>>Hey everyone. Lisa Martin of the cube here, HPE and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment. And I'm here with four guests. Please. Welcome Charlie Mulrooney global presales engineering manager at Athi John saws also of Shi joins this global pre-sales technical consultant. And back with me are Terry Richardson, north American channel chief and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Welcome gang. Great to have you all here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thanks. You good to be here? >>All right, Charlie, let's go ahead and start with you. Keeping the earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions. Greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses, right? Everywhere. Globally. Can you talk Charlie about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable? It? >>Sure. So starting about a year and a half, two years ago, we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports, their chairman's letters, their sec filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral or carbon zero goals starting with 2050 dates. And then since then we've seen 20, 40, and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and RFPs, RFIs that we're fielding. Certainly all now contain elements of that. So this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers, our fortune two 50 and fortune 500 customers. For sure. We're, we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this. We get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand, you know, here's what we have today. What can we do better? What can we do different to help make an impact on those goals? >>So making an impact top of mind, pretty much for everyone, as you mentioned, John SAS, let's bring you into the conversation. Now, when you're in customer conversations, what are some of the things that you talk about with respect tohis approach to sustainability, sustainable it, are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space? >>Well, so Charlie touched on something really important that, you know, the, the wake up moment for us was receiving, you know, proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability. And it was really around two years ago, I suppose, for the first time. And those requests started coming from European based companies, cuz they had a bit of a head start over the us based global companies even. And what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to use renewable energy for data centers utilize the, they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance cost and other factors that you typically have at the top. So as we started working with them, I guess at beginning it was more tactical cuz we really had to find a way to respond. >>We were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability, we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second headquarters in Austin, Texas, those are lead gold certified. We've been installing solar panels, reducing waste across the company, recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles, all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in, in, in our offices and in our headquarters. But it's a lot more than that. And what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of, of customers and partners. We have over 30,000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers. And we wanted to find best practices and technologies and services that we could talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a, as a really large global reseller and integrator. We can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple partners that we work with to help solve customer problems. And so over time it's become more strategic and we've been as a company building the, the, the, the, the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that, and then also reporting for CDP Ecova and so forth. And it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years. And we take it very seriously. >>It sounds like, and it also sounds like from the customer's perspective, they're shifting from that tactical, maybe early initial approach to being more strategic, to really enabling sustainable it across their organization. And I imagine from a business driver's perspective, John saws and Charlie, are you hearing customers? You talked about it being part of RFPs, but also where are customers in terms of, we need to have a sustainable it strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers. Charlie, John, what are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, that's top of mind with, with all the folks that we're talking to, I would say there's probably a three way tie for the importance of attracting and retaining investors. As you said, plus customers, customers are shopping, their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities and sustainable priorities with their own and who is gonna help them with their own reporting of, you know, scope two and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining talent. It's another element now of when you're bringing on new talent to your organization, they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align. So we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with, with the customers we're talking to. And it was a little surprising, cuz it, we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors, but it really has become quite a bit more than that. And it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization >>More comprehensive across the organization. Let's bring Dr. John Fry into the conversation and Terry your next. So stay tuned. Dr. Fry, can you talk about HPE and S H I partnering together? What are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned? >>Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them. No one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our collective customers the same way. From an HPE perspective, we bring the expertise on our products. We bring in sustainable it point of view, where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies implement a sustainable it program. But our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers. And in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table. So they extend the reach, they bring their own expertise. Their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just enterprise