>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome to the Fira in Barcelona, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23, day one of that coverage. We have four days of wall-to-wall action going on, the place is going crazy. I'm here with Dave Nicholson, Lisa Martin is also in the house. Today's ecosystem day, and we're really excited to have Manish Singh who's the CTO of the Telecom Systems Business unit at Dell Technologies. He's joined by Doug Wolf who's the head of strategy for the Telecom Systems Business unit at Dell. Gents, welcome. What a show. I mean really the first major MWC or used to be Mobile World Congress since you guys have launched your telecom business, you kind of did that sort of in the Covid transition, but really exciting, obviously a huge, huge venue to match the huge market. So Manish, how did you guys get into this? What did you see? What was the overall thinking to get Dell into this business? >> Manish: Yeah, well, I mean just to start with you know, if you look at the telecom ecosystem today, the service providers in particular, they are looking for network transformation, driving more disaggregation into their network so that they can get better utilization of the infrastructure, but then also get more agility, more cloud native characteristics onto their, for their networks in particular. And then further on, it's important for them to really start to accelerate the pace of innovation on the networks itself, to start more supply chain diversity, that's one of the challenges that they've been having. And so there've been all these market forces that have been really getting these service providers to really start to transform the way they have built the infrastructure in the past, which was legacy monolithic architectures to more cloud native disaggregated. And from a Dell perspective, you know, that really gives us the permission to play, to really, given all the expertise on the work we have done in the IT with all the IT transformations to leverage all that expertise and bring that to the service providers and really help them in accelerating their network transformation. So that's where the journey started. We've been obviously ever since then working on expanding the product portfolio on our compute platforms to bring Teleco great compute platforms with more capabilities than we can talk about that. But then working with partners and building the ecosystem to again create this disaggregated and open ecosystem that will be more cloud native and really meet the objective that the service providers are after. >> Dave Vellante: Great, thank you. So, Doug the strategy obviously is to attack this market, as Manish said, from an open standpoint, that's sort of new territory. It's like a little bit like the wild, wild west. So maybe you could double click on what Manish was saying from a, from a strategy standpoint, yes, the Telecos need to be more flexible, they need to be more open, but they also need this reliability piece. So talk about that from a strategy standpoint of what you guys saw. >> Doug: Yeah, absolutely. As Manish mentioned, you know, Dell getting into open systems isn't something new. You know, Dell has been kind of playing in that world for years and years, but the opportunity in Telecom that came was opening of the RAN, the core network, the edge, all of these with 5G really created a wide opening for us. So we started developing products and solutions, you know, built our first Telecom grade servers for open RAN over the last year, we'll talk about those at the show. But you know, as, as Manish mentioned, an open ecosystem is new to Telecom. I've been in the Telecom business along with Manish for, you know, 25 plus years and this is a new thing that they're embarking on. So started with virtualization about five, six years ago, and now moving to cloud native architectures on the core, suddenly there's this need to have multiple parties partner really well, share specifications, and put that together for an operator to consume. And I think that's just the start of really where all the challenges are and the opportunities that we see. >> Where are we in this transition cycle? When the average consumer hears 5G, feels like it's been around for a long time because it was hyped beforehand. >> Doug: Yeah. >> If you're talking about moving to an open infrastructure model from a proprietary closed model, when is the opportunity for Dell to become part of that? Is it, are there specific sites that have already transitioned to 5G, therefore they've either made the decision to be open or not? Or are there places where the 5G transition has taken place, and they might then make a transition to open brand with 5G? Where, where are we in that cycle? What does the opportunity look like? >> I'll kind of take it from the typology of the operator, and I'm sure Manish will build on this, but if I look back on the core, started to get virtualized you know, back around 2015-16 with some of the lead operators like AT&T et cetera. So Dell has been partnering with those operators for some years. So it really, it's happening on the core, but it's moving with 5G to more of a cloud-like architecture, number one. And number two, they're going beyond just virtualizing the network. You know, they previously had used OpenStack and most of them are migrating to more of a cloud native architecture that Manish mentioned. And that is a bit different in terms of there's more software vendors in that ecosystem because the software is disaggregated also. So Dell's been playing in the core for a number of years, but we brought out new solutions we've announced at the show for the core. And the parts that are really starting that transition of maybe where the core was back in 2015 is on the RAN and on the edge in particular. >> Because NFV kind of predated the ascendancy of cloud. >> Exactly, yeah. >> Right, so it really didn't have the impact that people had hoped. And there's some, when you look back, 'cause it's not same wine, new bottle as the open systems movement, there are a lot of similarities but you know, you mentioned cloud, and cloud native, you really didn't have, back in the nineties, true engineered systems. You didn't really have AI that, you know, to speak of at the sort of volume of the data that we have. So Manish, from a CTO's perspective, how are you attacking some of those differences in bringing that to market? >> Manish: Yeah, I mean, I think you touched on some very important points there. So first of all, the duck's point, a lot of this transformation started in the core, right? And as the technology evolution progress, the opportunities opened up. It has now come into the edge and the radio access network as well, in particular with open RAN. And so when we talk about the disaggregation of the infrastructure from the software itself and an open ecosystem, this now starts to create the opportunity to accelerate innovation. And I really want to pick up on the point that you'd said on AI, for example. AI and machine learning bring a whole new set of capabilities and opportunities for these service providers to drive better optimization, better performance, better sustainability and energy efficiency on their infrastructure, on and on and on. But to really tap into these technologies, they really need to open that up to third parties implementation solutions that are coming up. And again, the end objective remains to accelerate that innovation. Now that said, all these things need to be brought together, right? And delivered and deployed in the network without any degradation in the KPIs and actually improving the performance on different vectors, right? So this is what the current state of play is. And with this aggregation I'm definitely a believer that all these new technologies, including AI, machine learning, and there's a whole area, host area of problems that can be solved and attacked and are actually getting attacked by applying AI and machine learning onto these networks. >> Open obviously is good. Nobody's ever going to, you know, argue that open is a bad thing. It's like democracy is a good thing, right? At least amongst us. And so, but, the RAN, the open RAN, has to be as reliable and performant, right, as these, closed networks. Or maybe not, maybe it doesn't have to be identical. Just has to be close enough in order for that tipping point to occur. Is that a fair summarization? What are you guys hearing from carriers in terms of their willingness to sort of put their toe in the water and, and what could we expect in terms of the maturity model of, of open RAN and adoption? >> Right, so I mean I think on, on performance that, that's a tough one. I think the operators will demand performance and you've seen experiments, you've really seen more of the Greenfield operators kind of launch. >> Okay. >> Doug: Open RAN or vRAN type solutions. >> So they're going to disrupt. >> Doug: Yeah, they're going to disrupt. >> Yeah. >> Doug: And there's flexibility in an open RAN architecture also for 5G that they, that they're interested in and I think the Brownfield operators are too, but let's say maybe the Greenfield jump first in terms of doing that from a mass deployment perspective. But I still think that it's going to be critical to meet very similar SLAs and end user performance. And, you know, I think that's where, you know, maturity of that model is what's required. I think Brownfield operators are conservative in terms of, you know, going with something they know, but the opportunities and the benefits of that architecture and building new flexible, potentially cost advantaged over time solutions, that's what the, where the real interest is going forward. >> And new services that you can introduce much more quickly. You know, the interesting thing about Dell to me, you don't compete with the carriers, the public cloud vendors though, the carriers are concerned about them sort of doing an end run on them. So you provide a potential partnership for the carriers that's non-threatening, right? 'Cause you're, you're an arms dealer, you're selling hardware and software, right? But, but how do you see that? Because we heard in the keynote today, one of the Teleco, I think it was the chairman of Telefonica said, you know, cloud guys can't do this alone. You know, they need, you know, this massive, you know, build out. And so, what do you think about that in terms of your relationship with the carriers not being threatening? I mean versus say potentially the cloud guys, who are also your partners, I understand, it's a really interesting dynamic, isn't it? >> Manish: Yeah, I mean I think, you know, I mean, the way I look at it, the carriers actually need someone like Dell who really come in who can bring in the right capabilities, the right infrastructure, but also bring in the ecosystem together and deliver a performance solution that they can deploy and that they can trust, number one. Number two, to your point on cloud, I mean, from a Dell perspective, you know, we announced our Dell Telecom Multicloud Foundation and as part of that last year in September, we announced what we call is the Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks. The first one we announced with Wind River, and this is, think of it as the, you know, hardware and the cashier all pre-integrated with lot of automation around it, factory integrated, you know, delivered to customers in an integrated model with all the licenses, everything. And so it starts to solve the day zero, day one, day two integration deployment and then lifecycle management for them. So to broaden the discussion, our view is it's a multicloud world, the future is multicloud where you can have different clouds which can be optimized for different workloads. So for example, while our work with Wind River initially was very focused on virtualization of the radio access network, we just announced our infrastructure block with Red Hat, which is very much targeted and optimized for core network and edge, right? So, you know, there are different workflows which will require different capabilities also. And so, you know, again, we are bringing those things to these service providers to again, bring those cloud characteristics and cloud native architecture for their network. >> And It's going to be hybrid, to your point. >> David N.: And you, just hit on something, you said cloud characteristics. >> Yeah. >> If you look at this through the lens of kind of the general world of IT, sometimes when people hear the word cloud, they immediately leap to the idea that it's a hyperscale cloud provider. In this scenario we're talking about radio towers that have intelligence living on them and physically at the base. And so the cloud characteristics that you're delivering might be living physically in these remote locations all over the place, is that correct? >> Yeah, I mean that, that's true. That will definitely happen over time. But I think, I think we've seen the hyperscalers enter, you know, public cloud providers, enter at the edge and they're dabbling maybe with private, but I think the public RAN is another further challenge. I think that maybe a little bit down the road for them. So I think that is a different characteristic that you're talking about managing the macro RAN environment. >> Manish: If I may just add one more perspective of this cloud, and I mean, again, the hyperscale cloud, right? I mean that world's been great when you can centralize a lot of compute capability and you can then start to, you know, do workload aggregation and use the infrastructure more efficient. When it comes to Telecom, it is inherently it distributed architecture where you have access, you talked about radio access, your port, and it is inherently distributed because it has to provide the coverage and capacity. And so, you know, it does require different kind of capabilities when you're going out and about, and this is where I was talking about things like, you know, we just talked, we just have been working on our bare metal orchestration, right? This is what we are bringing is a capability where you can actually have distributed infrastructure, you can deploy, you can actually manage, do lifecycle management, in a distributed multicloud form. So it does require, you know, different set of capabilities that need to be enabled. >> Some, when talking about cloud, would argue that it's always been information technology, it always will be information technology, and especially as what we might refer to as public cloud or hyperscale cloud providers, are delivering things essentially on premises. It's like, well, is that cloud? Because it feels like some of those players are going to be delivering physical infrastructure outside of their own data centers in order to address this. It seems the nature, the nature of the beast is that some of these things need to be distributed. So it seems perfectly situated for Dell. That's why you guys are both at Dell now and not working for other Telecom places, right? >> Exactly. Exactly, yes. >> It's definitely an exciting space. It's transformed, the networks are under transformation and I do think that Dell's very well positioned to, to really help the customers, the service providers in accelerating their transformation journey with an open ecosystem. >> Dave V.: You've got the brand, and the breadth, and the resources to actually attract an ecosystem. But I wonder if you could sort of take us through your strategy of ecosystem, the challenges that you've seen in developing that ecosystem and what the vision is that ultimately, what's the outcome going to be of that open ecosystem? >> Yeah, I can start. So maybe just to give you the big picture, right? I mean the big picture, is disaggregation with performance, right, TCO models to the service providers, right? And it starts at the infrastructure layer, builds on bringing these cloud capabilities, the cast layer, right? Bringing the right accelerators. All of this requires to pull the ecosystem. So give you an example on the infrastructure in a Teleco grade servers like XR8000 with Sapphire, the new intel processors that we've just announced, and an extended array of servers. These are Teleco grade, short depth, et cetera. You know, the Teleco great characteristic. Working with the partners like Marvel for bringing in the accelerators in there, that's important to again, drive the performance and optimize for the TCO. Working then with partners like Wind River, Red Hat, et cetera, to bring in the cast capabilities so you can start to see how this ecosystem starts to build up. And then very recently we announced our private 5G solution with AirSpan and Expeto on the core site. So bringing those workloads together. Similarly, we have an open RAN solution we announce with Fujitsu. So it's, it's open, it's disaggregated, but bringing all these together. And one of the last things I would say is, you know, to make all this happen and make all of these, we've also been putting together our OTEL, our open Telecom ecosystem lab, which is very much geared, really gives this open ecosystem a playground where they can come in and do all that heavy lifting, which is anyways required, to do the integration, optimization, and board. So put all these capabilities in place, but the end goal, the end vision again, is that cloud native disaggregated infrastructure that starts to innovate at the speed of software and scales at the speed of cloud. >> And this is different than the nineties. You didn't have something like OTEL back then, you know, you didn't have the developer ecosystem that you have today because on top of everything that you just said, Manish, are new workloads and new applications that are going to be developed. Doug, anything you'd add to what Manish said? >> Doug: Yeah, I mean, as Manish said, I think adding to the infrastructure layers, which are, you know, critical for us to, to help integrate, right? Because we kind of took a vertical Teleco stack and we've disaggregated it, and it's gotten a little bit more complex. So our Solutions Dell Technology infrastructure block, and our lab infrastructure with OTEL, helps put those pieces together. But without the software players in this, you know, that's what we really do, I think in OTEL. And that's just starting to grow. So integrating with those software providers with that integration is something that the operators need. So we fill a gap there in terms of either providing engineered solutions so they can readily build on or actually bringing in that software provider. And I think that's what you're going to see more from us going forward is just extending that ecosystem even further. More software players effectively. >> In thinking about O-RAN, are they, is it possible to have the low latency, the high performance, the reliability capabilities that carriers are used to and the flexibility? Or can you sort of prioritize one over the other from a go to market and rollout standpoint and optimize one, maybe get a foothold in the market? How do you see that balance? >> Manish: Oh the answer is absolutely yes you can have both We are on that journey, we are on that journey. This is where all these things I was talking about in terms of the right kind of accelerators, right kind of capabilities on the infrastructure, obviously retargeting the software, there are certain changes, et cetera that need to be done on the software itself to make it more cloud native. And then building all the surrounding capabilities around the CICD pipeline and all where it's not just day zero or day one that you're doing the cloud-like lifecycle management of this infrastructure. But the answer to your point, yes, absolutely. It's possible, the technology is there, and the ecosystem is coming together, and that's the direction. Now, are there challenges? Absolutely there are challenges, but directionally that's the direction the industry is moving to. >> Dave V.: I guess my question, Manish, is do they have to go in lockstep? Because I would argue that the public cloud when it first came out wasn't nearly as functional as what I could get from my own data center in terms of recovery, you know, backup and recovery is a perfect example and it took, you know, a decade plus to get there. But it was the flexibility, and the openness, and the developer affinity, the programmability, that attracted people. Do you see O-RAN following a similar path? Or does it, my question is does it have to have that carrier class reliability today? >> David N.: Everything on day one, does it have to have everything on day one? >> Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, like again, the Greenfield operators I think we're, we're willing do a little bit more experimentation. I think the operators, Brownfield operators that have existing, you know, deployments, they're going to want to be closer. But I think there's room for innovation here. And clearly, you know, Manish came from, from Meta and we're, we've been very involved with TIP, we're very involved with the O-RAN alliance, and as Manish mentioned, with all those accelerators that we're working with on our infrastructure, that is a space that we're trying to help move the ball forward. So I think you're seeing deployments from mainstream operators, but it's maybe not in, you know, downtown New York deployment, they're more rural deployments. I think that's getting at, you know, kind of your question is there's maybe a little bit more flexibility there, they get to experiment with the technology and the flexibility and then I think it will start to evolve >> Dave V.: And that's where the disruption's going to come from, I think. >> David N.: Well, where was the first place you could get reliable 4K streaming of video content? It wasn't ABC, CBS, NBC. It was YouTube. >> Right. >> So is it possible that when you say Greenfield, are a lot of those going to be what we refer to as private 5G networks where someone may set up a private 5G network that has more functions and capabilities than the public network? >> That's exactly where I was going is that, you know, that that's why you're seeing us getting very active in 5G solutions that Manish mentioned with, you know, Expeto and AirSpan. There's more of those that we haven't publicly announced. So I think you'll be seeing more announcements from us, but that is really, you know, a new opportunity. And there's spectrum there also, right? I mean, there's public and private spectrum. We plan to work directly with the operators and do it in their spectrum when needed. But we also have solutions that will do it, you know, on non-public spectrum. >> So let's close out, oh go ahead. You you have something to add there? >> I'm just going to add one more point to Doug's point, right? Is if you look on the private 5G and the end customer, it's the enterprise, right? And they're, they're not a service provider. They're not a carrier. They're more used to deploying, you know, enterprise infrastructure, maintaining, managing that. So, you know, private 5G, especially with this open ecosystem and with all the open run capabilities, it naturally tends to, you know, blend itself very well to meet those requirements that the enterprise would have. >> And people should not think of private 5G as a sort of a replacement for wifi, right? It's to to deal with those, you know, intense situations that can afford the additional cost, but absolutely require the reliability and the performance and, you know, never go down type of scenario. Is that right? >> Doug: And low latencies usually, the primary characteristics, you know, for things like Industry 4.0 manufacturing requirements, those are tough SLAs. They're just, they're different than the operator SLAs for coverage and, you know, cell performance. They're now, you know, Five9 type characteristics, but on a manufacturing floor. >> That's why we don't use wifi on theCUBE to broadcast, we need a hard line. >> Yeah, but why wouldn't it replace wifi over time? I mean, you know, I still have a home phone number that's hardwired to align, but it goes to a voicemail. We don't even have handset anymore for it, yeah. >> I think, well, unless the cost can come down, but I think that wifi is flexible, it's cheap. It's, it's kind of perfect for that. >> Manish: And it's good technology. >> Dave V.: And it works great. >> David N.: For now, for now. >> Dave V.: But you wouldn't want it in those situations, and you're arguing that maybe. >> I'm saying eventually, what, put a sim in a device, I don't know, you know, but why not? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, and Dell offers, you know, from our laptop, you know, our client side, we do offer wifi, we do offer 4G and 5G solutions. And I think those, you know, it's a volume and scale issue, I think for the cost structure you're talking about. >> Manish: Come to our booth and see the connected laptop. >> Dave V.: Well let's, let's close on that. Why don't you guys talk a little bit about what you're going on at the show, I did go by the booth, you got a whole big lineup of servers. You got some, you know, cool devices going on. So give us the rundown and you know, let's end with the takeaways here. >> The simple rundown, a broad range of new powered servers, broad range addressing core, edge, RAN, optimized for those with all the different kind of acceleration capabilities. You can see that, you can see infrastructure blocks. These are with Wind River, with Red Hat. You can see OTEL, the open telecom ecosystem lab where all that playground, the integration, the real work, the real sausage makings happening. And then you will see some interesting solutions in terms of co-creation that we are doing, right? So you, you will see all of that and not to forget the connected laptops. >> Dave V.: Yeah, yeah, cool. >> Doug: Yeah and, we mentioned it before, but just to add on, I think, you know, for private 5G, you know, we've announced a few offers here at the show with partners. So with Expeto and AirSpan in particular, and I think, you know, I just want to emphasize the partnerships that we're doing. You know, we're doing some, you know, fundamental integration on infrastructure, bare metal and different options for the operators to get engineered systems. But building on that ecosystem is really, the move to cloud native is where Dell is trying to get in front of. And we're offering solutions and a much larger ecosystem to go after it. >> Dave V.: Great. Manish and Doug, thanks for coming on the program. It was great to have you, awesome discussion. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and Lisa Martin. We're seeing the disaggregation of the Teleco network into open ecosystems with integration from companies like Dell and others. Keep it right there for theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. We'll be right back. (upbeat tech music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Power Panel where we're going to talk about application modernization, also success templates, and take a look at some new survey data to see how CIOs are thinking about digital transformation, as we get deeper into the post isolation economy. And with me are three familiar VIP guests to CUBE audiences. Tony Bear, the principal at DB InSight, Doug Henschen, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research and Sanjeev Mohan principal at SanjMo. Guys, good to see you again, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Glad to be here. >> All right, Doug. Let's get started with you. You know, this recent survey, which was commissioned by Couchbase, 650 CIOs and CTOs, and IT practitioners. So obviously very IT heavy. They responded to the following question, "In response to the pandemic, my organization accelerated our application modernization strategy and of course, an overwhelming majority, 94% agreed or strongly agreed." So I'm sure, Doug, that you're not shocked by that, but in the same survey, modernizing existing technologies was second only behind cyber security is the top investment priority this year. Doug, bring us into your world and tell us the trends that you're seeing with the clients and customers you work with in their modernization initiatives. >> Well, the survey, of course, is spot on. You know, any Constellation Research analyst, any systems integrator will tell you that we saw more transformation work in the last two years than in the prior six to eight years. A lot of it was forced, you know, a lot of movement to the cloud, a lot of process improvement, a lot of automation work, but transformational is aspirational and not every company can be a leader. You know, at Constellation, we focus our research on those market leaders and that's only, you know, the top 5% of companies that are really innovating, that are really disrupting their markets and we try to share that with companies that want to be fast followers, that these are the next 20 to 25% of companies that don't want to get left behind, but don't want to hit some of the same roadblocks and you know, pioneering pitfalls that the real leaders are encountering when they're harnessing new technologies. So the rest of the companies, you know, the cautious adopters, the laggards, many of them fall by the wayside, that's certainly what we saw during the pandemic. Who are these leaders? You know, the old saw examples that people saw at the Amazons, the Teslas, the Airbnbs, the Ubers and Lyfts, but new examples are emerging every year. And as a consumer, you immediately recognize these transformed experiences. One of my favorite examples from the pandemic is Rocket Mortgage. No disclaimer required, I don't own stock and you're not client, but when I wanted to take advantage of those record low mortgage interest rates, I called my current bank and some, you know, stall word, very established conventional banks, I'm talking to you Bank of America, City Bank, and they were taking days and weeks to get back to me. Rocket Mortgage had the locked in commitment that day, a very proactive, consistent communications across web, mobile, email, all customer touchpoints. I closed in a matter of weeks an entirely digital seamless process. This is back in the gloves and masks days and the loan officer came parked in our driveway, wiped down an iPad, handed us that iPad, we signed all those documents digitally, completely electronic workflow. The only wet signatures required were those demanded by the state. So it's easy to spot these transformed experiences. You know, Rocket had most of that in place before the pandemic, and that's why they captured 8% of the national mortgage market by 2020 and they're on track to hit 10% here in 2022. >> Yeah, those are great examples. I mean, I'm not a shareholder either, but I am a customer. I even went through the same thing in the pandemic. It was all done in digital it was a piece of cake and I happened to have to do another one with a different firm and stuck with that firm for a variety of reasons and it was night and day. So to your point, it was a forced merge to digital. If you were there beforehand, you had real advantage, it could accelerate your lead during the pandemic. Okay, now Tony bear. Mr. Bear, I understand you're skeptical about all this buzz around digital transformation. So in that same survey, the data shows that the majority of respondents said that their digital initiatives were largely reactive to outside forces, the pandemic compliance changes, et cetera. But at the same time, they indicated that the results while somewhat mixed were generally positive. So why are you skeptical? >> The reason being, and by the way, I have nothing against application modernization. The problem... I think the problem I ever said, it often gets conflated with digital transformation and digital transformation itself has become such a buzzword and so overused that it's really hard, if not impossible to pin down (coughs) what digital transformation actually means. And very often what you'll hear from, let's say a C level, you know, (mumbles) we want to run like Google regardless of whether or not that goal is realistic you know, for that organization (coughs). The thing is that we've been using, you know, businesses have been using digital data since the days of the mainframe, since the... Sorry that data has been digital. What really has changed though, is just the degree of how businesses interact with their customers, their partners, with the whole rest of the ecosystem and how their business... And how in many cases you take look at the auto industry that the nature of the business, you know, is changing. So there is real change of foot, the question is I think we need to get more specific in our goals. And when you look at it, if we can boil it down to a couple, maybe, you know, boil it down like really over simplistically, it's really all about connectedness. No, I'm not saying connectivity 'cause that's more of a physical thing, but connectedness. Being connected to your customer, being connected to your supplier, being connected to the, you know, to the whole landscape, that you operate in. And of course today we have many more channels with which we operate, you know, with customers. And in fact also if you take a look at what's happening in the automotive industry, for instance, I was just reading an interview with Bill Ford, you know, their... Ford is now rapidly ramping up their electric, you know, their electric vehicle strategy. And what they realize is it's not just a change of technology, you know, it is a change in their business, it's a change in terms of the relationship they have with their customer. Their customers have traditionally been automotive dealers who... And the automotive dealers have, you know, traditionally and in many cases by state law now have been the ones who own the relationship with the end customer. But when you go to an electric vehicle, the product becomes a lot more of a software product. And in turn, that means that Ford would have much more direct interaction with its end customers. So that's really what it's all about. It's about, you know, connectedness, it's also about the ability to act, you know, we can say agility, it's about ability not just to react, but to anticipate and act. And so... And of course with all the proliferation, you know, the explosion of data sources and connectivity out there and the cloud, which allows much more, you know, access to compute, it changes the whole nature of the ball game. The fact is that we have to avoid being overwhelmed by this and make our goals more, I guess, tangible, more strictly defined. >> Yeah, now... You know, great points there. And I want to just bring in some survey data, again, two thirds of the respondents said their