standards are there, but some of the things are going to sort out. These type of transitions do take years to go, but why so important and how does Dell play into the story? >> I think if we go back towards kind of the 2012 timeframe, I think there were two acronyms that really came to the forefront. It was SDN and it was NFV. And at the time it was really discussed in the lens of how we saw the second half of 4G materializing and recognizing that for the second half of 4G with the early days of IoT, the economics of how you operate the network needed to change drastically. We saw some of that start to happen when we look at NFV in the industry, I think there's a little bit of trough of disillusionment out there, and I think we see some use cases that have been successful. We've seen some challenges in terms of operationalizing NFV at scale. I think SDN to date has really been confined to sitting within the data center or interconnecting servers and building overlay technologies for the data centers. But what I expect to see now as we go into 5G is not the need for incremental improvement but the need for an absolute step function in terms of performance, in terms of reliability, in terms of reduction in latency, all at a drastically different cost economics. So now when we start to think about the second wave of NFV and we think about SDN leaving the data center, I think that's where we're going to see 5G really play a lead. From taking some of the technologies we've been talking about in siloed pockets and really see them move to scaled operations. >> So, you mentioned a lot of the telco space and in this environment, I've got familiarity with how EMC used to work with the service providers. Dell, of course you know, plays up and down and all over the place. What's the relationship with the telcos and the service providers from the Dell family? >> I think when Dell Technology speaks about the four transformations, we talk about workforce transformation, IT transformation, digital transformation and security transformation. I think all of those are opportunities for the telcos and service providers in two ways. One, is recognizing that their own network operations are transforming and that embracing the concepts of the IT transformation inside of their own operations, obviously with the telco grade reliability, is an area that we work very closely with the telecos and SPs around. The second part is recognizing that the digital transformation and the shift towards digital for most of small medium business will be recognized through service providers, through cloud technologies. So the second way we work very closely with these service providers is helping them build the services that allow them to capture digital transformation as it moves off-prem into the cloud. >> Can you provide some clarity or vision into the service provider space, when it comes to the need for innovation to make that step transformation to 5G? With an enterprise we can see VMware NSX and we're blown away by it and that's way beyond what a lot of customers need, but there's still a lot of work to go through to your point. What are some of those innovations that have to happen? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think if you're at Mobile World Congress and just about any tradeshow event, and even Michael Dell's keynote this morning at Dell Technologies World, the conversation of the edge came up. I think that there's still a lot of debate around what the edge is, and I know that the conversation came up around distribution of compute. But I think that the conversation is really around decentralization. If we've looked over the last five years as cloud services like AWS and Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, various others, have really been built. They've been built around a model that said that to achieve efficiency and scale you have to build massively scaled centralized data centers. Now it turns out that low latency, highly interactive services that are very data driven just don't work well when the distance between the applications and the users consuming those applications is really large. Latency is too high, jitter's too high, it's a little bit too unpredictable. I think that the number one iteration, the number one innovation that we will see in the network's is the innovation at the edge. Now, the edge can be on-prem, it can sit on-prem at stadiums and venues. It can sit at the cell site, it can sit in the mobile backbone network, it can sit at central office locations. I think what we'll continue to see is recognition of, not necessarily, if you build it, they will come model, but recognition that there is a class of services and applications that the edge just makes sense to rally around. And we'll see the edge become the new cloud. >> We talk about NFV, the edge, shed some light, what would a CPE device look like at the edge? Is that NFV running on the customer's virtualized infrastructure, is that truly some x86 box that the service provider puts in place that's provided by Dell? Paint a clearer picture, I hope, for the edge. >> So the answer is yes. >> Keith: I was afraid you'd say that, It's a CPE that sits on the branch and at the enterprise prem right. Dell EMC and Mobile World Congress and most recently announced our Virtual Edge Platform family of products with the first platform being the Virtual Edge Platform 4600. The industry's first Skylake-D platform, specifically targeting the access and branch edge. But in addition to that, I think that what we're going to see is in the central office locations the boundaries between what is a compute device and what is a network device really start to blur. That modular servers, that include x86 and merchant silicon and FPGA to terminate certain circuit switch workloads, like cloud LAN and smart NICs to be able to process data on the NIC itself are really going to start to come to the forefront. Maybe we see GPU start to be included in that as well for more machine learning and artificial intelligence use cases. But I think that going forward the end goal of the programmability that we talked about, both at the application layer as well as at the infrastructure layer, means that the boundaries between what's a server, and what's a network device, really start to blur. >> Last question I have for you. When I talk to service providers, it feels like that they're being pulled from both sides. On the one side, there's public cloud, lots of them are figuring out how to do direct connect, work to integrate into those services for VMware's partnering with them on that. On the other side, there's all this edge stuff that you've been talking about. You know, massive footprint and there's so many pieces that they need to think about. What do you hear from your customers? What's their biggest challenges and opportunities that they're facing? >> Yeah, I think you're right. I think that when customers are being torn and service providers are being torn in the way that they are, they somewhat retreat to an or mindset, right. Is it this or this, do I live in the public cloud or do I live at my edge? Do I live in an open source environment or do I embrace technologies coming from industry vendors? I think more and more what we're seeing is a transition to an end environment and recognition that certain applications and workloads are well suited to reside in particular locations. Michael said in his keynote this morning that the cloud is not a place, it's a business model. I think that what we actually see is even extending that thought a little further, is that the cloud is just a whole bunch of different places. We're going to move services and applications and workloads to the locations that are best able to meet the subscriber experience and deliver on what the applications expect. >> Kevin, really appreciate your help giving us an instant insight into one of the more dynamic pieces of the IT industry. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Dell World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, this is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018 here in Las Vegas, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest Kevin Shatzkamer who's the vice president of Service Provider Strategy and Solution with Dell EMC. Kevin, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, so, first time on the program. Give us a little bit about your background, you know what brought you to the Dell family of tech companies. >> Sure, absolutely. So I've been in the service provider industry, supporting and working with service providers, gosh, about 20 years. Working in areas first at the launch of 2G mobile data services, 3G, 4G, now we're at the advent of 5G, and during the entire time, what we've continued to witness is continued move away from proprietary more towards open technologies, obviously moving away from proprietary hardware appliances, more towards x86 based appliances, the networking stacks moving more and more open. In the last 18 months, during my journey here at Dell EMC it was an opportunity to really come in and recognize Dell EMC and Dell Technologies' family of companies as the foundational technologies for how we watch the telco industry really transform itself and start to embrace IT transformation to their own operations. >> Great background. Keith and I had a great discussion with Tom Burns about networking. We've been watching the open networking piece. But we haven't gotten into all the Gs as much, so explain to our audience, you know, we've got interrupt down the street, we've done coverage of Mobile World Congress, but, 5G, some of the standards are there, some of the things are going to sort out. These types of transitions do take years to go, but why so important and how does Dell play into the story? >> Yeah I think, you know, if we go back towards kind of the 2012 timeframe, I think there were two acronyms that really came to the forefront. It was SDN and it was NFV, and at the time it was really discussed in the lens of how we saw the second half of 4G materializing and recognizing that for the second half of 4G, with the early days of IoT, the economics of how you operate the networks needed to change drastically. So we saw some of that start to happen. When we look at NFV in the industry, I think there's a little bit of trough of disillusionment out there. I think we see some use cases that have been successful. We've seen some challenges in terms of operationalizing NFV at scale. I think SDN to date has really been confined to sitting within the data center for interconnecting servers and building overlay technologies for the data centers. But what I expect to see now as we go into 5G is not the need for incremental improvement, but the need for an absolute step function in terms of performance, in terms of reliability, in terms of reduction in latency, all at a drastically different cost economics. So now when we start to think about the second wave of NFV, and we think about SDN leaving the data center, I think that's where we're going to see 5G really play a lead, from taking some of the technologies we've been talking about in siloed pockets and really seeing them move to scaled operations. >> So you mentioned a lot of the telco space in this environment. I've got familiarity with how EMC used to work with the service providers. Dell, of course, plays up and down and all over the place. What's the relationship with the telcos and the service providers from the Dell family? >> Yeah, I think when Dell Technologies speaks about the four transformations, we talk about workforce transformation, IT transformation, digital transformation, and security transformation, I think all of those are opportunities for the telcos and service providers in two ways. One is recognizing that their own network operations are transforming and that embracing the concepts of the IT transformation inside of their own operations, obviously with the telco grade reliability is an area that we work very closely with the telcos and SPs around. The second part is recognizing that the digital transformation and the shift towards digital for most of small-medium business will be recognized through service providers, through cloud technologies. So the second way we work very closely with these service providers is helping them build the services that allow them to capture digital transformation as it moves off-prem into the cloud. >> So Kevin can you help provide some clarity or vision into the service provider space when it comes to the need for innovation to make that step transformation to 5G? In the enterprise, you know, we can see (mumbles) we're blown away by it and that's way beyond what a lot of customers need, but there's still a lot of work to go through, to your point. What are some of those innovations that have to happen? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think if you're at Mobile World Congress, just about any trade show event, and even Michael Dell's keynote this morning at Dell Technologies World, the conversation of the edge came up. I think that there's still a lot of debate around what the edge is, and I know that the conversation came up around distribution of compute. But I think that the conversation is really around decentralization. So if we've looked over the last five years as cloud services like AWS and Microsoft Azure, IBM Softlayer, various others, have really been built, they've been built around a model that to achieve efficiency in scale, you have to build massively scaled centralized data centers. Now, it turns out that low latency, highly interactive services that are very data driven just don't work well when the distance between the applications and the users consuming those applications is really large. Latency is too high, jitter's too high. It's a little bit too unpredictable. So I think that the number one iteration, the number one innovation that we will see in the networks is the innovation at the edge. Now, the edge can be on-prem, it can sit on-prem at stadiums and venues. It can sit at the cell site. It can sit in the mobile backhaul