products. So by working together, we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs, give them the right technology solutions and enhance that customer experience because they get more value from us collectively. >>It really is better together, which is in a very appropriate name for our segment here. Terry, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to us about AMD. How is it helping customers to create that sustainable it strategy? And what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that, that are able to be delivered through partners like Shi? >>Well, Lisa, you used the word enabling just a short while ago. And fundamentally AMD enables HPE and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers. So in the data center space, we began our journey in 2017 with some fundamental design elements for our processor technology that were really keenly focused on improving performance, but also efficiency. So now the, the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about is really that measure of performance per wat. And you'll continue to see AMD enabled customers to, to try to find ways to, to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing, whether it's availability of power data center space, or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals. So we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to HPE and two Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers. >>Sounds like to me, Terry, that it's, that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler, but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability. >>You you're right about that. And, and we actually have tools, greenhouse gas, TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the, the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals. So we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like HPE and Shi >>Better together. As we said at the beginning in just a minute ago, Charlie, let's bring you back in, talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable it and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives. >>So for quite a while, we've had some offerings to help customers, especially in the end user compute side. A lot of customers were interested in, I've got assets for, you know, let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and, you know, those need to be refreshed. What do I do with those? How do I responsibly retire or recycle those? And we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time. It's within the last year or two, when we started offering for them guarantees and assurances assurances of how they can, if that equipment is reusable by somebody else, how can we issue them? You know, credits for carbon credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else. So it's not necessarily going to be e-waste, it's something that can be recycled and reused. We have other programs with helping extend the life of, of some systems where they look at well, I have a awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the, the, the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically. We can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment. So we've been able to come up with some creative solutions specifically around end user compute in the past, but we are looking to new ways now to really help extend that into data center infrastructure and beyond to really help with what are the needs, what are the, the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them. >>That's a great point that you bring up. Charlie and security kind of popped into my head here, John Saul's question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about, or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling, where are you having those customer conversations? Cause I know sustainability is a board level, it's a C level discussion, but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization? >>Well, so it's a, it's a combination of organizations within the customer. These are these global organizations. Typically when we're talking about asset life cycle management, asset recovery, how do you do that in a sustainable green way and securely the customers we're dealing with? I mean, security is top sustainability is right up there too. O obviously, but Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are global rollouts, tens of thousands of employees typically to, to have mobile devices, laptops, and phones, and so forth. And they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to, to the employees. And how do you do that in a sustainably? You need to think about that. Does it all go to a central location or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way? >>And I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that, well for, for example, one European pharmaceutical that states in their reports that they're already in scope one in scope two they're fully net zero at this point. And, and they say, but that only solves 3% of our overall sustainability goals. 97% is scope three, it's travel, it's shipping. It's, it's, it's all the, the, all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times, but they're coming to us now as a, as a supplier and as, and, and we're filling out, you know, forms and RFPs and so forth to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal >>Sustain sustainable supply chain. Absolutely. Yes. Dr. John Fry and Terry, I want to kind of get your perspectives. Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective, customers coming through RFP saying, Hey, we've gotta work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway, HPE and AMD hearing the same thing Dr. Fry will start with you. And then Terry >>Sure, absolutely. We receive about 2,500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year. And that's come up from a few hundred. So yeah, absolutely accelerating. Then the conversations turn deeper. Can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption? Then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can HPE offer net zero or carbon neutral technology solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those solutions in their own carbon footprint. So the questions are getting more sophisticated, the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing. And as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions, I think this trend is just gonna continue up. >>Yeah. And we see the same thing. We get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals. But the surveying that survey work that we've done with customers has led us to, you know, understand that, you know, approximately 75% of customers are gonna make sustainability goals, a key component of their RFIs in 2023, which is right around the corner. And, and, you know, 60% of those same customers really expect to have business level KPIs in the new year that are really related to sustainability. So this is not just a, a kind of a buzzword topic. This is, this is kind of business imperatives that, you know, the company, the companies like HPE and AMD and the partners like I, that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really gonna be ahead of the game. >>That's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't, we're not talking about a buzzword here. We're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all industries and Dr. Far, you mentioned regulations. And something that we just noticed is that the S E C recently said, it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions. If they were, if that were to, to come into play, I'm gonna pun back to Charlie and John saws. How would Shi and, and frankly at HPE and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of regulation were to be implemented. Charlie. >>Yeah. So we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that, with the reporting, we know reporting is a challenge. The scope two reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was gonna be a ways out now, all of a sudden, Hey, if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three targets, then you have to report on them. So that, that has become really important very quickly as word about this requirement is rumbling around there's concern. So we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose, but stay tuned, cuz we have something coming. That's interesting. >>Definitely PED my, my ears are, are, are perk here. Charlie, we'll stay tuned for that. Dr. Fry. Terry, can you talk about together with Shi HPE and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the da data obviously, which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it. We talked a little bit about security, but how are from a better together perspective, Dr. Fry will start with you, how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it? And at these days what it's real time requirements. >>Yeah. It's, it's an increasing challenge. In fact, we have changed the H HP story the way we talk about H HP's value proposition to talk about data first modernization. So how often do you collect data? Where do you store it? How do you avoid moving it? How do you make sure if you're going to collect data, you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value. And then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable it, because when I talk to technology executives, what they tell me again, and again, is there's this presumption within their user community, that storage is free. And so when, when they have needs for collecting data, for example, if, if once an hour would do okay, but the system would collect it once a minute, the default, the user asks for of course, once a minute. And then are you getting insights from that data? Or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge, because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network. There's huge power and carbon implications of doing that. So it's really making a better decision about what do we collect, why do we collect it, what we're gonna do with it when we collect and how we store it. >>And, and for years, customers have really talked about, you know, modernization and the need to modernize their data center. You know, I, I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that catalyst to really drive true modernization. And as they think forward, you know, when we work with, with HPE, you know, they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in, you know, specific customer workloads from the largest, super computers down to kind of general purpose servers. And when we work with partners like Shi, not only can they deliver the full suite of offerings for on premise deployments, they're also very well positioned to leverage the public cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there. And, and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end to end sustainability goal. >>That's a great point that, that it needs to be strategic, but it also needs to be an end to end goal. We're just about out of time, but I wanted to give John saws the last word here, take us out, John, what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest, but what are some of the things that you are excited about as HPE AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives? >>Sure. Couple comments here. So Charlie, yeah, you touched on some upcoming capabilities that Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management. See, this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way. This is a train coming at everybody very quickly and they're not ready. Most customers aren't ready. And if we can help as, as a reseller integrator assessments, to be able to understand what they're currently running compare to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state, that seems valuable if we can help in that way. That's, those are things that we're looking into specifically, you know, greenhouse gas, emissions, relevant assessments, and, and, and within the comments of, of, of Terry and, and John around the, the power per wat and the vast portfolio of, of technologies that they, that they had to address various workloads is, is fantastic. >>We'd be able to help point to technologies like that and move customers in that direction. I think as a, as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers, I saw an article on BBC this morning that I, I, I think if, if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems. The BBC article mentioned this was Ethereum, a cryptocurrency, and they have a big project called merge. And today was a go live date. And BBC us news outlets have been reporting on it. They basically changed the model from a model called power of work, which takes a, a lot of compute and graphic, GPU power and so forth around the world. And