(soft upbeat music) >> Narrator: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is live. We love saying that. theCUBE is live at HPE Discover '22. It's about 8,000 HP folks here, customers, partners, leadership. It's been an awesome day one. We're looking forward to a great conversation next. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, two guests join us. We're going to be talking about the power of the channel. Mike Beltrano joins us, Worldwide Channel Sales Leader at AMD, and Phil Soper is here, the North America Head of Channel Sales at HPE. Guys, great to have you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to be here. >> So we're talking a lot today about the ecosystem. It's evolved tremendously. Talk to us about the partnership. Mike, we'll start with you. Phil, we'll go to you. What's new with HPE and AMD Better Together? >> It's more than a partnership. It's actually a relationship. We are really tied at the hip, not just in X86 servers but we're really starting to get more diverse in HP's portfolio. We're in their hyper-converged solutions, we're in their storage solutions, we're in GreenLake. It's pretty hard to get away from AMD within the HP portfolio so the relationship is really good. It's gone beyond just a partnership so starting to transition now down into the channel, and we're really excited about it. >> Phil, talk about that more. Talk about the evolution of the partnership and that kind of really that pull-down. >> I think there's an impression sometimes that AMD is kind of the processor that's in our computers and it's so much more, the relationship is so much more than the inclusion of the technology. We co-develop solutions. Interesting news today at Antonio's presentation of the first Exascale supercomputer. We're solving health problems with the supercomputer that was co-developed between AMD and HPE. The other thing I would add is from a channel perspective, it's way more than just what's in the technology. It's how we engage and how we go to market together. And we're very active in working together to offer our solutions to customers and to be competitive and to win. >> Describe that go-to-market model that you guys have, specifically in the channel. >> So, there is a, his organization and mine, we develop joint go-to-market channel programs. We work through the same channel ecosystem of partners. We engage on specific opportunities. We work together to make sure we have the right creative solution pricing to be aggressive in the marketplace and to compete. >> It's a great question because we're in a supply chain crisis right now, right? And you look at the different ways that HP can go to market through the channel. There's probably about four or five ways that channel partners can provide solutions, but it's also route to purchase for the customers. So, we're in a supply chain crisis right now, but we have HP AMD servers in stock in distribution right now. That's a real big competitive advantage, okay? And if those aren't exactly what you need, HP can do custom solutions with AMD platforms all day, across the board. And if you want to go ahead and do it through the cloud, you've got AMD technology in GreenLake. So, it's pretty much have it your way for the customers through the channel and it's really great for the customers too because there's multiple ways for them to procure the equipment through the channel so we really love the way that HP allows us to kind of integrate into their products, but then integrate into their procurement model down through the channel for the end user to make the right choice. So, it's fantastic. >> You mentioned that AMD's in HCI, in storage, in GreenLake and in the channel. What are the different requirements within those areas? How does the channel influence those requirements and what you guys actually go to market with? >> Well, it comes down to awareness. Awareness is our biggest enemy and the channel's just huge for us because AMD's competitive advantage in our technology is much different. And when you think about price and performance and security and sustainability, that's what we're delivering. And really the channel kind of plugs that in and educates their customers through their marketing and demand gen, kind of influences when they hear from their customers or if they're proactively touching them, influences the route to purchase based on their situation, if they want to pay for it as a service, if they want to finance it, if it does happen to be in stock and speed of delivery is important to them, the channel partner influences that through the relationships and distribution or they can go ahead and place it as a custom to order. So, it's just really based on where they're at in their purchasing cycle and also, it's not about the hardware as much as it's about the software and the applications and the high-value workloads that they're running and that kind of just dictates the platform. >> Does hardware matter? >> Yes, it sure does. It does, man. We're just kind of, it's kind of like the vessel at this point and our processors and our GPS are in the HP vessel, but it is about the application. >> I love that analogy. I would say, absolutely does, workloads matter more and then what's the hardware to run those workloads is really critical. >> And to your point though, it's not just about the CPU anymore. It's about, you guys have made some acquisitions to sort of diversify. It's about all the other supporting sort of actors, if you will, that support those new workloads. >> Let me give you an example that's being showcased at this show, okay? Our extreme search solution with being driven by Splunk, okay? And it's a cybersecurity solution that the industry is going to have to be able to handle in regards to response to any sort of breach and when you think about, they have to search through the data and how they have to get through it and do it in a timely fashion. What we've done is developed a DL385 solution where we have a epic processor from AMD, we have a Xilinx which who we own now, they're FGPA, and Samsung SSDs which are four terabytes per drive packed in a DL385. Now you add the Splunk solution on top of that and if there ever is a breach, it would normally take about days to go ahead and access that breach. Now it can be done in 25 minutes and we have that solution here right now so it's not like we acquire Xilinx and we're waiting to integrate it. We hit the ground running and it's fantastic 'cause the solution's being driven by one of our top partners, WWT, and it's live in their booth here today so we're kind of showing that integration of what AMD is doing with our acquisitions in HP servers and being able to show that today with a workload on top of it is real deal. >> Purpose-built to scan through all those log files and actually surface the inside. >> Exactly what it is, and it's on public sector right now, that's a requirement to be able to do that and to not have it take weeks and be able to do it in 25 minutes is pretty impressive. >> Those are the outcomes customers are demanding? >> That's it. People are, if you're purchasing an outcome, HP can deliver it with AMD and if you're looking to build your own, we can give it to you that way too so, it's flexibility. >> Absolutely critical. Mike, from your perspective on the partnership we've seen and obviously a lot of transformation at HPE over the last couple of years, Antonio stood on this stage three years ago and said, "By 2022, we're going to deliver the entire portfolio as a service." How influential has AMD been from a relationship perspective on what he said three years ago and where they are today? >> Oh my gosh! We've been with them all the way through. I mean, HP is just such a great partner, and right now, we're the VDI solution on GreenLake so it's HP GreenLake, VDI solutions powered by AMD. We love that brand recognition as a service, okay? Same with high-performance computing powered by AMD, offered on HP GreenLake so it's really changed it a lot because as a service, it's just a different way for a customer to procure it and they don't have to worry about that hardware and the stack and anything like that. It's more about them going into that GreenLake portal and being able to understand that they're paying it just like they pay their phone bill or anything else so it's really Antonio's been spot-on with that because that's a reality today and it's being delivered through the channel and AMD's proud to be a part of it and it's much different 'cause we don't need to be as evolved as we have to be from a hardware sale perspective when it's going through GreenLake and it makes it much easier for us. >> Phil, you talked about workloads, really kind of what matter, how are they evolving? How is that affecting? What are customers grabbing you and saying, "We need this." What do you and from a workload standpoint and how are you delivering that? >> Well, the edge to the cloud platform or GreenLake is very much as a service offering, aimed at workloads. And so, if HPE is building and focusing its solutions on addressing specific workload needs, it's not about necessarily the performance you mentioned, or you're asking the question about hardware. It's not necessarily about that. It's, what is the workload, should the workload be, or could the workload be in public cloud or is it a workload that needs to be on premise and customers are making those choices and we're working with those customers to help them drive those strategies and then we adapt depending on where the customer wants the workload. >> Well, it's interesting, because Antonio in his keynote today said, "That's the wrong question," and my reaction was that's the question everybody's asking. It may be the wrong question, but that's what so, your challenge is to, I guess, get them to stop asking that question and just run the right tool for the right job kind of thing. >> That's exactly what it's about because you take high-value workloads, okay? And that can mean a lot of different things and if you just pick one of them, let's say like VDI or hyper-converged. HP's the only game in town where they can kind of go into a gun, a battle with four different guns. They give you a lot of choices and they offer them on an AMD platform and they're not locking you in. They give you a lot of flexibility and choice. So, if you were doing hyper-converged through HPE and you were looking to do it on AMD platform, they can offer to you with VMware vSAN ReadyNodes. They can offer it to you with SimpliVity. They can offer it to you with Nutanix. They can offer it to you with Microsoft, all on an AMD stack. And if you want to bring your own VMware and go bare metal, HP will just give you the notes. If you want to go factory integrated or if you want to purchase it via OEM through HP and have them support it, they just deliver it any way you want to get it. It's just a fantastic story. >> I'll just say, look, others could do that, but they don't want to, okay? That's the fact. Sometimes it happens, sometimes the channel cobbles it together in the field, but it's like they do it grinding their teeth so I mean, I think that is a differentiator of HPE. You're agnostic to that. In fact, by design. >> They can bring your own, you can bring your own software. I mean, it's like, you just bring your own. I mean, if you have it, why would we make a customer buy it again? And HP gives them that flexibility and if it's multiple hypervisors and it's brand agnostic, it's more about, let's deliver you the nodes, purpose-built, for the application that you're going to run in that workload and then HP goes ahead and does that across their portfolio on a custom to order. It's just beautiful for us to fit the need for the customer. >> Well, you're meeting customers where they are. >> Yes. >> Which in today's world is critical. There's no, really no other option for companies. Customers are demanding. Demands are not going to go. We're not going to see a decrease after the pandemic's over of demand, right? And the expectations on businesses. So meeting the customers where they are, giving them that choice, that flexibility is table stakes. >> How has those, you've mentioned supply chain constraints, it sounds like you guys are managing that pretty well. It's I think it's a lot of these hard to get supporting components, maybe not the most expensive component, but they just don't have it. So you can't ship the car or you can't ship the server, whatever it is, how is that affecting the channel? How are they dealing with that? Maybe you could give us an update. >> Oh, the channel's just, we love them, they're the front line, that's who the customers call in, who's been waiting to get their technology and we're wading through it, thank goodness that we have GreenLake because if you wanted to buy it traditionally, because HP is supplying supply-to-purchase through distribution in stock, but it's very limited. And then if you go customer order, that's where the long lead times come into place because it's not just the hard drives and memory and the traditional things that are constrained now. Now it's like the clips and the intangibles and things like that and when you get to that point, you got to just do the best you can and HP supply chain has just been fantastic, super informative, AMD, we're not the problem. We got HP, plenty of processors and plenty of accelerators and GPUs and we're standing with them because that back to the relationship, we're facing the customer with them and managing their expectations to the best we can and trying to give them options to keep their business floating. >> So is that going to be, is this a supply chain constraints could be an accelerant for GreenLake because that capacity is in place for you to service your customers with GreenLake presumably. You're planning for that. There's headroom there in terms of being able to deliver that. If you can't deliver GreenLake, all this promise. >> I would say I would be careful not to position GreenLake as an answer to supply chain challenges, right? I think there's a greater value proposition to a client, and keep in mind, you still have technology at the heart of it, right? And so, and to your question though about our partners, honestly in a lot of ways, it's heartbreaking given the challenges that they face, not just with HPE, but other vendors that they sell and support and without our partners and managing those, we'd be in a world of hurt, frankly and we're working on options. We work with our partners really closely. We work