digital strategies were set by IT and only 26% by the C-suite, 8% by the line of business. Now, this was largely a survey of CIOs and CTOs, but, wow, doesn't seem like the right mix. It's a Doug's point about, you know, leaders in lagers. My guess is that Rocket Mortgage, their digital strategy was led by the chief digital officer potentially. But at the same time, you would think, Tony, that application modernization is a prerequisite for digital transformation. But I want to go to Sanjeev in this war in the survey. And respondents said that on average, they want 58% of their IT spend to be in the public cloud three years down the road. Now, again, this is CIOs and CTOs, but (mumbles), but that's a big number. And there was no ambiguity because the question wasn't worded as cloud, it was worded as public cloud. So Sanjeev, what do you make of that? What's your feeling on cloud as flexible architecture? What does this all mean to you? >> Dave, 58% of IT spend in the cloud is a huge change from today. Today, most estimates, peg cloud IT spend to be somewhere around five to 15%. So what this number tells us is that the cloud journey is still in its early days, so we should buckle up. We ain't seen nothing yet, but let me add some color to this. CIOs and CTOs maybe ramping up their cloud deployment, but they still have a lot of problems to solve. I can tell you from my previous experience, for example, when I was in Gartner, I used to talk to a lot of customers who were in a rush to move into the cloud. So if we were to plot, let's say a maturity model, typically a maturity model in any discipline in IT would have something like crawl, walk, run. So what I was noticing was that these organizations were jumping straight to run because in the pandemic, they were under the gun to quickly deploy into the cloud. So now they're kind of coming back down to, you know, to crawl, walk, run. So basically they did what they had to do under the circumstances, but now they're starting to resolve some of the very, very important issues. For example, security, data privacy, governance, observability, these are all very big ticket items. Another huge problem that nav we are noticing more than we've ever seen, other rising costs. Cloud makes it so easy to onboard new use cases, but it leads to all kinds of unexpected increase in spikes in your operating expenses. So what we are seeing is that organizations are now getting smarter about where the workloads should be deployed. And sometimes it may be in more than one cloud. Multi-cloud is no longer an aspirational thing. So that is a huge trend that we are seeing and that's why you see there's so much increased planning to spend money in public cloud. We do have some issues that we still need to resolve. For example, multi-cloud sounds great, but we still need some sort of single pane of glass, control plane so we can have some fungibility and move workloads around. And some of this may also not be in public cloud, some workloads may actually be done in a more hybrid environment. >> Yeah, definitely. I call it Supercloud. People win sometimes-- >> Supercloud. >> At that term, but it's above multi-cloud, it floats, you know, on topic. But so you clearly identified some potholes. So I want to talk about the evolution of the application experience 'cause there's some potholes there too. 81% of their respondents in that survey said, "Our development teams are embracing the cloud and other technologies faster than the rest of the organization can adopt and manage them." And that was an interesting finding to me because you'd think that infrastructure is code and designing insecurity and containers and Kubernetes would be a great thing for organizations, and it is I'm sure in terms of developer productivity, but what do you make of this? Does the modernization path also have some potholes, Sanjeev? What are those? >> So, first of all, Dave, you mentioned in your previous question, there's no ambiguity, it's a public cloud. This one, I feel it has quite a bit of ambiguity because it talks about cloud and other technologies, that sort of opens up the kimono, it's like that's everything. Also, it says that the rest of the organization is not able to adopt and manage. Adoption is a business function, management is an IT function. So I feed this question is a bit loaded. We know that app modernization is here to stay, developing in the cloud removes a lot of traditional barriers or procuring instantiating infrastructure. In addition, developers today have so many more advanced tools. So they're able to develop the application faster because they have like low-code/no-code options, they have notebooks to write the machine learning code, they have the entire DevOps CI/CD tool chain that makes it easy to version control and push changes. But there are potholes. For example, are developers really interested in fixing data quality problems, all data, privacy, data, access, data governance? How about monitoring? I doubt developers want to get encumbered with all of these operationalization management pieces. Developers are very keen to deliver new functionality. So what we are now seeing is that it is left to the data team to figure out all of these operationalization productionization things that the developers have... You know, are not truly interested in that. So which actually takes me to this topic that, Dave, you've been quite actively covering and we've been talking about, see, the whole data mesh. >> Yeah, I was going to say, it's going to solve all those data quality problems, Sanjeev. You know, I'm a sucker for data mesh. (laughing) >> Yeah, I know, but see, what's going to happen with data mesh is that developers are now going to have more domain resident power to develop these applications. What happens to all of the data curation governance quality that, you know, a central team used to do. So there's a lot of open ended questions that still need to be answered. >> Yeah, That gets automated, Tony, right? With computational governance. So-- >> Of course. >> It's not trivial, it's not trivial, but I'm still an optimist by the end of the decade we'll start to get there. Doug, I want to go to you again and talk about the business case. We all remember, you know, the business case for modernization that is... We remember the Y2K, there was a big it spending binge and this was before the (mumbles) of the enterprise, right? CIOs, they'd be asked to develop new applications and the business maybe helps pay for it or offset the cost with the initial work and deployment then IT got stuck managing the sprawling portfolio for years. And a lot of the apps had limited adoption or only served a few users, so there were big pushes toward rationalizing the portfolio at that time, you know? So do I modernize, they had to make a decision, consolidate, do I sunset? You know, it was all based on value. So what's happening today and how are businesses making the case to modernize, are they going through a similar rationalization exercise, Doug? >> Well, the Y2K era experience that you talked about was back in the days of, you know, throw the requirements over the wall and then we had waterfall development that lasted months in some cases years. We see today's most successful companies building cross functional teams. You know, the C-suite the line of business, the operations, the data and analytics teams, the IT, everybody has a seat at the table to lead innovation and modernization initiatives and they don't start, the most successful companies don't start by talking about technology, they start by envisioning a business outcome by envisioning a transformed customer experience. You hear the example of Amazon writing the press release for the product or service it wants to deliver and then it works backwards to create it. You got to work backwards to determine the tech that will get you there. What's very clear though, is that you can't transform or modernize by lifting and shifting the legacy mess into the cloud. That doesn't give you the seamless processes, that doesn't give you data driven personalization, it doesn't give you a connected and consistent customer experience, whether it's online or mobile, you know, bots, chat, phone, everything that we have today that requires a modern, scalable cloud negative approach and agile deliver iterative experience where you're collaborating with this cross-functional team and course correct, again, making sure you're on track to what's needed. >> Yeah. Now, Tony, both Doug and Sanjeev have been, you know, talking about what I'm going to call this IT and business schism, and we've all done surveys. One of the things I'd love to see Couchbase do in future surveys is not only survey the it heavy, but also survey the business heavy and see what they say about who's leading the digital transformation and who's in charge of the customer experience. Do you have any thoughts on that, Tony? >> Well, there's no question... I mean, it's kind like, you know, the more things change. I mean, we've been talking about that IT and the business has to get together, we talked about this back during, and Doug, you probably remember this, back during the Y2K ERP days, is that you need these cross functional teams, we've been seeing this. I think what's happening today though, is that, you know, back in the Y2K era, we were basically going into like our bedrock systems and having to totally re-engineer them. And today what we're looking at is that, okay, those bedrock systems, the ones that basically are keeping the lights on, okay, those are there, we're not going to mess with that, but on top of that, that's where we're going to innovate. And that gives us a chance to be more, you know, more directed and therefore we can bring these related domains together. I mean, that's why just kind of, you know, talk... Where Sanjeev brought up the term of data mesh, I've been a bit of a cynic about data mesh, but I do think that work and work is where we bring a bunch of these connected teams together, teams that have some sort of shared context, though it's everybody that's... Every team that's working, let's say around the customer, for instance, which could be, you know, in marketing, it could be in sales, order processing in some cases, you know, in logistics and delivery. So I think that's where I think we... You know, there's some hope and the fact is that with all the advanced, you know, basically the low-code/no-code tools, they are ways to bring some of these other players, you know, into the process who previously had to... Were sort of, you know, more at the end of like a, you know, kind of a... Sort of like they throw it over the wall type process. So I do believe, but despite all my cynicism, I do believe there's some hope. >> Thank you. Okay, last question. And maybe all of you could answer this. Maybe, Sanjeev, you can start it off and then Doug and Tony can chime in. In the survey, about a half, nearly half of the 650 respondents said they could tangibly show their organizations improve customer experiences that were realized from digital projects in the last 12 months. Now, again, not surprising, but we've been talking about digital experiences, but there's a long way to go judging from our pandemic customer experiences. And we, again, you know, some were great, some were terrible. And so, you know, and some actually got worse, right? Will that improve? When and how will it improve? Where's 5G and things like that fit in in terms of improving customer outcomes? Maybe, Sanjeev, you could start us off here. And by the way, plug any research that you're working on in this sort of area, please do. >> Thank you, Dave. As a resident optimist on this call, I'll get us started and then I'm sure Doug and Tony will have interesting counterpoints. So I'm a technology fan boy, I have to admit, I am in all of all these new companies and how they have been able to rise up and handle extreme scale. In this time that we are speaking on this show, these food delivery companies would have probably handled tens of thousands of orders in minutes. So these concurrent orders, delivery, customer support, geospatial location intelligence, all of this has really become commonplace now. It used to be that, you know, large companies like Apple would be able to handle all of these supply chain issues, disruptions that we've been facing. But now in my opinion, I think we are seeing this in, Doug mentioned Rocket Mortgage. So we've seen it in FinTech and shopping apps. So we've seen the same scale and it's more than 5G. It includes things like... Even in the public cloud, we have much more efficient, better hardware, which can do like deep learning networks much more efficiently. So machine learning, a lot of natural language programming, being able to handle unstructured data. So in my opinion, it's quite phenomenal to see how technology has actually come to rescue and as, you know, billions of us have gone online over the last two years. >> Yeah, so, Doug, so Sanjeev's point, he's saying, basically, you ain't seen nothing yet. What are your thoughts here, your final thoughts. >> Well, yeah, I mean, there's some incredible technologies coming including 5G, but you know, it's only going to pave the cow path if the underlying app, if the underlying process is clunky. You have to modernize, take advantage of, you know, serverless scalability, autonomous optimization, advanced data science. There's lots of cutting edge capabilities out there today, but you know, lifting and shifting you got to get your hands dirty and actually modernize on that data front. I mentioned my research this year, I'm doing a lot of in depth looks at some of the analytical data platforms. You know, these lake houses we've had some conversations about that and helping companies to harness their data, to have a more personalized and predictive and proactive experience. So, you know, we're talking about the Snowflakes and Databricks and Googles and Teradata and Vertica and Yellowbrick and that's the research I'm focusing on this year. >> Yeah, your point about paving the cow path is right on, especially over the pandemic, a lot of the processes were unknown. But you saw this with RPA, paving the cow path only got you so far. And so, you know, great points there. Tony, you get the last word, bring us home. >> Well, I'll put it this way. I think there's a lot of hope in terms of that the new generation of developers that are coming in are a lot more savvy about things like data. And I think also the new generation of people in the business are realizing that we need to have data as a core competence. So I do have optimism there that the fact is, I think there is a much greater consciousness within both the business side and the technical. In the technology side, the organization of the importance of data and how to approach that. And so I'd like to just end on that note. >> Yeah, excellent. And I think you're right. Putting data at the core is critical data mesh I think very well describes the problem and (mumbles) credit lays out a solution, just the technology's not there yet, nor are the standards. Anyway, I want to thank the panelists here. Amazing. You guys are always so much fun to work with and love to have you back in the future. And thank you for joining today's broadcast brought to you by Couchbase. By the way, check out Couchbase on the road this summer at their application modernization summits, they're making up for two years of shut in and coming to you. So you got to go to couchbase.com/roadshow to find a city near you where you can meet face to face. In a moment. Ravi Mayuram, the chief technology officer of Couchbase will join me. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. (bright music)

>> theCUBE presents Dell technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, from the show floor, the Venetian in lively Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We're having a little reunion with our guests that we haven't seen in a couple years. Please welcome back to theCUBE, Doug Schmitt, President of Dell Technologies and Services. Alex Barretto joins us as well, the Senior Vice President at Emerging Services and Technology. Guys, it's great to see you in 3D. >> I know great to be back. >> Yes. >> Its Awesome to be back. >> Isn't it great? >> And fantastic. >> It is. >> We were talking about how we have to get our sea legs back about, even just interacting with in life. >> That's exactly right. Being able to see everybody be back in person at these events. And it's great to see everybody it's like coming back to family. >> It is, it's been a reunion since Sunday. One of the, obviously the last two years have been quite challenging for everybody, for customers. Dell is coming off it's best year ever in FY22, over 100 billion in revenues, 17% growth year over year, astounding growth. The voice of the customer is always strong here at Dell technologies. But Doug, talk to us about some of the things that have been going on services perspective and how you really stepped in to help customers across industries succeed in the dynamic times we've been living in. >> Well. Yeah, thank you, and you're right. Coming off a very great, great year. And I think as you can see behind us and in the room here just great solutions for our customers. And that's what it's about, delivering the outcomes. And service is a huge piece of that, of making sure we bring all that together, deliver the outcomes our customers are looking for. If you look at the overall services organization just to take a step back just a little bit, we are a team around over 60,000 folks in 170 countries. And look, it's about this life cycle of services we provide. Everything from consulting to deployment to our support, manage services, security, education services, residency services, all the way to asset sustainability and recovery. So we can get all of the material back in and recycle it. So we have a great suite of services, and it's bringing all that together for the customer again to deliver with the products and the solutions and the software, the outcomes they're looking for. You asked a little bit about just to kind of double click that, about what our customers really saying, kind of what they're hearing, what we're hearing. I think there's three things. When I think about what they're looking for, one is the trusted advisor. You heard this during Michael's keynotes speech, that is key. They're navigating through the digital transformation, hybrid cloud, all of these things. Determining what they need to do to deliver their outcomes. And Dell can bring that trusted advisor status to them. So we can consult with them professional services, help bring that. The second thing is really around that life cycle services I talked about, all those different services that we bring. We allow our customers clearly the choice to say what pieces of the services do they need. Now we think we can bring everything together into a managed solution for them, but if there's certain pieces that they need to just, double click on, we can help with that. And then look, the third item that I'm hearing and that we can bring and that we have for them is flexible consumption. They can choose the way they want to consume the technology. You consume it by usage. You can consume by month, by quarter, or if you want the stability of long term contracts one, two, three years we'll do that. So really it's about trusted advisor and choice to help them deliver their outcomes. >> So a lot changed during the isolation economy. You guys obviously had to support new initiatives. First of all, budgets got squeezed in 2020. Then boom back, so they sort of slingshot it, real focus on obviously client solutions, remote work, endpoint security, identity access, VDI. Now in the post isolation economy, it's like, okay, some of the stuff at HQ you maybe needs to be updated, maybe we're rethinking the network. So, what are you hearing from customers? Where are they in their digital transformations, Alex? You know, what's hot. >> Yeah, so we actually recently created an emerging services group. And the reason for that is exactly what you're alluding today. So we actually talked in that group everything in this emerging. So APEX, telco, edge, data management, all the things our customers are asking for and we are convening new solutions, new services to meet their needs, and all that is housing in one unit, and we're thinking about the product management, the technology that goes with it, and we're working partnership with our customers to actually build and develop solutions that they're looking for. >> Yeah, there was no as a service really. I mean, you could do it with financial machinations before, now it's becoming much more mainstream. I mean, I know it's not a hundred percent of your business and maybe never will be. >> Yeah. >> But that's a whole new mindset. What else is changing in the business that you guys see? >> Well, yeah, I think there's, I think that's what comes back to what we saw, first of all we listen to the customers, follow what their needs are, and you're right. As far as the, as a service, I think it's back to that choice. If they want to purchase or consume as flexible or as needed, we'll do that. They want the contracts, the standard CapEx model, we'll do that as well. Look, there's three things. Professional services is really changing as well. We're seeing the needs again for going in and being able to deliver the services to customers, but also manage that in a lot of cases, they're asking us to take the workloads from them so that they can go and change their transformation, and their digitalization is one of the things that we're clearly hearing. And I know you're hearing the second one, security. I mean that is top of mind for everyone. And I, we have launched a lot of services around this. Some of those like MDR or Managed Detection Response our cyber vault, as well as our APEX cyber recovery services as well that we've announced here. So security's number two. And then the third one is this sustainability, again very important for us and our customers, is we have a 2030 goal around this as I'm sure or you've heard, but more importantly, that's something I know my team and I and everyone at Dell, that's a great personal feeling too. When you're getting up and you're doing something that you know, is right, really just doing it to help the customers as well is just an extra added benefit. So those would be the three things professional services changing, doing more and more of the manage take workloads off, two is the security, and the third is the sustainability clearly. >> We talked with JJ Davis yesterday, and we're talking a lot about ESG and how a tremendous percentage of RFPs come in wanting to know what is Dell technologies doing from an environmental, social, governance perspective. That it's really your customers wanting to work with companies like Dell who have a focused clear agenda on ESG. One thing that I'm curious when you talk about the increase in advantage services, the great resignation. We've all, that's been happening now for a couple years. It's probably going to persist for a while. Customers suddenly, labor shortages and the supply chain issues. How have you helped organizations deal with some of the challenges that they're going through from a labor perspective is that why one of the reasons the managed services is we're seeing an increase there. >> Yeah. I'm sure that can be and I wouldn't doubt that, you mean in terms of our customer is wanting more and more the managed and the professional. Yeah, I think that is a piece of it, but I also think part of that is that speed matters and customers are looking for the additional assistance to take things off, that they may have traditionally done so that they can, they can really get this transformation, this hybrid cloud, getting things moving very, very quickly. There's just so much to be done in terms of data management and bringing information to their end user customers. And they want to spend more time doing that. And so I'm hearing that more, but you are right. There's absolutely, there's absolutely the times where we have a residency service, we, and that has been growing very, very fast. And that tends to be why they ask for it, is because people have either left or are leaving >> Alex, Doug really kind of alluded to an area that I want to probe a little bit. And it's that's, I was talking to Jen Felch recently she's going to be on soon. And the, you mentioned security, Doug, as the top initiative clearly. And the distance between number two is widening, but number two is cloud migration. Now I asked Jen about that, because internally Dell has its own cloud. And I said, how do you interpret that? Or how do you, what's your second priority? She goes, well, I would translate that into modernization. So we're essentially building our own cloud is how I interpreted it. So my question to you is, are you seeing that with customers, how closely do you work with your own IT to take those learnings to your customers? And what does modernization actually mean to your customers? >> Yeah, that's a great question. It's actually the essence of why we're here. Talking to our customers and showcasing what we do within services, what we do within IT. Jen and I talk very often about her roadmap, our roadmap, and we want to showcase that to our customers because it's a proof point, it's a proof point of how they can do the transformation on their own. Do we have a whole slue of products from a services standpoint that are tied with what Jen is doing as well? And that's what we bring to market. So whether that's on APEX, that we announced right here two days ago, the cyber recovery services available now, that's working very closely with our IT counterparts. And we have a whole slue of roadmap with high performance computing, to be announced soon and machine learning operations, all that is to meet the customer needs, and what they're asking for. And if you look at the emergence of needs from a customer standpoint, it goes in a multitude of uses. We have telco customers, they have very specific needs and we're looking to meet those needs. We have the traditional customers, which may be going at a slower speed in their adoption of the cloud, we're there to help them. And we're all about to hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud is a hundred percent of our strategy. So whether you want to go cloud based, whether you want to be OnPrem or you want to be hybrid, we're there to solve your needs. >> What's the partner story in terms of delivering services, we know that the Dell technologies' partner ecosystem is massive. We know how important partners are to the growth. I think I saw 59 billion in revenue came through the channel last year alone. How do you enable partners to deliver some of those key services that you talked about? >> To leverage the partners for the, on the broader ecosystem for that? >> Yes. >> Yes, well, you're right. We do have a very large partner network and we're very flexible on that. Again, it sounds like we are flexible in everything and we are by the way, for our customers and our partners, 'cause look it is about delivering first of all, how our customers want their service. I do like this idea and we talk about modernization, transformation, digitalization all these things are kind of the same thing about going in and looking about how we're improving the overall infrastructure and these outcomes. And to that end, we work with the customer on what they're looking for. And then we'll either do a couple things with working with the partners. Either we take prime and we'll take that and take the pieces that they can deliver and we can deliver together. But again, it's with the customer in mind of how they want to do that, working with the customer. We do have code delivery services as well. And look, we're very open with our partners about if they want to be prime and then leverage those same lifecycle services we have. What this is about is about getting this transformation and this technology and these so into the hands of the customers in the best way possible. >> So, I could white label as a partner. Could I white label your services? >> We don't have the white label. >> Okay. >> We do have co-delivery. >> Okay. So that's what I could do. I can say, okay, I'm bringing this value. Dell's bringing that value. You're visible to the customer. >> That's correct. >> Which is I presume a benefit to the customer. >> Correct, correct. >> The trust that you've built up. >> Now that gets, just the white label you would say like our ProSeries, ProSupport, ProDeploy, ProManage, all of those things. Isn't a white label, but at the same time our customers especially in the professional service side of it could be the prime, which would be the same thing as a label. >> How are client? This is kind of interesting thought I had the other day. How are client services changing? Do you see the point where, I mean, maybe you're doing it already. It's just a full manage all my client devices and just take that away from me, and Dell you take care of that and I'll pay you a monthly fee. >> Well, yeah, we are seeing that. And one of the things that they like the best about is doing that management, is bringing kind of the AI and the BI to it that we can with our support assist and all of the data that we give back, we're actually able to help manage those environments much better. And in terms of an end to end, keep things updated, upgraded, manage it. But more importantly, what we see when we do have those client managed services end to end, the customers are actually coming back and asking us to help improve their operational performance. And, and what I mean by that is, all of a sudden you'll see things where the trouble tickets are coming in 'cause we're seeing that. And we're actually going back in with that information to help alleviate or improve their operational processes, so that they're able to function and spend more time on their business outcomes >> And reduce that complexity, sorry, Dave. >> No worries. How about the tip of the spear, the consulting piece? What are you seeing there? Are we going through and as we modernize, are we going through another wave of application rationalization, people trying to figure out their digital transformation, what to double down on? What to retire? What to sun set? What's that like? >> Yeah, I think it's similar to the managed service conversation we just had. It's really pivoting to technology. Even in the services space, it was all about our physical footprint. Five, six years ago, our physical capabilities, the number of people, depots et cetera that we had, right now, our customers and even internally what we're pivoting towards is technology. They want to know how are you going to do is solve our problems, whether it's consulting or managed services using technology. Precisely to the point that Doug was making, because they want insights, value add from the services we provide, not just consult for me, not just manage my service, but provide me value added service on top of that so that I can actually differentiate my services, my solutions and that's where we're building, that's what delivering really leveraging technology. You look at the number of software engineers we have, data scientists, the algorithms we're building now inside services. It's really become a technology hub, whereas it used to be a physical hub. >> I'm just going to, oh, I'm sorry please. >> No, go ahead. >> Follow up. >> Where it's really headed is, if you look at this it's going to become this outcome based services. When I talk about outcome based services, it's not managing just the IT infrastructure, that you have to do, you have to modernize and transform. However you want to say that to customers. But in addition to that, they're looking for us to take that information and help change their business models as well, with the data and the and the insights we're getting back. >> Their operating model. >> Absolutely. >> But changing that in the last couple years and pivoting over and over again, to survive and to thrive, talk to us, Alex about the emerging services and how you've maybe a particular customer example of how you've helped an organization radically transform in the last two years to be competitive and to be thriving in this new economy in which we're living. >> Yeah. I think a great example is Dish. If you look at Dish, they're actually launching one of the first Open RAN networks. Leveraging the power of 5G. And we're working very closely with them on the services and solutions to enable them to deliver that service to their customers. And that's a new area for us, a new area for them. So we're actually working together in innovating and coming up with solutions and bringing those to the market. It's a great example. >> Lot of collaboration guys, thank you so much for joining us. Great to see you back in person again after couple years, probably three. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thanks guys. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin here, you're watching theCUBE's live from Dell Technologies World 2022. Stick around. Be right back with our next guest. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. This is Data as Code, The Future of Enterprise Data and Analytics. This is also season two, episode two of our ongoing series with exciting partners from the AWS ecosystem who are here to talk with us about data and analytics. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Two guests join me, one, a cube alumni. Venkat Venkataramani is here CEO & Co-Founder of Rockset. Good to see you again. And Doug Moore, VP of cloud platforms at Command Alkon. You're here to talk to me about how Command Alkon implemented real time analytics in just days with Rockset. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, great to be here. >> Doug, give us a little bit of a overview of Command Alkon, what type of business you are? what your mission is? That good stuff. >> Yeah, great. I'll pref it by saying I've been in this industry for only three years. The 30 years prior I was in financial services. So this was really exciting and eye opening. It actually plays into the story of how we met Rockset. So that's why I wanted to preface that. But Command Alkon is in the business, is in the what's called The Heavy Building Materials Industry. And I had never heard of it until I got here. But if you think about large projects like building buildings, cities, roads anything that requires concrete asphalt or just really big trucks, full of bulky materials that's the heavy building materials industry. So for over 40 years Command Alkon has been the north American leader in providing software to quarries and production facilities to help mine and load these materials and to produce them and then get them to the job site. So that's what our supply chain is, is from the quarry through the development of these materials, then out to the to a heavy building material job site. >> Got it, and now how historically in the past has the movement of construction materials been coordinated? What was that like before you guys came on the scene? >> You'll love this answer. So 'cause, again, it's like a step back in time. When I got here the people told me that we're trying to come up with the platform that there are 27 industries studied globally. And our industry is second to last in terms of automation which meant that literally everything is still being done with paper and a lot of paper. So when one of those, let's say material is developed, concrete asphalt is produced and then needs to get to the job site. They start by creating a five part printed ticket or delivery description that then goes to multiple parties. It ends up getting touched physically over 50 times for every delivery. And to give you some idea what kind of scale it is there are over 330 million of these type deliveries in north America every year. So it's really a lot of favor and a lot of manual work. So that was the state of really where we were. And obviously there are compelling reasons certainly today but even 3, 4, 5 years ago to automate that and digitize it. >> Wow, tremendous potential to go nowhere but up with the amount of paper, the lack of, of automation. So, you guys Command Alkon built a platform, a cloud software construction software platform. Talk to me of about that. Why you built it, what was the compelling event? I mean, I think you've kind of already explained the compelling event of all the paper but give us a little bit more context. >> Yeah. That was the original. And then we'll get into what happened two years ago which has made it even more compelling but essentially with everything on premises there's really in a huge amount of inefficiency. So, people have heard the enormous numbers that it takes to build up a highway or a really large construction project. And a lot of that is tied up in these inefficiencies. So we felt like with our significant presence in this market, that if we could figure out how to automate getting this data into the cloud so that at least the partners in the supply chain could begin sharing information. That's not on paper a little bit closer to real time that we could make has an impact on everything from the timing it takes to do a project to even the amount of carbon dioxide that's admitted, for example from trucks running around and being delayed and not being coordinated well. >> So you built the connect platform you started on Amazon DynamoDB and ran into some performance challenges. Talk to us about the, some of those performance bottlenecks and how you found Venkat and Rockset. >> So from the beginning, we were fortunate, if you start building a cloud three years ago you're you have a lot of opportunity to use some of the what we call more fully managed or serverless offerings from Amazon and all the cloud vendors have them but Amazon is the one we're most familiar with throughout the past 10 years. So we went head first into saying, we're going to do everything we can to not manage infrastructure ourselves. So we can really focus on solving this problem efficiently. And it paid off great. And so we chose dynamo as our primary database and it still was a great decision. We have obviously hundreds of millions of billions of these data points in dynamo. And it's great from a transactional perspective, but at some point you need to get the data back out. And what plays into the story of the beginning when I came here with no background basically in this industry, is that, and as did most of the other people on my team, we weren't really sure what questions were going to be asked of the data. And that's super, super important with a NoSQL database like dynamo. You sort of have to know in advance what those usage patterns are going to be and what people are going to want to get back out of it. And that's what really began to strain us on both performance and just availability of information. >> Got it. Venkat, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to me about some of the challenges that Doug articulated the, is industry with such little automation so much paper. Are you finding that still out there for in quite a few industries that really have nowhere to go but up? >> I think that's a very good point. We talk about digital transformation 2.0 as like this abstract thing. And then you meet like disruptors and innovators like Doug, and you realize how much impact, it has on the real world. But now it's not just about disrupting, and digitizing all of these records but doing it at a faster pace than ever before, right. I think this is really what digital transformation in the cloud really enable tools you do that, a small team in a, with a very very big mission and responsibility like what Doug team have been, shepherding here. They're able to move very, very, very fast, to be able to kind of accelerate this. And, they're not only on the forefront of digitizing and transforming a very big, paper-heavy kind of process, but real-time analytics and real time reporting is a requirement, right? Nobody's wondering where is my supply chain three days ago? Are my, one of the most important thing in heavy construction is to keep running on a schedule. If you fall behind, there's no way to catch up because there's so many things that falls apart. Now, how do you make sure you don't fall behind, realtime analytics and realtime reporting on how many trucks are supposed to be delivered today? Halfway through the day, are they on track? Are they getting behind? And all of those things is not just able to manage the data but also be able to get reporting and analytics on that is a extremely important aspect of this. So this is like a combination of digital transformation happening in the cloud in realtime and realtime analytics being in the forefront of it. And so we are very, very happy to partner with digital disruptors like Doug and his team to be part of this movement. >> Doug, as Venkat mentioned, access to real time data is a requirement that is just simple truth these days. I'm just curious, compelling event wise was COVID and accelerator? 'Cause we all know of the supply chain challenges that we're all facing in one way or the other, was that part of the compelling event that had you guys go and say, we want to do DynamoDB plus Rockset? >> Yeah, that is a fantastic question. In fact, more so than you can imagine. So anytime you come into an industry and you're going to try to completely change or revolutionize the way it operates it takes a long time to get the message out. Sometimes years, I remember in insurance it took almost 10 years really to get that message out and get great adoption and then COVID came along. And when COVID came along, we all of a sudden had a situation where drivers and the foreman on the job site didn't want to exchange the paperwork. I heard one story of a driver taping the ticket for signature to the foreman on a broomstick and putting it out his windows so that he didn't get too close. It really was that dramatic. And again, this is the early days and no one really has any idea what's happening and we're all working from home. So we launched, we saw that as an opportunity to really help people solve that problem and understand more what this transformation would mean in the long term. So we launched internally what we called Project Lemonade obviously from, make lemonade out of lemons, that's the situation that we were in and we immediately made some enhancements to a mobile app and then launched that to the field. So that basically there's now a digital acceptance capability where the driver can just stay in the vehicle and the foreman can be anywhere, look at the material say it's acceptable for delivery and go from there. So yeah, it made a, it actually immediately caused many of our customers hundreds to begin, to want to push their data to the cloud for that reason just to take advantage of that one capability >> Project lemonade, sounds like it's made a lot of lemonade out of a lot of lemons. Can you comment Doug on kind of the larger trend of real time analytics and logistics? >> Yeah, obviously, and this is something I didn't think about much either not knowing anything about concrete other than it was in my driveway before I got here. And that it's a perishable product and you've got that basically no more than about an hour and a half from the time you mix it, put it in the drum and get it to the job site and pour it. And then the next one has to come behind it. And I remember I, the trend is that we can't really do that on paper anymore and stay on top of what has to be done we'll get into the field. So a foreman, I recall saying that when you're in the field waiting on delivery, that you have people standing around and preparing the site ready to make a pour that two minutes is an eternity. And so, working a real time is all always a controversial word because it means something different to anyone, but that gave it real, a real clarity to mean, what it really meant to have real time analytics and how we are doing and where are my vehicles and how is this job performing today? And I think that a lot of people are still trying to figure out how to do that. And fortunately, we found a great tool set that's allowing us to do that at scale. Thankfully, for Rockset primarily. >> Venkat talk about it from your perspective the larger trend of real time analytics not just in logistics, but in other key industries. >> Yeah. I think we're seeing this across the board. I think, whether, even we see a huge trend even within an enterprise different teams from the marketing team to the support teams to more and more business operations team to the security team, really moving more and more of their use cases from real time. So we see this, the industries that are the innovators and the pioneers here are the ones for whom real times that requirement like Doug and his team here or where, if it is all news, it's no news, it's useless, right? But I think even within, across all industries, whether it is, gaming whether it is, FinTech, Bino related companies, e-learning platforms, so across, ed tech and so many different platforms, there is always this need for business operations. Some, certain aspects certain teams within large organizations to, have to tell me how to win the game and not like, play Monday morning quarterback after the game is over. >> Right, Doug, let's go back at you, I'm curious with connects, have you been able to scale the platform since you integrated with Rockset? Talk to us about some of the outcomes that you've achieved so far? >> Yeah, we have, and of course we knew and we made our database selection with dynamo that it really doesn't have a top end in terms of how much information that we can throw at it. But that's very, very challenging when it comes to using that information from reporting. But we've found the same thing as we've scaled the analytics side with Rockset indexing and searching of that database. So the scale in terms of the number of customers and the amount of data we've been able to take on has been, not been a problem. And honestly, for the first time in my career, I can say that we've always had to add people every time we add a certain number of customers. And that has absolutely not been the case with this platform. >> Well, and I imagine the team that you do have is far more, sorry Venkat, far more strategic and able to focus on bigger projects. >> It, is, and, you've amazed at, I mean Venkat hit on a couple of points that it's in terms of the adoption of analytics. What we found is that we are as big a customer of this analytic engine as our customers are because our marketing team and our sales team are always coming to us. Well how many customers are doing this? How many partners are connected in this way? Which feature flags are turned on the platform? And the way this works is all data that we push into the platform is automatically just indexed and ready for reporting analytics. So we really it's no additional ad of work, to answer these questions, which is really been phenomenal. >> I think the thing I want to add here is the speed at which they were able to build a scalable solution and also how little, operational and administrative overhead that it has cost of their teams, right. I think, this is again, realtime analytics. If you go and ask hundred people, do you want fast analytics on realtime data or slow analytics on scale data, people, no one would say give me slow and scale. So, I think it goes back to again our fundamental pieces that you have to remove all the cost and complexity barriers for realtime analytics to be the new default, right? Today companies try to get away with batch and the pioneers and the innovators are forced to solve, I know, kind of like address some of these realtime analytics challenges. I think with the platforms like the realtime analytics platform, like Rockset, we want to completely flip it on its head. You can do everything in real time. And there may be some extreme situations where you're dealing with like, hundreds of petabytes of data and you just need an analyst to generate like, quarterly reports out of that, go ahead and use some really, really good batch base system but you should be able to get anything, and everything you want without additional cost or complexity, in real time. That is really the vision. That is what we are really enabling here. >> Venkat, I want to also get your perspective and Doug I'd like your perspective on this as well but that is the role of cloud native and serverless technologies in digital disruption. And what do you see there? >> Yeah, I think it's huge. I think, again and again, every customer, and we meet, Command Alkon and Doug and his team is a great example of this where they really want to spend as much time and energies and calories that they have to, help their business, right? Like what, are we accomplishing trying to accomplish as a business? How do we enable, how do we build better products? How do we grow revenue? How do we eliminate risk that is inherent in the business? And that is really where they want to spend all of their energy not trying to like, install some backend software, administer build IDL pipelines and so on and so forth. And so, doing serverless on the compute side of that things like AWS lambda does and what have you. And, it's a very important innovation but that isn't, complete the story or your data stack also have to become serverless. And, that is really the vision with Rockset that your entire realtime analytics stack can be operating and managing. It could be as simple as managing a serverless stack for your compute environments like your APS servers and what have you. And so I think that is going to be a that is for here to stay. This is a path towards simplicity and simplicity scales really, really well, right? Complexity will always be the killer that'll limit, how far you can use this solution and how many problems can you solve with that solution? So, simplicity is a very, very important aspect here. And serverless helps you, deliver that. >> And Doug your thoughts on cloud native and serverless in terms of digital disruption >> Great point, and there are two parts to the scalability part. The second one is the one that's more subtle unless you're in charge of the budget. And that is, with enough effort and enough money that you can make almost any technology scale whether it's multiple copies of it, it may take a long time to get there but you can get there with most technologies but what is least scalable, at least that I as I see that this industry is the people, everybody knows we have a talent shortage and these other ways of getting the real time analytics and scaling infrastructure for compute and database storage, it really takes a highly skilled set of resources. And the more your company grows, the more of those you need. And that is what we really can't find. And that's actually what drove our team in our last industry to even go this way we reached a point where our growth was limited by the people we could find. And so we really wanted to break out of that. So now we had the best of both scalable people because we don't have to scale them and scalable technology. >> Excellent. The best of both worlds. Isn't it great when those two things come together? Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me on "theCUBE" today. Talking about what Rockset and Command Alkon are doing together better together what you're enabling from a supply chain digitization perspective. We appreciate your insights. >> Great. Thank you. >> Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For Doug Moore and Venkat Venkatramani, I'm Lisa Martin. Keep it right here for more coverage of "theCUBE", your leader in high tech event coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to the cubes cover dot com. Splunk annual conference >>Virtual this year. I'm john for >>your host of the cube as always we're being the best stories. The best guest to you and the best guest today is the ceo Doug merit of course, Top Dog. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming on to be seen. >>So nice. I can't believe it. We had a whole year without seeing each other. >>I love this conference because it's kind of like a studio taking over a full virtual studio multiple sets, cubes here. You have the main stage, you've got rooms upstairs, tons of virtual interactions. Great numbers. Congratulations. >>Thank you. Thank you. We were, we wanted this to be primarily live where we are live, primarily on site. Um, and we pivoted some private marketing team. How quickly they pivoted and I love the environment they've created as I know next year we will be always have virtual now we've all learned but will be on site, which is great. >>It's good to see kind of you guys telling the story a lot, a lot more stories happening and You know, we've been covering splint since 2012 on the Cube. I think longer than aws there was 2013 our first cube seeing Splunk emerge is the trend has been, it's new, it's got value and you operationalize it for customers. Something new happens. You operationalized for customers and it just keeps on the Splunk way, the culture of innovation. It just seems now more than ever. You guys were involved in security early 2015 I think that was the year we started kind of talking about it your first year and now it just feels like something bigger is right here in front of us. It's and people are trying to figure out multi cloud observe ability. We see that what that's a big growth wave coming. What's the wave that's happening? >>So uh the beauty of Splunk and the kind of culture and how we were born was we have this non structured backbone um what I would call the investigative lake where you just dump garbage into it and then get value out of it through the question asking which means you can traverse anywhere because you're not taking a point of view on the data it's usable all over the place. And that's how we went up in security. As we had the I. T. Systems administrators pinging that thing with with questions. And at that point in time the separate teams were almost always part of the I. T. Teams like hey can we ask questions that thing. It's like yeah go ahead. And also they got value. And then the product managers and the app dev guys started asking questions. And so a lot of our proliferation has been because of the underlying back bonus blank the ability for new people to come to the data and find value in the data. Um as you know and as our users know we have tried to stay very focused on the go to market basis on serving the technical triumphant the cyber teams, the infrastructure management, 90 ops teams and the abdomen devoPS teams and on the go to market basis and the solutions we package that is, we're trying to stay super pure to that. That's $90 billion of total addressable market. We're super excited will be well over three billion an error this year, which is amazing is 300 million when I started seven years ago so that 10 x and seven years is great. But three billion and 90 billion like we're all just getting going right now with those Corbyn centers. The were on top of what sean bison as we tell you about, hey, we've got to continue to focus on multi cloud and edge is really important. Machine learning is important. That the lever that we've been focused on for a long time that we'll continue to gain better traction on is making sure that we've got the right data plane and application platform layer so that the rest of the world can participate in building high quality reusable and recyclable applications so that operate operationalization that we have done officially around cyber it and devops and unofficially on a one off basis for marketing and supply chain and logistics and manufacturing that those other use cases can be packaged repeated, sold and supported by the people that really know those domains because we're not manufacturing experts. It's we're honored that portion BMW are using us to get operational insight into the manufacturing floor. But they lead that we just were there is the technical Splunk people to help bring that to life. But there are lots of firms out there, no manufacturing cold process versus the screed and they can create with these packages. They're appropriate for automotive, automotive versus paint versus wineries versus having that. I think the big Accelerant over the next 10 years response, we gotta keep penetrating our core use cases but it would be allowing our ecosystem and so happy Teresa Karlsson's here is just pounding the table and partners to take the other probably 90% of the market that is not covered by by our core market. >>Yeah, I think that's awesome. And the first time we get to the partner 1st and 2nd the rebranding of the ecosystem as it's growing. But you mentioned you didn't know manufacturing as an example where the value is being created. That's interesting because you guys are enabling that value, their adding that because they know their apps then they're experts. That's where the ecosystem is really gonna shine because if you can provide that enablement this control plane as you mentioned, that's going to feed the ecosystem. So the question I have for you is as you guys have become essentially the de facto control playing for most companies because they were using spring for a lot of other great reasons now you have set them up that way is the pattern to just keep building machine learning apps on top of it or more querying what's the what's the customer next level trends that you're seeing. >>So the two core focus areas that we will stay on top of is enriching that data platform and ensure that we continue to provide better at peace and better interfaces so that when people want to build a really interesting automotive parts, supply chain optimization app that they're able to do that, we've got the right A. P. S. We've got the right services, we've got the right separation between the application of platforms so they can get that done, we'll continue to advance that platform so that there's modernization capabilities and there's advertising capabilities and other pieces that they can make their business. The other piece that will stay very focused on is within the cyber realm within I. T. Ops within devops, ensuring that we're leveraging that platform, but baking ml and baking all the advanced edge and other capabilities into those solutions because the cyber teams as where you started with a You know, we really started reporting on cyber 2015, those guys have got such a hard job and while there's lots of people pretending like they're going to come in and serve them, it's the difficulty is there are hundreds of tools and technologies that the average C so deals with and the rate of innovation is not slowing down and those vendors that have a vested interest and I want to maintain my footprint and firewalls, I want to maintain an implant, I want to maintain. It's really hard for them to say, you know what? There are 25 other categories of tools and there's 500 vendors. You gotta play nicely with your competitors and know all those folks if you really want to provide the ml the detection, the remediation, The investigation capabilities. And that's where I'm really excited about the competition. The fake competition in many cases because like, yeah, bring it on. Like I've got 2000 engineers, all they do all day long is focused on the data layer and making sure that we're effective there and I'm not diverting my engineers with any other tasks that I've got a it's hard enough to do what we do in the day layers. Well, >>it's interesting. I just had some notes here, I had one data driven innovation you've been talking about since you've been here. We've been talking about data driven innovation, cybersecurity mentioned for many years, it's almost like the balance of you gotta have tools, but you gotta have the platform. If you have too many tools and no platform, then there's a mix match here and you get hung up with tools and these blind spots. You can't have blind spots, you can't have silos. This is what kind of everyone's pretty much agreeing on right now. It's not a debate. It's more like, okay, I got silos and I got blind spots. Well how do I solve >>the difficulty? And I touched a little bit of the sun my keynote of There are well over 60 and I was using 16 because DB engines categorizes 16 different database tools. But there's actually more if you go deeper. So there's different 16 different categories of database tools. Think relational database, data warehouse, ledger databases, graph database, et cetera over 16 categories those 350 vendors. That's not because we're all stupid in tech like a graph DB is different than a relational database, which is different than what we do with our stimulus index. So there's those categories that many vendors because they're trying to solve different problems within the swim lane that you are in which for us is this non structured, high volume difficult data to manage Now. The problem is how do you create that non broken that end to end view. So you can handle your use cases effectively. Um and then the customer is still going to do with the fact that we're not a relational database engine company. We're not a data warehousing company where we were beginning to use graph DB capabilities within our our solution sets. We're gonna lean on open source other vendors use the tool for the job >>you need. But I think that what you're thinking hitting on my like is this control plane idea. I want to get back to that because if you think about what the modern application developers want is they want devops and deVOps kind of one infrastructures codes there. But if I'm a modern developer, I just want to code, >>I don't want to configure >>the data or the infrastructure. So the data value now is so much more important for the developer, whether that's policy based innovation, get options, some people call it A I ops, these are big trends. This is fairly new in the sense of being mainstream. It's been around for a couple of years, but this time, how do you see the data being much more of a developer input. >>People talk about deVOps is a new thing when I was running on the HR products at Peoplesoft in 2000 and four, we had a deVOPS teams. So that is, you know, there's always been a group of people whether Disney or not that are kind of managing the manufacturing floor for your developers, making sure they got the right tools and databases and what's new is because the ephemeral nature of cloud, that app dev work and devops and everyone that surrounds those or is now 100% data driven because you have ephemeral services, they're popping up and popping down. And if you're not able to trap the data that are each one of those services are admitting and do it on a real time basis and a thorough, complete basis, you can't sample then you are flying blind and that's not gonna work when you've got a critical code push for a feature your customers demanding and if you don't get it out, your competitors are, you need to have assurance that you've done the right things and that the quality and and the actual deployment actually works And that's where what lettuce tubes or ability Three years ago as we roughly started doing our string of acquisitions is we saw that transition from a state full world where it was all transaction engine driven. I've got to insert transaction and engines in a code. Very different engineering problem to I've got to grab data and it's convoluted data. It's chaotic data. It's changing all the time. Well, jeez that sounds and latency >>issues to they're gonna be doing fast. >>I've got to do it. You literally millisecond by millisecond. You've got are are bigger customers were honored because of how we operate. Splunk to serve some of the biggest web properties in the in the globe and they're dealing with hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of data per day that are traversing these pipes and you've got to be able to extract metrics that entire multi petabyte or traces that entire multi pedal extreme and you can't hope you're guessing right by only extracting from portions of it because again, if you missed that data you've missed it forever. So for us that was a data problem, which is why we stepped in and >>other things That data problem these days, it's almost it's the most fun to talk about if you love the problem statement that we're trying to solve. I want to get your reaction something if you don't mind. I was talking to a C. So in the C. I. O. We have a conversation kind of off camera at an event recently and I said what's the biggest challenge that you have? Just curious? I asked him, it's actually it's personnel people are mad at each other. Developers want to go faster because there are ci cd pipeline is devops their coding. They're having to wait for the security groups in some cases weeks and days when they could do it in minutes they want to do it on the in the pipelines, shifting left as some call it and it's kind of getting in the way. So it's kind of like it's not they're not getting along very well uh meaning they're slowing things down. I can say something what they really said, but they weren't getting along. What's your reaction? Because that seems to be a speed scale problem. That's developer centric, not organizational, you've got organizational challenges and being slowed down. >>So uh while we all talk about this converted landscape and how exciting is going to be. You do have diametrically opposed metrics and you're never going to have, it's very difficult to get a single person to have the same allegiance to those diametrically a virgin metrics as you want. So you've got checks and balances and the reality of what the cyber teams need to be doing to ensure that you aren't just coding effective functions with the right delivery timeframe. But that's also secure is I think going to make the security team is important forever and the same thing. You can't just write sloppy code that consumes, that blows your AWS budget or G. C. P budget within the first week of deploying it because you've still got to run a responsible business. So there are different dimensions that we all have to deal with quality time and feature functionality that different groups represent. So we, I believe a converged landscape is important. It's not that we're gonna blow it up and one person is going to do it all if you've got to get those groups talking better and you've got to reduce cycle times now we believe it's plunk is with a common data plane, which is the backbone and then solutions built from that common data plane to serve those groups. You're lessening the lack of understanding and you're reducing the cycle time. So now I can look when I'm publishing the code. If it's done properly, is it also secure And the cyber teams can kind of be flying in saying, hey, wait, wait, wait, we just saw something in the data says we're not quite ready. I'm sorry. I know you want to push, you can't push now, but there'll be a data driven conversation and not this, you shouldn't be waiting a week or two weeks, like we can't operate that scale and you've got to address people with facts and data and logic and that's what we're trying to get done. And you >>guys have a good policy engine, you can put up that up into the pipeline. So awesome. That's great, great insight there. Thanks for sharing. Final question. Um looking back in your time since you've been Ceo the culture kind of hasn't changed at Splunk, it's still they have fun, hard charging laid back a little bit and public company now, he's still got to meet the numbers, but your growing business is good, but there's a lot more coming as a big wave coming talk about the Splunk culture. >>So the core elements of culture that I love that. I think all of us agree you don't want to change one where curiosity driven culture, our tool is an investigative tool, so I never want to lose. I think that threat of grit, determination, tenacity and curiosity is paramount in life and I think literally what we push out represents that and I want our people represent that and I think the fun element is really the quirkiness of the fund, like that is one of the things I love about Splunk but we are a serious company, we are in the data plane of tens of thousands of organizations globally and what we do literally makes a difference on whether they're successful or not. As organizations, we're talking about walmart is example And how one second latency can have a, have a 10% drop off in fulfillment of transaction for wal mart that's like a billion dollars a week if you cannot get their system to perform at the level it needs to so what we do matters and the change that we've been driving that I think is a great enhancement to the culture is as we are now tip into the 50% cloud company, you have the opportunity to measure millisecond by millisecond, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour and that's a different level of help that you get. You can literally see patterns happening over the course of minutes within customers and that's not something we were born with. We were an on premise solution, we had beautiful tools and it was the C E O. S problem, the CSS problem um and their opportunity to get that feedback. Now we get that feedback so we're trying to measure that crunchiness, the fun, the cool part about Splunk with. We also have got to be very operationally disciplined because we carry a heavy responsibility set from our customers and we're in the middle of that as well as the world knows, we're halfway through our transition to be a cloud first company but I'm excited with the results I'm seeing, so I think curiosity and tenacity go with that operational rigor. Like we should all be growth mindset oriented and very excited about, Hey, can I improve? I guess there's some information that I need that I'm not getting that will make me serve my customers better and that is the tone and tenor. I want to cross all the Splunk of whether in HR legal or engineering or sales or we serve customers and we've got to be so excited every day about getting better feedback and how to serve them better. >>Doug. Thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing that inside. I know you had to cancel your physical event, pulled off an exceptionally strong virtual event here in person. Thanks for having the Cuban. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for being here and I can't wait to do this in person. Next >>to mary the ceo of Splunk here inside the cube cube coverage continues stay with us for more. We've got more interviews all the rest of the day, Stay with us. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching. Mm >>mm mhm >>mhm >>Yeah