it's now called power of stake, which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct. >>They have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency. And if they're wrong, it's taken from them. This new model reduces the emissions of their environment by 99 plus percent. The June emissions from Ethereum were, it was 120 telos per, per year, a Terra terat hours per year. And they reduced it actually, that's the equivalent of what the net Netherlands needed for energy, so comparable to a medium sized country. So if you can think differently about how to solve problems, it may be on-prem, it may be GreenLake. It may be, it may be the public cloud in some cases or other, you know, interesting, innovative technologies that, that AMD HPE, other partners that we can bring in along, along with them as well, we can solve problems differently. There is a lot going on >>The opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting. We thank you so much for talking together about how HPE AMD and SSHA are really working in partnership in synergy to help your customers across every organization, really become much more focused, much more collaborative about sustainable it. Guys. We so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. My >>Pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Hello. Welcome to the cube here at Dell tech world. I'm John furry host of the cube with Dave Alon here with Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell technologies cube alumni comes on every year. We have the cube here. It's been two years. Michael, welcome to the cube. Get to see you. >>Hey, John, Dave, great to be with you guys. Thanks for being here. Wonderful to be back here in Vegas with >>You. Well, great to be in person two years ago, we had the cue with the pandemic a lot's happened. We were talking end to end solutions here at Dell tech world in person two years ago, pandemic hits. Thank God you had all that supply for the, for the people having the remote remote end to work now back in person. What's it look like now with, with Dell tech end to end, the edge is important. What's the story, >>You know, edge is, is the physical world. And if you, if you step back from clouds and, you know, multi-cloud, you sort of think about what is the purpose of a cloud or a data center? Well, it's to take data out of the physical world and move it to this place, to somehow enhance it or do something with it and create business value and hopefully create better outcomes. Well, it turns out that, you know, increasingly a lot of that data is gonna stay in the physical world and all of those nodes are gonna be connected. They're gonna be intelligent and we're seeing it in manufacturing and retail and healthcare, transportation, logistics. We're seeing this rapidly intelligent edge being formed. And then of course, with the new networks, the 5g we're seeing, you know, all, all this develop. And so here on the show floor, we're showing a lot of those solutions, but our customers are, are highly engaged. And certainly we think that's a, a big, a big growth factor for the next decade. >>And it's been ING to watch the transformation of the it world and cloudification and the as service, uh, consumption model, which you guys are putting out there has been very successful, but cloud operations is more prominent now on premises and edge and cloud. So the combination of cloud on-premise and edge hardware matters more now than ever before Silicon advances, um, abstraction layers from modern cloud native applications are what people are focused on. What's the story that you cite to the CIOs saying, we're here to help you with that new architecture cloud multi-cloud on premise and edge. What's the main story for you guys with the customers? >>Well, you know, customers want to go faster, right? And they want to accelerate their transformation. And so they wanna shift more resources over to developers, to applications, to access their data, to create competitive advantage. And so we talk a lot about the value line and what are those things below the value line, where we can provide that as a service on a consumption based model and accelerate their transformation, kind of, you know, do for them what we've done inside our own business. And, you know, it's absolutely resonating. We're seeing great growth there. People continue to, to need the solutions, but as we can automate the management and deployment of infrastructure and make it super easy, it gives them a lot of cycles back. >>You know, Michael, my, the favorite part, my favorite part of your book was you were in, I think you were in his, in his home court, in his dining room at Carl Icahn's house. And you said, well, why don't you just buy the company? And then you'll do what you're doing. I I'll buy it back for cheaper. Now, thankfully, you didn't have to do that. Cuz you had an environment of low interest rates and you obviously took it into the other direction, added tremendous value, 101 billion in revenue last year, 17% revenue growth, which was out astounding. When you think about that, um, now we're entering a new chapter with VMware untethered of course you're the chairman of both companies. So how should we think about the new Dell what's next? >>Well, so look, we, we have some unbelievable core businesses, right? We have our client system business and we've all learned during these last two years, how incredibly important it is to enable and empower your workforce with the right tools in the remote and high hybrid work. And we're showing off all kinds of new innovations here. That's a huge business force continues to grow, continues to be super important. Then we have our ISG, the cloud data center, the network of the future, the edge, you know, the, the sort of epicenter of where we're embracing, consumption based business models. That's absolutely huge. Then we have these new, new businesses that we're building with telco with edge, put it all together. It's a 1.3 trillion Tam that we operate in, as you said, more than a hundred billion dollars last year. So there's plenty of room for us to continue to grow and, and expand. And you know, as we make this shift to outcomes, it's obviously more valuable for customers and that, you know, increases our opportunity, increases the, the value we can create for all our stakeholders. >>And number one, number one, share in PCs, by the