network. It can sit at central office locations. And I think what we'll continue to see is recognition of not necessarily a if you build it they will come model, but recognition that there is a class of services and applications that the edge just makes sense to rally around, and we'll see the edge become the new cloud. >> So as we talk about NFV, the edge, shed some light. What would the CPE device look like at the edge. Is that NFV running on a customer's virtualized infrastructure? Is that truly some x86 box that the service provider puts in place that's provided by Dell? Paint a clearer picture, I hope, for the edge. >> So the answer is yes. >> Keith: (laughs) How dare you say that? >> It's a CPE that sits on the branch and at the enterprise prem, and Dell EMC and Mobile World Congress and most recently announced our Virtual Edge Platform family of products with the first platform being the Virtual Edge Platform 4600. The industry's first Skylake D platform specifically targeting the access of branch edge. But in addition to that, I think that what we're going to see is in the central office locations, the boundaries between what is a compute device and what is a network device really start to blur. And that modular servers that include x86, and merchant silicon, and FPGA to terminate certain circuit switch workloads like Cloud-RAN and SmartNICs to be able to process data on the NIC itself are really going to start to come to the forefront. Maybe we see GPUs start to be included in that as well for more machine learning and artificial intelligence use cases. But I think that going forward, the end goal of the programmability that we talk about, both at the application layer as well as at the infrastructure layer, means that the boundaries between what's a server and what's a network device really start to blur. >> Kevin, last question I have for you: when I talk to service providers it feels like they're being pulled from both sides, so on the one side there's public cloud. Lots of them are figuring out how to do direct connect, work integrate into those services for VMwares, partnering with them on that. And on the other side, there's all this edge stuff that you've been talking about. Massive footprint, and, you know, so many pieces that they need to think about. What do you hear from your customers? What's their biggest challenges and opportunities that they're facing? >> Yeah, I think you're right. I think that when customers are being torn and service providers are being torn in the way that they are, they somewhat retreat to an "or" mindset. Is it this or this, right? Do I live in the public cloud or do I live at my edge? Do I live in an open source environment or do I embrace technologies coming from industry vendors, right? And I think more and more what we're seeing is a transition to an "and" environment and recognition that certain applications and workloads are well suited to reside in particular locations. Michael said in his keynote this morning that the cloud is not a place, it's a business model. And I think that what we actually see is, even extending that thought a little further, is that the cloud is just a whole bunch of different places, and we're going to move services and applications and workloads to the locations that are best able to meet the subscriber experience and deliver on what the applications expect. >> Kevin, really appreciate you help giving us some insight into one of the more dynamic pieces of the IT industry. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Dell World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, this is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Berlin, Germany It's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017 Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2017, here in Berlin, Germany. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Peter Burris. We are joined by Tim Pitcher, he is the Vice President, Next-Generation Data Centre for NetApp. Thanks so much for coming on the program. It's an absolute pleasure, it's a pleasure to be here. So let's start just defining for our viewers the Next-Generation Data Centre, how it's built, how it's founded. Yeah so, if you think about NetApp today we think about our customers really consuming technology in three ways. We've got sort of more, we're modernizing traditional data centers and architectures using data management and flash storage and these sorts of things and this really is our back yard, this is what we've been doing for years and years, been incredibly successful at it. And the big disrupter in many ways is Cloud and so our partnerships with the major hyperscalers are critically important to us as well. But there's a third piece to the jigsaw which is the Next-Generation Data Centre and the way we think about that is that if you imagine that you want to use Cloud services but you want to do a lot of that yourself, you want to take advantage of the sort of simple, scalable, automated nature of Cloud then that's really what we're delivering in the Next-Generation Data Centre for our customers. So the Next-Generation Data Centre is being driven by technology advances, business requirements, the realities of data, what are the practical things that are driving, or indicating, the steps that people should take as they think about new technology and new business practices? I mean, the big driver is really to remove a lot of complexity from their business so if you think about going to the Cloud, you're making a really very simple consumption choice. You're saying I'm going to consume data and services from the public Cloud environment and that drives a similar behavior inside large organizations as well, organizations of all sizes. So they're thinking about how do they build private Cloud, take advantage of both with a hybrid Cloud environment, or they can have multiple public Cloud instances as well. So they're thinking about it all very differently and they're thinking about the most appropriate services that they're trying to deliver or the most appropriate way to deliver that application or that data set, if you will, to their customers. So it's not like everything needs to be in one place, and also critically customers very often want to change that as well so they'll make a decision to put something in a public cloud, it might not be the best fit over time for whatever reason, so they want to bring it back in house and deliver that on their own infrastructure and when they do that they want to take advantage, they like what they've had in the Cloud so they want to put that on premise. So the real drive is they really want simplicity, they're really focused on a much more performant outcome that's focused on simplicity focused on how you scale your business and being able to have truly multi-tenant environments that give you the predictability of your traditional architectures if you will, the architectures you know well and have been using for a long time. You want to be able to do that in a Cloud like environment because you the economics of