with AMD where we have constraints to move to other potential configurations. >> Does GreenLake make it harder or easier for you to forecast? Because on the one hand, it's as a service and on the other hand, I can dial it down as a customer or dial it up and spike it up if I need to. Do you have enough experience to know at this point, whether it's easier or harder to forecast? >> I think intuitively it's probably harder because you have that variable component that you can't forecast, right? It's with GreenLake, you have your baseline so you know what that baseline is going to be, the baseline commitment and you build in that variable component which is as a service, you pay for what you consume. So that variable component is the one thing that is we can estimate but we don't know exactly what the customer is going to use. >> When you do a GreenLake deal, how does it work? Let's say it's a two-year deal or a three-year deal, whatever and you negotiate a price with a customer for price per X. Do you know like what that contract value is going to be over the life or do you only know that that baseline and then everything else is upside for you and extra additional cost? So how does that work? >> It's a good question. So you know both, you know the baseline and you know what the variable capacity is, what the limits are. So at the beginning of the contract, that's what you know, whether or not a customer determines that they have to expand or do a change order to add another workload into the configuration is the one thing that we hope happens. You don't know. >> But you know with certainty that over the life of that contract, the amount of that contract that's booked, you're going to recognize at some point that. You just don't know when. >> Yes, and so that, and that's to your question, you know that element, the fluctuation in terms of usage is depending on what's happening in the world, right? The pandemic, as an example, with GreenLake customers, probably initially at the beginning of the pandemic, their usage went down for obvious reasons and then it fluctuates up. >> I think a lot of people don't understand that. That's an interesting nuance. Cool, thank you. >> Guys, thanks so much for joining us on the program, talking about the relationship that AMD and HPE have together, the benefits for customers on the outcomes that it's achieving. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thanks for having us, guys. >> Appreciate it. >> Our pleasure. >> Phil: Thank you. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at HPE Discover '22. Stick around. Our keynote analysis is up next. (soft upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. The virtual edition. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of H. P. S. Big customer event. Patrick Moorehead is here of moor insights and strategy is the number one analyst in the research analyst. Business. Patrick. Always a pleasure. Great to see you, >>David. Great to see you too. And I know you're you're up there fighting for that number one spot to. It's great to see you and it's great to see you in the meetings that were in. But it's even more fun to be here on the cube. I love to be on the cube and every once in a while you'll even call me a friend of the cube, >>unquestionably my friend and so and I can't wait second half. I mean you're traveling right now. We're headed to Barcelona to mobile World Congress later on this month. So so we're gonna we're gonna see each other face to face this year. 100%. So looking forward to that. So you know, let's get into it. Um you know, before we get into H. P. E. Let's talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the market. We've got, you know, we we finally, it feels like the on prem guys are finally getting their cloud act together. Um it's maybe taken a while, but we're seeing as a service models emerge. I think it's resonating with customers. The clearly not everything is moving to the cloud. There's this hybrid model emerging. Multi cloud is real despite what, you know, >>some some >>cloud players want to say. And then there's this edges like jump ball, what are you seeing in the marketplace? >>Yeah. Davis, as exciting as ever in. Just to put in perspective, I mean the public cloud has been around for about 10 years and still only 20% around 20% of the data in 20% of the applications are there now will be a very important ones and I'm certainly not a public cloud denier, I never have been, but there are some missing pieces that need to come together. And you know, even five years ago we were debating dave the hybrid cloud. And I feel like when amazon brought out outposts, the conversation was over right now, what you have is cloud native folks building out hybrid and on prem capabilities, you have a classic on, on prem folks building out hybrid and as a service capabilities. And I really think it boils down 22 things. I mean it's, it's wanting to have more flexibility and you know, I hate to use it because it sounds like a marketing word, but agility, the ability to spin up things and spin down things in a very, a quick way. And uh you know what they've learned, The veterans also know, hey, let's do this in a way that doesn't lock us in too much into a certain vendor. And I've been around for a long time. David and I'm a realist too. Well, you have to lock yourself into something. Uh it just depends on what do you want to lock yourself into, but super exciting and what H. P. E. You know, when they further acts in the sea with Green Lake, I think it was four years ago, uh I think really started to stir the pot. >>You know, you mentioned the term cloud denial, but you know, and I feel like the narrative from, I like to determine as I think you should use the term veteran. You know, it's very, they're ours is the only industry patrick where legacy is a pejorative, but so, but the point I want to make is I feel like there's been a lot of sort of fear from the veteran players, but, but I look at it differently, I wonder what your take is. I, I think, I think I calculated that the Capex spending by the big four public clouds including Alibaba last year was $100 billion. That's like a gift to the world. Here we're gonna spend $100 billion like the internet. Here you go build. And so I, and I feel like companies like HP are finally saying, yeah, we're gonna build, we're gonna build a layer and we're gonna hide the complexity and we're gonna add value on top. What do you think about that? >>Yeah. So I think it's now, I wish, I wish the on prem folks like HP, you would have done it 10 years ago, but I don't think anybody expected the cloud to be as big as it's become over the last 10 years. I think we saw companies like salesforce with sas taking off, but I think it is the right direction because there are advantages to having workloads on prem and if you add an as a service capability on top of the top of that, and let's say even do a Coehlo or a managed service, it's pretty close to being similar to the public cloud with the exception, that you can't necessarily swipe a credit card for a bespoke workload if you're a developer and it is a little harder to scale out. But that is the next step in the equation day, which is having, having these folks make capital expenditures, make them in a Polo facility and then put a layer to swipe a credit card and you literally have the public cloud. >>Yeah. So that's, that's a great point. And that's where it's headed, isn't it? Um, so let's, let's talk about the horses on the track. Hp as you mentioned, I didn't realize it was four years ago. I thought it was, wow, That's amazing. So everybody's followed suit. You see, Dallas announced, Cisco has announced, uh, Lenovo was announced, I think IBM as well. So we, so everybody's sort of following suit there. The reality is, is it's taken some time to get this stuff standardized. What are you seeing from, from HP? They've made some additional announcements, discover what's your take on all this. >>Yeah. So HPD was definitely the rabbit here and they were first in the market. It was good to see. First off some of their, Um, announcements on, on how it's going and they talked about $428 billion 1200 customers over 900 partners and 95% retention. And I think that's important. Anybody who's in the lead and remember what aws I used to do with the slide with the amount of customers would just get bigger and bigger and bigger and that's a good way to show momentum. I like the retention part two which is 95%. And I think that that says a lot uh probably the more important announcements that they made is they talked about the G. A. Of some of their solutions on Green Lake and whether it is A. S. A. P. Hana. Ml apps HPC with Francis, VD. I was Citrus and video but they also brought more of what I would call a vertical layer and I'm sure you've seen the vertical ization of all of these cloud and as a service workloads. But what they're doing with Epic, with EMR and looseness, with financial payments and Splunk and intel with data and risk analysis and finally, a full stack for telco five G. One of the biggest secrets and I covered this about five years ago is HPV actually has a full stack that Western european carriers use and they're now extending that to five G. And um, so more horizontal, uh, and, and more vertical. That was the one of the big swipes, uh, that I saw that there was a second though, but maybe we can talk about these. >>Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, so the other piece of that of course is standardization right there there because there was a, there was a, there was a lot of customization leading up to this and everybody sort of, everybody always had some kind of financial game they can play and say, hey, there's an adversary as a service model, but this is definitely more of a standardized scalable move that H P E. Is making with what they call Lighthouse. Right? >>Yeah, that's exactly right. And I've talked to some Green Lake customers and they obviously gave it kudos or they wouldn't have HP wouldn't have served them up and they wouldn't have been buying it. But they did say, um, it took, it took a while, took some paperwork to get it going. It's not 100% of push button, but that's partially because hp allows you to customize the hardware. You want a one off network adapter. Hp says yes, right. You want to integrate a different type of storage? They said yes. But with Green Lake Lighthouse, it's more of a, what you see is what you get, which by the way, is very much like the public cloud or you go to a public cloud product sheet or order sheet. You're picking from a list and you really don't know everything that's underneath the covers, aside from, let's say, the speed of the network, the type of the storage and the amount of the storage you get. You do get to pick between, let's say, an intel processor, Graviton two or an M. D processor. You get to pick your own GPU. But that's pretty much it. And HP Lighthouse, sorry, Green Lake Lighthouse uh is bringing, I think a simplification to Green Lake that it needs to truly scale beyond, let's say the White House customers that HP Yeah, >>Well done. So, you know, and I hear your point about we're 10 years in plus. And to me this is like a mandate. I mean, this is okay, good, good job guys about time. But if I had a, you know, sort of look at the big player, it's like we have an oligopoly here in this, in this business. It's HP, Cisco, you got Dell Lenovo, you've got, you know, IBM, they're all doing this and they all have a different little difference, you know, waste of skin of catch. And your point about simplicity, it seems like HP HP is all in antony's like, okay, here's what we're going to announce that, you know, a while ago. So, and they seem to have done a good job with Wall Street and they got a simple model, you know, Dell is obviously bigger portfolio, much more complicated. IBM is even more complicated than that. I don't know so much about Lenovo and in Cisco of course, has acquired a ton of SAAS companies and sort of they've got a lot of bespoke products that they're trying to put together. So they've got, but they do have SAS models. So each of them is coming at it from a different perspective. How do you think? And so and the other point we got lighthouse, which is sort of Phase one, get product market fit. Phase two now is scale, codify standardized and then phase three is the moat build your unique advantage that protects your business. What do you see as HP ES sort of unique value proposition and moat that they can build longer term. >>That's a great, great question. And let me rattle off kind of what I'm seeing that some of these players here, So Cisco, ironically has sells the most software of any of those players that you mentioned, uh with the exception of IBM um and yeah, C I >>CSDB two. Yeah, >>yeah, they're the they're the number two security player, uh Microsoft, number one, So and I think the evaluation on the street uh indicate that shows that I feel like Dell tech is a very broad play because not only do they have servers, storage, networking insecurity, but they also have Pcs and devices. So it's a it's a scale and end play with a focus on VM ware solutions, not exclusively of course. Uh And um then you've got Lenovo who is just getting into the as a service game and are gosh, they're doing great in hyper scale, they've got scale there vertically integrated. I don't know if if too many people talk about that, but Lenovo does a lot of their own manufacturing and they actually manufacture Netapp storage solutions as well. So yeah, each of these folks brings a different game to the table. I think with h P e, what you're bringing the table is nimble. When HP and HP split, the number one thing that I said was that ah, h P E is going to have to be so much faster than it offsets the scale that Dell technology has and the HBs credit, although there, I don't think we're getting credit for this in the stock market yet. Um and I know you and I are both industry folks, not financial folks, but I think their biggest thing is speed and the ability to move faster. And that is what I've seen as it relates to the moat, which is a unique uh competitive advantage. Quite frankly, I'm still looking for that day uh in in in what that is. And I think in this industry it's nearly impossible. And I would posit that that any, even the cloud folks, if you say, is there something that AWS can do that as your can't if it put it put its mind to it or G C P. I don't think so. I think it's more of a kind of land and expand and I