way, congratulations, again, hit that milestone. All of our gamer, uh, fans in our discord want to know what's the hottest chips coming. What's the fastest machines. What, how's the monitors coming? They want faster, cheaper. What's the coolest, uh, monitors out there right now and, and machines. >>Well, uh, you know, what what's, what's amazing is the, the pace of innovation continues to improve. So whether it's in the GPU, the CPU, the, the resolution, I I'm pretty partial to our 41, uh, display 11 million pixels of fun. And look, I mean, we, we it's, it's, it's clear that people are more productive when they have large screens and all the performance is enabling photo realistic, uh, you know, uh, gaming and photo realistic, everything. And these are immersive experiences. And, you know, again, uh, what companies have figured out to bring it back to, to, to a little bit of business here, John, is that when you, uh, give people the right tools, they're more productive, they're more engaged and look, people are smart. They know what tools are available. And, you know, uh, the thing that actually is most representative of how a person thinks about the tools they have at their organization is actually the thing that's right in front of 'em. And so, you know, this ability for us to provide a pool set of solutions for organizations to keep their workforce productive, to run their applications and infrastructure securely anywhere they want. That's, that's a winning proposition. >>Michael trust was a big theme of your keynote yesterday. And when you acquired EMC and got VMware, it really changed the dynamic with regard to your ability to, into new parts of organizations. You became a much more strategic supplier. I, I would argue. And now with VMware as a separate company, do you feel like you have built up over the, you know, five or whatever years that muscle memory you kinda earn that trust. So how do you see the customer relationship with that regard to that integration that they, they loved the eco. So system competitors might not have loved it so much, but the customers really did love. In fact, the, the U S a, a gentleman yesterday kind of mentioned that, how do you see it? >>You know, customers, uh, are not as interested in the balance sheet and what you know, where different holdings are, what they, they want things to work together, right? And they want partnerships in ecosystems. And certainly, you know, with VMware, even before the combination, we had a powerful partnership. It obviously solidified in a super special way. And now we have this first and best relationship and I've remained the chairman of VMware and super excited about their future. But our ecosystem is incredibly broad. And you see that here in this show floor, and again, making things work together better and more effectively building these engineered solutions that allow people to very quickly deploy the kind of capabilities they want, whether it's, you know, snowflake now working with the on premise and the edge data and more of these, you know, multi-cloud, uh, eco of systems that are being built. It's not gonna be just one company >>You called the edge a couple years ago. You're really prominent in your, in your speeches. And your keynotes data also is a big theme. You mentioned data now, data engineering seems to be the hottest track of, of, of students graduating with data engineering skills, not data science, data engineering, large scale data as code concepts. So what's your vision now with data, how's that fitting into the solutions and the role of data, obviously data protection with cybersecurity data as code is becoming really part of that next big thing. >>Yeah. I mean, if, if you look at anything that is interesting in the world today, uh, at the center of it is data, right? Whether it's the blockchain or the defi or the AI drug discovery, or the autonomous vehicles or whatever you wanna do, there's data in, in, in the middle of that. And of course with that data, well, you've gotta manage it. You, you need compute engines, right? You need to be able to protect it, secure it. And, you know, that's kind of what we do, and we're not going to create all those solutions, but we are gonna be an enabling layer to allow that data to be accessed no matter, you know, where, where it is. And, and, and of course, you know, leading in storage continues to be a super important part of our business. Number one, larger than number two than number three, number four, combined, and, and most of number five as well, and, and growing share. And, and you saw today, the software defined innovations, allowing that, you know, data layer to exist across the edge, the colos, the OnPrem, and the public clouds >>Throughout a stat yesterday. I can't remember if it was a keynote of the analyst round table, but it was 9 million cell towers. And if I heard, right, you kinda look at those as potential data centers talk about that's >>Right. It it's actually 7 million, but, but probably will be 9 million and not, not too long, I don't have the update, but so yeah, the public clouds all together is about 600 data centers. They're about 7 million cellular base stations in the world. Every single one of those is becoming a, you know, multi access, edge compute node. And what are they putting in there? They're putting many data centers of compute and GPS and storage. And, you know, 5g is not about, uh, connecting people that was 4g and before 5g is about connecting things. And there are way more things than there are people, right? And, uh, you know, this, this, this edge is, is rapidly developing. You'll also have private 5g and you'll have, you know, again, embedded intelligence I believe is gonna be in everything this next decade is going to be about that intelligent, connected future, taking that data, turning it into useful outsides in insights and outcomes. And, you know, lots of new businesses will be existing. Businesses will be transformed and also disrupted. >>Yeah. I mean, I think that's so right on and not to pat ourselves on the back day, but we called that edge distributed computing a couple years ago on the cube. And that's, what's turning into the home with COVID you saw that become a workplace, basically compute center, these compute nodes, tying it together as we, what everyone's talking about right now. So as customers say, okay, I want to keep my operations