Cloud but you get the predictability of dedicated environments. So which of the customers that you work with are in fact executing this Next-Generation Data Centre strategy most beautifully in your opinion? Well so, if you think about the strategy that NetApp has for our Next-Gen Data Centre is really based on two companies that they acquired. One is Object Storage platform called StorageGRID Webscale the other one is SolidFire. Which, SolidFire was a young, emerging, hot technology company that was focused on delivering what I've just articulated, simple technologies, simple storage platform operated at scale, completely automated and SolidFire was born out of a service provider, born out of a service provider at the same time as OpenStack so it's kind of unique in that perspective. The company was formed to solve a problem and the problem that Rackspace really were looking to solve was how do they take their managed service clients and move them into the Cloud, what's stopping them doing that? And the answer is obviously customers worry about security and things like that but the key thing that was really stopping them was their concern about performance. So if I'm going to share, put all my stuff in with everybody else's, in a shared environment, how do I know I'm going to get what I'm paying for how do I know that I'm not going to have somebody else's applications consume all the services that are going to be given to me? So as a consequence, this was the thing that prevented people going to the Cloud so this is what the company formed to fix so SolidFire came out of that and that's our background and that's why NetApp acquired us because very different way of looking at things so as a consequence service providers are really at the forefront of how they deliver services to their customers and they leveraged SolidFire and we were very successful as an independent company selling to service providers and have been increasingly successful now that we're part of NetApp. Our very first customer for example is in Jersey and is still a very happy NetApp customer, a company called Calligo and they offer tiered services all on SolidFire, trusted Cloud services in and off-shore kind of environment they're focused on the financial services community and things like that. And now we have also major services providers like 1and1 in Germany, which is one of the largest services providers in Europe, long time NetApp customer and they're a SolidFire customer for their public Cloud services as well for the Cloud that they offer. And in the UK as well, Interoute, major service provider. What I like about them is one, they deal with a massive amount of traffic, they've got a huge network so very traffic intensive, but also they really take advantage of NetApp being, sorry, SolidFire being part of NetApp now so they use the on-tap base products in their manage services which those products are optimized for that kind of environment but for their Cloud environment where they're offering tiered services they use SolidFire so they've got us on both sides of the house if you will and so its a great example of SolidFire being part of NetApp, why that's so powerful, why that's so successful. And companies like Internet Solutions in South Africa is one major service provider in South Africa, big consumer of SolidFire and now is part of NetApp, it's a much better place for them because we've got a big business in South Africa, we're very successful there, so we're part of that team now and they go from strength to strength. So now the next challenge is taking some of the best practices that have emerged from what you've learned from working with these service providers and transferring them to other industries. Yeah so, we're seeing a lot in Fin-tech right now, Farmer is a good market for us, Astrozeneca uses SolidFire so a great example of one of NetApps long-term and major customers that's now consuming products and services from other business units and other offerings that we have across a much broader portfolio so they're very happy customers now. That's part of our global account business. Business Wire in the UAE is another example of a successful business transformation that they're doing as well. We've seen a lot of activity in Dev-ops, these products are perfect for Dev-ops because they're so simple, they don't require management they're completely automated, you're not building those large infrastructures of people to support these environments. And it's much quicker to be able to launch applications because of the simple nature of the technology you can launch applications, new products, new services so your time to market is an awful lot quicker as well. Great, well thanks so much for coming on the show Tim, it's been really fun talking to you. It's been a pleasure, thanks very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, we will have more from NetApp Insight just after this. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here at VMworld 2017 day three wrap-up. We're going to wrap up the whole show. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, Keith Townsend. Cube, set, two sets of coverage. Guys, great job, we have Justin Warren as well, John Troyer, Lisa Martin. Great team, guys, amazing. Three days, a lot of content, wall-to-wall coverage. Double barrel shotgun of Cube content. Amazing. What's left in the tank? Let's get this done. Dave, your thoughts as VMworld comes down to a close. >> Well, so I missed VMworld last year as you know, 'cause I was doing another show. Pat was giving me a lot of grief for that. But if I go back two years ago, two years ago VMware was shrinking. Its license revenue was in decline. Its cloud strategy was in continued disarray. Customers were kind of, you know, losing a lot of faith. >> John: Ecosystem was in turmoil. >> And the world thought that Amazon was going to completely destroy this company. Fast forward two years later, license growth, you know, 12-13%, the company's growing. It's nearly eight billion dollars, three billion dollars of operating cash, big stock buybacks, clarity on the cloud and, I think, and I'd love for Keith's opinion on this, a recognition of the customers that "I can't just throw everything in the cloud." Okay, that's one thing, but what I can do is try to bring the cloud model to my data, and AW, I mean Amazon, sorry, VMware is going to be a partner in doing that. And I think those have all been tailwinds along with some product cycles and some >> John: And Dell Technologies buying out from the federation which was taking on water. Let's not forget. Let's not forget about the federation EMC owned VMware and that was bought by Dell. >> People talk about the Dell discount. I'm not seeing the Dell discount right now. >> What is a Dell discount? What does that mean? >> The Dell discount is because Dell owns VMware, just like when EMC owned VMware, it somehow shackles them and depresses the value. Michael obviously doesn't agree. >> So product focus as well has been not diminished at all. The products are front and center. They