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for this very important event, the award for best partner transformation, best energy solution. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCUBE and I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. They are Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pariveda Solutions and Doug Priedeman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. Welcome to the program, so glad to have you here. >> Glad to be here. Thank you. >> Yes, thanks for having us. >> Terrific. Well, let's start with you, Doug. Can you give us a brief overview of your subsidiary for some of our audience that may not be familiar with it? And also how are you using AWS now to transform collaboration on major capital projects? >> Certainly and thank you. So as many will know ExxonMobil as a sort of a global energy provider around the world operating on six out of the seven continents. Global Projects, which is the specific subsidiary where I work, we are responsible for delivery of major capital projects to the various business units around the world. So we have the opportunity to, once approved by the business unit, to deliver on the engineering, procurement, and construction activities associated with building a new facility, if you will. And that ranges across oil and gas production, refining and chemical activities. >> Terrific. And I'd love to shift now to Alan. Could you give us an insight on DPH and your collaboration with ExxonMobil? That would be terrific. >> Happy too. We first got involved with Digital Project Home after Doug had reached out to AWS seeking ways to innovate how major capital projects look at collaboration in the engineering, procurement, and construction value chain. And we were brought in as an AWS Premier Partner to help design an uplift, a new way to facilitate that collaboration between ExxonMobil and its EPC companies. And we got involved early on in the design phase where we were in the room together putting up wire frames on the walls, walking through the processes, trying to figure out how do we streamline the process that had quite a bit of toil in it from both the combination of mixed systems to manual processes. And that's where we got involved and really helped to sketch out some of that early vision from Doug. >> Terrific. Now, Doug, how is Digital Project Home facilitating collaboration with your contractors? >> Well, as folks would recognize, some of these projects are quite large, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, very extensive in terms of the number of people on the owner-operator side as well as the various professional contracting firms that help us to succeed at building out these projects and the decisions, the interactions, the way that we work with one another involves hundreds of millions of hours in some cases, and many, many decisions. What we were looking for is to try to understand how some of those formal interactions, where questions are asked and answered and we need a record of the question that was asked and answered for contractual purposes and for the history, when documents are submitted and need to be reviewed and returned. Some of those formal interactions, historically, had been through platforms and methodologies that were really quite, to use the phrase Alan just did, quite toilsome. And what we were looking to do was to kind of come in to the modern world and use some of the digital tools, methods and programming that are available to help automate in some cases, to help smooth the actual transfer of information, and to bring information to the surface. As practitioners on a project, how do you have information available to you at your fingertips so that you can have better information that allows you to make better decisions and return your answers, not only more quickly with less hours involved in getting to that answer, but also a better answer with a higher confidence that we've answered it the way we need to, we don't have to revisit later. >> Terrific. Well, Alan can you now describe some of the benefits of this cloud native serverless architecture? >> Absolutely. If you remember back what Doug was saying earlier, ExxonMobil operates on six to seven continents around the world. So one of the first things we wanted to do is make sure that we were designing for a solution that could meet any end-user, no matter where they were in the world, whether it was Africa, North America, Australia, Asia, it didn't matter. So we wanted to choose a cloud infrastructure like AWS that had an amazing ability to serve global customers around the world. And more specifically, we knew it was really important to get to a value adding solution as quickly as possible. So by leveraging serverless technology, we got to spend most of our time building the technology that was going to be adding value because AWS infrastructure had already solved many of just the pipe work style issues at hand. So AWS really gave us an accelerated platform to really start diving in to the innovative side of improving collaboration between ExxonMobil and their engineering, procurement and construction vendors. >> Terrific. Now staying with you, Alan. I'd love to hear how is that helping ExxonMobil to build with greater agility and at lower costs? >> There are a couple of things that come to mind with me. First, we led very early on with a modular based design. We knew there were going to be multiple use cases that we had to satisfy and every major capital project does follow rigorous global processes, but often has to adapt them to the environment at hand to what they're particularly constructing, things of that nature. So we wanted to build a solution that would adapt them quickly, so they're not constantly having to go back and build new customizations, new workflows that were specific to one entity or project versus another. So just by making it modular and flexible, we were able to already start to save costs. Additionally, because we're moving into the cloud, we completely take out a lot of the infrastructure maintenance costs that go with that. And that's really where the AWS infrastructure and the cloud based solution really started to help save money as we streamlined this solution. >> Yeah. Well, speaking of flexibility, Doug, why is it so important for your business? >> So, as Alan pointed out, Natalie, we work all over the world with different partners, different EPC contractors, and so we needed the flexibility to be able to use this tool in locations, all around the world. In many cases, the same project has people located around the world. So we had to have that speed and access. We also had to have the flexibility to be able to adjust to specific requirements perhaps of unique relationships between us, our co-venture partners, the countries that host us and so forth. But in addition to that, I'll add to Alan's comment, by structuring it the way Pariveda did, what we ended up with is sort of foundational building blocks that allowed us then to extend in future to additional interactions that we might have with our contractors. So we built out the first couple, and those are available to us today, technical queries and document reviews, but we knew and anticipate that we will continue to have additional workflows, if you will, additional interactions with our partners that we will want to automate and strengthen in the same way. And so having the flexibility of this building block architecture that Pariveda put together allows us to anticipate that in future we can build that out to additional workflows. >> Terrific. Well, now shifting gears. I'd love to hear from Alan a bit here, or actually Doug, excuse me. How do you actually find the system? Do you find that it is intuitive, or do you have to train people really meticulously on this kind of platform? >> Well, design from the beginning to be a very user-friendly. The user experience element of the design work, Pariveda brought that in from the very beginning. And in fact, from our perspective, was one of the key talents that they brought to the design. So we had a problem that we were trying to solve, a platform that we wanted it to work on, but that user interaction, that user experience was so important from the very beginning and is quite frankly, an area where I lacked the experience to have been able to influence it very much, but the Pariveda team and the AWS team as they work together with us built in user experience from the very beginning. That doesn't mean that we don't have to still give some folks a little bit of training to get used to it, but it was designed from the beginning to be quite an intuitive approach, so folks could do their work. We really were after, from my view, from the very beginning, low in toil, rich in information, those were the two things we were trying to accomplish with the entire platform. >> Yeah. And if either one of you want to jump in here. Obviously, you're dealing with a lot of information, what is the data storage like? >> It's surprising not as much as you might think. We designed for optimized data storage from the beginning. We really wanted to make sure we only stored the data that we needed, but also capture as much of it as possible so that we could surface information. That was a goal for us in the beginning, was to not only capture the information that was happening between the collaboration, but design it in a way that we could use technologies like AI and machine learning languages capabilities to surface data out. So from a data storage standpoint, a lot of the data was stored outside of AWS, but we also have a fair amount stored inside of AWS. And because of that footprint, we were able to keep costs quite low. >> Terrific. Well, Alan, again, staying with you, really curious. How is this system addressing the pain points of ExxonMobil global projects specifically? >> One of the main goals from the beginning, like Doug was saying, is to reduce the toil. And a lot of the toil came from the process of an EPC company needing to submit a document over to ExxonMobil and then getting it distributed to the right teams to provide that feedback, or perhaps in reverse, where ExxonMobil needed to send a document over to another EPC companies to get feedback as well. That oftentimes involve multiple people on both sides of that equation. It involved multiple systems that had to be accessed and leveraged to not only capture and trance to document, provide tools for doing markup and providing comments. Digital Project Home unified that entire experience so that the engineers on both sides of the document collaboration process could go into one system and perform all their functions. We automated the routing. We gave them an in tool PDF markup capabilities. So they could just load the document straight into their browser, start doing their work, add their comments, save and submit, and the system would facilitate all of that. So we took out multiple hops in the process and reduce the amount of time people had to spend doing tasks that weren't necessarily a value add. >> And I'll add to that. Natalie, is it okay I'll add to that? >> Oh, please do. >> Both on the EPC contractor side as well as the owner side, we have small teams of what we call document controllers 'cause we handle so many documents. But it's quite a labor intensive or manual type approach, but it didn't need to be. And the DPH approach and the way that it was built out, it's still not completely eliminated all of the intervention of document controllers, but it reduces the burden and even the team size necessary to maneuver those documents back and forth. We in our engagements with our contractors have a contractual obligation to return our comments within a specified period of time. And we were losing 10 to 20% of that time just in the document management side of getting it from the right person to the right person and back. And so when schedules are tight, we have a lot to do, losing 20% of our contractual time to get a document returned with comments, that was a bit painful for us. So eliminating that, or at least drastically reducing it was a big win among others. >> Well, staying with you, Doug, what do you see as the major benefits of creating this platform on AWS? >> Really, to me, it comes down to better decisions. In underpinned by better information at hand to those who are or having to review, answer questions, review documents that are information at hand that allows us then to have the information that's required to get to a good answer and provide that back, whether it's from the contractor to us or the other way around. On either side, surfacing information, because otherwise a practitioner is going off to find an industry standard, going back to find out if we already had a query on that same document, see what we said last time or how that question was different from this question. There was a lot of hunting and pecking, so to speak to find out what information was allied to the question or allied to the document. And what we were really looking for was a solution that would bring that information up, give us live links, allow us to jump across to that information straight away. Not only have the information, but also be able to access it quite quickly. >> Terrific. And Alan, now shifting gears over to you. I'm really curious how this system will improve efficiencies for MCPs for the years to come. >> As Doug mentioned, we designed the system from the beginning to be extendable, to be modular, to think of like Lego blocks, where the Legos themselves represent functionality that we know can serve purposes in multiple different workflows. So as ExxonMobil continues to develop this platform in partnership with feedback from their engineering, procurement, and construction companies, they're going to be able to quickly build new workflows leveraging component based design that we did from day one. So the efficiency is going to come as they or able to add new capabilities to the platform very quickly and using modern technology to ensure that it's relevant and capable and serving the businesses needs. >> Terrific. Now, Doug, as this project scales up, what are some of the other benefits would you expect can be realized? >> Well, Natalie, we're looking to extend it to more projects as is often the case with things like this. We trial it in a few places to get, to build it out, gain the experience. We're looking to extend it to additional users, but we're also looking to do, just what Allan was just mentioning there, folks involved in major projects are familiar with such things as management of change, deviations, issues management. So there are a handful of interactions that happen between between parties and something like this. And so while we've built out two of the workflows as a starting place, and while we've deployed this tool, if you will to a few of our projects, our vision is that we would be able to extend the number of users and be able to build out additional important interactions or workflows that we have so that the Digital Project Home becomes a place that holds even more of a practitioners daily work activities. >> Terrific. And if either one of you would like to jump in here and provide just like a quick snapshot of how much manpower, time, and costs are saved as a result of using this type of platform. >> Well, on our side, Alan, I'll jump in here. We anticipate on a large project, we will transact over thousands of documents. Now, some of them get more review and some of them get less review, but there are thousands of documents that are developed in terms of engineering, procurement, and construction type activities. And to the extent that we can save a small amount of time and get better answers on each one, that really adds up quickly when you consider the number of hours expended in that overall effort. So we're talking thousands upon thousands of hours that we believe can be reduced and what that translates to, not only the ability to execute a project with a smaller team, but we are confident with better information in hand, we'll make better decisions. >> Well, thank you both for your insights. Loved having you on this program. That was Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pariveda Solutions and Doug Priedeman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. That's all for this session for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, and I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is theCUBE's continuous virtual in-depth coverage of the people, processes, and technologies that are changing our world. Right now we're going to talk about modernization and the Synergy with Cloud. And we're pleased to welcome Doug Armbrust, who's the VP GTS Cloud Synergy. Hey Doug, how you doing? >> Great, Dave. I'm excited to be on theCUBE, thanks for having me. >> It's our pleasure. Hey, let's talk a little bit of tech. What are some of the technologies that your clients are applying on their path to modernization? >> Sure. I'll give you three examples and three that we're seeing a lot of interest in from a services standpoint. One is automation. Automation is an area that's been a focus for Several decades but We're seeing a renewed excitement around the opportunity for automated operations. Really, I'll talk about two other technologies but the extension of automation and to some of the newer cloud technologies. So that's one. Two is cloud. Cloud has been a terminal industry for a while now and folks have been at various points of a journey to cloud-centric models and technologies. We're seeing an even accelerated transition to not just public cloud but also private cloud technologies, and in particular, need to interconnect those with one another and with a traditional environments. The last one, I think there's been a bit of a referendum on the technology over the last year is around containers, specifically Kubernetes, as a standard for that space. A cementing of direction around containers. Clearly, people are different stages of implementation and experimentation with the technology but I do see a referendum on this being a fundamental part of future technology and direction. >> So, okay. So automation, cloud, and containers. I'm going to ask you a follow up on containers because it's clear that when you look at all the data, it's off the charts in terms of adoption and ultimately our scenario is okay, it gets subsumed into the stack. But where Where the customers ultimately want to go? Obviously, they're upskilling but what's the outcome that they're trying to achieve? >> Yeah, it's a good question. General question of the ask a modernization. I like modern things. We'd like to live in a modern house, my wife likes a farmhouse so guess where we live. (laughs loudly) We live in a farm house with Modernized appliances and infrastructure. >> New cost to live with. (laughs loudly) >> Ultimately, enterprises, they're working back from an objective, and that objective, had this term digital transformation for about a decade. Underneath that umbrella, it's about being able to move and respond quickly. It's about being able to create innovation and accelerate innovation. I think probably most important is deliver on a customer experience and end customer experience. 10 years ago, what I expected when I went to a restaurant was a If I could look them up on the internet and find their location, use my GPS, get there, I was good to go. A year ago, I'm looking for Use an app, them to remember my favorite place to sit. Very different expectations and that pressure on enterprise, to meet those end expectations is really at the heart of The modernization and part of that's Infrastructure modernization containers is interesting because it brings together, not just infrastructure, brings together how application development cycles are being implemented. It has implications for security that Can be positive if done right. We do see that as A key area to meet the end and business objectives. It's going to take some time. IDC, I think is the most bullish. They took like 80% of workloads. By 2023, we'll shift to containers. I believe that for newly created workloads. I think developers have got this in their hands and they understand the efficiencies for their own work as well as when this moves to production. This sort of DevSecOps model, kind of comes with containers if done right. There's a legacy that's going to be around a long time, helping customers understand those operating models and how to live with them both is going to be important over the next five to 10 years. >> You're talking about those drivers responsiveness, the innovation, et cetera. I live in an old house too and there's another component here which is that 80%, reasonable people could discuss that, because there's a risk component, right? I can modernize my house but I could jack up one into the house but it might mess up something that I just did. And so, CIO is obviously a risk-averse, they want to modernize but at the same time, they want to get from point a to point b with minimum disruption. To that end, I wonder if you could talk about what you saw during the pandemic. We're still in the pandemic but you had a reduction in budgets, virtually across the board, minus four, minus 5% in spending, had a shift toward work from home, whatever, VDI, laptops, rushed endpoint security, that whole thing. A lot of organizations try to do both. They said, "Hey, we're actually going to double down on digital transformation." We see this as a lean and opportunity. We got liquidity. How did COVID influence modernization initiatives in your client base? >> It impacted different clients in different ways. Some, as you mentioned, I almost view it as very Darwinian in the sense that those who had modernized and had capabilities, more deeply automated were ready for the transition that they had to go through so they were able to quickly shift to work from home. They were able to deliver on new client experiences, the analogy before in digital transformation, those pressures never went away, but COVID just brought new ones, and they expected all of those things but now they expected the restaurant They expect the restaurant to bring that food to my door and do it in a safe manner. The challenges it brought on organizations were In many cases, new. Some who were in a good position could accelerate work in place and leverage that. Others had a harder time, right? Those who couldn't translate technology to immediate returns, to kind of fuel that ongoing progress, had to make some hard decisions. I would say that's probably the single trend, projects are very carefully reviewed. There's that view of "Will this help me now and into the future?" That's always present but it's present in a stronger manner than we would've have seen it for some time. In that envelope, can I come back to within those three technologies? Automation has certainly We've seen a jump because of its nature. What we see in automation projects is A faster time to implement and achieve some of the agility and flexibility that cloud provides but can take a longer timeframe if you haven't gotten far along in your cloud journey. Containers, even longer timeframe. So a lot of folks are looking at automation projects, particularly those that weren't as well positioned for sort of a quick turn and then taking that automation work and extending it into cloud and containers, as those initiatives progress. >> There are definitely some historical parallels and I could even go back to Y2K and look at all the application rationalization exercises that were going on back then. The technologies were different. You didn't have the modern cloud, containers have been around forever but not in the form of Kubernetes. The automation was scary back then but nonetheless, people were trying to use scripts or whatever they could do. But now, it's almost like an automation mandate, if you were in a digital business, you were out of business. So what are the What are some of the learnings that you've seen from these modernization journeys that you're taking customers on that you might be able to share. >> Let me comment on automation first, I'll say it more generally. I think automation, you're right, we're not finding enterprises that are doing things manually. Everybody's gotten at least to kind of that scripting point. And then we see That has its own journey. Then there's centralization and folks trusting the automation to enable self-service. That's sort of a Kind of a tipping point to who is ready for COVID and who wasn't. Those who had hardened their automation to enable self-service generally could then call on that self service to meet the new demands that they were facing. The next stage and we see less folks there, we get into this sort of Infrastructure as code. We talk about areas of intelligence in your automation. You talk about trust, not as many have progressed to where they trust their automation to Proactively, maybe sometimes reactively respond to a situation or set of You have to be very integrated at that point and you have to really believe in your automation. You then talk about integrating AI to sense, respond, make decisions and bring those back into your automation technologies. I'd say, that's still very future but folks are very intrigued by that. Your more general question, what's sort of some of the learnings. Really goes back to Modernization needs to have a business school. That's become maybe more clear than it was a year and a half ago. In the absence of that, IT projects have always had some degree of failure. It's just the evidence of that failures, probably a little bit more poignant. Related to that, is there needs to be a strategic plan and in particular with modernization, it's easy to get caught up with the modern side. And Dave, you were kind of alluded to this before. If you're not thinking about the old, the connection to the legacy, that's a very common kind of failure signature. It's a marching ahead with the modernization, without a strategic plan and connect those things and an ability to kind of tackle a piece at a time. Sometimes budgets go away and that's a problem. Each step in the journey is really the third lesson. Needs to have incremental value. It needs to kind of pay back something to help fund the next stage of modernization. I'd say the last one and it's self-serving for us as a services company. It's helpful to have a partner on these journeys. In my particular area of focus, in a year and a half, we've had 1,600 engagements. A lot of those engagements are people coming to us after making what they now view as mistakes. Some of the three areas I just mentioned. And being able to bring somebody in with experience with maybe some complimentary skills that can partner within an enterprise can be very helpful to avoid some of the pitfalls. >> I think, your point is right on. I've seen horror stories where people Literally, we're going to go off the mainframe. They got decades old COBOL code that's working just fine and they literally risked their business trying to brute force migrate off and they never could We're not going to freeze the code. It's just horror stories. But today's different, you can actually build an abstraction layer, leverage cloud services, and Kubernetes, and the like, use microservices to actually connect the old to the new. And that's the hardest part, again, old house analogies. I've done a lot of connecting the old to the new, that's the hardest part. You got to be really careful but today the technologies are enabling to do that and one of them is Obviously, things like OpenShift. The definition of open, again, a little history here, it used to be Unix was open and then Windows and then Linux, the LAMP stack. But really That piece of your portfolio is a critical part to enable these types of moves. >> Absolutely. It's exciting that technologies are there and there's a path forward. And it's great to Great to work with a partner, who's maybe, done that 10 or 15 times, or more and have them help guide you on that path. But the good news is there is Enabling technologies to transform in a number of ways, depending on what the business objectives are for an enterprise. >> Cool. All right, Doug, we've got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to see you. >> Okay, same Dave. >> All right. >> Appreciate it. >> Keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching IBM Think 2021. The virtual edition covered on theCUBE. (bouncy music)