think for H P E. When it comes to high performance computing and I'm not just talking about government installations, I'm talking about product development, drug development. I think that is a landing place where H P. E already does pretty well can come in and expand its footprint. >>You know, that's really interesting um, observations. So, and I would agree with you. It's kind of like, this is a copycat industry. It's like the west coast offense like the NFL, >>so, >>so the moat comes from, you know, brand execution and your other point about when HP and HP split, that was a game changer because all of a sudden you saw companies like them, you always had a long term relationship with H P E, but or HP, but then they came out of the woodworks and started to explode. And so it really opened up opportunities. So it really is a execution, isn't it? But go ahead please. >>Dave if I had to pick something that I think HP HPV needs to always be ahead in as a service and listen you and I both know announcements don't mean delivery, but there is correlation between if you start four years ahead of somebody that other company is going to have to put just, I mean they're going to have to turn that ship and many of its competitors really big ships to be able to get there. So I think what Antonio needs to do is run like hell, right? Because it, it I think it is in the lead and as a service holistically doesn't mean they're going to be there forever, but they have to stay ahead. They have to add more horizontal solutions. They have to add more vertical solutions. And I believe that at some point it does need to invest in some Capex at somebody like Anna Quinn X play credit card swiper on top of that. And Dave, you have the public, you have the public cloud, you don't have all the availability zones, but you have a public cloud. >>Yeah, that's going to happen. I think you're right on. So we see this notion of cloud expanding. It's no longer just remote set of services. Somewhere out in the cloud. It's like you said, outpost was the sort of signal. Okay, We're coming on prem. Clearly the on prem uh, guys are connecting to the cloud. Multi cloud exists, we know this and then there's the edge but but but that brings me to that sort of vision and everybody's laying out of this this this seamless integration hiding the complexity log into my cloud and then life will be good. But the edge is different. Right? It's not just, you know, retail store or a race track. I mean there's the far edge, there's the Tesla car, there's gonna be compute everywhere and that sort of ties into the data. The data flows, you know the real time influencing at the edge ai new semiconductor models. You you came out of the semiconductor industry, you know it inside and out arm is exploding, dominating in the edge with apple and amazon Alexa and things like that. That's really where the action is. So this is a really interesting cocktail and soup that we have going on. How do >>you say? Well, you know, Dave if the data most data, I think one thing most everybody agrees on is that most of the data will be created on the edge, whether that's a moving edge a car, a smartphone or what I call an edge data center without tile flooring. Like that server that's bolted to the wall of Mcdonald's. When you drive through, you can see it versus the walmart. Every walmart has a raised tile floor. It's the edge to economically and performance wise, it doesn't make any sense to send all that data to the mother ships. Okay. And whether that's unproven data center or the giant public cloud, more efficient way is to do the compute at the closest way possible. But what it does, it does bring up challenges. The first challenge is security. If I wanted to, I could walk in and I could take that server off the Mcdonald's or the Shell gas station wall. So I can't do that in a big data center. Okay, so security, physical security is a challenge. The second is you don't have the people to go in there and fix stuff that are qualified. If you have a networking problem that goes wrong in Mcdonald's, there's nobody there that can help uh they can they can help you fix that. So this notion of autonomy and management and not keeping hyper critical data sitting out there and it becomes it becomes a security issue becomes a management issue. Let me talk about the benefits though. The benefits are lower latency. You want you want answers more quickly when that car is driving down the road And it has a 5GV 2 x communication cameras can't see around corners. But that car communicating ahead, that ran into the stop sign can, through Vita X talked to the car behind it and say, hey, something is going on there, you can't go to, you can't go to the big data center in the sky, let's make that happen, that is to be in near real time and that computer has to happen on the edge. So I think this is a tremendous opportunity and ironically the classic on prem guys, they own this, they own this space aside from smartphones of course, but if you look at compute on a light pole, companies like Intel have built complete architecture is to do that, putting compute into five G base stations, heck, I just, there was an announcement this week of google cloud and its gaming solution putting compute in a carrier edge to give lower latency to deliver a better experience. >>Yeah, so there, of course there is no one edge, it's highly fragmented, but I'm interested in your thoughts on kinda whose stack actually can play at the edge. And I've been sort of poking uh H P E about this. And the one thing that comes back consistently is Aruba, we we could take a room but not only to the, to the near edge, but to the far edge. And and that, do you see that as a competitive advantage? >>Oh gosh, yes. I mean, I would say the best acquisition That hp has made in 10 years has been aruba, it's fantastic and they also managed it in the right way. I mean it was part of HB but it was, it was managed a lot more loosely then, you know, a company that might get sucked into the board and I think that paid off tremendously. They're giving Cisco on the edge a absolute run for their money, their first with new technologies, but it's about the solution. What I love about what a ruble looks at is it's looking at entertainment solutions inside of a stadium, a information solution inside of an airport as opposed to just pushing the technology forward. And then when you integrate compute with with with Aruba, I think that's where the real magic happens. Most of the data on a permanent basis is actually video data. And a lot of it's for security, uh for surveillance. And quite frankly, people taking videos off, they're off their smartphones and downloaded video. I I just interviewed the chief network officer of T mobile and their number one bit of data is video, video uploaded, video download. But that's where the magic happens when you put that connectivity and the compute together and you can manage it in a, in an orderly and secure fashion. >>Well, I have you we have a ton of time here, but I I don't pick your brain about intel the future of intel. I know you've been following it quite closely, you always have Intel's fighting a forefront war, you got there battling a. M. D. There, battling your arm slash and video. They're they're taking on TSMC now and in foundry and, and I'll add china for the looming threat there. So what's your prognosis for for intel? >>Yeah, I liked bob the previous Ceo and I think he was doing a lot of of the right things, but I really think that customers and investors and even their ecosystem wanted somebody leading the company with a high degree of technical aptitude and Pat coming, I mean, Pat had a great job at VM or, I mean he had a great run there and I think it is a very positive move. I've never seen the energy at Intel. Probably in the last 10 years that I've seen today. I actually got a chance to talk with Pat. I visited Pat uhh last month and and talk to him about pretty much everything and where he wanted to take the company the way you looked at technology, what was important, what's not important. But I think first off in the world of semiconductors, there are no quick fixes. Okay. Intel has a another two years Before we see what the results are. And I think 2023 for them is gonna be a huge year. But even with all this competition though, Dave they still have close to 85% market share in servers and revenue share for client computing around 90%. Okay. So and they built out there networking business, they build out a storage business um with obtain they have the leading Aid as provider with Mobileye. And and listen I was I was one of Intel's biggest, I was into one of Intel's biggest, I was Intel's biggest customer when I was a compact. I was their biggest competitor at A. M. B. So um I'm not obviously not overly pushing or there's just got to wait and see. They're doing the right things. They have the right strategy. They need to execute. One of the most important things That Intel did is extend their alliance with TSMC. So in 2023 we're going to see Intel compute units these tiles they integrate into the larger chips called S. O. C. S. B. Manufactured by TSMC. Not exclusively, but we could see that. So literally we could have AMG three nanometer on TSMC CPU blocks, competing with intel chips with TSMC three nanometer CPU blocks and it's on with regard to video. I mean in video is one of these companies that just keeps going charging, charging hard and I'm actually meeting with Jensen wang this week and Arm Ceo Simon Segers to talk about this opportunity and that's a company that keeps on moving interestingly enough in video. If the Arm deal does go through will be the largest chip license, see CPU licensee and have the largest CPU footprint on on the planet. So here we have A and D. Who's CPU and Gpu and buying an F. P. G. A company called Xilinx, you have Intel, Cpus, Gpus machine learning accelerators and F. P. G. S and then you've got arms slashing video bit with everything as well. We have three massive ecosystems. They're gonna be colliding here and I think it's gonna be great for competition date. Competition is great. You know, when there's not competition in Cpus and Gpus, we know what happens, right. Uh, the B just does not go on and we start to stagnate. And I did, I do feel like the industry on CPU started to stagnate when intel had no competition. So bring it on. This is gonna be great for for enterprises then customers to, and then, oh, by the way, the custom Chip providers, WS has created no less than 15 custom semiconductors started with networking uh, and, and nitro and building out an edge that surrounded the general compute and then it moved to Inferential to for inference trainee um, is about to come out for training Graviton and gravitas to for general purpose CPU and then you've got Apple. So innovation is huge and you know, I love to always make fun of the software is eating the world. I always say yeah but has to run on something. And so I think the combination of semiconductors, software and cloud is just really a magical combination. >>Real quick handicap the video arm acquisition. What what are the odds that that they will be successful? They say it's on track. You've got to 2 to 13 to 1 10 to 1. >>I say 75%. Yes 25%. No China is always the has been the odd odd man out for the last three years. They scuttled the qualcomm NXP deal. You just don't know what china is going to do. I think the Eu with some conditions is gonna let this fly. I think the U. S. Is absolutely going to let this fly. And even though the I. P. Will still stay over in the UK, I think the U. S. Wants to see, wants to see this happen. Japan and Korea. I think we'll allow this china is the odd man out. >>In a word, the future of H. P. E. Is blank >>as a service >>patrick Moorehead. Always a pleasure my friend. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming back in the cube. >>Yeah, Thanks for having me on. I appreciate that. >>Everybody stay tuned for more great coverage from HP discover 21 this is day Volonte for the cube. The leader and enterprise tech coverage. We'll be right back. >>Mm.

>>Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. The virtual edition. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of H. P. S. Big customer event. Patrick Moorehead is here of moor insights and strategy is the number one analyst in the research analyst. Business. Patrick. Always a pleasure. Great to see you, >>David. Great to see you too. And I know you're you're up there fighting for that number one spot to. It's great to see you and it's great to see you in the meetings that were in. But it's even more fun to be here on the cube. I love to be on the cube and every once in a while you'll even call me a friend of the cube, >>unquestionably my friend and so and I can't wait second half. I mean you're traveling right now. We're headed to Barcelona to mobile World Congress later on this month. So so we're gonna we're gonna see each other face to face this year. 100%. So looking forward to that. So, you know, let's get into it. Um you know, before we get into H. P. E. Let's talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the market. We've got, you know, we we we finally, it feels like the on prem guys are finally getting their cloud act together. Um, it's maybe taken a while, but we're seeing as a service models emerge. I think it's resonating with customers. The clearly not everything is moving to the cloud. There's this hybrid model emerging. Multi cloud is real despite what, you know, >>some some >>cloud players want to say. And then there's this edges like jump ball, what are you seeing in the marketplace? >>Yeah. Davis, as exciting as ever in. Just to put in perspective, I mean, the public cloud has been around for about 10 years and still only 20%. Around 20% of the data in 20% of the applications are there now, albeit very important ones. And I'm certainly not a public cloud denier, I never have been, but there are some missing pieces that need to come together. And you know, even five years ago we were debating dave the hybrid cloud and I feel like when Amazon brought out outposts, the conversation was over right now, what you have is cloud native folks building out hybrid and on prem capabilities, you have the classic on prem folks building out hybrid and as a service capabilities. And I really think it boils down 22 things. I mean it's wanting to have more flexibility and you know, I hate to use it because it sounds like a marketing word, but agility, the ability to spin up