still got the sessions. Guys, on the product side, what's your view? >> Strong product offering. I really love the message they want. A lot of the response from the community was like, "Pat is feeling energized." He has this shadow of what is going to happen post-acquisition. Is there going to be a Dell discount? You know what? VMware, you know, famously, five years ago, Pat was onstage. He said he's going to double down on virtualization. He jettisoned Pivotal, and we were all wondering, "What is he doing?" Proved over the long run he was right. Last year, this year, he's doubled down, not on just virtualization, but on this concept of SDDC. And it's finally starting to pay off. We're seeing consistently this concept of VCF. VMware cloud foundation on premises, off prem, and even in AWS, ironically. You know, three or four years ago, we were like, well, is OpenStack going to eat VMware's lunch? VMware has turned the tables and become that OpenStack layer, that consistent cloud layer, at least for that legacy type of way to do IT. Taking your internal data center processes and moving them to the cloud consistently across their vCAN network in the AWS. >> So if I get this right, you're basically saying that VMware essentially went from a position where they're twisting in the wind at all levels, turmoil in every department, every, house is on fire, to pulling one major bold bet, grab it out of the hat, kicking ass, taking names, Pat Gelsinger and team made good calls. >> You know what, I'm not a fan of calling what VMware's SDDC thing a private cloud. I don't think it's true private cloud. It is valuable to the infrastructure, but it's not private cloud, but customers love the message. Take what I'm doing now, check an easy box, move it into AWS or vCAN and it's resonating. >> Well certainly, Stu just gave you the eye dagger, 'cause Stu, the true private cloud report from Wikibon, which has been going viral at the show, been the talk of the show, everyone has been talking about it, Wikibon's true private cloud report. People love that, too, because the message is simple, take care of business at home, called the on prem. Yeah, change the operating model, that's going to take some time. >> So, my thought on this is, for years, we were talking about the stack wars. Lately, we've been talking about the cloud wars, and for the last few years, when I talked to the partner ecosystem, they were shrinking their booths. They were looking for alternatives. Remember Cisco? Aw geez, flaying anything but VMware. Let's see if we can do this. You know, IBM who was a big VMware partner. Well, they got rid of X86. Where are they going to part with VMware? On and on, HPE going closer with Microsoft. Even Dell, pre-acquisition, how much deeper they going to go with Microsoft? Now, you know, John, we've been talking on theCUBE for a while. You know, there's Microsoft. Their stack, their partnerships, their application, where they're putting it. Amazon, huge elephant in the room, when they made the deal it was like, oh well, you know, Pat's on his way out the door, and he's kind of, you know, pulling one over on Dell before he leaves. Now, I think we understand a little bit better where this fits in that portfolio of the Dell family. Open source, still something we beat on Pat and EMC before that. They're not really open source. They've got a proprietary software alternative that their partners seem excited about. They've really fumbled around with their cloud strategy for a year. They've got one that seems to be going well. We'll see, 4,500 service provider partners, the Amazon thing. We will still see where revenue comes. >> Stu, that's a good point. Pat Gelsinger was kicking ass as a CEO now, but his channels on his job many times, so props to Pat. He made some good calls, stayed on course, held the line on the direction, did not cave at all, him and his team, they did it. There's been some turnover as we know in VMware. I'll see the results. I'll clear the scoreboard. They're winning. Question I'll put to you guys right now. Impact of Andy Jassy from AWS here on day one. How much of an impact was that? He made some statements. And the question I want to ask you, in addition to the impact, is he said, "This is not an optical deal." Most companies make optical illusional deals, make it look like they're all in, and they don't really deliver. So one, impact of Jassy being here and two, who was he talking about? >> Dave: Well >> Where's the Barney deal? >> Well, so okay, first thing is I saw, I've always seen that AWS deal from Andy Jassy's perspective as TAM expansion. Big part of a CEO's job is, I've got to expand my TAM, especially when you see the growth of AWS, and it's slowing down a little bit, even though it's still impressive. He's got to expand his TAM. Well, how does AWS do that? Look to 500,000 VMware customers. So that's number one. Barney deal? There are a lot of Barney deals out there. I mean, most... >> What are you referring to, 'cause Google came on the stage the next day. I was getting tweets saying "Azure?" Stu, guys, who's the deal? Who was Andy Jassy talking about when he was looking at the VMware customers saying, essentially, this is not, implying others are? >> I'm not sure that he was necessarily throwing shade at anyone specifically. What there was is there was 18 months from when this deal went through, a lot of work. This was a lot of engineering work. Talk to the cloud foundation team, talk to the VSAN team. The amount of work to actually integrate, because we know Amazon actually has an extensive engineering team. They hyper-optimize what they're doing, so this is not some white box that I just slapped VMware on and said the BIOS, you know, it works and everything where I still am a little concerned if I'm, you know, a VMware employee as customers, I talked to some customers that really excited about this, the Lighthouse customers. They say it's going to get my team that loves their vCenter. They love everything, it's going to help them move faster. Then, you're talking to, "Oh there's these services they're going to be able to use." I'm like well, how much are they going to realize oh hey, this is great, and the VMware sales reps are just going to get eaten by the lion while the customer goes off. >> And so the impact's big then, you're saying, but you won't answer the question of who he's referring to. You don't think he's referring to anyone. Keith, what do you think? >> Let's look at, I like the comment about how difficult the integration was. Last year when I read, it said something like, wait, hold on what, the AWS, who is notorious about controlling their message, what I thought was funny is that Andy didn't use the term private cloud, he didn't use the term VMware cloud, he, VMware infrastructure and AWS, which is a massive engineering effort. So from that, I question whether or not they could execute upon that, but Andy Jassy being onstage on Monday showed the commitment that we're going to make these other services work, the total addressable market of 500,000 additional