>>the service experience has dramatically changed over the course of history within enterprise it once a purely break fixed business that put out fires technology services has become a linchpin of customer I. T. Execution strategies where companies carefully select technology partners to anticipate and remediate potential problems before they occur. Moreover, organizations have come to expect a cloud like experience for their entire I. T. Estate spanning on prem cloud cross clouds. And increasingly the edge and technology services are looked upon by customers to provide a layer that helps abstract that underlying complexity of I. T. So they can focus on what they do best welcome to the cubes ongoing virtual coverage of Dell technologies world with me today to talk about the modern services experience are Doug Schmidt, who is the president of Dell Technologies and Services and Alex Barreto. Senior vice president. Dell Technology Services gentlemen welcome to the cube. Great to see you >>Well thank you. Dave big traven us >>really. My pleasure. Doug and I wonder if you could start by just giving us a quick overview of the organization that you lied. What's new with with Dell technology services? >>Well, yeah, so you know, first of all I get the privilege along with my team of leading over 60,000 service professionals and partners and we support customers in over 170 countries and 54 languages. And we can cover the entire technology spectrum from the edge to the core to the cloud. And our expertise in this area is broad and deep as you can imagine. And we help our customers with their transformation with the indian services and this includes consulting, uh deployment, support, managed services, education services as well as asset recovery. So just to name a few, so we use all of this technology and this capability to help our customers with their digital transformation. >>Greatest Alex, what's your wheelhouse? What's your role in in the services, strategy and technology? >>Yeah, I have the great opportunity to drive strategy, operations and technology. We're doing exciting things across all three day. But in particularly the technology space when I think about the intersection of technology and customer experience, a lot of exciting things there, I'm sure we'll talk about today. >>Yeah. Doug I mean if you look at the past 12 months, I mean you certainly saw you know, a real shift to work from home technologies and you guys, you know all about, you know the story well. But one of the things that we've been talking about is the uptick that we're expecting and we're already seeing it in professional services because there is a talent gap, there's a skills shortage and people have to they have to get hybrid right, they have to fund their digital transformation, they need help. So there's been a lot of changes in the market during the past year. What are you hearing from customers? What are their priorities? How are they changing? >>Well yeah you've stated Dave look there's a lot of changes in the market during the last year clearly and what our customers are telling us and where they're changing priorities are are really centered around two things. The first uh is that all of us are helping our customers deliver a better experience to their customers right to end customers that matters. You know in a brand new study we commissioned from Forrester consulting. Actually 56% of I. T. Leaders said that improving customer experience is the top driver for their digital transformation efforts. The second thing that we're hearing and that I'm hearing is that they're asking us to assist in this digital transformation. In that same research that I talked to you about From Forrester, 81 of the Iraqi leaders said that they need to leverage external technology specific expertise to help their internal I. T. Teams be successful. And I think just to deep dive these two items, you know first it's on the first one for the customer experience. It's just crucial for customers to transform their C. X. To be competitive. That's for all of us and you know there's not an industry or a team around that's not going through this whether it's schools uh doing digital learning healthcare and all of the things you know recently I just talked to a doctor via the you know zoom. I mean these are all new experiences, right? Uh government and corporations. It's just it's very remote. It's very seamless. It's very timely and uh look the employee experience is also closely tied to this right to the customer experience. Obviously if your employees aren't able to perform in this environment you can't really deliver the customer experience and they need the right technology and tools to really deliver that. And that's where we at Dell Technologies and Dell Technology Services are really helping our customers. Uh The second area I mentioned was really about getting our customers ready for the future and you know, digital transformation is not a one and done. This is a ongoing journey uh that gets our customers to assist their customers and their team members. And look they're looking for trusted advisor who can you know, specialized in the experience they need uh to guide them through this. And you know, I. T. Is not just back office anymore, as you know, it's really about getting in front of this, breaking down the silos, helping all of the departments not just I. T. Everything with their business needs and really delivering these outcomes that are going to help them with the customer experience and the digital transformation. >>Yeah thank you for that. And and doug I mean the Consumer Ization of I. T. Has been going on for the better part of a decade or or or more the cloud obviously has affected how we think about the experience and pricing and the like and and we're hearing a lot about Apex from Dell tech right now. What's the role of services in apex? >>Well look services has always been a primary interface with our customers and will continue to play a major part of that. And this is really about services and our products and our great solutions and software all coming together to really deliver the best experience for our customers. But specifically speaking about services, look this will be about services helping our customers seamlessly integrate apex offers and leverage the best of our infrastructure management capabilities into end. And I talked a little bit about those at the beginning, but this will be helping the customers deploy apex monitor it operated, optimized support, Decommissioning all those things from the end in life cycle. And look, we'll leverage our advantages in the supply slain as well. And scale Apex globally working with Kevin Brown and the operations team. So it's about bringing all the strength of Dell along with services to deliver apex, you know, services also is going to help accelerate the value of the customers with for example, apex data storage as a service, which I'm sure you're hearing about will manage the infrastructure across the lifecycle and help our customers get the most out of all of this great technology, we're bringing >>so Alex and then dug maybe you can you can chime in but you guys, you talked talked talked about how important customer experiences can you tell us more about what services is doing to specifically enhance that customer experience? Yeah, >>sure. Thank David. And look, you talked about which I thought was great about the notion of services much more than just break fixed. So that customer experience now spans the entire services lifecycle. So when we talk, yes, it's really that entire Cf. So we're doing a couple of things to to really drive customer experience to the next level. In fact three distinct focus areas. The first one is really around artificial intelligence, machine learning and embedding that notion of A I into everything that we do, whether that support deployment services, managed services, consulting services, education services. The entire spectrum of our services offering now carries a I into the services offering. We started with support but now we expanded to the entire entire spectrum that drives efficiency and customers see that and feel that in terms of lower costs, greater speed, it drives value for our customers as well because they're able to generate new and appreciated insights. And second, if you think about the total customer experience, there are times when they do have to interact with us and that interaction now is food and it's a seamless, unified in simple experience that the customers have with us across the entire product set of Dell. So there's pc servers, network storage we provide, we provide a single unified view in a simple view for our customers. And then third, if you think about our services offers, we're modernizing them, talked a little bit about this as well. We're embedding technology into the services offering, make them better and faster. Good example, that is modern provisioning. We launched at the beginning this year. Great market feedback has new features, new capability, leverages our cloud infrastructure to deliver the services. >>You know, Alex, I want to stay on that for a minute because when I when I think about apex to me it's it's it's a cultural transformation that's going on. I mean look, Del is a tech technology company, have been product company and you know, services there to support that, but it's always you've always had to align with product. But now that I almost see the, you know, the product is aligning with the customer service experience and they're coming together like this. So so we talked about the changes and obviously the focus on C. X. Can you tell us more about the specific technologies that services is leveraging to affect that? >>Yeah it's a good question. Often we actually talked about products and services now and services is the product, as you said, they're really coming together and there are a number of things we're doing to drive that technology change both within apex and also outside apex of our regular Capex model. So a couple examples of things were around the data management side as an example using graph technologies to really contextualized data generate insights from that data regardless of how the data is structured, regardless of where the data is stored, represent those values. Were using that inside L. For services, we actually then monetizing that in providing that to our customers. We are consulting services and manage services. You talked about Apex Cloud is and hybrid Cloud is a big big area for us. Big focus here. In fact all the apex offers are actually they'll manage customer operators. So that managed services component is integrated and is a fundamental part of everything our other apex offers that we're putting in place. There are a couple of other areas. We're also excited about two of them to highlight specifically Five G and the Edge and five G. We see phenomenal growth and opportunities around for customers around the new digital transformation that they can do with five G. But enabling that is the carriers behind that infrastructure of five G, which we are supporting with our managed services, developing carrier grade specific managed services capabilities for carriers around the globe. And on the edge side with the growth and phenomenal exponential growth actually of data around the far edge being driven by sensors and greater compute needs and storage needs at the far edge, we're actually providing services for those specific data centers. They're very distributed some of them in urban areas, some of them in non urban ears and there's hundreds of them and they require remote services capabilities which we have that infrastructure today. So we're deploying that in this far edge space, another area that we're excited about five G the edge apex and then our core services capabilities, >>the edges like this, this really infinite technology opportunity. It's so we see the, you know, the data center and you see the cloud and okay, we were largely a remote set of cloud services. You're seeing the cloud come into the on prem, you're seeing on prem come into the cloud. So you've got the hybrid connections here, cross cloud and then even at the edge you've got layers of edge, you think about, you know, the autonomous vehicle, there's so much going on their custom silicon etcetera, it's okay you're not gonna get into the auto business, I don't think at least any time soon. But all that data that's being collected that has to get back to the cloud and much of its not gonna get persisted. A lot of it's gonna stay at the edge of a lot of it's gonna come back to the cloud. Everything is just exploding. You've gotta roll there. It's just these layers and connections that are coming through into this, this kind of ubiquitous matrix. I mean it's like the movie, it's amazing. Very exciting times. And doug. I wonder just going off here Doug. I wonder if we could give you the last word. Maybe I'm looking into the future beyond apex what's next for Dell tech services and your customers? >>Well, first of all, they did a great job on that. It is exciting. Look, and the reason we're putting so much effort into the emerging technologies uh we've talked about is to prepare uh you know assist our customers with this and you and you brought this up as well. Look, the vast amount of customer data uh that they're going to have to contend with is just staggering. 175 0 bytes of data will be created worldwide by 2025 according to D. C. And even more amazing about that is 30% of it is you know, projected to be processed real time. You're talking about that edge, right? And more than you know 50% of the enterprise generated data will be created and processed at that edge according to Gartner. So look it's gonna be exciting. And over the next 5 to 10 years we predict that all devices will be able to communicate anywhere on earth. And you know look these types of support tools to gather intelligence from billions of in point, uh, is going to be fascinating as well. And there will be new ways to consume the this knowledge seamlessly, making the relationship between us and the intelligence even more seamless and natural. You know, an example of that that we're working with right now is augmented reality a R out for our field resources. And, you know, we're seeing the capability, it's going to provide our field engineers and it's, it's pretty amazing gonna buy a better experience for our team members and a better experience for our customers. You know, and customers are going to have to contend with all of these challenges. And so we're modernizing to help them and kind of just summarizing up, you know, look, the value of services is really about shifting to intelligence as a service. And there's three ways uh, that this will really come about. One is our relationship with our customers is evolving from providing technology solutions. You mentioned this in your opening to being fully integrated as a business partner. That's the first one. Second one, we're helping to shape how our customers run their business from processes to resources to the experience they delivered to their end customer. That's number two and number three, it's really about uh measuring our success. Everything we do is about our customers achieving their business targets and their outcomes. And that's why we believe intelligence as a service is the future of services. >>And this is where technology plays such an important role in the services component of that as they set up front is the linchpin. There's an inverse relationship over the course of my career between the customer experience and the technical complexity. The simpler it gets for customers, the more complex it gets at the back end, and you've got to hide that complexity and that's a big part of where technology and services comes in. We're seeing the explosion of data as you said, and and the explosion of processing power is very exciting times, Alex and Doug. Thanks so much for coming to the Cuban, sharing the update on Dell Tech services in the future. I really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you for having us. >>All right, and thank you for watching everybody's day volonte for the Cube and our ongoing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2021. The virtual edition will be right back.

(soothing music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is theCUBE's continuous virtual in-depth coverage of the people, processes, and technologies that are changing our world. Right now we're going to talk about modernization and the Synergy with Cloud. And we're pleased to welcome Doug Armbrust, who's the VP GTS Cloud Synergy. Hey Doug, how you doing? >> Great, Dave. I'm excited to be on theCUBE, thanks for having me. >> It's our pleasure. Hey, let's talk a little bit of tech. What are some of the technologies that your clients are applying on their path to modernization? >> Sure. I'll give you three examples and three that we're seeing a lot of interest in from a services standpoint. One is automation. Automation is an area that's been a focus for... Several decades but... We're seeing a renewed excitement around the opportunity for automated operations. Really, I'll talk about two other technologies but the extension of automation and to some of the newer cloud technologies. So that's one. Two is cloud. Cloud has been a terminal industry for a while now and folks have been at various points of a journey to cloud-centric models and technologies. We're seeing an even accelerated transition to not just public cloud but also private cloud technologies, and in particular, need to interconnect those with one another and with a traditional environments. The last one, I think there's been a bit of a referendum on the technology over the last year is around containers, specifically Kubernetes, as a standard for that space. A cementing of direction around containers. Clearly, people are different stages of implementation and experimentation with the technology but I do see a referendum on this being a fundamental part of future technology and direction. >> So, okay. So automation, cloud, and containers. I'm going to ask you a follow up on containers because it's clear that when you look at all the data, it's off the charts in terms of adoption and ultimately our scenario is okay, it gets subsumed into the stack. But where... Where the customers ultimately want to go? Obviously, they're upskilling but what's the outcome that they're trying to achieve? >> Yeah, it's a good question. General question of the ask a modernization. I like modern things. We'd like to live in a modern house, my wife likes a farmhouse so guess where we live. (laughs loudly) We live in a farm house with... Modernized appliances and infrastructure. >> New cost to live with. (laughs loudly) >> Ultimately, enterprises, they're working back from an objective, and that objective, had this term digital transformation for about a decade. Underneath that umbrella, it's about being able to move and respond quickly. It's about being able to create innovation and accelerate innovation. I think probably most important is deliver on a customer experience and end customer experience. 10 years ago, what I expected when I went to a restaurant was a... If I could look them up on the internet and find their location, use my GPS, get there, I was good to go. I'm looking for... Use an app, them to remember my favorite place to sit. Very different expectations and that pressure on enterprise, to meet those annex and expectations is really at the heart of... The modernization and part of that's... Infrastructure modernization containers is interesting because it brings together, not just infrastructure, brings together how application development cycles are being implemented. It has implications for security that... Can be positive if done right. We do see that as... A key area to meet the end and business objectives. It's going to take some time. IDC, I think is the most bullish. They took like 80% of workloads. By 2023, we'll shift to containers. I believe that for newly created workloads. I think developers have got this in their hands and they understand the efficiencies for their own work as well as when this moves to production. This sort of DevSecOps model, kind of comes with containers if done right. There's a legacy that's going to be around a long time, helping customers understand those operating models and how to live with them both is going to be important over the next five to 10 years. >> You're talking about those drivers responsiveness, the innovation, et cetera. I live in an old house too and there's another component here which is that 80%, reasonable people could discuss that, because there's a risk component, right? I can modernize my house but I could jack up one into the house but it might mess up something that I just did. And so, CIO is obviously a risk-averse, they want to modernize but at the same time, they want to get from point a to point b with minimum disruption. To that end, I wonder if you could talk about what you saw during the pandemic. We're still in the pandemic but you had a reduction in budgets, virtually across the board, minus four, minus 5% in spending, had a shift toward work from home, whatever, VDI, laptops, rushed endpoint security, that whole thing. A lot of organizations try to do both. They said, "Hey, we're actually going to double down on digital transformation." We see this as a lean and opportunity. We got liquidity. How did COVID influence modernization initiatives in your client base? >> It impacted different clients in different ways. Some, as you mentioned, I almost view it as very Darwinian in the sense that those who had modernized and had capabilities, more deeply automated were ready for the transition that they had to go through so they were able to quickly shift to work from home. They were able to deliver on new client experiences, the analogy before in digital transformation, those pressures never went away, but COVID just brought new ones, and they expected all of those things but now they expected the restaurant... They expect the restaurant to bring that food to my door and do it in a safe manner. The challenges it brought on organizations were... In many cases, new. Some who were in a good position could accelerate work in place and leverage that. Others had a harder time, right? Those who couldn't translate technology to immediate returns, to kind of fuel that ongoing progress, had to make some hard decisions. I would say that's probably the single trend, projects are very carefully reviewed. There's that view of... "Will this help me now and into the future?" That's always present but it's present in a stronger manner than we would've have seen it for some time. In that envelope, can I come back to within those three technologies? Automation has certainly... We've seen a jump because of its nature. What we see in automation projects is... A faster time to implement and achieve some of the agility and flexibility that cloud provides but can take a longer timeframe if you haven't gotten far along in your cloud journey. Containers, even longer timeframe. So a lot of folks are looking at automation projects, particularly those that weren't as well positioned for sort of a quick turn and then taking that automation work and extending it into cloud and containers, as those initiatives progress. >> There are definitely some historical parallels and I could even go back to Y2K and look at all the application rationalization exercises that were going on back then. The technologies were different. You didn't have the modern cloud, containers have been around forever but not in the form of Kubernetes. The automation was scary back then but nonetheless, people were trying to use scripts or whatever they could do. But now, it's almost like an automation mandate, if you were in a digital business, you were out of business. So what are the... What are some of the learnings that you've seen from these modernization journeys that you're taking customers on that you might be able to share. >> Let me comment on automation first, I'll say it more generally. I think automation, you're right, we're not finding enterprises that are doing things manually. Everybody's gotten at least to kind of that scripting point. And then we see... That has its own journey. Then there's centralization and folks trusting the automation to enable self-service. That's sort of a... Kind of a tipping point to who is ready for COVID and who wasn't. Those who had hardened their automation to enable self-service generally could then call on that self service to meet the new demands that they were facing. The next stage and we see less folks there, we get into this sort of... Infrastructure as code. We talk about areas of intelligence in your automation. You talk about trust, not as many have progressed to where they trust their automation to... Proactively, maybe sometimes reactively respond to a situation or set of... You have to be very integrated at that point and you have to really believe in your automation. You then talk about integrating AI to sense, respond, make decisions and bring those back into your automation technologies. I'd say, that's still very future but folks are very intrigued by that. Your more general question, what's sort of some of the learnings. Really goes back to... Modernization needs to have a business school. That's become maybe more clear than it was a year and a half ago. In the absence of that, IT projects have always had some degree of failure. It's just the evidence of that failures, probably a little bit more poignant. Related to that, is there needs to be a strategic plan and in particular with modernization, it's easy to get caught up with the modern side. And Dave, you were kind of alluded to this before. If you're not thinking about the old, the connection to the legacy, that's a very common kind of failure signature. It's a marching ahead with the modernization, without a strategic plan and connect those things and an ability to kind of tackle a piece at a time. Sometimes budgets go away and that's a problem. Each step in the journey is really the third lesson. Needs to have incremental value. It needs to kind of pay back something to help fund the next stage of modernization. I'd say the last one and it's self-serving for us as a services company. It's helpful to have a partner on these journeys. In my particular area of focus, in a year and a half, we've had... 1,600 engagements. A lot of those engagements are people coming to us after making what they now view as mistakes. Some of the three areas I just mentioned. And being able to bring somebody in with experience with maybe some complimentary skills that can partner within an enterprise can be very helpful to avoid some of the pitfalls. >> I think, your point is right on. I've seen horror stories where people... Literally, we're going to go off the mainframe. They got decades old COBOL code that's working just fine and they literally risked their business trying to brute force migrate off and they never could... We're not going to freeze the code. It's just horror stories. But today's different, you can actually build an abstraction layer, leverage cloud services, and Kubernetes, and the like, use microservices to actually connect the old to the new. And that's the hardest part, again, old house analogies. I've done a lot of connecting the old to the new, that's the hardest part. You got to be really careful but today the technologies are enabling to do that and one of them is... Obviously, things like OpenShift. The definition of open, again, a little history here, it used to be... Unix was open and then Windows and then Linux, the LAMP stack. But really... That piece of your portfolio is a critical part to enable these types of moves. >> Absolutely. It's exciting that technologies are there and there's a path forward. And it's great to... Great to work with a partner, who's maybe, done that 10 or 15 times, or more and have them help guide you on that path. But the good news is there is... Enabling technologies to transform in a number of ways, depending on what the business objectives are for an enterprise. >> Cool. All right, Doug, we've got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to see you. >> Okay, same Dave. >> All right. >> Appreciate it. >> Keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching IBM Think 2021. The virtual edition covered on theCUBE. (bouncy music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios, with our ongoing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, the digital experience, we can't be together this year, but we can still get together this way. And we're excited for our very next segment, really talking about one of the big leverage points that the Dell VMware relationship can result in, so we're excited. Joining us our next guest is Guy Bartram, he is the Director of Product Marketing for Cloud Director, for VMware. Guy great to see you, where are you coming in from? >> Thanks for having me on Jeff. >> Where are you coming in from today? (Guy chuckles) >> So this yeah, this London for me, this is from London. >> Excellent, great to see you. >> In the UK. >> And also joining us, Doug Lieberman, he is the Global Solutions Director for Dell Technology, Doug, great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> Well, thanks for having me, I'm calling in from just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. >> Excellent, love Philly's lived there for a couple of years and man, there's some terrific food in that part of the world, I tell yah. So let's get into--- >> You say--- >> Are you Pat's or Geno's. >> Actually I'll eat either one but I think I prefer Pat. >> Okay buddy, I used to get one of each and eat half and half and piss people off that were the purest, but that's a difference--- >> That's the right way to do it. (Jeff and Guy laughs) >> Right, so let's get into it, you know, before we turned on the cameras, you guys were talking about this exciting announcement that you've been working on for a really long time. So before we get kind of into the depths and the importance, why don't we just go ahead and tell us, what is the big announcement that we're sharing today? Go to you Guy. >> And so VMware and Dell really have worked together and we both have partner programs that are focused on service providers, Cloud Service providers, and systems integrators and strategic outsourcers. And what we've done is work together to build a solution that is really targeted towards them in the cloud arena, so taking our cloud capabilities and solutions and optimizing it for cloud providers and doing that through what we call, leveraging our Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and putting VMware Cloud Director on top of that. >> So that's pretty amazing, and really, to you Guy, what does that enable Cloud Service providers to do that they couldn't do so well before? >> It brings a whole lot of benefits to a Cloud Service provider, I mean, for cloud providers, historically they've had to have infrastructure services that've been, you know, quite heavy for them to build, taken a long time to get the market, and really had a high burn and operational costs and this solution VMware Cloud Director on Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is going to bring them the multitenancy aspects of cloud director and all of the speed and efficiencies in application and infrastructure delivery to enable them to address the common need now around hybrid cloud management and hybrid cloud operations. >> And you talked about before, I'm sorry, go ahead, Doug. >> No, I was saying, you know, I think that the big key piece is that, there're special requirements that cloud providers really need from their infrastructure, from their cloud, that makes it special to their business model, and what this aims to do, is to provide those capabilities in a easily consumable and rapid implementation format so that they can get to revenue faster and they can get to higher level services faster. >> It's funny, you talked about getting to revenue faster, back in the day I worked at Intel and Craig Barrett was famous for TTM. TTM, everyone used to think it was time to market bringing a new product to market, and he said, no, no, no, it's time to money, right, how fast can you get operational, so that you can basically get this thing to start generating revenue, I always think of that when you look at seven 37 sitting at a gate, you know, how do you get it operational? So Doug, what were some of those special challenges that they have in their market and how are you helping them solve them? >> So it's a great question, Jeff, as we work with service providers all over the world, they've given us a consistent message, that the days of the value in their service being, how they build the underlying cloud and how they do that orchestration automation are really behind us, right, they're expecting today, an end to end capability delivered as sort of an appliance for that underlying infrastructure for the cloud components, so that they can focus on the higher level services and the things that provide more value and more margin for them, and so, you know, the as a service offerings that run on top of the underlying cloud. And so what this joint solution does is really provide a validated design so that they can redirect their engineering resources from figuring out how to make that base cloud work in a service provider format, with multitenancy, chargeback, showback, portals, et cetera, and get that up and running faster and not have to worry about how to automate all that themselves, so they can focus their engineering efforts on those higher level services that provide greater value to their bottom line, to be honest, >> Great, that's great, and Guy, I want to go back to you, you know, the Cloud Service providers probably don't get as much of publicity as you know, we hear all the time about the big public Cloud Providers, you know, the big three or four or however you want to count them and we hear a lot about data centers and staff migrating between those two, we don't hear a lot of conversation in kind of the hybrid or the multicloud discussion about the role of the smaller Cloud Service providers. So I wonder if you can share a little bit about how they play in the market, you know why this is a really important segment for everyone's, you know, kind of architecture and ability to deliver applications. >> That's great common, I mean, one of the things we tend to call on our partners internally is the fall of mega cloud, that you know you really haven't heard of, there's 4,000 partners in our partner program and all of them are providing very valuable cloud services. They provide cloud services they've in all areas of cloud, so this could be into Azure, Google, AWS or in their own data centers, and many of them have come from infrastructure rich environments or what we call asset heavy environments and delivering services in these environments. The recent kind of drive to cloud adoption and digital transformation has meant that there's been a growing demand for Cloud Service providers to deliver valuable managed services and professional services to help customer do that digital transformation and really help the customer identify, where their customer's workloads, would be best apt and running. And, you know, cloud providers specialize in delivering these services like Doug was saying, they're looking at that higher value and they brought a lot of skills and capability in those areas. >> That's great, 'cause it's really good to keep in mind they pay a really important role in this whole thing. And Doug I want to go back to you in terms of working together with VMware in the solution space, right, so it's one thing to talk about a relationship between two companies, it's one thing to see Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger on stage together, it's a whole nother deal to get together and put in the investment in these joint solutions. So I wonder if you could share a little bit more color on not only today's announcement, but what this really means for you guys going forward and more importantly, your customers, and ultimately your customer's customers. >> Absolutely, so Dell and VMware are both committed to really driving the success of our Cloud Provider partners all over the world, and to do that, we recognize that there's an additional level of capabilities that we need to bring together and jointly do that. And so we agreed to work together to go build a series of capabilities that are really targeted at going beyond just the basic HCI market and the basic cloud market and extending that for capabilities that are targeted specifically and built specifically for our service providers. And so this solution that we're announcing today is the first step on a journey, but we both committed to and made investments in, continuing that and adding more and more capabilities as we move forward and really addressing that very specific market. And working with our Cloud Service provider partners to figure out what is the next step, what do they need from us, at the end of the day, we're looking to jointly help them be more successful and accelerate their time to market and their go to market capabilities. >> Right, that's great, and Guy back to you, you actually had some numbers, some IDC numbers that you can share in terms of some of the real measurable benefits of this. >> That's right Jeff, yeah, we have, IDC did a recent analysis for us with about 12 partners interviewed across the globe, and some of the results that came back were pretty astounding actually, this pay-for is available on our VCE product page on vmware.com. But just as kind of summarize, you know, we talk about getting to revenue faster, they found that on average service providers were able to onboard customers, i.e migrate them, into their cloud environment around 72% faster, 57% faster delivery of new services and we all know that, you know, portfolio and construction of services takes a long time, but you get business units to buy in to give it support services, so 57% faster delivery of services is incredible. And then, you know, obviously getting to revenue 32% more revenue from VCD services than without VCD and 51% overall more growth with VCD from things like more efficient operations, which are also marked at like 31%. So, you know, significant advantages to having Cloud Director bringing those economies of scale, bringing that capability to migrate from a customer premise into service providers cloud, and then obviously be able to utilize multiple larger clouds across multiple regions. >> That's great, and Doug, I wonder if you could share, are there some specific applications that are driving this more than others, is there any particular kind of subset of the solutions that you can highlight where you're getting the most demand and where you see kind of the both short term opportunity as well as mid and longterm opportunity? >> A great question, I think it really evolves around a couple of different aspects. So one is from a pure security standpoint and things like data sovereignty, we're seeing an increased demand for the service providers that are our partners, as in the ecosystem of cloud, there will always be a role for the hyperscaler clouds as well as the role of these independent Cloud Service providers that are at the next tier down, both