things and spin down things in a very quick way. And uh, you know what they've learned. The veterans also know, hey, let's do this in a way that doesn't lock us in too much into a certain vendor. And I've been around for a long time. David and I'm a realist too. Well, you have to lock yourself into something. It just depends on what do you want to lock yourself into, but super exciting. And what H. P. E. When they threw the acts in the sea with Green Lake, I think it was four years ago, I think really started to stir the pot. >>You know, you mentioned the term cloud denial, but you know, and I feel like the narrative from, I like to determine is I think you should use the term veteran. You know, it's very, they're ours is the only industry patrick where legacy is a pejorative, but but but so but the point I want to make is I feel like there's been a lot of sort of fear from the veteran players, but I look at it differently. I wonder what you're taking. I think, I think, I think I calculated that the Capex spending by the big four public clouds including Alibaba last year was $100 billion. That's like a gift to the world. Here, we're going to spend $100 billion like the internet here you go build. And and so I, and I feel like companies like HP are finally saying, yeah, we're gonna build, we're gonna build a layer and we're gonna hide the complexity and we're gonna add value on top. What do you think about that? >>Yeah. So I think it's now, I wish, I wish the on prem folks like HP, you would have done it 10 years ago, but I don't think anybody expected the cloud to be as big as it's become over the last 10 years. I think we saw companies like salesforce with sas taking off, but I think it is the right direction because there are advantages to having workloads on prem and if you add an as a service capability on top of the top of that, and let's say even do a Coehlo or a managed service, it's pretty close to being similar to the public cloud with the exception, that you can't necessarily swipe a credit card for a bespoke workload if you're a developer and it is a little harder to scale out. But that is the next step in the equation day, which is having, having these folks make capital expenditures, make them in a polo facility and then put a layer to swipe a credit card and you literally have the public cloud. >>Yeah. So that's, that's a great point and that's where it's headed, isn't it? Um, so let's, let's talk about the horses on the track. Hp. As you mentioned, I didn't realize it was four years ago. I thought it was, wow, That's amazing. So everybody's followed suit. You see, Dallas announced, Cisco has announced, uh, Lenovo was announced, I think IBM as well. So we, so everybody started following suit there. The reality is, is it's taken some time to get this stuff standardized. What are you seeing from, from HP? They've made some additional announcements, discover what's your take on all this. >>Yeah. So HPD was definitely the rabbit here and they were first in the market. It was good to see, first off some of their, Um, announcements on, on how it's going. And they talked about 4, $28 billion 1200 customers over 900 partners and 95% retention. And I think that's important anybody who's in the lead and remember what Aws used to do with the slide with the amount of customers would just get bigger and bigger and bigger and that's a good way to show momentum. I like the retention part two which is 95%. And I think that that says a lot uh probably the more important announcements that they made is they talked about the G. A. Of some of their solutions on Green Lake and whether it was S. A. P. Hana Ml apps HPC with Francis V. I was Citrus in video but they also brought more of what I would call a vertical layer and I'm sure you've seen the vertical ization of all of these cloud and as a service workloads. But what they're doing with Epic with EMR and looseness, with financial payments and Splunk and intel with data and risk analysis and finally, a full stack for telco five G. One of the biggest secrets and I covered this about five years ago is HPV actually has a full stack that western european carriers use and they're now extending that to five G. And um, so more horizontal uh and and more vertical. That was the one of the big swipes uh that I saw that there was a second though, but maybe we can talk about these. >>Yeah. Okay, Okay. So, so the other piece of that of course is standardization right there there because there was a, there was, there was a lot of customization leading up to this and everybody sort of, everybody always had some kind of financial game they can play and say, hey, there's an adversary as a service model, but this is definitely more of a standardized scalable move that H P E. Is making with what they call Lighthouse, Right? >>Yeah, that's exactly right. And I've talked to some Green Lake customers and they obviously gave it kudos or they wouldn't have HP wouldn't have served them up and they wouldn't have been buying it. But they did say, um, it took, it took a while, took some paperwork to get it going. It's not 100% of push button, but that's partially because hp allows you to customize the hardware. You want a one off network adapter. Hp says yes, right. You want to integrate a different type of storage? They said yes. But with Green Lake Lighthouse, it's more of a, what you see is what you get, which by the way is very much like the public cloud or you go to a public cloud product sheet or order sheet. You're picking from a list and you really don't know everything that's underneath the covers, aside from, let's say the speed of the network, the type of the storage and the amount of the storage you get. You do get to pick between, let's say, an intel processor, Graviton two or an M. D processor. You get to pick your own GPU. But that's pretty much it. And HP Lighthouse, sorry, Green Lake Lighthouse uh, is bringing, I think a simplification to Green Lake that it needs to truly scale beyond, let's say, the white house customers at HP. Yeah, >>Well done. So, you know, and I hear your point about 10 years in, you know, plus and to me this is like a mandate. I mean, this is okay. Good, good job guys about time. But if I had a, you know, sort of look at the big players, like, can we have an oligopoly here in this, in this business? It's HP, Cisco, you got Dell Lenovo, you've got, you know, IBM, they're all doing this and they all have a different little difference, you know, waste of skin of catch. And your point about simplicity, it seems like HP HP is all in Antonio's like, okay, here's what we're going to announce that, you know, while ago, so, and they seem to have done a good job with Wall Street and they get a simple model, you know, Dell's obviously bigger portfolio, much more complicated. IBM is even more complicated than that. I don't know so much about Lenovo and in Cisco of course, has acquired a ton of SAAS companies and sort of they've got a lot of bespoke products that they're trying to put together, so they've got, but they do have SAS models. So each of them is coming at it from a different perspective. How do you think? And so and the other point we got lighthouse, which is sort of Phase one, get product market fit. Phase two now is scale codify standardized and then phase three is the moat build your unique advantage that protects your business. What do you see as HP? Es sort of unique value proposition and moat that they can build longer term. >>That's a great, great question. And let me rattle off kind of what I'm seeing that some of these these players here. So Cisco, ironically, has sells the most software of any of those players that you mentioned, uh with the exception of IBM. Um, and yeah, C >>ICSDB two. Yeah, >>yeah, they're the they're the number two security player, uh, Microsoft, number one. So and I think the evaluation on the street uh indicate that shows that I feel like uh Deltek is a is a very broad play because not only do they have servers, storage, networking and security, but they also have Pcs and devices, so it's a it's a scale and end play with a focus on VM ware solutions, not exclusively, of course. Uh And um then you've got Lenovo who is just getting into the as a service game and are gosh, they're doing great in hyper scale, they've got scale there vertically integrated. I don't know if if too many people talk about that, but Lenovo does a lot of their own manufacturing and they actually manufacture Netapp storage solutions as well. So yeah, each of these folks brings a different game to the table, I think with h P E, what your bring to the table is nimble. When HP and HP split, the number one thing that I said was that uh huh H P E is going to have to be so much faster than it offsets the scale that Dell technology has and the HBs credit, although there, I don't think we're getting credit for this in the stock market yet. Um, and I know you and I are both industry folks, not financial folks, but I think their biggest thing is speed and the ability to move faster and that is what I've seen as it relates to the moat, which is a unique uh, competitive advantage. Quite frankly, I'm still looking for that day in, in, in what that is and I think in this industry it's nearly impossible and I would posit that that any, even the cloud folks, if you say, is there something that AWS can do that Azure can't, if it put it put its mind to it or G C P. I don't think so. I think it's more of a kind of land and expand and I think for H P E, when it comes to high performance computing and I'm not just talking about government installations, I'm talking about product development, drug development, I think that is a landing place where H P E already does pretty well can come in and expand its footprint, >>you know, that's really interesting um, observations. So, and I would agree with you, it's kind of like, this is a copycat industry, it's like the west coast offense, like the NFL >>and >>so, so the moat comes from, you know, brand execution and your other point about when HP and HP split, that was a game changer, because all of a sudden you saw companies like them, you always had a long term relationship with H P E but or HP, but then they came out of the woodworks and started to explode. And so it really opened up opportunities. So it really >>is an execution, >>isn't it? But go ahead, please >>Dave if I had to pick something that I think HP HPV needs to always be ahead and as a service and listen, you know, I both know announcements don't mean delivery, but there is correlation between if you start four years ahead of somebody that other company is going to have to put just, I mean they're gonna have to turn that ship and many of its competitors really big ships to be able to get there. So I think what Antonio needs to do is run like hell, right, Because it, it, I think it is in the lead and as a service holistically doesn't mean they're going to be there forever, but they have to stay ahead. They have to add more horizontal solutions. They have to add more vertical solutions. And I believe that at some point it does need to invest in some Capex at somebody like ANna Quinn x play credit card swiper on top of that. And Dave, you have the public, you have the public cloud, you don't have all the availability zones, but you have a public cloud. >>Yeah, that's going to happen. I think you're right on. So we see this notion of cloud expanding. It's no longer just remote set of services. Somewhere out in the cloud. It's as you said, outpost was the sort of signal. Okay, We're coming on prem clearly the on prem, uh, guys are connecting to the cloud. Multi cloud exists, we know this and then there's the edge but but but that brings me to that sort of vision and everybody's laying out of this this this seamless integration hiding the complexity log into my cloud and then life will be good. But the edge is different. Right? It's not just, you know, retail store or a race track. I mean there's the far edge, there's the Tesla car, there's gonna be compute everywhere. And that sort of ties into the data. The data flows, you know the real time influencing at the edge ai new semiconductor models. You you came out of the semiconductor industry, you know it inside and out arm is exploding is dominating in the edge with with with apple and amazon Alexa and things like that. That's really where the action is. So this is a really interesting cocktail and soup that we have going on. How do you >>say? Well, you know, Dave if the data most data, I think one thing most everybody agrees on is that most of the data will be created on the edge. Whether that's a moving edge a car, a smartphone or what I call an edge data center without tile flooring. Like that server that's bolted to the wall of Mcdonald's. When you drive through, you can see it versus the walmart. Every walmart has a raised tile floor. It's the edge to economically and performance wise, it doesn't make any sense to send all that data to the mother ships. Okay. And whether that's unproven data center or the giant public cloud, more efficient way is to do the compute at the closest way possible. But what it does, it does bring up challenges. The first challenge is security. If I wanted to, I could walk in and I could take that server off the Mcdonald's or the Shell gas station wall. So I can't do that in a big data center. Okay, so security, Physical security is a challenge. The second is you don't have the people to go in there and fix stuff that are qualified. If you have a networking problem that goes wrong and Mcdonald's, there's nobody there that can help uh, they can they can help you fix that. So this notion of autonomy and management and not keeping hyper critical data sitting out there and it becomes it becomes a security issue becomes a management issue. Let me talk about the benefits though. The benefits are lower latency. You want you want answers more quickly when that car is driving down the road and it has a five G V two X communication cameras can't see around corners, but that car communicating ahead, that ran into the stop sign, can I through vi to X. Talk to the car behind it and say, hey, something is going on there, you can't go to, you can't go to the big data center in the sky to make that happen, that is to be in near real time and that computer has to happen on the edge. So I think this is a tremendous opportunity and ironically the classic on prem guys, they own this, they own this space aside from smartphones of course, but if you look at compute on a light pole, companies like Intel