customers. You don't do this for bare metal servers. >> John: VMware has 500,000 customers? >> Yeah. That's the total addressable market, but that's not where AWS is going to grow by halting physical servers, by selling more Lambda, selling more CDN, selling more PAS, is the key, and where VMware and AWS relationship his weak is in that true integration between the two hybrid IT environments. So when you say, "Where's the barney deals?" the barney deals are, I think it's across the industry. Unless you're getting fully in bed and committed to make that level of investment >> No but engineering resources, this comes back down to what, the new kind of engagement between biz dev deals look like. You need to have that kind of level. >> I have no problem pointing to the Nutanix Google deal, anything that people are doing with Azure, no one's partnered at this level. >> Okay, Azure is a good one too, because I've heard from startups that have been enticed by the dollars, 'cause Microsoft's been sprinkling some cash on, who have left to go back to AWS, because of technical reasons, reverse proxies, basically software clued just to basically make stuff work. >> Well, so, where do we, how much do we know about the IBM VMware relationship? Because I mean IBM's >> Pat brought it up today. >> Soft layer hosting, right? They've got a lot more experience with VMware, IBM has said, I think they're shipping, they've been shipping for quite some time. So there's an example of engineering that had already largely been done, that's actually delivering value for customers. Pat probably brought it up because it's a great distribution channel for him. And I think Keith's right on. AWS doesn't speak in terms of VMs. They talk in terms of cloud services, like Lambda, database services, middleware, PAS layers, that's really where they're going to hook people in this community into their platform. >> Okay, so here's a question to end the segment as we wrap up the show, because this is kind of where it's all going. To me, my big epiphany was the following. Andy Jassy, statesman, Harvard MBA, now CEO of AWS, ticking names, ticking this, huge accomplishments, he's done great in his career, he's only getting better. And then Sam Ramji, great developer chops, knows software ecosystems, not Andy Jassy in terms of the title, but in terms of status, still a solid guy. Two contrasting positions, running the biggest cloud today, to Google brainpower, okay? So you're looking at that and you're saying, "Hmm, where is this going to go?" So the question on the table is, what does it take for someone to be successful in today's IT environment? Does IT need to be smarter in business or does need to be more smarter in IT, or both, and does Google have enough IQ in IT to actually make the products fast enough or are they at risk? >> Well I'll take the customer point of view, and you know, we always talk about people, process, technology. The technology is maturing, and it's maturing pretty quickly, but maybe still not quite to the point where the true private cloud vision is where we need it to be, but what's going to slow that down is the people and process side is going to take a lot longer. Stu, you made a comment yesterday, VMware's moving at the pace of the CIO. >> It's Keith's line, he's been using all week. >> Okay, great line and Robin Matlock heard that today, course marketing CMO said, "And the CIO needs to move faster." (men laugh) Well guess what? They can't. I thought that was just a perfect testament >> But that is exactly the dilemma isn't it? >> It really is, and this stuff is hard. And cloud doesn't necessarily make it any easier, (laughs) if anything, it makes it more complex, 'cause it's a completely new business model. >> But remember the old term, forklift upgrade? Okay, you don't have forklift upgrades anymore, you have rip and replace, whatever word you want to use. >> Stu: Now we have lift and shift. >> Lift and shift, rip and replace, lift and shift. Is Google, and this is my challenge to Sam, I didn't have time to ask him this question, I'll certainly do one on one next time I see him. Is Google smart enough with IQ in IT, certainly we know they're smart enough, but do they have enough IQ in IT to really make the transformation, or are they betting on a rip and replace version of a cloud? >> So John, no doubt Google's smart, and they built amazing things that, the ripple that Google has through the industry is phenomenal. They spin off whole industries based on what they're doing. Google played a very different game than Amazon is, you know, when you talk to customers and how they're first getting onto Google, you know, data's really important, analytics of course. Couple of years ago Google was saying, "Oh, we're just going to be that data analytics cloud," now of course they're trying to be a big player. Amazon, the company, remember, Amazon isn't just AWS. Andy Jassy fits into Jeff Bazer's great plans. You know, I'd love to hear, when we go to reinvent, what's happening in Whole Foods that's impacted by AWS. They are everywhere, they are, you know, Walmart did. >> How about TAM expansion, my wife's checking Amazon even more. >> But this is really interesting right, because Walmart's now using its muscle to say, "Hey, you going to do business "with AWS" >> Absolutely >> "And Whole Foods? "You're not doing business with us." So the point being that digital business is allowing companies to traverse industries and now you're seeing it in really interesting competitive lashbacks. >> So Capital One was onstage, I say something that over the past couple of years been controversial, no one believes me, but I believe this is what needs to happen. Capital One claimed that it's a technology company, they're not a bank. Well I want to bank with a bank, that' a whole 'nother conversation. But technology is just a tool to get your job done, and just like we had bookkeepers that knew Excel and then eventually Excel just became a part of your toolkit. AI, I talked to Chuck Hollis of Oracle about this on the podcast the other day. AI is just going to be a business toolkit that a business user uses. To the question, business users will become smarter at using technology. The cloud providers that enables the business user to have the least amount of friction to use that technology, to solve business challenges will win. The question is, is that Google or Andy Jassy, who has done it with Amazon, or some other cloud provider that's eating their own dog food. >> Okay guys, let's wrap this up. Let's go around the table, one word, two words, how do you wrap up VMware's position vis a vis as they go forward? >> VMware's on fire, I think the data center's on fire, the ecosystem is reforming around the cloud. And there's a lot of momentum right now, I mean I'm wondering, okay, what's going to happen to derail this, but right now the fundamentals look very good. >> Relevant, John. >> Yeah. >> Cool and relevant again. It's right, you know, cool, we can all argue, you know, look, I like what I heard with Amazon, it was better than I was