steady, steady, and secure. How do I glue it together? How do I bring these compute node together? That seems to be the top question on, on top of people's minds. And they want it to be cloud native, which means they want it to run cloud-like and they want to connect these compute node together. That's a big discussion point. What's your view on, >>Well, you know, if you, if you sort of have a, a cloud here, a cloud there cloud everywhere, and you, you know, have lots of different Kubernetes frameworks, uh, and you've got, you know, everything is, is spread out, it's a disaster, right? And, and, and it's, it's a, it's a, it's a real challenge to manage all that. So what people are trying to do is create ruthless standardization. It's like, how do you drive cost out and get speed? It's ruthless standardization create consistent environments where you can operate the across all the different domains that, that you want. And so, uh, you know, this is what we're bringing together in, in, in the capabilities that we're delivering. >>And that chaos is great opportunity for you. Um, how are you feeling about VMware these days, new team, uh, give us the update there. >>Yeah. The team is doing well. You know, I think the tons message is resonating. You know, people want Kubernetes and, and, and container based apps, for sure. That's the main, you know, growth in, in, in, in, in new, in new workloads. Uh, but they also want it to work with what they have. Yeah. And they don't want it to be locked into one particular infrastructure. So software finding everything, making it run in all the public clouds, you know, we've had a great success with VxRail, you know, that, that absolutely continues. We have, uh, 200,000 plus nodes, 15,000 customers and growing, we have edge satellite nodes and we continue to work together in SD wan in software defined networking in VMware cloud foundation, uh, you know, expressed, uh, in, in, in all locations. >>You know, one of the things that we've been seeing with the trend towards, um, future of work, which is a big theme, here is a lot of managed services are popping up where the complexity is so ha high that customers want to manage services. Uh, and also the workforce of it's kind of changing. You got a younger generation coming in, how do you see that future of the workforce? The next level? It's not gonna be like, yesterday's it, it's gonna be distributed computing dashboard based. And then you've got these managed services, you know, need to have the training and expertise maybe to run something at scale. How do, how do you see that connecting? Cuz that seems to be another big trend people are talking about, Hey, it's complex someone manage it for me. And I want ease of views. I want the easy button in it. >>Yeah. Well we we've all been at this a while. So we can remember, you know, the beginnings of converged infrastructure and then hyperconverged, which wasn't that long go. And now we have consumption based business models. These are all along the trajectory of the easy button that you're talking about and customers really thinking about the value line, where are the things that really differentiate and add value for their business. And it's not below the value line in those infrastructure areas are creating that easy button with appliances, with consumption based models and allowing them to deploy the scarce resources. They have to the things that really drive their unique differe. And you know, if you look at our managed services flex on demand, all the sort of ancestors and predecessors of apex, those have been great businesses for us. And now with apex, we're kind of industrializing this and, and making it, you know, at scale for all >>Customers, you know, the three of us, we go back, we, we, our first interactions with you separately, we're in the nine. And then we reconnected in the 2012. I think it was Tarkin Mayer had a little breakout session with CIOs. You brought us to early on a Dell tech world in Austin. And of course it was, >>It was just Dell world. Then Dell >>Four, we had Dell tech, you and then EMC world in 2010 was our first cube. And now that's all come together here in Las Vegas. So, you know, it's been great. Uh, the three of us come together and so really appreciate that. Yeah. >>Awesome. Absolutely awesome. >>Well, you know, really appreciate you guys being here, the wonderful work you do in thank you in, you know, bringing out the, the, the stories and, and showing off and helping us show off the innovations that, you know, our team has been working on. You know, during the past year >>It's been great in conversations and, and on a personal note, it's been great to have, uh, chat with all the top people and your company. Appreciate it. Um, someone told me to ask you this question, I want to ask you, you, we've all seen waves of innovation cycles up and down. We're kind of on one. Now you're seeing an inflection point, this next gen, uh, computing and, and web three cultural shit F with workforces and distributed computing decentralization. You mentioned that DFI earlier, how do you see this wave coming? Cause we've seen cycles come and go.com. Bubble kind of looks the same as the web three NFTs and stuff. Now it seems to be Look different, but how do you see this next wave? Cuz looking back on all the other ones that you you have lived through and you rode >>Well. So, you know, the, the way I see it is is, uh, to some extent, these are like foundational layers that have to be built for the next phase to occur. And if you look at the sort of new companies that are being founded today, and we see a lot of those, you, you, you, you see'em, we invest in a bunch of 'em, you know, they're, they're not going and, and kind of redoing the old foundational layers, they're going deeply into vertical businesses and, and disrupting and adding value on top of those. And I think that's, that's really the, the point of, of technology, right? It's enabling human progress us in, in all fields, it's making us healthier. It's making us safer. It's making us more successful in everything that, that we as humans do. And so all these layers of technology are enabling further progress and I think it's absolutely gonna continue. It's all been super exciting. Yeah. You know, so far for the first several decades, but as I, as I believe it, it's, it's just a pre-game show. >>And it's clear your