have built Complete architectures to do that, putting compute into 5G base stations. Heck, I just, there was an announcement this week of google cloud in its gaming solution putting compute in a carrier edge to give lower latency to deliver a better experience. >>Yeah, so there, of course there is no one edge, it's highly fragmented, but I'm interested in your thoughts on kind of who's stack actually can play at the edge. And I've been sort of poking uh H P E about this. And the one thing that comes back consistently is Aruba, we we can take a room but not only to the, to the near edge, but to the far edge. And and that, do you see that as a competitive advantage? >>Oh gosh, yes. I mean, I would say the best acquisition That hp has made in 10 years has been aruba it's fantastic. And they also managed it in the right way. I mean, it was part of HB but it was it was managed a lot more loosely then, you know, a company that might get sucked into the board. And I think that paid off tremendously. They're giving Cisco on the edge a absolute run for their money, their first with new technologies. But it's about the solution. What I love about what a ruble looks at is it's looking at entertainment solutions inside of a stadium, um a information solution inside of an airport as opposed to just pushing the technology forward. And then when you integrate compute with with with Aruba, I think that's where the real magic happens. Most of the data on a permanent basis is actually video data. And a lot of it's for security uh for surveillance. And quite frankly, people taking videos off, they're off their smartphones and downloading video. I I just interviewed the chief network officer of T mobile and their number one bit of data is video, video uploaded, video download. But that's where the magic happens when you put that connectivity and the compute together and you can manage it in a, in an orderly and secure fashion >>while I have you, we have a ton of time here, but I I don't pick your brain about intel, the future of intel. I know you've been following it quite closely, you always have Intel's fighting a forefront war. You got there, battling A. M. D. There, battling your arm slash and video. They're they're taking on TSMC now and in foundry and, and I'll add china for the looming threat there. So what's your prognosis for for intel? >>Yeah, I liked bob the previous Ceo and I think he was doing a lot of of the right things, but I really think that customers and investors and even their ecosystem wanted somebody leading the company with a high degree of technical aptitude and Pat coming, I mean, Pat had a great job at VM or, I mean, he had a great run there and I think it is a very positive move. I've never seen the energy At Intel probably in the last 10 years that I've seen today. I actually got a chance to talk with pat. I visited pat uhh last month and and talk to him about pretty much everything and where he wanted to take the company the way you looked at technology, what was important, what's not important. But I think first off in the world of semiconductors, there are no quick fixes. Okay. Intel has a another two years Before we see what the results are. And I think 2023 for them is gonna be a huge year. But even with all this competition though, Dave they still have close to 85% market share in servers and revenue share for client computing around 90%. Okay. So and they've built out there networking business, they build out a storage business um with with obtain they have the leading Aid as provider with Mobileye. And and listen I was I was one of Intel's biggest, I was into one of Intel's biggest, I was Intel's biggest customer when I was a compact. I was their biggest competitor at AMG. So um I'm not obviously not overly pushing or there's just got to wait and see. They're doing the right things. They have the right strategy. They need to execute. One of the most important things That Intel did is extend their alliance with TSMC. So in 2023 we're going to see Intel compute units these tiles, they integrate into the larger chips called S. O. C S B. Manufactured by TSMC. Not exclusively, but we could see that. So literally we could have AMG three nanometer on TSMC CPU blocks, competing with intel chips with TSMC three nanometer CPU blocks and it's on with regard to video. I mean in video is one of these companies that just keeps going charging, charging hard and I'm actually meeting with Jensen wang this week and Arms Ceo Simon Segers to talk about this opportunity and that's a company that keeps on moving interestingly enough in video. If the arm deal does go through will be the largest chip license, see CPU licensee and have the largest CPU footprint on the planet. So here we have AMG who's CPU and Gpu and buying an F. P. G. A company called Xilinx, you have Intel, Cpus, Gpus machine learning accelerators and F. P. G. S. And then you've got arms slashing video bit with everything as well. We have three massive ecosystems. They're gonna be colliding here and I think it's gonna be great for competition. Date. Competition is great. You know, when there's not competition in CPUs and Gpus, we know what happens right. Uh, the beach just does not go on and we start to stagnate. And I did, I do feel like the industry on CPU started to stagnate when intel had no competition. So bring it on. This is gonna be great for for enterprises then customers to and then, oh, by the way, you have the custom Chip providers. WS has created no less than 15 custom semiconductors started with networking and nitro and building out an edge that surrounded the general computer. And then it moved to Inferential for inference trainee um, is about to come out for training Graviton and Gravitas to for general purpose CPU and then you've got apple. So innovation is huge and I love to always make fun of the software is eating the world. I always say yeah but has to run on something. And so I think the combination of semiconductors software and cloud is just really a magical combination. >>Real quick handicap the video arm acquisition. What what are the odds that that they will be successful? They say it's on track. You got a 2 to 13 to 1 10 to 1. >>I say 75%. Yes 25%. No China is always the has been the odd odd man out for the last three years. They scuttled the Qualcomm NXp deal. You just don't know what china is going to do. I think the EU with some conditions is going to let this fly. I think the U. S. Is absolutely going to let this fly. And even though the I. P. Will still stay over in the UK, I think the U. S. Wants to see wants to see this happen, Japan and Korea I think we'll allow this china is the odd man out. >>In a word, the future of h p. E is blank >>as a service >>patrick Moorehead. Always a pleasure. My friend. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming back in the cube. >>Yeah, Thanks for having me on. I appreciate that. >>Everybody stay tuned for more great coverage from HP discover 21 this is day Volonte for the cube. The leader and enterprise tech coverage. We'll be right back.

>> Hey, welcome back already, Jeffrey. Here with the Cube, we are high top San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower in the newest center offices. It's really beautiful and is part of that. They have their San Francisco innovation hubs, so it's five floors of maker's labs and three D printing and all kinds of test facilities and best practices Innovation theater and in this studio, which is really fun to be at. So we're talking about hybrid cloud in the development of cloud and multi cloud. And, you know, we're, you know, continuing on this path. Not only your customers on this path, but everyone's kind of on this path is the same kind of evolved and transformed. We're excited. Have a couple experts in the field. We got Larry Soccer. He's the global managing director of Intelligent Cloud Infrastructure Service's growth and strategy at a center. Very good to see you again. Great to be here. And the Jay Patel. He's the senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider, software business unit, being where enemies of the people are nice. Well, so, uh so first off, how you like the digs appear >> beautiful place and the fact we're part of the innovation team. Thank you for that. It's so let's just >> dive into it. So a lot of crazy stuff happening in the market place a lot of conversations about hybrid cloud, multi cloud, different cloud, public cloud movement of Back and forth from Cloud. Just wanted. Get your perspective a day. You guys have been in the Middle East for a while. Where are we in this kind of evolution? It still kind of feeling themselves out. Is it? We're kind of past the first inning, so now things are settling down. How do you kind of you. Evolution is a great >> question, and I think that was a really nice job of defining the two definitions. What's hybrid worse is multi and simply put hybrid. We look at hybrid as when you have consistent infrastructure. It's the same infrastructure, regardless of location. Multi is when you have disparate infrastructure. We're using them in a collective. So just from a level setting perspective, the taxonomy starting to get standardized industry starting to recognize hybrid is a reality. It's not a step in the long journey. It is an operating model that's gonna be exists for a long time, so it's no longer about location. It's a lot harder. You operate in a multi cloud and a hybrid cloud world and together, right extension BM would have a unique opportunity. Also, the technology provider Accenture, as a top leader in helping customers figure out where best to land their workload in this hybrid multicolored world, because workloads are driving decisions right and one of the year in this hybrid medical world for many years to come. But >> do I need another layer of abstraction? Cause I probably have some stuff that's in hybrid. I probably have some stuff in multi, right, because those were probably not much in >> the way we talked a lot about this, and Larry and I were >> chatting as well about this. And the reality is, the reason you choose a specific cloud is for those native different share capability. Abstraction should be just enough so you can make were close portable, really use the caper berry natively as possible right, and by fact, that we now with being where have a native VM we're running on every major hyper scaler, right? And on. Prem gives you that flexibility. You want off not having to abstract away the goodness off the cloud while having a common and consistent infrastructure. What tapping into the innovations that the public cloud brings. So it is a evolution of what we've been doing together from a private cloud perspective to extend that beyond the data center to really make it operating model. That's independent location, right? >> Solarium cures your perspective. When you work with customers, how do you help them frame this? I mean, I always feel so sorry for corporate CEOs. I mean, they got >> complexities on the doors are already going on >> like crazy that GDP are now, I think, right, The California regs. That'll probably go national. They have so many things to be worried about. They got to keep up on the latest technology. What's happening in containers away. I thought it was Dr Knight. Tell me it's kubernetes. I mean, it's really tough. So how >> do you help them? Kind of. It's got a shot with the foundation. >> I mean, you look at cloud, you look at infrastructure more broadly. I mean, it's there to serve the applications, and it's the applications that really drive business value. So I think the starting point has to be application lead. So we start off. We have are intelligent. Engineering guys are platform guys. You really come in and look And do you know an application modernisation strategy? So they'll do an assessment. You know, most of our clients, given their scale and complexity, usually have from 520,000 applications, very large estates, and they got to start to freak out. Okay, what's my current application's? You know, you're a lot of times I use the six R's methodology, and they say, OK, what is it that I I'm gonna retire. This I'm no longer needed no longer is business value, or I'm gonna, you know, replace this with sass. Well, you know, Yeah, if I move it to sales force, for example, or service now mattress. Ah, and then they're gonna start to look at their their workloads and say OK, you know, I don't need to re factor reform at this, you know, re hosted. You know, when one and things obviously be Emily has done a fantastic job is allowing you to re hosted using their softer to find a data center in the hyper scale er's environments >> that we called it just, you know, my great and then modernized. But >> the modern eyes can't be missed. I think that's where a lot of times you see clients kind of getting the trap Hammer's gonna migrate and then figure it out. You need to start tohave a modernisation strategy and then because that's ultimately going to dictate your multi and your hybrid cloud approaches, is how they're zaps evolve and, you know, they know the dispositions of those abs to figure out How do they get replaced? What data sets need to be adjacent to each other? So >> right, so a j you know, we were there when when Pat was with Andy and talking about, you know, Veum, Where on AWS. And then, you know, Sanjay has shown up, but everybody else's conferences a Google cloud talking about you know, Veum. Where? On Google Cloud. I'm sure there was a Microsoft show I probably missed. You guys were probably there to know it. It's kind of interesting, right from the outside looking in You guys are not a public cloud per se. And yet you've come up with this great strategy to give customers the options to adopt being We're in a public hot. And then now we're seeing where even the public cloud providers are saying here, stick this box in your data center and Frank, this little it's like a little piece of our cloud of floating around in your data center. So talk about the evolution of the strategy is kind of what you guys are thinking about because you know, you're cleared in a leadership position, making a lot of interesting acquisitions. How are you guys see this evolving? And how are you placing your bets? >> You know, that has been always consistent about this. Annie. Any strategy, whether it's any cloud, was any device, you know, any workload if you will, or application. And as we started to think about it, right, one of the big things be focused on was meeting the customer where he's out on its journey. Depending on the customer, let me simply be trying to figure out looking at the data center all the way to how the drive in digital transformation effort in a partner like Accenture, who has the breadth and depth and something, the vertical expertise and the insight. That's what customers looking for. Help me figure out in my journey. First tell me where, Matt, Where am I going and how I make that happen? And what we've done in a clever way, in many ways is we've created the market. We've demonstrated that VM where's the omen? Consistent infrastructure that you can bet on and leverage the benefits of the private or public cloud. And I You know, I often say hybrids a two way street. Now, which is you're bringing Maur more hybrid Cloud service is on Prem. And where is he? On Premise now the edge. I was talking to the centering folks and they were saying the mitral edge. So you're starting to see the workloads, And I think you said almost 40 plus percent off future workers that are gonna be in the central cloud. >> Yeah, actually, is an interesting stat out there. 