expecting coming in. You know, getting in there, they talked about serverless, they talked about edge computing, something I actually had a couple really good conversations ticking to, partners doing IoT, and customers looking at that. If they can be relevant, not just in the data center, but in the cloud, and even at the edge, VMware's going to have a good life going forward. >> Yeah, and I'll wrap it up, you stole my word relevant, so I'll say, I'll a little bit further than relevant, VMware is still the leader in enterprise infrastructure software. They're not letting that lead go. >> But just on that, the last thing, they're an infrastructure software company. I think they showed how they can be more than that in the future. >> And my take is, smart strategy playing out, now people are starting to realize the long game that Pat's been playing. It's showing up in the financial results, and there's clarity, and you can see the game playing out, you're starting to see there where they're going to position, so good job, guys, that's a wrap. Want to thank our sponsors. Without sponsors theCUBE would not be able to come for the three days of wall-to-wall coverage provided to the community. We get great support from the folks on Twitter, we get support from the folks who watch the videos, want to thank you for watching, and also the sponsors, VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Dell EMC, IBM, OVH, CenturyLink, Datrium, Densify, Druva, Hitachi, INFINIDAT, Kamarino, NetApp, Nutanix, Red Hat, Rackspace, Rubrik, Skytap, Veeam and Zadara Storage. Thanks to all the 20 sponsors that we can go out and bring our best stuff here. Really appreciate your support. Thanks for watching theCUBE. This is a wrap from VMworld, thanks guys, thanks everybody here, and that's a wrap for VMworld 2017, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for the Cube's exclusive coverage, three days of HPE, Hewlett Packard Enterprises Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier. My co-host Dave Vallente. Seven years of coverage, in our seventh year, and of course, we've had many guests on over those years. And our next guest has been on every year. Steven Deitch, Vice-President Worldwide Service Provider Business. Great to see you. >> Good to see you. >> Seven year Cube alumni. You've been on every year. >> That's right. >> Great to see you. >> Good, just getting older. (laughing) >> And smarter. >> Co-Host: I think we started at VM World. >> We did, way back. >> Yeah, yeah, at Barcelona, I think you were on at Barcelona. We had no live. Alot's changed. I mean, what's up with you right now? Before we get into some of the historical on where we've been and where we're going, what's happening for you in the news here at HPE Discover? What's the big story? >> Well, you know, the headline, and what Meg and Antonio and everybody else have been talking about, is HPE strategy core belief's vision, which revolves around three elements. Making hybrid IT simple. Powering the Edge and then the expertise that goes along to bring that all together. My focus is really around that hybrid IT portion. Hybrid IT is pervasive, on prem, off prem, traditional IT, private cloud, sorry, public cloud. And customers are increasingly moving to that model given the value that they see, of optimizing their IT environment and sticking workloads or sourcing applications from the best execution venue. My personal focus right now is around the service providers that will deliver the off-premise element of HPE's hybrid strategy going forward. Because we made some very clear decisions that we weren't going to do that anymore. We had a public cloud before, that we decided to shut down. With the spinoff of enterprise services, that leaves us dependent, or actually embracing partners to deliver all of that consumption-based off-premise service element. >> I mean, a lot's changed, I mean, the elephant in the room is, obviously, the decline in people buying boxes and, or hardware, peddling hardware, but IT's not declining. IT's shifting. The services model is interesting. Service provider roles are changing. You know, anyone who's in the SAAS businesses, enterprises having SAAS products that they offer their customers. In essence, a traditional enterprise buying data center hardware and software from HPE is now providing a service to their customers. >> Steve: That's right. >> With digital. >> Steve: That's right. >> This is the digital transformation. How does that shift? How do you guys talk to customers now? Because now, the service provider definition has increased. Enterprises have, maybe a portion of traditional enterprise, but also now service provider component. How do you guys talk to customers? 'Cause this is truly where the business transformation is hitting the road. How do you guys talk to customers about this trend? >> Well, let's start at, you mentioned a digital transformation. At the end of the day and in simple terms, it's entities utilizing digital technologies to improve the experience of their constituents, partners, customers, employees, processes, systems, and so forth. Hybrid IT ultimately is one of the enablers behind the digital transformation. We're extremely passionate about that because you're right, that's where everybody's going whether you're small in the market, you're mid, you're a large enterprise, or you're a service provider. You're going through your own transformation as you go forward to be able to deliver against that digital transformation process. >> You said before we're kind of reliant on, then you sort of amended that and said embracing the cloud. In fact, if you don't have a cloud strategy today, you're toast. You are relying on your partners for a big part of that strategy. It's not just Azure. It's not a one trick pony. Can you talk about sort of beyond the big partner, what you're doing to differentiate within that next tier and how they're differentiating from the big guys like AWS. >> Right, and you're absolutely right. We firmly believe the world's going to be multi-cloud so certain work loads will stay in the data center, certain will be private cloud in the data center, others will move to managed private cloud, off premise. Then others will make a lot of sense to go to a hyper-scale provider like Amazon, Azure or Google. You want the best execution venue for that application or workload. It makes all the sense in the world. That's what we call, and you've heard us talk about this before, the right mix. As customers look to where they're going to put those workloads we're working with service providers below those big hyper-scale, big gorillas, to project or deliver value that the hyper-scale providers can not. Everything is not going to go to Amazon. It's a fact. >> It's not a winner take all game. >> It's not a winner take all. The world is way too diverse. Diverse workloads, diverse geographies, diverse business requirements. The way we look at it and we embrace the service provider's below the gorillas, we want to collectively go after opportunities that the hyper-scale