for the data sovereignty issues, things like GDPR, but as well as kind of that personal feel, that personal touch and specialty in applications, some of the specific areas we're seeing are things like business process management capabilities, database as a service, VDI as a service, but even more critically things like cyber recovery and backup as a service we're seeing, especially in the current situation that we're in, really an uptick in the cyber attacks and the ransomware, et cetera, and so solutions such as our cyber recovery are critical in those capabilities and those higher level services tied into and integrated with an overall service provider framework are key. And so in the area that we're really seeing uptake are really the business critical mission functions that enterprises are looking to run in a trusted partner's data center, and that's what we're seeing, where we're a lot of traction for this Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, combining VCD and VCF together to give you all those features and enterprise reliability. >> Right, and I didn't ask you Guy kind of the partnership question about having the opportunity to put your capability, you know, on the Dell Cloud Platform, opens up a whole new set of field resources, a whole new set of technical resources, you know, a whole different resources, not that VMware's short on resources by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly an additive, you know, kind of one plus one makes three opportunity. >> Yeah, I mean, it's great to be doing this and we've actually already been doing this on a couple of other initiatives, so from my perspective, I, you know, I manage Cloud Director Portfolio and we've already integrated Dell, Data Domain Dell, Avamar backup solutions, Data Protection Suite, into VCD as self service and we've already put in quite a bit of work, working together with Dell on that, as we go forward we're going to be putting more work into supporting VCD on the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and integrating more services from Dell and from other vendors into the solution as well. So all we want to really provide is the capability for service provider to have the easy to consume hardware model, easy to consume subscription software model, with our program, and then the extensibility of services over and above just the infrastructure layer. So looking at things like object storage, and as Doug said, data protection, migration services, container cluster services, there's a myriad of services that VCD provides today out the box, and then there's the a whole extensibility framework, which we use when we work with partners, like we've done with Dell to deliver things like data protection. >> Yeah, I want to go back to you Doug, in terms of kind of a higher level, this whole transition to as a service, you've been in the business for a long time, you've been in the solutions a long time, but, you know, switching everything to as a service, as often as we can, and as frequently as we can, and as broadly across portfolio is really a terrific response to what the customers now, are looking for. So I'm wondering if you share some color on, you know, this philosophy of trying to get to, as a service, as much as you can, across the broadest solution set as you can. >> Yeah and if you look over the last decade, and decade and a half, there has been this increasing trend to moving to as a service offerings and the public clouds really drove a large part of that, than in tier two service providers around the globe. The key piece especially in the current business model, then going forward is how do you optimize, your CapEx versus OPEX and how do you really leverage the IT infrastructure to the maximum extent possible, based upon current business conditions, and that means the ability to grow and train and the ability to only consume what you need. In the past, when we had traditional data centers, you basically built for the worst case, and so the worst case was you had, an accounting run that happened at the end of the month that required a lot of processing power, then you built to that and that's what you use, and for the rest of the month, it really mostly idle. The cloud model really gives you the ability to A, improve their, or only use what you need and consume when you want to use it, but also adds in really shifting the responsibility for the management and the operations into someone, people who are experts in that area, so that again, you as a business can focus on your mission critical aspects of what you do whether that's developing a drug, building cars, making pizza, whatever it is, really as a service model enables your business to drive their core competency and not have to worry about the IT infrastructure that other people can do more efficiently and with better value than you could do it internally. And all that drive to that as a service model with the additional financial models that really aligned to the business paradigm that really companies are looking for. >> As you're saying that I'm thinking, wow, remember those days when our worst case scenario, was running a big batch load at the end of the month or the end of the quarter, and that would be re-missed, right, we are 2020, we're spread out all over the country and the world on both sides of the Atlantics. If I didn't say something about, you know, kind of the COVID impacts in terms of this accelerate, 'cause we hear it all the time in social media, right, who's driving your digital transformation, is it the CEO, the CIO, of COVID, and we've moved from this kind of light switch moment and then merged to, hey, this is an ongoing thing, and you know, kind of the new normal, is the new normal. And it's really shifted, a lot of people are talking about, you know, kind of shifts in the cloud infrastructure, the direction of the traffic, right, from going now from East to West and it's North to South, 'cause it's going to everybody's home. I wonder, I'll go back to you Guy, in terms of, the response that you've heard from some of your customers, in a response to, you know, kind of A, let's put a stop gap in early March that was interesting, and critical, and done, but now, kind of looking forward as to, you know, kind of a redistribution of workloads and architecture and users and I think Doug talked about security. How are you seeing any kind of ongoing effects and how is this impacting, you know, kind of you go to market and what you guys are bringing to market. >> Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of change in the way that service providers are trying to address this now. At the start of COVID, it was really a struggle, I think, for everyone to get the resources that they required to keep customers up from running, a lot of people started re-examining their disaster recovery contingency planning, and realizing that actually, what has happened in the last couple of years is, you know, workloads have exploded, a lot of patient workloads have completely gone through the roof and container workloads have grown drastically, and what's happened is the contingency plans behind all this stuff haven't changed and they just simply can't keep up the dynamic nature of the way we're doing business. Quite simply put technology is outpacing our weight, our ability to deal with that, so, you know, service providers need to provide a platform solution that enables them to be able to orchestrate at scale and enables them to orchestrate securely at scale, and really that means they've got to move away from this is hardware analog and move into virtual resourcing, cloud resource pooling elasticity, and particularly hypothesy. I know VMware we talk a lot about hybrid solutions and multicloud, but it's a reality when you look at where customers are today in their cloud journey, most of them have a footprint in their premise, have a footprint in a cloud provider premise and have multiple footprints in public cloud environments, so they need to have that consistent security model across that, they need to have data contingency and backup solutions, and someone needs to be in that to manage that, and that's where the service providers come in. They need to move away from the kind of infrastructure day to day operations that they were doing before and scale it out to now application protection and application development environments. >> Right, so Doug, I'm going to give you the last word as we wrap up this segment, you know, it's easy for us and pundits and people to write about multicloud and hybrid cloud and all these concepts, you guys actually have to make it work on the ground with real customers and real workloads. So I wonder if you could just kind of, you know, share your perspective, you've been working on this Dell Cloud Platform, you know, kind of how you see this evolving over time, and again, kind of what gets you up in the morning as you look forward as to what this journey is going to be over the next six months, one year, two year, three years down the road. >> Brought a lot of functionality capabilities to the world, right, the ability to consume things as you need them, the ability to really rely on a combined set of clouds and multicloud, and if you look at any enterprise that by any estimate, any company of any size, it's probably got 12, 15 clouds that contain their multicloud between using hyperscalers, tier two service providers, as well as cloud based services like Salesforce.com or Office 365, and you combine all those together and what that provides is a lot of flexibility, a lot of functionality, but also an extreme amount of complexity. And that complexity is really where Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is looking to help and to reduce that complexity, 'cause ultimately a successful enterprise is going to leverage the best from multiple clouds across multiple different implementations in order to provide the end to end IT experience that they need for both their external facing and internal IT operations. And with Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and working with our service providers, what we aim to do is to simplify the implementation of those multiple clouds and how they work together and make it as seamless as possible to shift workloads where they need to be, see your entire virtual enterprise IT environment, no matter where it's running, and to really optimize on your business to understand how you're using cloud, where you're using cloud, and how those clouds work together. And so the integration of all the different features with VMware and Dell bring together that end to end capability to significantly simplify the multicloud experience, and then ultimately our service provider partners, can help you on that journey to provide that management and orchestration across those different clouds and the data transformation, the digital transformation necessary in order to drive success. >> That's great, well, thank you Doug, for putting a nice big bow on it, and congratulations to you both for getting this release out, I know there's a lot of hard work and effort behind it, so it's always kind of good to finally get to expose it to the real world, so thanks for taking a few minutes with us. >> Great, thank you for having us. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah thanks Jeff, thank you. >> All right, he's Guy, he's Doug, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (soft upbeat music)

>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of Dell technologies, world 2020. The digital experience. I am Lisa Martin and I got two returning guests from Dell technologies during any back on the cube today, we've got Doug Schmidt, president of Dell technology services. Doug, welcome back to the virtual cube. >>Well, thank you. Thank you for having, uh, Alex and I back again, >>And Alex is here, Alex. Beretto SPP at the planning and technology for Dell technologies. Alex, welcome, >>Happy to be here. >>So there's a lot has happened since we last got to sit together about 18 months ago and Dell technologies world 2019, I think back right, the big bag, um, pre pandemic, but we could actually be not socially sense. Talk to us, talk about what's going on with Dell technology services. You gave us a great update then what's going on now and now you guys have 60,000 services and it folks you're working delivering services in 170 countries. Give us an update. >>Well, yeah, so look, it's really about, uh, Dell technology services, enabling our customers to effectively adopt and leverage and sustain their it investment bottom line, helping our customers get the most out of what they're looking for out of their it solutions and making sure we deliver that for them. And as you stated, the size of the organization, I had the privilege of leading that team of 60,000 direct and partners in 170 countries. We provide that service and over 55 languages and really we cover services from the edge to the core. So everything in between, and it's an end to end service, meaning we can help with consulting a deployment managed services, education services, right down to the support side of it. And that really gives us a lot of flexibility to help our customers deliver what they need. And it's really about helping them navigate the digital journey, right? Uh, it really is helping them pivot to the new business model we're seeing out there. Uh, especially today, considering as we said, last time we were sitting down together. Now we're doing this virtually, everyone's going through this transformation in addition to moving more to the edge and hybrid cloud. So it's, it's a, it's as important as ever for services to be there for our customers. That's what we're doing every single day. >>And we'll unpack a bit more. Some of the things that you've been doing since 2020 has started and made all these changes, but Alex, let's go to you for a little bit services, strategy services, technology what's going on there >>Really do you think about our physical footprint, quite a few countries as you pointed out. And if you look, we have everything from consumer all the way to the large enterprise. So we're fully perspective. And then if you look from our digital beach, we have massive digital reach, which is really quite unmatched. And actually that's where the technology piece really comes to shine. You think about it. We have 200 million assets in the field today. Those assets are generating 22 terabytes of data per day. That's a massive set of AI engines to generate customer insight. Last year alone, we were able to predict 3.7 million issues before they occurred and then take proactive action on those issues. And that's just one example, but we're really messy in our software engineering capabilities. Building tools enable our customers to drive their own actual digital transformation to do we do this across the entire services life cycle. So everything from consulting to deployment to support, to manage services. >>Excellent. Thanks for that, Alex. So Doug now let's kind of dig into, what's been going on in the year of 2020, the year of what's next lot of changes and big challenges for customers in every industry, you know, seven months ago, trying to figure out how do we survive in this mode, the massive shift to work from home to remote devices everywhere. Talk to us about how Dell technologies has responded and helped your customers to survive and get to that thrive state in this crazy time. >>Yeah, well, no, you're right. And it was a, it was something that happened very, very quickly obviously to all of us globally. Um, and these events in 2020, it really brought us even closer to our customers. We've always listened very closely, made sure we were in tune with that. Uh, obviously when all of this shit, uh, we were there for them, um, and we had to rapidly challenge and change, uh, how we delivered our service in this dynamic environment. We were able to do that. We have an incredible team that obviously went to imagine that with 60,000 folks, uh, changing our service offerings, so where we may have gone, uh, on site or customer, we then set up a Depot, uh, so that we were able to do that safely. We were able to get our PPE equipment out to the field service agents that needed to be in a data center and make sure we were following all the protocols. >>Uh, we leverage our five integrated global command centers. These are strategic hubs. We have around the world to really monitor and help, uh, and track all of this. So we were able to do that. That was, that had been digitized years before. So we were able to, to do all that safely, uh, really this was about going in then and helping our customers mitigate the impacts that they may have had helped them through that, whether it was through deployments, being virtual, getting them the systems that they needed and just helping them through their critical, uh, environment and changes. >>What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers? Because, you know, we talked about this massive pivot for everyone and the breadth of services that you cover from consulting to managed services to education. What were some of the things that were really, um, the highest need that you saw from customers, especially when this first happened? >>Well, when it first happened, it was clearly the working remote, right. And helping everybody do that and doing it virtually making sure that, uh, like I talked about, uh, making sure they have the systems, making sure connections for okay. If the centers were able to handle all of that and doing all that in a fashion, in a safe way for our team members and our customers team members that was first and foremost priority was the safety of everyone. Uh, once we had gotten through that, I'm going to say, you know, look no gauge exact. Uh, but I would say starting beginning of summer, you know, maybe may what we started seeing then is the people really actually pivoting even more into their transformation. So they weren't doing their digital transformations. Our customers were, and they were really looking for strategic guidance and on their planning. >>And so we set up where our consultants were delivering a half day accelerator workshops virtually to help them solve their it challenges that they may have had. We also, uh, help them understand what we add in, in the space of unified workspace as a complete solution that helps them deploy, support, manage all of their end user devices so that they can achieve full productivity in this new environment. And they were asking for it to be simple, how do we simplify a lot of this and how do they simplify that via our managed services capabilities? And so we were working through that again, setting up these virtual workshops and having them understand what those capabilities were and how we could help them through that. And then look, they were also as, you know, um, financing, financing options. How can we do this as a service, all these different methods that we were helping with as well. It was, it was really a great, uh, in the sense of us stepping up to help our customers. And we were there for him. >>And we talked about the digital transformation guys last year at Dell technologies world, that Dell technologies was undergoing. Let's talk to us about what is going on with that digital transformation that Dell has undergone and how technology services or other services technology is helping to play a role in that, especially in the last six, seven months. >>Yeah, it's amazing. We actually do this every day for our customers, but as you pointed out, we're actually undergoing fast with everything that's happening with our customers. Some of the insights that we learn in house, if you look at services, we invested quite heavily on software engineering, the number of software engineers that we have now with inside the services, visit units at an all time high. If you look at the number of data, scientists and PhDs that we have brought in, again, all time high, it really focused on developing our AI engines that we use both internally and externally driving digital transformation. A couple of examples of that. If you look at something called PCI, which is an proactive, uh, the proactive case intelligence, it actually looks at, uh, the entire services journey that our customer has. And we're able to detect and put information in front of agents at the right time, the right information then actually enables them to deliver a better customer experience. >>We've actually seen through the implementation of PCI, a 10% reduction to the time that we spent engaging with customers in at the same time and improvement in seaside, the tune of approximately 130 basis points. So we're on a productivity improvement, which helps us internally as well as obviously benefit for the customers. Another thing we're doing is actually digitizing our entire services processes. That means everything from consulting to the point of support. So we have a digital variant of what processes should look like. And then real time we're able to actually measure our active processes versus what they should be. And when we detect anomalies, we're able to correct those real time. That again gives us efficiencies internally, but more importantly enables us to deliver a better customer experience. >>And that customer experience is critical, not just for Dell technologies to deliver to its customers, but for your customers to deliver to their customers. You talked about improving the customer experience and some of the impact there, Alex, you think about in the last, in the year of 2020, how we suddenly went from this expectation that we can order anything on Amazon. And it shows up tomorrow to having things be delayed, that we were not anticipating. Talk to me about the transformation you guys are on. We, and we've heard a lot of, um, Dell folks talk about the acceleration in the digital transformation that your customers are undergoing. But if you, if you could walk us through from a strategic vision perspective, you've got the digitization going of the services. We know that a good amount of remote workforce will stay that way for quite some time, but give us a vision into the year 2021. >>Yeah, let's, let's talk about the future because T to your point, look, we have AI today and we plan to continue log any besting AI. We're going to continue to develop new software applications that have our customers to drive that transformation. But if you look forward to exciting areas, so let me, let me name three specifically. There are very interesting. The first is as a service, we actually taken our complete services portfolio and positioning all of it to be available as a service. That's what customers are looking for a very simple way to consume by in consumer service services. And we're doing that transformation and taking everything in transitioning to be available as a service second five G we're fully embracing that so that we can have and deliver cloud services, our solutions in a very simple and easy way and gets denied. >>And Doug wrap us up here with the vision overall from Dell technology services, the demand coming in from customers globally, all of the changing demands and this uncertainty in which we're living in, what does the future of the next year or so look like from Dell technologies services level? >>Well, yeah, as you, as we've talked about like the demand for exceptional customer and employee experiences through all of this is really driving these business model disruptions across the board. And look, we understand customers, uh, need to thrive during all this, and it's rapidly evolving and changing. So we're building our portfolio, uh, quickly to stay ahead of that. Uh, you know, being able to listen to customers and build those services out. So we're doing that as we mentioned earlier, uh, both Alex and I we've talked about the disruption. We're seeing with five G the edge cloud as a service, and this is driving a massive change in the industry, right? And therefore you have, uh, having all the services to help our customers manage through that. And it's really about this convergence, we're seeing capabilities that we provide the lines between, like I call these traditional silos inside support, uh, consulting, managed services, all of that, to being blurred, our customers are really looking for an outcome. >>They're looking for flexibility and some things to be simple. We're helping them achieve that. And like I talked about earlier, our customers want outcomes and they really want to select Dell, uh, for the comprehensive portfolio that we have. That could be everything from PC as a service storage, as a service right into hybrid cloud. So, you know, moving forward, uh, we work very closely, obviously integrated with our product teams, uh, hand in hand. We see that blurring as well. The product is a service. The service is a product. We think Dell technologies is in the ideal position to pull all this together. And we have a clear vision with a world class team are really to help our customers through their transformation, deliver the outcomes. >>Doug, Alex, thank you so much. It's nice to see you again, albeit virtually maybe someday soon, we'll get to be sitting down on a cube desk together again. I hope look forward to it. Thank you. Thank you for and Alex burrito. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world. The virtual edition. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From around the Globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, Digital experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. I am Lisa Martin and I got two returning guests from Dell Technologies joining me back on theCUBE today, we've got Doug Schmidtt, President of Dell Technology Services. Doug, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Well, thank you Lisa. Thank you for having Alex and I back again. >> And Alex is here, Alex Barretto, SPP of Planning and Technology for Dell Technologies. Alex, welcome back. >> Thanks Lisa, happy to be here. >> So guys a lot has happened since we last got to sit together about 18 months ago and Dell Technologies World 2019, I think back. >> Thanks you. >> Right, you could think back pre pandemic, when we could actually be not socially distant. Talk to us Doug about what's going on with Dell Technology Services. You gave us a great update then, what's going on now and now you guys have 60,000 services and IT. Folks you're delivering services in 170 countries. Give us an update. >> Well, yeah, so look, it's really about Dell Technology Services enabling our customers to effectively adopt and leverage and sustain their IT investment. It's bottom line, helping our customers get the most out of what they're looking for out of their IT solutions, and making sure we deliver that for them. And as you stated, the size of the organization, I had the privilege of leading that team of 60,000 direct and partners in 170 countries. We provide that service and over 55 languages and really we cover services from the edge to the core. So everything in between, and it's an end to end service, meaning we can help with consulting a deployment managed services, education services, right down to the support side of it. And that really gives us a lot of flexibility to help our customers deliver what they need. And it's really about helping them navigate the digital journey, right? It really is helping them pivot to the new business model we're seeing out there. Especially today, considering as we said last time we were sitting down together. Now we're doing this virtually, everyone's going through this transformation in addition to moving more to the edge and hybrid cloud. So it's as important as ever for services to be there for our customers. And that's what we're doing every single day. >> And we'll unpack a bit more, some of the things that you've been doing since 2020 has started and made all these changes. But Alex, let's go to you for a little bit, services strategy, services technology, what's going on there? >> Yeah, so really responsible for both those areas, right strategy and technology on the strategy side, really believe we're differentiated across three batters, you think about our physical footprint, right? Quite massive, we operate in quite a few countries, as you pointed out. And if you look at a portfolio graph, we have everything from consumer all the way to the large enterprise. So big scale from a portfolio perspective. And then if you look from our digital reach, we have massive digital reach, which is really quite unmatched. And actually, that's where the technology piece really comes to shine. If you think about it? We have 200 million assets in the field today, those assets are generating 22 terabytes of data per day. That's a massive settlement not being able to use our AI engines to generate valuable customer insight. (clears throat) Last year alone, we are able to predict 3.7 million issues before they occurred, and then take proactive action on those issues. And that's just one example. But we're really investing in our software engineering capabilities, building tools that enable our customers to drive their own actual digital transformation. And as Doug alluded to, we do this across the entire services lifecycle. So everything from consulting, to deployment, to support, to manage services. >> Excellent, thanks for that, Alex. So Doug now let's kind of dig into what's been going on in the year of 2020, the year of what's next, a lot of changes and big challenges for customers in every industry, seven months ago, trying to figure out how do we survive in this mode, the massive shift to work from home to remote devices everywhere. Talk to us about how Dell Technologies has responded and helped your customers to survive and get to that thrive state in this crazy time. >> Yeah, well no, you're right. And it was something that happened very, very quickly, obviously to all of us globally. And these events in 2020, really brought us even closer to our customers, we've always listened very closely made sure we were in tune with that. Obviously, when all of this hit, we were there for them and we had to rapidly challenge and change how we delivered our service in this dynamic environment. We were able to do that we have an incredible team that obviously went to in full work remote, you could imagine that with 60,000 folks changing our service offering, so where we may have gone on site for a customer, we then set up a depot. So that we're able to do that safely. We were able to get our PPE equipment out to the field service agents that needed to be in a data center and make sure we were following all the protocols. We leverage our five Integrated Global Command Centers, these are strategic Hubs, we have around the world to really monitor and help and track all of this. So we were able to do that that was that had been digitized years before, so we were able to do all that safely. Really, this was about going in then and helping our customers mitigate the impacts that they may have had help them through that, whether it was through deployments being virtual, getting in the systems that they needed, and just helping them through their critical environments and changes. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers? Because we talked about this massive pivot for everyone, and the breadth of services that you cover from consulting to managed services to education. What were some of the things that were really the highest need that you saw from customers, especially when this first happened? >> Well, when it first happened, it was clearly the working remote, right, and helping everybody do that and doing it virtually making sure that like I talked about making sure they had the systems, making sure connection for okay, did the centers were able to handle all of that, and doing all that in a fashion in a safe way for our team members and our customers, team members, that was first and foremost priority with the safety of everyone. Once we had gotten through that, I'm going to say, look no gauge exact, but I would say starting beginning of summer, maybe May, what we started seeing that is the people really actually pivoting even more into their transformations that they were doing, their digital transformations our customers were, and they were really looking for strategic guidance in on their planning. And so we set up where our consultants were delivering half day accelerator workshops virtually to help them solve their IT challenges that they may have had. We also help them understand what we added in the space of unified workspace as a complete solution that helps them deploy support, manage all of their end user devices, so that they can achieve full productivity in this new environment. And they were asking for IT to be simple. How do we simplify a lot of this? And how do they simplify that via our managed service capabilities. And so we are working through that, again, setting up these virtual workshops, and having them understand what those capabilities were and how we can help them through that. And then look, they were also as you know, financing? Financing options? How can we do this type of service, all these different methods that we were helping with as well. It was really a great in the sense of us stepping up to help our customers and we were there for them. >> And we talked about the digital transformation, guys last year at Dell Technologies world that Dell Technologies was undergoing. Alex, talk to us about, what is going on with that digital transformation that Dell has undergone and how technology services or rather services technology is helping to play a role in that especially the last six, seven months. >> Yeah, it's amazing to your question, we actually do digital transformation every day for our customers. But as you pointed out, we're actually undergoing our own digital transformation. And that's actually quite interesting to see compare and contrast with everything that's happening with our customers. And we're able to actually take some of the insights that we learn in house and expose that to customers. So we actually, if you look at services, we invested quite heavily on software engineering, the number of software engineers that we've had now inside the services business units and all time high. If you look at the number of data scientists and PhDs that we have brought in, again, all time high, it really focused on developing AI engines that we use both internally and externally, driving digital transformation. A couple examples of that, if you look at something called PCI, which is a stands for Proactive Case Intelligence, it actually looks at the entire services journey that a customer has, and we're able to detect and put information in front of agents at the right time, the right information then actually enables them to deliver a better customer experience. We've actually seen through the implementation of PCI, a 10% reduction in the time that we spent engaging with customers and at the same time and improvement in seaside to the tune of approximately 130 basis points. So we're off a productivity improvement which helps us internally as well as obviously benefit for the customers. Another thing we're doing is actually digitizing our entire services processes. That means everything from consulting to the point of support. So we have a digital variant of what processes should look like. And then real time, we're able to actually measure active processes versus what they should be, and when we detect anomalies, we're able to correct those in real time, that again, gives us efficiencies internally, but more importantly, enables us to deliver a better customer experience. >> And that customer experience is critical, not just for Dell Technologies to deliver to its customers, but for your customers to deliver to their customers. You talked about improving the customer experience and some of the impact there, Alex, you think about the last in the year of 2020, how we suddenly went from this expectation that we can order anything on Amazon, and it shows up tomorrow to having things be delayed that we were not anticipating, talk to me about the transformation you guys are on, and we've heard a lot of Dell folks talk about the acceleration in the digital transformation that your customers are undergoing, that if you can walk us through from a strategic vision perspective, you've got the digitization going to the services, we know that a good amount of remote workforce will stay that way, for quite some time, but give us a vision into the year 2021. >> Yeah, let's talk about the future, because to your point look we have AI today, and we plan to continue augmenting and investing in AI, we're going to continue developing software applications to have our customers to drive the transformation. But if you look forward to exciting areas, and let me name three specifically, there are very interesting. The first is as a service, we're actually take in our complete services portfolio and transitioning all of it to be available as a service. That's what customers are looking for a very simple way to consume buy and consume our set of services, and we're doing that transformation and taking everything in transition to be available as a service. Second 5G, and Telco the Telco Transformation is that's going to occur as part of 5G, we're fully embracing that, so that we can have and deliver the set of services in a differentiated way leveraging the power of 5G, and you see that come about when you fast forward 2021, 2020. And then we have cloud services, also something we're very, very interested excited about. So we obviously have our hybrid cloud solution, Doug alluded to this. But on top of that hundred color solutions, we're developing and building a set of cloud services, that's going to enable our customers to be able to consumer solutions in a very simple and easy way, and get the value out that they're looking for again, >> And Doug wrap us up here with the vision overall, from Dell Technologies services, the demand coming in from customers globally, all of the changing demands and this uncertainty in which we're living in what does the future the next year so look like from Dell Technologies services level? >> Well yeah, as we've talked about, like the demand for exceptional customer, and employee experiences through all this is really driving these business model disruptions across the board. And look, we understand customers need to thrive during all this. And it's rapidly evolving and changing. So we're building our portfolio, quickly to stay ahead of that being able to listen to customers and build those services out. So we're doing that. As we mentioned earlier, both Alex and I, we've talked about the disruption we're seeing with 5G, the edge, cloud as a service. And this is driving a massive change in the industry, right. And therefore you have all the services to help our customers manage through that. And it's really about this convergence, we're seeing of capabilities that we provide, the lines between like I call these traditional silos inside support, consulting, managed services, all of that being blurred. Our customers are really looking for an outcome, they're looking for flexibility and some for things to be simple. We're helping them achieve that. And like I talked about earlier, they our customers want outcomes. And they really want to select Dell, for the comprehensive portfolio that we have. That could be everything from PC as a service, storage as a service, right into hybrid cloud. So, look moving forward, we work very closely, obviously integrated with our product teams hand in hand, we see that blurring as well. The product is a service the service is a product. We think Dell Technologies is in an ideal position to pull all this together and we have a clear vision with a world-class team will really help our customers to their transformation and deliver the outcomes they're looking for. >> It's definitely customer influence customer driven the future of Dell Technologies service. One last question done for you, this year's Dell Technologies world not going to be able to get those 14,000 or so folks together, what are some of the things, education wise that folks can learn about the different types of services? which you're offering now, some of the things that have changed since they last engaged with you? >> Well, yeah, actually, that's being discussed as you mentioned, throughout the Dell Technologies World, so it's ingrained, obviously, into our product announcements solution announcements that we're doing as a team. We obviously have everything online and links so that folks can learn more and more customers can learn more about these great solutions and the services we offer, and of course, through there, you can always click to link back to myself and the team and we're more than willing to help anybody at any time. If they have questions or further things they want to learn. >> Terrific, Doug, Alex, thank you so much. It's nice to see you again. I'll be it virtually. Maybe someday soon we'll get to be sitting down on a CUBE desk together again I hope. >> Look forward to eat. >> Thank you. Thank you for Doug Schmidtt and Alex Barretto. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the virtual edition. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality symposium brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi everybody. This is Dave Vellante and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the MIT CDOIQ 2020 event. Of course, it's gone virtual. We wish we were all together in Cambridge. They were going to move into a new building this year for years they've done this event at the Tang Center, moving into a new facility, but unfortunately going to have to wait at least a year, we'll see, But we've got a great guest. Nonetheless, Doug Laney is here. He's a Business Value Strategist, the bestselling author, an analyst, consultant then a long time CUBE friend. Doug, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Dave, great to be with you again as well. So can I ask you? You have been an advocate for obviously measuring the value of data, the CDO role. I don't take this the wrong way, but I feel like the last 150 days have done more to accelerate people's attention on the importance of data and the value of data than all the great work that you've done. What do you think? (laughing) >> It's always great when organizations, actually take advantage of some of these concepts of data value. You may be speaking specifically about the situation with United Airlines and American Airlines, where they have basically collateralized their customer loyalty data, their customer loyalty programs to the tunes of several billion dollars each. And one of the things that's very interesting about that is that the third party valuations of their customer loyalty data, resulted in numbers that were larger than the companies themselves. So basically the value of their data, which is as we've discussed previously off balance sheet is more valuable than the market cap of those companies themselves, which is just incredibly fascinating. >> Well, and of course, all you have to do is look to the Trillionaire's Club. And now of course, Apple pushing two trillion to really see the value that the market places on data. But the other thing is of course, COVID, everybody talks about the COVID acceleration. How have you seen it impact the awareness of the importance of data, whether it applies to business resiliency or even new monetization models? If you're not digital, you can't do business. And digital is all about data. >> I think the major challenge that most organizations are seeing from a data and analytics perspective due to COVID is that their traditional trend based forecast models are broken. If you're a company that's only forecasting based on your own historical data and not taking into consideration, or even identifying what are the leading indicators of your business, then COVID and the economic shutdown have entirely broken those models. So it's raised the awareness of companies to say, "Hey, how can we predict our business now? We can't do it based on our own historical data. We need to look externally at what are those external, maybe global indicators or other kinds of markets that proceed our own forecasts or our own activity." And so the conversion from trend based forecast models to what we call driver based forecast models, isn't easy for a lot of organizations to do. And one of the more difficult parts is identifying what are those external data factors from suppliers, from customers, from partners, from competitors, from complimentary products and services that are leading indicators of your business. And then recasting those models and executing on them. >> And that's a great point. If you think about COVID and how it's changed things, everything's changed, right? The ideal customer profile has changed, your value proposition to those customers has completely changed. You got to rethink that. And of course, it's very hard to predict even when this thing eventually comes back, some kind of hybrid mode, you used to be selling to people in an office environment. That's obviously changed. There's a lot that's permanent there. And data is potentially at least the forward indicator, the canary in the coal mine. >> Right. It also is the product and service. So not only can it help you and improve your forecasting models, but it can become a product or service that you're offering. Look at us right now, we would generally be face to face and person to person, but we're using video technology to transfer this content. And then one of the things that I... It took me awhile to realize, but a couple of months after the COVID shutdown, it occurred to me that even as a consulting organization, Caserta focuses on North America. But the reality is that every consultancy is now a global consultancy because we're all doing business remotely. There are no particular or real strong localization issues for doing consulting today. >> So we talked a lot over the years about the role of the CDO, how it's evolved, how it's changed the course of the early... The pre-title days it was coming out of a data quality world. And it's still vital. Of course, as we heard today from the Keynote, it's much more public, much more exposed, different public data sources, but the role has certainly evolved initially into regulated industries like financial, healthcare and government, but now, many, many more organizations have a CDO. My understanding is that you're giving a talk in the business case for the CDO. Help us understand that. >> Yeah. So one of the things that we've been doing here for the last couple of years is a running an ongoing study of how organizations are impacted by the role of the CDO. And really it's more of a correlation and looking at what are some of the qualities of organizations that have a CDO or don't have a CDO. So some of the things we found is that organizations with a CDO nearly twice as often, mention the importance of data and analytics in their annual report organizations with a C level CDO, meaning a true executive are four times more often likely to be using data, to transform the business. And when we're talking about using data and advanced analytics, we found that organizations with a CIO, not a CDO responsible for their data assets are only half as likely to be doing advanced analytics in any way. So there are a number of interesting things that we found about companies that have a CDO and how they operate a bit differently. >> I want to ask you about that. You mentioned the CIO and we're increasingly seeing lines of reporting and peer reporting alter shift. The sands are shifting a little bit. In the early days the CDO and still predominantly I think is an independent organization. We've seen a few cases and increasingly number where they're reporting into the CIO, we've seen the same thing by the way with the chief Information Security Officer, which used to be considered the fox watching the hen house. So we're seeing those shifts. We've also seen the CDO become more aligned with a technical role and sometimes even emerging out of that technical role. >> Yeah. I think the... I don't know, what I've seen more is that the CDOs are emerging from the business, companies are realizing that data is a business asset. It's not an IT asset. There was a time when data was tightly coupled with applications of technologies, but today data is very easily decoupled from those applications and usable in a wider variety of contexts. And for that reason, as data gets recognized as a business, not an IT asset, you want somebody from the business responsible for overseeing that asset. Yes, a lot of CDOs still report to the CIO, but increasingly more CDOs you're seeing and I think you'll see some other surveys from other organizations this week where the CDOs are more frequently reporting up to the CEO level, meaning they're true executives. Along I advocated for the bifurcation of the IT organization into separate I and T organizations. Again, there's no reason other than for historical purposes to keep the data and technology sides of the organizations so intertwined. >> Well, it makes sense that the Chief Data Officer would have an affinity with the lines of business. And you're seeing a lot of organizations, really trying to streamline their data pipeline, their data life cycles, bringing that together, infuse intelligence into that, but also take a systems view and really have the business be intimately involved, if not even owned into the data. You see a lot of emphasis on self-serve, what are you seeing in terms of that data pipeline or the data life cycle, if you will, that used to be wonky, hard core techies, but now it really involving a lot more constituent. >> Yeah. Well, the data life cycle used to be somewhat short. The data life cycles, they're longer and they're more a data networks than a life cycle and or a supply chain. And the reason is that companies are finding alternative uses for their data, not just using it for a single operational purpose or perhaps reporting purpose, but finding that there are new value streams that can be generated from data. There are value streams that can be generated internally. There are a variety of value streams that can be generated externally. So we work with companies to identify what are those variety of value streams? And then test their feasibility, are they ethically feasible? Are they legally feasible? Are they economically feasible? Can they scale? Do you have the technology capabilities? And so we'll run through a process of assessing the ideas that are generated. But the bottom line is that companies are realizing that data is an asset. It needs to be not just measured as one and managed as one, but also monetized as an asset. And as we've talked about previously, data has these unique qualities that it can be used over and over again, and it generate more data when you use it. And it can be used simultaneously for multiple purposes. So companies like, you mentioned, Apple and others have built business models, based on these unique qualities of data. But I think it's really incumbent upon any organization today to do so as well. >> But when you observed those companies that we talk about all the time, data is at the center of their organization. They maybe put people around that data. That's got to be one of the challenge for many of the incumbents is if we talked about the data silos, the different standards, different data quality, that's got to be fairly major blocker for people becoming a "Data-driven organization." >> It is because some organizations were developed as people driven product, driven brand driven, or other things to try to convert. To becoming data-driven, takes a high degree of data literacy or fluency. And I think there'll be a lot of talk about that this week. I'll certainly mention it as well. And so getting the organization to become data fluent and appreciate data as an asset and understand its possibilities and the art of the possible with data, it's a long road. So the culture change that goes along with it is really difficult. And so we're working with 150 year old consumer brand right now that wants to become more data-driven and they're very product driven. And we hear the CIO say, "We want people to understand that we're a data company that just happens to produce this product. We're not a product company that generates data." And once we realized that and started behaving in that fashion, then we'll be able to really win and thrive in our marketplace. >> So one of the key roles of a Chief Data Officers to understand how data affects the monetization of an organization. Obviously there are four profit companies of your healthcare organization saving lives, obviously being profitable as well, or at least staying within the budget, depending upon the structure of the organization. But a lot of people I think oftentimes misunderstand that it's like, "Okay, do I have to become a data broker? Am I selling data directly?" But I think, you pointed out many times and you just did that unlike oil, that's why we don't like that data as a new oil analogy, because it's so much more valuable and can be use, it doesn't fall because of its scarcity. But what are you finding just in terms of people's application of that notion of monetization? Cutting costs, increasing revenue, what are you seeing in the field? What's that spectrum look like? >> So one of the things I've done over the years is compile a library of hundreds and hundreds of examples of how organizations are using data and analytics in innovative ways. And I have a book in process that hopefully will be out this fall. I'm sharing a number of those inspirational examples. So that's the thing that organizations need to understand is that there are a variety of great examples out there, and they shouldn't just necessarily look to their own industry. There are inspirational examples from other industries as well, many clients come to me and they ask, "What are others in my industry doing?" And my flippant response to that is, "Why do you want to be in second place or third place? Why not take an idea from another industry, perhaps a digital product company and apply that to your own business." But like you mentioned, there are a variety of ways to monetize data. It doesn't involve necessarily selling it. You can deliver analytics, you can report on it, you can use it internally to generate improved business process performance. And as long as you're measuring how data's being applied and what its impact is, then you're in a position to claim that you're monetizing it. But if you're not measuring the impact of data on business processes or on customer relationships or partner supplier relationships or anything else, then it's difficult to claim that you're monetizing it. But one of the more interesting ways that we've been working with organizations to monetize their data, certainly in light of GDPR and the California consumer privacy act where I can't sell you my data anymore, but we've identified ways to monetize your customer data in a couple of ways. One is to synthesize the data, create synthetic data sets that retain the original statistical anomalies in the data or features of the data, but don't share actually any PII. But another interesting way that we've been working with organizations to monetize their data is what I call, Inverted data monetization, where again, I can't share my customer data with you, but I can share information about your products and services with my customers. And take a referral fee or a commission, based on that. So let's say I'm a hospital and I can't sell you my patient data, of course, due to variety of regulations, but I know who my diabetes patients are, and I can introduce them to your healthy meal plans, to your gym memberships, to your at home glucose monitoring kits. And again, take a referral fee or a cut of that action. So we're working with customers and the financial services firm industry and in the healthcare industry on just those kinds of examples. So we've identified hundreds of millions of dollars of incremental value for organizations that from their data that we're just sitting on. >> Interesting. Doug because you're a business value strategist at the top, where in the S curve do you see you're able to have the biggest impact. I doubt that you enter organizations where you say, "Oh, they've got it all figured out. They can't use my advice." But as well, sometimes in the early stages, you may not be able to have as big of an impact because there's not top down support or whatever, there's too much technical data, et cetera, where are you finding you can have the biggest impact, Doug? >> Generally we don't come in and run those kinds of data monetization or information innovation exercises, unless there's some degree of executive support. I've never done that at a lower level, but certainly there are lower level more immediate and vocational opportunities for data to deliver value through, to simply analytics. One of the simple examples I give is, I sold a home recently and when you put your house on the market, everybody comes out of the woodwork, the fly by night, mortgage companies, the moving companies, the box companies, the painters, the landscapers, all know you're moving because your data is in the U.S. and the MLS directory. And it was interesting. The only company that didn't reach out to me was my own bank, and so they lost the opportunity to introduce me to a Mortgage they'd retain me as a client, introduce me to my new branch, print me new checks, move the stuff in my safe deposit box, all of that. They missed a simple opportunity. And I'm thinking, this doesn't require rocket science to figure out which of your customers are moving, the MLS database or you can harvest it from Zillow or other sites is basically public domain data. And I was just thinking, how stupid simple would it have been for them to hire a high school programmer, give him a can of red bull and say, "Listen match our customer database to the MLS database to let us know who's moving on a daily or weekly basis." Some of these solutions are pretty simple. >> So is that part of what you do, come in with just hardcore tactical ideas like that? Are you also doing strategy? Tell me more about how you're spending your time. >> I trying to think more of a broader approach where we look at the data itself and again, people have said, "If you tortured enough, what would you tell us? We're just take that angle." We look at examples of how other organizations have monetized data and think about how to apply those and adapt those ideas to the company's own business. We look at key business drivers, internally and externally. We look at edge cases for their customers' businesses. We run through hypothesis generating activities. There are a variety of different kinds of activities that we do to generate ideas. And most of the time when we run these workshops, which last a week or two, we'll end up generating anywhere from 35 to 50 pretty solid ideas for generating new value streams from data. So when we talk about monetizing data, that's what we mean, generating new value streams. But like I said, then the next step is to go through that feasibility assessment and determining which of these ideas you actually want to pursue. >> So you're of course the longtime industry watcher as well, as a former Gartner Analyst, you have to be. My question is, if I think back... I've been around a while. If I think back at the peak of Microsoft's prominence in the PC era, it was like windows 95 and you felt like, "Wow, Microsoft is just so strong." And then of course the Linux comes along and a lot of open source changes and low and behold, a whole new set of leaders emerges. And you see the same thing today with the Trillionaire's Club and you feel like, "Wow, even COVID has been a tailwind for them." But you think about, "Okay, where could the disruption come to these large players that own huge clouds, they have all the data." Is data potentially a disruptor for what appear to be insurmountable odds against the newbies" >> There's always people coming up with new ways to leverage data or new sources of data to capture. So yeah, there's certainly not going to be around for forever, but it's been really fascinating to see the transformation of some companies I think nobody really exemplifies it more than IBM where they emerged from originally selling meat slicers. The Dayton Meat Slicer was their original product. And then they evolved into Manual Business Machines and then Electronic Business Machines. And then they dominated that. Then they dominated the mainframe software industry. Then they dominated the PC industry. Then they dominated the services industry to some degree. And so they're starting to get into data. And I think following that trajectory is something that really any organization should be looking at. When do you actually become a data company? Not just a product company or a service company or top. >> We have Inderpal Bhandari is one of our huge guests here. He's a Chief-- >> Sure. >> Data Officer of IBM, you know him well. And he talks about the journey that he's undertaken to transform the company into a data company. I think a lot of people don't really realize what's actually going on behind the scenes, whether it's financially oriented or revenue opportunities. But one of the things he stressed to me in our interview was that they're on average, they're reducing the end to end cycle time from raw data to insights by 70%, that's on average. And that's just an enormous, for a company that size, it's just enormous cost savings or revenue generating opportunity. >> There's no doubt that the technology behind data pipelines is improving and the process from moving data from those pipelines directly into predictive or diagnostic or prescriptive output is a lot more accelerated than the early days of data warehousing. >> Is the skills barrier is acute? It seems like it's lessened somewhat, the early Hadoop days you needed... Even data scientist... Is it still just a massive skill shortage, or we're starting to attack that. >> Well, I think companies are figuring out a way around the skill shortage by doing things like self service analytics and focusing on more easy to use mainstream type AI or advanced analytics technologies. But there's still very much a need for data scientists and organizations and the difficulty in finding people that are true data scientists. There's no real certification. And so really anybody can call themselves a data scientist but I think companies are getting good at interviewing and determining whether somebody's got the goods or not. But there are other types of skills that we don't really focus on, like the data engineering skills, there's still a huge need for data engineering. Data doesn't self-organize. There are some augmented analytics technologies that will automatically generate analytic output, but there really aren't technologies that automatically self-organize data. And so there's a huge need for data engineers. And then as we talked about, there's a large interest in external data and harvesting that and then ingesting it and even identifying what external data is out there. So one of the emerging roles that we're seeing, if not the sexiest role of the 21st century is the role of the Data Curator, somebody who acts as a librarian, identifying external data assets that are potentially valuable, testing them, evaluating them, negotiating and then figuring out how to ingest that data. So I think that's a really important role for an organization to have. Most companies have an entire department that procures office supplies, but they don't have anybody who's procuring data supplies. And when you think about which is more valuable to an organization? How do you not have somebody who's dedicated to identifying the world of external data assets that are out there? There are 10 million data sets published by government, organizations and NGOs. There are thousands and thousands of data brokers aggregating and sharing data. There's a web content that can be harvested, there's data from your partners and suppliers, there's data from social media. So to not have somebody who's on top of all that it demonstrates gross negligence by the organization. >> That is such an enlightening point, Doug. My last question is, I wonder how... If you can share with us how the pandemic has effected your business personally. As a consultant, you're on the road a lot, obviously not on the road so much, you're doing a lot of chalk talks, et cetera. How have you managed through this and how have you been able to maintain your efficacy with your clients? >> Most of our clients, given that they're in the digital world a bit already, made the switch pretty quick. Some of them took a month or two, some things went on hold but we're still seeing the same level of enthusiasm for data and doing things with data. In fact some companies have taken our (mumbles) that data to be their best defense in a crisis like this. It's affected our business and it's enabled us to do much more international work more easily than we used to. And I probably spend a lot less time on planes. So it gives me more time for writing and speaking and actually doing consulting. So that's been nice as well. >> Yeah, there's that bonus. Obviously theCUBE yes, we're not doing physical events anymore, but hey, we've got two studios operating. And Doug Laney, really appreciate you coming on. (Dough mumbles) Always a great guest and sharing your insights and have a great MIT CDOIQ. >> Thanks, you too, Dave, take care. (mumbles) >> Thanks Doug. All right. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, our continuous coverage of the MIT Chief Data Officer conference, MIT CDOIQ, will be right back, right after this short break. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stuart Miniman and welcome to this episode of CUBE conversations. I'm here from our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program, Doug Matthews. He's the vice president of product management with Veritas coming to us from Atlanta. Doug, thanks so much for joining us. Nice to see you. >> Hey, great to see you Stuart and thanks for having me today. >> Yeah, so Doug obviously, 2020, there's a lot of change going on, globally, a lot of things happening financially, but one of the ongoing changes that we've been watching and has had huge ripple effects, is of course the impact on cloud. So why don't you bring us in a little bit. Tell us, what you work on, and how cloud has been impacting, what's happening with the data protection or resiliency in your world? >> Sure, so, Veritas Technologies is a long brand of focus on data protection. And we are highly focused on protecting data regardless of where it lives, whether it lives on a customer's premise or whether it lives in a cloud, public cloud architecture, or even in a cloud application. So, for us, this has been a transformational change as more and more people begin to adopt cloud services as the work from home trend starts and we're seeing them much higher emergence of ransomware. >> Yeah, so cloud of course, it is a unevenly distributed if you look at, if look at a countries, if you look at industries, >> Right. >> I'm wondering what you're hearing from customers, what's kind of the 2020 snapshot of where we are with the overall cloud wave. >> Sure, yeah. What we're seeing is a much more rapid adoption of cloud services as businesses and organizations begin to wrestle with the fact that they can't bring people into the office. So the work from home trend, the access to resources needs to be delivered through the cloud applications, even data centers. We're now beginning to see you some supply chain hiccups that are causing the supply chain fulfillment of server orders beginning to slow down. So customers are beginning to think more broadly about cloud gives you agility, operational ability to react to change. So people are accelerating their adoption of cloud resources because they're almost being forced to. >> Yeah, is there anything specific you're seeing are you getting any data maybe with coronavirus as to what service is in the cloud and what impact that's having on your customers? >> Yeah, so dramatic change, right. So for example, Azure Cloud Services are up something like 775%, which is just astounding number, VDI, Virtual Desktops up over 300%, and just massive of these cloud resources is just a continuing component trim. >> Yeah, and how about from a data protection standpoint and security. Obviously, we've seen that the malicious attacks have increased, unfortunately, and when you have more people outside of the enterprise walls itself, there's more things we need to make sure that our data is secure. >> Yeah, absolutely. And we have without a doubt seen a rise in ransomware attacks and malware attacks. What's interesting to note is increasingly the consumer is placing the blame for these attacks, less on the perpetrators and more on the organization and business leaders. For example, over 40% of consumers actually hold the business leader responsible where ransomware attack that their business suffers And (indistinct) percent would actually say that they would stop buying from an organization that suffers from a malware or has been a victim of an attack. So the mindset here is no longer place blame on the perpetrators, but on the business leader and owner that didn't protect their data in such a way that kept the user from being exposed. >> Yeah, Doug, why don't you bring us inside and explain how Veritas is helping in these environments to protect our data? >> Yeah, so I think the first thing is as a business leader begins to think about their cloud contract, they need to understand their SLAs and how that maps to what that cloud provider is going to provide for them. We actually found, recently, we produced a report called the "Truth in Cloud Report" and in that report, we talked to cloud architects and business leaders over 1600 of them that respond, and one of the things that we found pretty interesting is that 85% of the respondents said that the cloud service provider is responsible for protecting their data, but that's completely disconnected from the actual fact that over 53% or so of those that responded actually had an SLA that was higher than their cloud service provider would provide. So they believe it's supposed to be done by the cloud provider, but it isn't being done by the cloud provider to meet their needs. So people really need to think about and analyze who's protecting their data and how they're protected when they move into that cloud architecture. >> Yeah, I have to say I'm a little surprised to hear those results, the drum beat that I've heard from the security industry for the last couple of years has been about the shared responsibility model, there have been some rather public and highly visible failures where say somebody made a false assumption that was something would be turned on and the cloud service providers have come back and said, "Hey, you all, if there's these things you need to do and just because there's a lock on the door, if you don't lock it, we're not responsible for it". It is kind of the analogy I use. Shouldn't we, by 2020 now, where cloud is not new. I would have thought that we would have gotten through some of these rather basic understanding of who's responsible for what and ultimately who needs to answer for these things. >> Yeah, I think we're still in that adoption life cycle and I think there was the... We mapped this as a hype cycle of our own... We're people right in the adoption of cloud and we believe that classically cloud architects, probably 20 to 25% of organizations, have actually fully adopted cloud at this point and are aggressively adopting cloud, but there is such a rush now to get in from these business leaders and architects, who haven't really you've taken the time to frame and understand things that they're now being pulled along in this journey and rediscovering this thing. So we have to keep that drum beat up as some of the cloud laggers or more mainstream technology adopters are beginning to adopt cloud 'cause they haven't stayed aware. I completely agree with you. We've been talking about the shared responsibility model for a long time, but these survey results showed that it's still a problem. >> Doug, you make a great point. You talk about companies have had to compress their cycles and while normally they would have been able to really plan things, walk through what they were going to do, they're often rushing into things a little bit more. So what advice would you give other companies that are now been dipping their toe, but jumping into cloud or they need to accelerate what they're doing, what advice would you make sure that people don't get in a little over their skis or do something that they're going to regret? >> Sure, so the first thing I would say is, have a recovery plan and make sure you rehearse it. Again, back to the blame here is falling on business leaders, so don't get caught by it, make sure that you understand your recovery plan, make sure that you rehearse it and that it works. The second thing is, I would absolutely read that fine print of your contract and make sure that your required SLAs match up with what your cloud services provider provides, or you need to adapt technology that helps you to adjust to make sure that you achieve that SLA. And then the final thing as you're doing all this, so many people look at cloud for cost optimization as an outcome, make sure you don't overpay because the there are various levels of cloud storage, cloud storage is extremely expensive, cloud resources are expensive. Typically people think about the actual host itself or the instance itself, make sure that you think about the storage as well. So use things like deduplication or lower tiers of storage to optimize your cost efficiency. >> All right, so Doug as we mentioned earlier in the discussion Veritas has been around for awhile really well understood how you help customers, help connect us as to what you're doing for the cloud specifically. >> Sure, so specifically for cloud, let's focus on an upcoming release. I think most people that are probably watching this are familiar with our product called NetBackup, it's the enterprise leader in data protection. NetBackup is designed to solve the data protection challenges across all infrastructure whether it's your typical on premise infrastructure or new cloud architectures. So in these new cloud architectures, we've done things to make sure that you efficiently utilize cloud storage. So we do things like deduplication, we also control network bandwidth and make sure that you minimize rather your impact on network bandwidth. So you've minimize your overall cost requirements associated with cloud or data protection. The other thing that we're doing in this next release, which I think is really exciting is, we're going to take our cloud point solution and our resiliency platform solution, these solutions are designed to help customers, efficiently recover in cloud as well as do it in a very quick and automated fashion. And we're going to bake those into our NetBackup product. So the NetBackup consumer will automatically have access to these two new technologies that we've been developing for the last several years. So that's really exciting for us to be including those with our NetBackup product. >> All right, and Doug, when we talk about cloud, is this supported across any cloud or there are specific integrations that we should understand or just where does this fit in the entire, on a multicloud ecosystem? >> Yeah, so the one other thing, again, about NetBackup being a platform, it support over 1400 different data sources, over 800 different data targets, and that includes over 60 cloud providers, so it supports us this broad ecosystem of cloud architecture but where that makes sense, we always go deep. So we go deep with your traditional cloud providers, like AWS or Azure and provide that deeper level capability for those those cloud providers. >> All right, great. What else should we know about what's new from Veratis's cloud offering? >> Yeah, I think when we build our cloud solutions, we focus on a four stage lifecycle of a customer. For example, we realized that customer wants to migrate the cloud, they want to protect their resources in cloud, they want to be able to recover when the time comes and then optimize their cloud footprint. So we tend to focus in those four pillars to achieve success for our customers. >> Yeah, a question on that, I think about moving to the cloud, there's a lot of discussion about how do I modernize my environment and often it's I move to the cloud, but then how do I really become cloud native, if you will. So I'm making updates and I'm making changes. If I think about backup traditionally, it was, let me get something, let me put it in place and I'm going to run it that way for years. So how does Veritas make sure that as I'm modernizing as I'm making changes that my data is still going to be protected no matter where I am along that journey. >> Sure, so I think as customers are migrating to and adopting cloud, their first stage on the train or their first station that they come to on the train is that lift and shift approach. We're going to take everything from on premise and we're going to move it to the cloud. So we have technologies that will help our customer do that with automated failback, so they can set up the replication solution, push a button now they're up and running in cloud, hey, it didn't work, push the button and they're back down in their on premise environment, adjust and do it when it makes sense and they're ready to make it make it work. So we have a fairly robust set of technologies that can help in that lift and shift process, lift and shift process. The other thing that we provide is for those infrastructure as code guys, the guys that are further out that are thinking, how do I natively build cloud based solutions? We have a very full suite of APIs so that the customer can implement their infrastructure as code requirements right there through that Swagger interface that you would expect and deploy infrastructure as code environments in cloud, utilizing our enterprise class API. So we're purpose built to be able to help customers get the cloud, and then also support those cloud applications that are built there natively. >> Yeah, Doug, I'm wondering, do you have either a customer example, maybe anonymized you can share, or just any general cloud learnings about where your customers are and how Veritas is helping them? >> Sure, so one of the first things that we see customers try to accomplish is the move of their backup storage infrastructure into a longterm storage in cloud. So they might use it as a replacement for tape, they might use it as a replacement for disk, and they want to live in the cloud environment. So we have a capability, we call it CloudCatalyst that moves data very efficiently from on prem into the cloud, keeps it deduplicated, optimizes it for wide area network transmit, and really efficiently moves that data in the cloud, and then really what's important is once it gets in the cloud, it doesn't touch that data. So we have a large customer who's got over a couple of petabytes of data in Europe that wanted to make that migration to cloud, they were using another provider at the time, so we came in and we were actually able to save them over 98% of their overall operational cost associated with moving and migrating that data just based on this one capability. So that's a key element, right. As people are moving that data to cloud, make sure that it stays efficient, optimized, deduplicated in stored efficient. >> All right, Doug, I'll give you the final word. >> Yeah, I think my warning for customers is to make sure that they are well-protected with their data state in cloud. Understand what your cloud service provider provides, make sure that your SLOs, your service level objectives are going to be met by the technologies that you deploy in order to solve your cloud problems. And then think about things holistically, think about it first from the migration, then how you protect it, then once you get there, what do you do to recover, make you test that. And then once you've got everything kind of thought through and ready to implement, make sure that you've optimized it to be efficient in it's cost utilization and in it's operations. >> All right, well, Doug Matthews, thank you so much for the updates, we really appreciate you sharing us some important tips for customers as they go along their cloud journey. >> Thank you so much, Stuart. >> All right, I'm Stuart Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Splunk .conf19. Brought to you by Splunk. Okay, welcome back, everyone. This is day three live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for Splunk's .conf. Its 10 years anniversary of their big customer event. I'm John Furrier, theCUBE. This is our seventh year covering, riding the wave with Splunk. From scrappy startup, to going public company, massive growth, now a market leader continuing to innovate. We're here with the CEO, Doug Merritt of Splunk. Thanks for joining me, good to see you. >> Thank you for being here, thanks for having me. >> John: How ya feelin'? (laughs) >> Exhausted and energized simultaneously. (laughs) it was a fun week. >> You know, every year when we have the event we discuss Splunk's success and the loyalty of the customer base, the innovation, you guys are providing the value, you got a lot of happy customers, and you got a great ecosystem and partner network growing. You're now growing even further, every year it just gets better. This year has been a lot of big highlights, new branding, so you got that next level thing goin' on, new platform, tweaks, bringing this cohesive thing. What's your highlights this year? I mean, what's the big, there's so much goin' on, what's your highlights? >> So where you started is always my highlight of the show, is being able to spend time with customers. I have never been at a company where I feel so fortunate to have the passion and the dedication and the enthusiasm and the gratitude of customers as we have here. And so that, I tell everyone at Splunk this is similar to a holiday function for a kid for me where the energy keeps me going all year long, so that always is number one, and then around the customers, what we've been doing with the technology architecture, the platform, and the depth and breadth of what we've been working on honestly for four plus years. It really, I think, has come together in a unique way at this show. >> Last year you had a lot of announcements that were intentional announcements, it's coming. They're coming now, they're here, they're shipping. >> They're here, they're here. >> What is some of the feedback you're hearing because a lot of it has a theme where, you know, we kind of pointed this out a couple of years ago, it's like a security show now, but it's not a security show, but there's a lot of security in there. What are some of the key things that have come out of the oven that people should know about that are being delivered here? >> So the core of what we're trying to communicate with Data-to-Everything is that you need a very multifaceted data platform to be able to handle the huge variety of data that we're all dealing with, and Splunk has been known and been very successful at being able to index data, messy, non-structured data, and make sense of it even though it's not structured in the index, and that's been, still is incredibly valuable. But we started almost four years ago on a journey of adding in stream processing before the data gets anywhere, to our index or anywhere else, it's moving all around the world, how do you actually find that data and then begin to take advantage of it in-flight? And we announced that the beta of Data Stream Processor last year, but it went production this year, four years of development, a ton of patents, a 40 plus person, 50 plus person, development team behind that, a lot of hard engineering, and really elegant interface to get that there. And then on the other end, to complement the index, data is landing all over the place, not just in our index, and we're very aware that different structures exist for different needs. A data warehouse has different properties than a relational database which has different properties than a NoSQL column store in-memory database, and data is going to only continue to be more dispersed. So again, four plus years ago we started on what now is Data Fabric Search which we pre-announced in beta format last year. That went production at this show, but the ability to address a distributed Splunk landscape, but more importantly we demoed the integration with HTFS and S3 landscapes as the proof point of we've built a connector framework, so that this really cannot just be a incredibly high-speed, high-cardinality search processing engine, but it really is a federated search engine as well. So now we can operate on data in the stream when it's in motion. We obviously still have all the great properties of the Splunk index, and I was really excited about Splunk 8.0 and all the features in that, and we can go get data wherever it lives across a distributed Splunk environment, but increasingly across the more and more distributed data environment. >> So this is a data platform. This is absolutely a data platform, so that's very clear. So the success of platforms, in the enterprise at least, not just small and medium-sized businesses, you can have a tool and kind of look like a platform, there's some apps out there that I would point to and say, "Hey, that looks like a tool, it's really not a platform." You guys are a platform. But the success of a platform are two things, ecosystem and apps, because if you're in a platform that's enabling value, you got to have those. Talk about how you see the ecosystem success and the app success. Is that happening in your view? >> It is happening. We have over 2,000 apps on our Splunkbase framework which is where any of our customers can go and download the application to help draw value of a Palo Alto firewall, or ensure integration with a ServiceNow trouble ticketing system, and thousands of other examples that exist. And that has grown from less than 300 apps, when I first got here six years ago, to over 2,000 today. But that is still the earliest inning, for earliest pitch and your earliest inning journey. Why are there 20,000, 200,000, two million apps out there? A piece of it is we have had to up the game on how you interface with the platform, and for us that means through a stable set of services, well-mannered, well-articulated, consistently maintained services, and that's been a huge push with the core Splunk index, but it's also a big amount of work that we've been doing on everything from the separation between Phantom runbooks and playbooks with the underlying orchestration automation, it's a key component of our Stream Processor, you know, what transformations are you doing, what enrichments are you doing? That has to live separate than the underlying technology, the Kafka transport mechanism, or Kinesis, or whatever happens in the future. So that investment to make sure we got a effective and stable set of services has been key, but then you complement that with the amazing set of partners that are out here, and making sure they're educated and enabled on how to take advantage of the platform, and then feather in things like the Splunk Ventures announcement, the Innovation Fund and Social Impact Fund, to further double down on, hey, we are here to help in every way. We're going to help with enablement, we're going to help with sell-through and marketing, and we'll help with investment. >> Yeah, I think this is smart, and I think one of the things I'll point out is that feedback we heard from customers in conversations we had here on theCUBE and the hallway is, there's a lot of great feedback on the automation, the machine learning toolkit, which is a good tell sign of the engagement level of how they're dealing with data, and this kind of speaks to data as a value... The value creation from data seems to be the theme. It's not just data for data's sake, I mean, managing data is all hard stuff, but value from the data. You mentioned the Ventures, you got a lot of tech for good stuff goin' on. You're investing in companies where they're standing up data-driven companies to solve world problems, you got other things, so you guys are adjusting. In the middle innings of the data game, platform update, business model changes. Talk about some of the consumption changes, now you got Splunk Cloud, what's goin' on on (laughs) how you charge, how are customers consuming, what moves did you guys make there and what's the result? >> Yeah, it's a great intro on data is awesome, but we all have data to get to decisions first and actions second. Without an action there is no point in gathering data, and so many companies have been working their tails off to digitize their landscapes. Why, well you want a more flexible landscape, but why the flexibility? Because there's so much data being generated that if you can get effective decisions and then actions, that landscape can adapt very, very rapidly, which goes back to machine learning and eventual AI-type opportunities. So that is absolutely, squarely where we've been focused, is translating that data into value and into actual outcomes, which is why our orchestration automation piece was so important. One of the gating factors that we felt has existed is for the Splunk index, and it's only for the Splunk index, the pricing mechanism has been data volume, and that's a little bit contrary to the promise, which is you don't know where the value is going to be within data, and whether it's a gigabyte or whether it's a petabyte, why shouldn't you be able to put whatever data you want in to experiment? And so we came out with some updates in pricing a month and change ago that we were reiterating at the show and will continue to drive on a, hopefully, very aggressive and clear marketing and communications framework, that for people that have adjusted to the data volume metric, we're trying to make that much simpler. There's now a limited set of bands, or tiers, from 100 gigs to unlimited, so that you really get visibility on, all right, I think that I want to play with five terabytes, I know what that band looks like and it's very liberal. So that if you wind up with six and a half terabytes you won't be penalized, and then there's a complimentary metric which I think is ultimately going to be the more long-lived metric for our infrastructurally-bound products, which is virtual CPU or virtual core. And when I think about our index, stream processing, federated search, the execution of automation, all those are basically a factor of how much infrastructure you're going to throw at the problem, whether it's CPU or whether it's storage or network. So I can see a day when Splunk Enterprise and the index, and everything else at that lower level, or at that infrastructure layer, are all just a series of virtual CPUs or virtual cores. But I think both, we're offering choice, we really are customer-centric, and whether you want a more liberal data volume or whether you want to switch to an infrastructure, we're there and our job is to help you understand the value translation on both of those because all that matters is turning it into action and into doing. >> It's interesting, in the news yesterday quantum supremacy was announced. Google claims it, IBM's debating it, but quantum computing just points to the trend that more compute's coming. So this is going to be a good thing for data. You mentioned the pricing thing, this brings up a topic we've been hearing all week on theCUBE is, diverse data's actually great for machine learning, great for AI. So bringing in diverse data gives you more aperture into data, and that actually helps. With the diversity comes confusion and this is where the pricing seems to hit. You're trying to create, if I get this right, pricing that matches the needs of the diverse use of data. Is that kind of how you guys are thinkin' about it? >> Meets the needs of diverse data, and also provides a lot of clarity for people on when you get to a certain threshold that we stop charging you altogether, right? Once you get above 10s of terabytes to 100 terabytes, just put as much data in as you want. The foundation of Splunk, going back to the first data, is we're the only technology that still exists on the index side that takes raw, non-formatted data, doesn't force you to cleanse or scrub it in any way, and then takes all that raw data and actually provides value through the way that we interact with the data with our query language. And that design architecture, I've said it for five, six years now, is completely unique in the industry. Everybody else thinks that you've got to get to the data you want to operate on, and then put it somewhere, and the way that life works is much more organic and emergent. You've got chaos happening, and then how do you find patterns and value out of that chaos? Well, that chaos winds up being pretty voluminous. So how do we help more organizations? Some of the leading organizations are at five to 10 petabytes of data per day going through the index. How do we help everybody get there? 'Cause you don't know the nugget across that petabyte or 10 petabyte set is going to be the key to solving a critical issue, so let's make it easy for you to put that data in to find those nuggets, but then once you know what the pattern is, now you're in a different world, now you're in the structured data world of metrics, or KPIs, or events, or multidimensional data that is much more curated, and by nature that's going to be more fine-grained. There's not as much volume there as there is in the raw data. >> Doug, I notice also at the event here there's a focus on verticals. Can you comment on the strategy there, is that by design? Is there a vertical focus? >> It's definitely by design. >> Share some insight into that. >> So we launched with an IT operations focus, we wound up progressing over the years to a security operations focus, and then our doubling down with Omnition, SignalFx, VictorOps, and now Streamlio is a new acquisition on the DevOps and next gen app dev buying centers. As a company and how we go to market and what we are doing with our own solutions, we stay incredibly focused on those three very technical buying centers, but we've also seen that data is data. So the data you're bringing in to solve a security problem can be used to solve a manufacturing problem, or a logistics and supply chain problem, or a customer sentiment analysis problem, and so how do you make use of that data across those different buying centers? We've set up a verticals group to seed, continue to seed, the opportunity within those different verticals. >> And that's compatible with the horizontally scalable Splunk platform. That's kind of why that exists, right? >> That the overall platform that was in every keynote, starting with mine, is completely agnostic and horizontal. The solutions on top, the security operations, ITOps, and DevOps, are very specific to those users but they're using the horizontal platform, and then you wind up walking into the Accenture booth and seeing how they've taken similar data that the SecOps teams gathered to actually provide insight on effective rail transport for DB cargo, or effective cell tower triangulation and capacity for a major Australian cell company, or effective manufacturing and logistics supply chain optimization for a manufacturer and all their different retail distribution centers. >> Awesome, you know, I know you've talked with Jeff Frick in the past, and Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante about user experience, I know that's something that's near and dear to your heart. You guys, it has been rumored, there's going to be some user experience work done on the onboarding for your Splunk Cloud and making it easier to get in to this new Splunk platform. What can we expect on the user experience side? (laughs) >> So, for any of you out there that want to try, we've got Splunk Investigate, that's one of the first applications on top of the fully decomposed, services layered, stateless Splunk Cloud. Mission Control actually is a complementary other, those are the first two apps on top of that new framework. And the UI and experience that is in Splunk Investigate I think is a good example of both the ease of coming to and using the product. There's a very liberal amount of data you get for free just to experiment with Splunk Investigate, but then the onboarding experience of data is I think very elegant. The UI is, I love the UI, it's a Jupyter-style workbook-type interface, but if you think about what do investigators need, investigators need both some bread crumbs on where to start and how to end, but then they also need the ability to bring in anybody that's necessary so that you can actually swarm and attack a problem very efficiently. And so when you go back and look at, why did we buy VictorOps? Well, it wasn't because we think that the IT alerting space is a massive space we're going to own, it's because collaboration is incredibly important to swarm incidents of any type, whether they're security incidents or manufacturing incidents. So the facilities at VictorOps gave, on allowing distributed teams and virtual teams to very quickly get to resolution. You're going to find those baked into all products like Mission Control 'cause it's one of the key facilities of, that Tim talked about in his keynote, of indulgent design, mobility, high collaboration, 'cause luckily people still matter, and while ML is helping all of us be more productive it isn't taking away the need for us, but how do you get us to cooperate effectively? And so our cloud-based apps, I encourage any of you out there, go try Splunk Investigate, it's a beautiful product and I think you'll be blown away by it. >> Great success on the product side, and then great success on the customer side, you got great, loyal customers. But I got to ask you about the next level Splunk. As you look at this event, what jumps out at me is the cohesiveness of the story around the platform and the apps, ecosystem's great, but the new branding, Data-to-Everything. It's not product-specific 'cause you have product leadership. This is a whole next level Splunk. What is the next level Splunk vision? >> And I love the pink and orange, in bold colors. So when I've thought about what are the issues that are some of the blockers to Splunk eventually fulfilling the destiny that we could have, the number one is awareness. Who the heck is Splunk? People have very high variance of their understanding of Splunk. Log aggregation, security tool, IT tool, and what we've seen over and over is it is much more this data platform, and certainly with the announcements, it's becoming more of this data fabric or platform that can be used for anything. So how do we bring awareness to Splunk? Well, let's help create a category, and it's not up to us to create the category, it's up to all of you to create the category, but Data-to-Everything in our minds represents the power of data, and while we will continue internally to focus on those technical buying centers, everything is solvable with data. So we're trying to really reinforce the importance of data and the capabilities that something like Splunk brings. Cloud becomes a really important message to that because that makes it, execution to that, 'cause it makes it so much easier for people to immediately try something and get value, but on-prem will always be important as well 'cause data has gravity, data has risk, data has cost to move. And there are so many use cases where you would just never push data to the cloud, and it's not because we don't love cloud. If you have a factory that's producing 100 terabytes an hour in a area where you've got poor bandwidth, there's no option for a cloud connect there of high scale, so you better be able to process, make sense of, and act on that data locally. >> And you guys are great in the cloud too, on-premise, but final word, I want to get your thoughts to end this segment, I know you got to run, thanks for your time, and congratulations on all your success. Data for good. There's a lot of tech for bad kind of narratives goin' on, but there's a real resurgence of tech for good. A lot of people, entrepreneurs, for-profit, for-nonprofit, are doing ventures for good. Data is a real theme. Data for good is something that you have, that's part of the Data-to-Everything. Talk about the data for good real quick. >> Yeah, we were really excited about what we've done with Splunk4Good as our nonprofit focused entity. The Splunk Pledge which is a classic 1-1-1 approach to make sure that we're able to help organizations that need the help do something meaningful within their world, and then the Splunk Social Impact Fund which is trying to put our money where our mouth is to ensure that if funding and scarcity of funds is an issue of getting to effective outcomes, that we can be there to support. At this show we've featured three awesome charities, Conservation International, NetHope, and the Global Emancipation Network, that are all trying to tackle really thorny problems with different, in different ways, different problems in different ways, but data winds up being at the heart of one of the ways to unlock what they're trying to get done. We're really excited and proud that we're able to actually make meaningful donations to all three of those, but it is a constant theme within Splunk, and I think something that all of us, from the tech community and non-tech community are going to have to help evangelize, is with every invention and with every thing that occurs in the world there is the power to take it and make a less noble execution of it, you know, there's always potential harmful activities, and then there's the power to actually drive good, and data is one of those. >> Awesome. >> Data can be used as a weapon, it can be used negatively, but it also needs to be liberated so that it can be used positively. While we're all kind of concerned about our own privacy and really, really personal data, we're not going to get to the type of healthcare and genetic, massive shifts in changes and benefits without having a way to begin to share some of this data. So putting controls around data is going to be important, putting people in the middle of the process to decide what happens to their data, and some consequences around misuse of data is going to be important. But continuing to keep a mindset of all good happens as we become more liberal, globalization is good, free flow of good-- >> The value is in the data. >> Free flow of people, free flow of data ultimately is very good. >> Doug, thank you so much for spending the time to come on theCUBE, and again congratulations on great culture. Also is worth noting, just to give you a plug here, because it's, I think, very valuable, one of the best places to work for women in tech. You guys recently got some recognition on that. That is a huge accomplishment, congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you, we had a great diversity track here which is really important as well. But we love partnering with you guys, thank you for spending an entire week with us and for helping to continue to evangelize and help people understand what the power of technology and data can do for them. >> Hey, video is data, and we're bringin' that data to you here on theCUBE, and of course, CUBE cloud coming soon. I'm John Furrier here live at Splunk .conf with Doug Merritt the CEO. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (futuristic music)