20 years 2020 to 70% of data will be produced and processed outside the cloud. So I mean, the the edges about, you know, as we were on the tipping point of, you know, I ot finally taking off beyond, you know, smart meters. You know, we're gonna see a huge amount of data proliferate out there. So, I mean, the lines between public and private income literary output you look at, you know, Anthony, you know, as your staff for ages. So you know, And that's where you know, I think I am where strategy is coming to fruition >> sometime. It's great, >> you know, when you have a point of view and you stick with it >> against a conventional wisdom, suddenly end up together and then all of a sudden everyone's falling to hurt and you're like, This is great, but I >> hit on the point about the vertical ization. Every one of our client wth e different industries have very different has there and to the meeting that you know the customer, you know, where they're on their journey. I mean, if you talk to a pharmaceutical, you know, geekspeak compliance. Big private cloud started to dip their toes into public. You know, you go to minds and they're being very aggressive public. So >> every manufacturing with EJ boat back in >> the back, coming to it really varies by industry. >> And that's, you know, that's a very interesting here. Like if you look at all the ot environment. So the manufacturing we started see a lot of end of life of environment. So what's that? Next generation, you know, of control system's gonna run on >> interesting on the edge >> because and you've brought of networking a couple times where we've been talking it, you know, and as as, ah, potential gate right when I was still in the gates. But we're seeing Maura where we're at a cool event Churchill Club, when they had Xilinx micron and arm talking about, you know, shifting Maur that compute and store on these edge devices ti to accommodate, which you said, you know, how much of that stuff can you do at the adverse is putting in. But what I think is interesting is how are you going to manage that? There is a whole different level of management complexity when now you've got this different level of you're looting and security times many, many thousands of these devices all over the place. >> You might have heard >> recent announcements from being where around the carbon black acquisition right that combined with our work space one and the pulse I ot well, >> I'm now >> giving you a management framework with It's what people for things or devices and that consistency. Security on the client tied with the network security with NSX all the way to the data center, security were signed. A look at what we call intrinsic security. How do we bake and securing the platform and start solving these end to end and have a park. My rec center helped design these next generation application architectures are distributed by design. Where >> do you put a fence? You're you could put a fence around your data center, >> but your APP is using service now. Another SAS service is so hard to talk to an application boundary in the sea security model around that. It's a very interesting time. >> You hear a lot of you hear a >> lot about a partnership around softer to find data center on networking with Bello and NSX. But we're actually been spending a lot of time with the i o. T. Team and really looking at and a lot of our vision, the lines. I mean, you actually looked that they've been work similarly, agent technology with Leo where you know, ultimately the edge computing for io ti is gonna have to be containerized because you can need multiple middleware stacks supporting different vertical applications, right? We're actually you know what we're working with with one mind where we started off doing video analytics for predictive, you know, maintenance on tires for tractors, which are really expensive. The shovels, It's after we started pushing the data stream up it with a video stream up into azure. But the network became a bottleneck looking into fidelity. So we gotta process there. They're not looking autonomous vehicles which need eight megabits low laden C band with, you know, sitting at the the edge. Those two applications will need to co exist. And you know why we may have as your edge running, you know, in a container down, you know, doing the video analytics. If Caterpillar chooses, you know, Green Grass or Jasper that's going to co exist. So you see how the whole container ization that were started seeing the data center push out there on the other side of the pulse of the management of the edge is gonna be very difficult. I >> need a whole new frontier, absolutely >> moving forward. And with five g and telco. And they're trying to provide evaluated service is So what does that mean from an infrastructure perspective. Right? Right, Right. When do you stay on the five g radio network? Worse is jumping on the back line. And when do you move data? Where's his process? On the edge. Those all business decisions that need to be doing to some framework. >> You guys were going, >> we could go on. Go on, go. But I want to Don't fall upon your Segway from containers because containers were such an important part of this story and an enabler to the story. And, you know, you guys been aggressive. Move with hefty Oh, we've had Craig McCloskey, honor. He was still at Google and Dan great guys, but it's kind of funny, right? Cause three years ago, everyone's going to Dr Khan, right? I was like that were about shows that was hot show. Now doctors kind of faded and and kubernetes has really taken off. Why, for people that aren't familiar with kubernetes, they probably here to cocktail parties. If they live in the Bay Area, why's containers such an important enabler? And what's so special about Coburn? 80 specifically. >> Do you wanna go >> on the way? Don't talk about my products. I mean, if you >> look at the world is getting much more dynamics on the, you know, particularly you start to get more digitally to couple applications you started. You know, we've gone from a world where a virtual machine might have been up for months or years. Toe, You know, obviously you have containers that are much more dynamic, allowed to scale quickly, and then they need to be orchestrated. That's essential. Kubernetes does is just really starts to orchestrate that. And as we get more distributed workloads, you need to coordinate them. You need to be able to scale up as you need it for performance, etcetera. So kubernetes an incredible technology that allows you really to optimize, you know, the placement of that. So just like the virtual machine changed, how we compute containers now gives us a much more flexible portable. You know that, you know you can run on anything infrastructure, any location, you know, closer to the data, et cetera. To do that. And I >> think the bold movie >> made is, you know, we finally, after working with customers and partners like century, we have a very comprehensive strategy. We announced Project Enzo, a philosophy in world and Project tansy really focused on three aspects of containers. How do you build applications, which is pivotal in that mansion? People's driven around. How do we run these arm? A robust enterprise class run time. And what if you could take every V sphere SX out there and make it a container platform? Now we have half a million customers. 70 million be EMS, all of sudden that run time. We're continue enabling with the Project Pacific Soviets. Year seven becomes a commonplace for running containers, and I am so that debate of'em czar containers done gone well, one place or just spin up containers and resource is. And then the more important part is How do I manage this? You said, becoming more of a platform not just an orchestration technology, but a platform for how do I manage applications where I deploy them where it makes most sense, right? Have decoupled. My application needs from the resource is, and Coburn is becoming the platform that allows me to port of Lee. I'm the old job Web logic guy, right? >> So this is like distributed Rabb logic job on steroids, running across clouds. Pretty exciting for a middle where guy This is the next generation and the way you just said, >> And two, that's the enabling infrastructure that will allow it to roll into future things like devices. Because now you've got that connection >> with the fabric, and that's working. Becomes a key part of one of the key >> things, and this is gonna be the hard part is optimization. So how do we optimize across particularly performance, but even costs? >> You're rewiring secure, exact unavailability, >> Right? So still, I think my all time favorite business book is Clayton Christians. An innovator's dilemma. And in one of the most important lessons in that book is What are you optimizing four. And by rule, you can't optimize for everything equally you have to you have to rank order. But what I find really interesting in this conversation in where we're going in the complexity of the throughput, the complexity of the size of the data sets the complexity of what am I optimizing for now? Just begs for applied a I or this is not This is not a people problem to solve. This is this >> is gonna be all right. So you look at >> that, you know, kind of opportunity to now apply A I over the top of this thing opens up tremendous opportunity. >> Standardize infrastructural auditory allows you to >> get more metrics that allows you to build models to optimize infrastructure over time. >> And humans >> just can't get their head around me because you do have to optimize across multiple mentions. His performances cost, but then that performances gets compute. It's the network, I mean. In fact, the network's always gonna be the bottlenecks. You look at it even with five G, which is an order of magnitude, more bandwidth from throughput, the network will still lag. I mean, you go back to Moore's Law, right? It's Ah, even though it's extended to 24 months, price performance doubles. The amount of data potentially can kick in and you know exponentially grow on. Networks don't keep pays, so that optimization is constantly going to be tuned. And as we get even with increases in network, we have to keep balancing that right. >> But it's also the business >> optimization beyond the infrastructure optimization. For instance, if you're running a big power generation field of a bunch of turbines, right, you may wanna optimize for maintenance because things were running at some steady state. But maybe there's oil crisis or this or that. Suddenly the price, right? You're like, forget the maintenance. Right now we've got you know, we >> got a radio controlled you start about other >> than a dynamic industry. How do I really time change the behavior, right? Right. And more and more policy driven. Where the infrastructure smart enough to react based on the policy change you made. >> That's the world we >> want to get to. And we're far away from that, right? >> Yeah. I mean, I think so. Ultimately, I think the Cuban honeys controller gets an A I overlay and the operators of the future of tuning the Aye aye engines that optimizing, >> right? Right. And then we run into the whole thing, which we've talked about many times in this building with Dr Room, A child re from a center. Then you got the whole ethics overlay on top of the thing. That's a whole different conversation from their day. So before we wrap kind of just want to give you kind of last thoughts. Um, as you know, customers Aaron, all different stages of their journey. Hopefully, most of them are at least at least off the first square, I would imagine on the monopoly board What does you know, kind of just top level things that you would tell people that they really need just to keep always at the top is they're starting to make these considerations, starting to make these investments starting to move workloads around that they should always have kind of top >> of mind. For me, it's very simple. It's really about focused on the business outcome. Leverage the best resource for the right need and design. Architectures are flexible that give you a choice. You're not locked in and look for strategic partners with this technology partners or service's partners that alive you to guide because the complexities too high the number of choices that too high. You need someone with the breath in depth to give you that platform in which you can operate on. So we want to be the digital kind of the ubiquitous platform. From a software perspective, Neck Centuries wants to be that single partner who can help them guide on the journey. So I think that would be my ask. It's not thinking about who are your strategic partners. What is your architecture and the choices you're making that gave you that flexibility to evolve. Because this is a dynamic market. What should make decisions today? I mean, I'll be the one you need >> six months even. Yeah. And And it's And that that dynamic that dynamics is, um is accelerating if you look at it. I mean, we've all seen change in the industry of decades in the industry, but the rate of change now the pace, you know, things are moving so quickly. >> I mean, little >> respond competitive or business or in our industry regulations, right. You have to be prepared for >> Yeah. Well, gentlemen, thanks for taking a few minutes and ah, great conversation. Clearly, you're in a very good space because it's not getting any less complicated in >> Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Larry. Ajay, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. >> We are top of San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower at the center Innovation hub. Thanks for watching. We'll see next time. Quick