providers can not deliver on. It really revolves around three things that we believe, we collectively, but more importantly those service providers should be able to do. One is embrace customer complexity. Go beyond simple services. Full stack SOAs. Drive digital transformations. Embrace customer intimacy. The big gorillas, they have a very broad set of services, very rich set of services, but when it comes time to intimacy and customization, you're not going to go there. A lot of customers remember 98% of the value in the market today is still traditional apps. Number two is geography. We all know that the big boys are in about 15 or 16% physical countries today. There's still 200 countries that don't have a physical presence and when you look at data resonancy, data privacy and so forth, or even performance in latency, you still need that physical presence. Even in the countries where the big hyper-scale providers are, you still need the girth of resources. Technical, sales and so fort and sometimes that's missing. Enterprise customers and mid-market customers want to embrace that. Finally, you know this as well as everybody else, and you made that point before, as customers evolve to hybrid, they have to manage that environment. The combination of on-prem, let's call it Tier 2/Tier 3 service providers, and then the AWSs and the Azures and the Googles of the world. That's a challenge. That's a big challenge to be able to manage that hybrid environment. The service providers that we're working with, we want them to be that hybrid manager, we want them to be that broker in order to mitigate the risk, determine the best execution venue and really deal with the challenges that these guys are going, including cost, time, and skill sets. >> If I could follow up on that in terms of the sustainability of those three differentiators. Complexity, I think you're okay. I think IT just keeps getting more and more complex. The GEOs, maybe slowly over time that changes, but your point is the local resources is probably not something that the big guys are going to put in place any time soon. Belly to belly. It was interesting to hear the CEO of Wipro talk about hyper automating, but we're still decades away from eliminating all the people required. Managing multi-cloud. That seems to be a big one that is a white space right now that nobody has really cornered. >> John: Huge. >> It's not likely that any one of the businesses, Amazon's not going to own multi-cloud management. That's really not even their interest. >> John: That's single cloud. >> To me, number three is a multi-hundred billion dollar opportunity for the market and HP specifically. >> Absolutely. We go hard at all three of those and some are more defendable than others, the geography, you're absolutely right, but the resources will continue to be a challenge for folks. Number one and number three are clearly ways that our service provider partners can take advantage of opportunities that the hyper scale providers will not be able to. >> John: Why HP? >> Why HP? At the end of the day, we bring best of class technology, we bring best in class commercial models, we bring collaborative go to markets. By the way, we don't compete with our partners. I challenge folks to look at their existing vendors and ask those questions. Particularly if you're a service provider partner. Ask those questions to your existing vendors and ask them, why are you competing against me. We are very, I'll use the word clean. Strategy is very simple, very clean, we're not competing. >> John: No hair on those partnership deals. >> No hair. >> If you take out the big hyper-scalers, AWS, Google, and FaceBooks of the world, there's a big torso mid range market that you guys are going after. You didn't have competition. You're going to have all your normal competitors that we all know and talk about going after that same space. Differentiations are what you said. How are they approaching it? They're going to try and create fud around what you guys are doing and certainly this transformation market that we're in is kind of confusing. People now being more educated on the cloud which is a good thing. There's still no real definition of what multi-cloud is. Multi-cloud is happening. how are you guys competing directly with the competitors and how are you guys going to go in to win? >> I think, the fact that we're partner first and we already understand how partners function and what they need in the requirements, it sounds a little simplistic, but at the end of the day, you have a whole lot of service provider partners out there that are pure, but you have thousands of service providers and what they've done? They've evolved from being a traditional reseller or a solution provider, to adding a third business model of being a consume oriented service provider and the fact that we understand the journey that they've been on, the challenges that they go through, I will challenge our competitors to have that deep of insight that have not been channel friendly at all. >> Is that the big transformation? That third point you mentioned, is that the big change in the service provider transformation, is that that consumer focus?L >> It is because we all recognize the big service providers whether you're a big cloud service provider or a consumer service provider like an Uber or Spotify, or a Telco. Think about all of the service providers out there, let's call them, for the lack of a better word a hybrid partner. They have a resale business where they do transactions, they have a solutions business and then they have a consume business. Those are the ones that are actually capable of pulling off the differentiation. They can get intimate with the customer - >> John: They have specialism. >> They have specialism, they have professional services, they have industry insight and they understand their customers much better. >> The channel's turning into the customer for you guys in the way the partner first message - >> It's a different type of partner. Different type of partner. Absolutely. Those three swim lanes. We look at partners will either be in one, two, or all three of them. >> Steve, thanks for coming on the Cube again. Appreciate seeing you. Big takeaway from the show here, the transformations in full swing, the market's kind of going crazy with cloud and IOT. What's your big takeaway from this show this year? >> The clarity. The clarity and the focus that Hewlett Packard has and the fact that our partners and customers are really embracing it. That's the key message that I've heard from everybody. Everybody's super excited and there's a focus. I think maybe in the past, because we've been so big and so complex, but the fact of our skinning down, going in opposite directions as some of our competitors, that clarity will lead to execution excellence, I believe. >> Awesome. Stephen, thanks for taking the time. This is the Cube live coverage from HPE Discover 2017, our 7th year we're covering the transformation. More live coverage after this short break. Stay with us. We'll be right back.