(upbeat music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios having a CUBE Conversation, we're just about ready for the madness of the conference season to start in a few months, so it's nice to have some time to have things a little calmer in the studio, and we're excited to have a new company, I guess they're not that new, but they're relatively new, they've been working on a really interesting technology around infrastructure, and we welcome to the studio, first time, I think, Sumit Puri, CEO and co-founder of Liqid, welcome. >> Thank you guys, very very happy to be here. >> And joined by our big brain, David Floyer, of course, the CTO and co-founder of Wikibon and knows all things infrastructure. Dave, always good to see you. >> It's so good to see you. >> All right, so let's jump into this, Sumit, give us the basic overview of Liqid, what are you guys all about, little bit of the company background, how long you've been around. No, absolutely, absolutely, Liqid is a software-defined infrastructure company, the technology that we've developed is referred to as composable infrastructure, think, dynamic infrastructure, and what we do, is we go and we turn data center resources from statically-configured boxes to dynamic, agile infrastructure. Our core technology is two-part. Number 1, we have a fabric layer, that allows you to interconnect off-the-shelf hardware, but more importantly, we have a software layer, that allows you to orchestrate, or dynamically configure servers, at the bare metal. >> So, who are you selling these solutions to? What's your market, what's the business case for this solution? >> Absolutely, so first, I guess, let me explain a little bit about what we mean by composable infrastructure. Rather than building servers by plugging devices into the sockets of the motherboard, with composability it's all about pools, or trays, of resources. A tray of CPUs, a tray of SSDs, a tray of GPUs, a tray of networking devices, instead of plugging those into a motherboard, we connect those into a fabric switch, and then we come in with our software, and we orchestrate, or recompose, at the bare metal. Grab this CPU, grab those four SSDs, these eight GPUs, and build me a server, just like you were plugging devices into the motherboard, except you're defining it in software, on the other side, you're getting delivered infrastructure of any size, shape, or ratio that you want. Except that infrastructure is dynamic, when we need another GPU in our server, we don't send a guy with a cart to plug the device in, we reprogram the fabric and add or remove devices as required by the application. We give you all the flexibility that you would get from public cloud, on the infrastructure that you are forced to own. And now, to answer your question of where we find a natural fit for our solution, one primary area is obviously cloud. If you're building a cloud environment, whether you're providing cloud as a service or whether you're providing cloud to your internal customers, building a more dynamic, agile cloud is what we enable. >> So, is the use case more just to use your available resources and reconfigure it to set something that basically runs that way for a while, or are customers more using it to dynamically reconfigure those resources based on, say, a temporary workload, is kind of a classic cloud example, where you need a bunch of something now, but not necessarily forever. >> Sure. The way we look at the world is very much around resource utilization. I'm buying this very expensive hardware, I'm deploying it into my data center, typical resource utilization is very low, below 20%, right? So what we enable is the ability to get better resource utilization out of the hardware that you're deploying inside your data center. If we can take a resource that's utilized 20% of the time because it's deployed as a static element inside of a box and we can raise the utilization to 40%, does that mean we are buying less hardware inside of our data center? Our argument is yes, if we can take rack scale efficiency from 20% to 40%, our belief is we can do the same amount of work with less hardware. >> So it's a fairly simple business case, then. To do that. So who are your competition in this area? Is it people like HP or Intel, or, >> That's a great question, I think both of those are interesting companies, I think HPE is the 800-pound gorilla in this term called composability and we find ourselves a slightly different approach than the way that those guys take it, I think first and foremost, the way that we're different is because we're disaggregated, right? When we sell you trays of resources, we'll sell you a tray of SSD or a tray of GPUs, where HP takes a converged solution, right? Every time I'm buying resources for my composable rack, I'm paying for CPUs, SSDs, GPUs, all of those devices as a converged resource, so they are converged, we are disaggregated. We are bare metal, we have a PCIe-based fabric up and down the rack, they are an ethernet-based fabric, there are no ethernet SSDs, there are no ethernet GPUs, at least today, so by using ethernet as your fabric, they're forced to do virtualization protocol translation, so they are not truly bare metal. We are bare metal, we view of them more as a virtualized solution. We're an open ecosystem, we're hardware-agnostic, right? We allow our customers to use whatever hardware that they're using in their environment today. Once you've kind of gone down that HP route, it's very much a closed environment. >> So what about some of the customers that you've got? Which sort of industries, which sort of customers, I presume this is for the larger types of customers, in general, but say a little bit about where you're making a difference. >> No, absolutely, right? So, obviously at scale, composability has even more benefit than in smaller deployments, I'll give you just a couple of use case examples. Number one, we're working with a transportation company, and what happens with them at 5 p.m. is actually very different than what happens at 2 a.m., and the model that they have today is a bunch of static boxes and they're playing a game of workload matching. If the workload that comes in fits the appropriate box, then the world is good. If the workload that comes in ends up on a machine that's oversized, then resources are being wasted, and what they said was, "We want to take a new approach. "We want to study the workload as it comes in, "dynamically spin up small, medium, large, "depending on what that workload requires, "and as soon as that workload is done, "free the resources back into the general pool." Right, so that's one customer, by taking a dynamic approach, they're changing the TCO argument inside of their environment. And for them, it's not a matter of am I going dynamic or am I going static, everyone knows dynamic infrastructure is better, no one says, "Give me the static stuff." For them, it's am I going public cloud, or am I going on prem. That's really the question, so what we provide is public cloud is very easy, but when you start thinking about next-generation workloads, things that leverage GPUs and FPGAs, those instantiations on public cloud are just not very cheap. So we give you all of that flexibility that you're getting on public cloud, but we save you money by giving you that capability on prem. So that's use case number one. Another use case is very exciting for us, we're working with a studio down in southern California, and they leverage these NVIDIA V100 GPUs. During the daytime, they give those GPUs to their AI engineers, when the AI engineers go home at night, they reprogram the fabric and they use those same GPUs for rendering workloads. They've taken $50,000 worth of hardware and they've doubled the utilization of that hardware. >> The other use case we talked about before we turned the cameras on there, was pretty interesting, was kind of multiple workloads against the same data set, over a series of time where you want to apply different resources. I wonder if you can unpack that a little bit because I think that's a really interesting one that we don't hear a lot about. So, we would say about 60 plus to 70% of our deployments in one way or another touch the realm of AI. AI is actually not an event, AI is a workflow, what do we do? First we ingest data, that's very networking-centric. Then we scrub and we clean the data, that's actually CPU-centric. Then we're running inference, and then we're running training, that's GPU-centric. Data has gravity, right? It's very difficult to move petabytes of data around, so what we enable is the composable AI platform, leave data at the center of the universe, reorchestrate your compute, networking, GPU resources around the data. That's the way that we believe that AI is approached. >> So we're looking forward in the future. What are you seeing where you can make a difference in this? I mean, a lot of changes happening, there's Gen 4 coming out in PCIe, there's GPUs which are moving down to the edge, how do see, where do you see you're going to make a difference, over the next few years. >> That's a great question. So I think there's 2 parts to look at, right? Number one is the physical layer, right? Today we build or we compose based upon PCIe Gen 3 because for the first time in the data center, everything is speaking a common language. When SSDs moved to NVMe, you had SSDs, network cards, GPUs, CPUs, all speaking a common language which was PCIe. So that's why we've chosen to build our fabric on this common interconnect, because that's how we enable bare metal orchestration without translation and virtualization, right? Today, it's PCIe Gen 3, as the industry moves forward, Gen 4 is coming. Gen 4 is here. We've actually announced our first PCIe Gen 4 products already, and by the end of this year, Gen 4 will become extremely relevant into the market. Our software has been architected from the beginning to be physical layer-agnostic, so whether we're talking PCIe Gen 3, PCIe Gen 4, in the future something referred to as Gen Z, (laughing) it doesn't matter for us, we will support all of those physical layers. For us it's about the software orchestration. >> I would imagine, too, like TPUs and other physical units that are going to be introduced in the system, too, you're architected to be able to take those, new-- >> Today, today we're doing CPUs, GPUs, NVMe devices and we're doing NICs. We just made an announcement, now we're orchestrating Optane memory with Intel. We've made an announcement with Xilinx where we're orchestrating FPGAs with Xilinx. So this will continue, we'll continue to find more and more of the resources that we'll be able to orchestrate for a very simple reason, everything has a common interconnect, and that common interconnect is PCIe. >> So this is an exciting time in your existence. Where are you? I mean, how far along are you to becoming the standard in this industry? >> Yeah, no, that's a great question, and I think, we get asked a lot is what company are you most similar to or are you most like at the early stage. And what we say is we, a lot of time, compare ourselves to VMware, right? VMware is the hypervisor for the virtualization layer. We view ourselves as that physical hypervisor, right? We do for physical infrastructure what VMware is doing for virtualized environments. And just like VMware has enabled many of the market players to get virtualized, our hope is we're going to enable many of the market players to become composable. We're very excited about our partnership with Inspur, just recently we've announced, they're the number three server vendor in the world, we've announced an AI-centric rack, which leverages the servers and the storage solutions from Inspur tied to our fabric to deliver a composable AI platform. >> That's great. >> Yeah, and it seems like the market for cloud service providers, 'cause we always talk about the big ones, but there's a lot of them, all over the world, is a perfect use case for you, because now they can actually offer the benefits of cloud flexibility by leveraging your infrastructure to get more miles out of their investments into their backend. >> Absolutely, cloud, cloud service providers, and private cloud, that's a big market and opportunity for us, and we're not necessarily chasing the big seven hyperscalers, right? We'd love to partner with them, but for us, there's 300 other companies out there that can use the benefit of our technology. So they necessarily don't have the R&D dollars available that some of the big guys have, so we come in with our technology and we enable those cloud service providers to be more agile, to be more competitive. >> All right, Sumit, before we let you go, season's coming up, we were just at RSA yesterday, big shows comin' up in May, where you guys, are we going to cross paths over the next several weeks or months? >> No, absolutely, we got a handful of shows coming up, very exciting season for us, we're going to be at the OCP, the Open Compute Project conference, actually next week, and then right after that, we're going to be at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, we're going to have a booth at both of those shows, and we're going to be doing live demos of our composable platform, and then at the end of April, we're going to be at the Dell Technology World conference in Las Vegas, where we're going to have a large booth and we're going to be doing some very exciting demos with the Dell team. >> Sumit, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to tell us a story, it's pretty exciting stuff, 'cause this whole flexibility is such an important piece of the whole cloud value proposition, and you guys are delivering it all over the place. >> Well, thank you guys for making the time today, I was excited to be here, thank you. >> All right, David, always good to see you, >> Good to see you. >> Smart man, alright, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. 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>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> We're back at IBM Think 2018. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris. Ken King is here; he's the general manager of OpenPOWER from IBM, and Sumit Gupta, PhD, who is the VP, HPC, AI, ML for IBM Cognitive. Gentleman, welcome to the Cube >> Sumit: Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, really, guys, a pleasure. We had dinner last night, talked about Picciano who runs the OpenPOWER business, appreciate you guys comin' on, but, I got to ask you, Sumit, I'll start with you. OpenPOWER, Cognitive systems, a lot of people say, "Well, that's just the power system. "This is the old AIX business, it's just renaming it. "It's a branding thing.", what do you say? >> I think we had a fundamental strategy shift where we realized that AI was going to be the dominant workload moving into the future, and the systems that have been designed today or in the past are not the right systems for the AI future. So, we also believe that it's not just about silicon and even a single server. It's about the software, it's about thinking at the react level and the data center level. So, fundamentally, Cognitive Systems is about co-designing hardware and software with an open ecosystem of partners who are innovating to maximize the data and AI support at a react level. >> Somebody was talkin' to Steve Mills, probably about 10 years ago, and he said, "Listen, if you're going to compete with Intel, "you can copy them, that's not what we're going to do." You know, he didn't like the spark strategy. "We have a better strategy.", is what he said, and "Oh, strategies, we're going to open it up, "we're going to try to get 10% of the market. "You know, we'll see if we can get there.", but, Ken, I wonder if you could sort of talk about, just from a high level, the strategy and maybe go into the segments. >> Yeah, absolutely, so, yeah, you're absolutely right on the strategy. You know, we have completely opened up the architecture. Our focus on growth is around having an ecosystem and an open architecture so everybody can innovate on top of it effectively and everybody in the ecosystem can profit from it and gains good margins. So, that's the strategy, that's how we design the OpenPOWER ecosystem, but, you know, our segments, our core segments, AIX in Unix is still a core, very big core segment of ours. Unix itself is flat to declining, but AIX is continuing to take share in that segment through all the new innovations we're delivering. The other segments are all growth segments, high growth segments, whether it's SAP HANA, our cognitive infrastructure in modern day to platform, or even what we're doing in the HyperScale data centers. Those are all significant growth opportunities for us, and those are all Linux based, and, so, that is really where a lot of the OpenPOWER initiatives are driving growth for us and leveraging the fact that, through that ecosystem, we're getting a lot of incremental innovation that's occurring and it's delivering competitive differentiation for our platform. I say for our platform, but that doesn't mean just for IBM, but for all the ecosystem partners as well, and a lot of that was on display on Monday when we had our OpenPOWER summit. >> So, to talk about more about the OpenPOWER summit, what was that all about, who was there? Give us some stats on OpenPOWER and ecosystem. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, it was a good day, we're up to well over 300 members. We have over 50 different systems that are coming out in the market from IBM or our partners. Over 20 different manufacturers out there actually developing OpenPOWER systems. A lot of announcements or a lot of statements that were made at the summit that we thought were extremely valuable, first of all, we got the number one server vendor in Europe, Atos, designing and developing P9, the number on in Japan, Hitachi, the number one in China, Inspur. We got top ODMs like Super Micro, Wistron, and others that are also developing their power nine. We have a lot of different component providers on the new PCIe gen four, on the open cabinet capabilities, a lot of announcements made by a number of component partners and accelerator partners at the summit as well. The other thing I'm excited about is we have over 70 ISVs now on the platform, and a number of statements were made and announcements on Monday from people like MapD, Anaconda, H2O, Conetica and others who are leveraging those innovations bought on the platform like NVLink and the coherency between GPU and CPU to do accelerated analytics and accelerated GPU database kind of capabilities, but the thing that had me the most excited on Monday were the end users. I've always said, and the analysts always ask me the questions of when are you going to start penetration in the market? When are you going to show that you've got a lot of end users deploying this? And there were a lot of statements by a lot of big players on Monday. Google was on stage and publicly said the IO was amazing, the memory bandwidth is amazing. We are deploying Zaius, which is the power nine server, in our data centers and we're ready for scale, and it's now Google strong which is basically saying that this thing is hardened and ready for production, but we also (laughs) had a number of other significant ones, Tencent talkin' about deploying OpenPOWER, 30% better efficiency, 30% less server resources required, the cloud armor of Alibaba talkin' about how they're putting on their on their X-Dragon, they have it in a piler program, they're asking everybody to use it now so they can figure out how do they go into production. PayPal made statements about how they're using it, but the machine learning and deep learning to do fraud detection, and we even had Limelight, who is not as big a name, but >> CDN, yeah. >> They're a CDN tool provider to people like Netflix and others. We're talkin' about the great capability with the IO and the ability to reduce the buffering and improve the streaming for all these CDN providers out there. So, we were really excited about all those end users and all the things they're saying. That demonstrates the power of this ecosystem. >> Alright, so just to comment on the architecture and then, I want to get into the Cognitive piece. I mean, you guys did, years ago, little Indians, recognizing you got to get software based to be compatible. You mentioned, Ken, bandwidth, IO bandwidth, CAPI stuff that you've done. So, there's a lot of incentives, especially for the big hyperscale guys, to be able to do more with less, but, to me, let's get into the AI, the Cognitive piece. Bob Picciano comes over from running a $15 billion analytics business, so, obviously, he's got some knowledge. He's bringin' in people like you with all these cool buzzwords in your title. So, talk a little bit about infrastructure for AI and why power is the right platform. >> Sure, so, I think we all recognize that the performance advantages and even power advantages that we were getting from Dennard scaling, also known as Moore's law, is over, right. So, people talk about the end of Moore's Law, and that's really the end of gaining processor performance with Dennard scaling and the Moore's Law. What we believe is that to continue to meet the performance needs of all of these new AI and data workloads, you need accelerators, and not just computer accelerators, you actually need accelerated networking. You need accelerated storage, you need high-density memory sitting very close to the compute power, and, if you really think about it, what's happened is, again, system view, right, we're not silicon view, we're looking at the system. The minute you start looking at the silicon you realize you want to get the data to where the computer is, or the computer where the data is. So, it all becomes about creating bigger pipelines, factor of pipelines, to move data around to get to the right compute piece. For example, we put much more emphasis on a much faster memory system to make sure we are getting data from the system memory to the CPU. >> Coherently. >> Coherently, that's the main memory. We put interfaces on power nine including NVLink, OpenCAPI, and PCIe gen four, and that enabled us to get that data either from the network to the system memory, or out back to the network, or to storage, or to accelerators like GPUs. We built and embedded these high-speed interconnects into power nine, into the processor. Nvidia put NVLink into their GPU, and we've been working with marketers like Xilinx and Mellanox on getting OpenCAPI onto their components. >> And we're seeing up to 10x for both memory bandwidth and IO over x86 which is significant. You should talk about how we're seeing up to 4x improvement in training of MLDL algorithms over x86 which is dramatic in how quickly you can get from data to insight, right? You could take training and turn it from weeks to days, or days to hours, or even hours to minutes, and that makes a huge difference in what you can do in any industry as far as getting insight out of your data which is the competitive differentiator in today's environment. >> Let's talk about this notion of architecture, or systems especially. The basic platform for how we've been building systems has been relatively consistent for a long time. The basic approach to how we think about building systems has been relatively consistent. You start with the database manager, you run it on an Intel processor, you build your application, you scale it up based on SMP needs. There's been some variations; we're going into clustering, because we do some other things, but you guys are talking about something fundamentally different, and flash memory, the ability to do flash storage, which dramatically changes the relationship between the processor and the data, means that we're not going to see all of the organization of the workloads around the server, see how much we can do in it. It's really going to be much more of a balanced approach. How is power going to provide that more balanced systems approach across as we distribute data, as we distribute processing, as we create a cloud experience that isn't in one place, but is in more places. >> Well, this ties exactly to the point I made around it's not just accelerated compute, which we've all talked about a lot over the years, it's also about accelerated storage, accelerated networking, and accelerated memories, right. This is really, the point being, that the compute, if you don't have a fast pipeline into the processor from all of this wonderful storage and flash technology, there's going to be a choke point in the network, or they'll be a choke point once the data gets to the server, you're choked then. So, a lot of our focus has been, first of all, partnering with a company like Mellanox which builds extremely high bandwidth, high-speed >> And EOF. >> Right, right, and I'm using one as an example right. >> Sure. >> I'm using one as an example and that's where the large partnerships, we have like 300 partnerships, as Ken talked about in the OpenPOWER foundation. Those partnerships is because we brought together all of these technology providers. We believe that no one company can own the agenda of technology. No one company can invest enough to continue to give us the performance we need to meet the needs of the AI workloads, and that's why we want to partner with all these technology vendors who've all invested billions of dollars to provide the best systems and software for AI and data. >> But fundamentally, >> It's the whole construct of data centric systems, right? >> Right. >> I mean, sometimes you got to process the data in the network, right? Sometimes you got to process the data in the storage. It's not just at the CPU, the GPUs a huge place for processing that data. >> Sure. >> How do you do that all coherently and how do things work together in a system environment is crucial versus a vertically integrated capability where the CPU provider continues to put more and more into the processor and disenfranchise the rest of the ecosystem. >> Well, that was the counter building strategies that we want to talk about. You have Intel who wants to put as much on the die as possible. It's worked quite well for Intel over the years. You had to take a different strategy. If you tried to take Intel on with that strategy, you would have failed. So, talk about the different philosophies, but really I'm interested in what it means for things like alternative processing and your relationship in your ecosystem. >> This is not about company strategies, right. I mean, Intel is a semiconductor company and they think like a semiconductor company. We're a systems and software company, we think like that, but this is not about company strategy. This is about what the market needs, what client workloads need, and if you start there, you start with a data centric strategy. You start with data centric systems. You think about moving data around and making sure there is heritage in this computer, there is accelerated computer, you have very fast networks. So, we just built the US's fastest supercomputer. We're currently building the US's fastest supercomputer which is the project name is Coral, but there are two supercomputers, one at Oak Ridge National Labs and one at Lawrence Livermore. These are the ultimate HPC and AI machines, right. Its computer's a very important part of them, but networking and storage is just as important. The file system is just as important. The cluster management software is just as important, right, because if you are serving data scientists and a biologist, they don't want to deal with, "How many servers do I need to launch this job on? "How do I manage the jobs, how do I manage the server?" You want them to just scale, right. So, we do a lot of work on our scalability. We do a lot of work in using Apache Spark to enable cluster virtualization and user virtualization. >> Well, if we think about, I don't like the term data gravity, it's wrong a lot of different perspectives, but if we think about it, you guys are trying to build systems in a world that's centered on data, as opposed to a world that's centered on the server. >> That's exactly right. >> That's right. >> You got that, right? >> That's exactly right. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Alright, you guys got to go, we got to wrap, but I just want to close with, I mean, always says infrastructure matters. You got Z growing, you got power growing, you got storage growing, it's given a good tailwind to IBM, so, guys, great work. Congratulations, got a lot more to do, I know, but thanks for >> It's going to be a fun year. comin' on the Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate you having us. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube live from IBM Think 2018. We'll be right back. (techno beat)