strategy is, is, is really building that foundation of a layer, hardening it, but making it flexible enough, anybody read your book, you're a technology, visionary. A lot of people put you in a, you know, finance bucket, but you can, you can see that you can connect the dots. And that's what you're doing with your foundation of layers. You that's where you're making the bets, isn't it? Uh, you don't can't predict the future. You've said that many times, but you can sort of see where it's going and be prepared for >>It. Well, you, you, you know, you think about any company in, in the industry or any public sector organization, right? Uh, they're, they're, they're wanting to evolve more quickly and transform more quick, more quickly. Right. And we can give them an infrastructure or set of tools, a set of capabilities to help them go faster. >>Yeah. And the other one thing in the eighties, when you started Dell and we were in college, there was no open source really then if look at the growth of open source, talk about those layers, open source, better Silicon GPS, faster, cheap >>More now and now we even have, uh, open source instruction sets for processors. So I mean the whole world's changing. It's exciting. You have people around the world working together. I mean, when you see our development teams, uh, whether they're in Israel or Ireland or Bangalore or Singapore, Hopton Austin, Silicon valley, you know, Taiwan, they're, they're all, they're all collaborating together and, you know, driving, driving innovation and, and, and our business is not that dissimilar from our customers >>Like great to have you in the queue. Great. To have a physical event. People are excited. I'm talking to people, Hey, haven't been back in Vegas in two years. Thanks for having this event. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Absolutely. Thank you guys. >>Michael Dell here in the cube CEO of Dell technologies. I'm John far, Dave Volante. We'll be right back, more live coverage here at Dell tech world.

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John fury host of the cube here in Palo Alto, California. We're talking open source. We're talking about the data center. We're talking about cloud scale, bringing that software benefits all to the table, all around the network, the network operating system, and more gotta go a guest here, sir. Rob Capor director of product management, Dell networking, sir. Rob. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you, John. Good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. >>You know, we were talking before we came on camera around how the networking business is changing, why hardware matters, why software's more important. And in all of this shift, that's happening in the transition to fully distributed computing, which Matt, you got the edge, you got the data center, you got the cloud all coming together. One of the common threads in all of this is open source. Okay. Open source software, next generations coming. You're seeing more and more new cool things in open source, but also in parallel with the enterprise. This is a huge kind of flash point to the next gen open source enterprise convergence with, with open source software and the communities and all and all that, all that good stuff. And you're in the middle of it. What's driving this Hmm. Source and the data center. We're seeing the levels of support like we've never seen before and specifically at the network level. >>Awesome. Yeah. So, well, to set the context, let's start by looking at the story of comput solution, right? Uh, in the nineties, the comput infrastructure was vertically integrated. Uh, there were multiple vendors each offering their own operating system, usually a version of hearings, uh, on, on the proprietary hardwares. If I wanted to run a Solas operating system, I had to run that over a Spoor and the applications were written, especially for, for that architecture. So, so this represented multiple challenges back then the customer were locked in growth and innovation developers had to recreate applications for, for different architectures and, and the interoperability was extremely difficult, but with the advent of X 86 architecture and standardized operating systems like like windows and Linux, the stack got disaggregated, which allowed for flexibility, innovation, affordability and finding expand engine. We see a similar trend happening on the networking side now where the traditional networking solutions, uh, are not flexible. >>The switch, the network operating system, the APIs are all provided by the same vendor. So if a feature is, is needed, the user has to either wait for the vendor to deliver it, or is forced to replace then time for structure. But with the of open networking and opensource networking based solutions, we see an evolution that has paved the way for the customers to unlock their data center technologies and innovate. The modern data center is, is no longer centered around protocol sax. It's about agility, flexibility, innovation, network automation, and simplicity. It's about how to make operations more agile, agile, more effective, and, and, you know, bake it into an overall infrastructure today. A large element of, uh, of, of business action behind open networking is that companies are moving towards application centricity and, and a true realization of as a service model. Right? So, so that is where Sonic comes into the picture, right? >>But it's large and diverse community around, around modular containers, architecture born in Microsoft as your environment, Sonic is, is built for automation, telemetry and scale. And the flexibility of this architecture allows you for, you know, in terms of running to applications by providing that high level of redundancy. So, so basically know Sonic kind of check marks to all the requirements of the modern data center from open flexible architectures to cloud economics. And if you have to follow a comput evolution analogy, we believe that, you know, switches is the server now in Sonic is the Linux for networking. >>It's like the Ker of networking. I mean, we'd be and reporting. We've had all the cube conversations where Sonic's been mentioned and people have been saying things like it's taking the networking world by storm. Um, and all, all that with open source kind of ties it and scales it together. Can you take a minute to explain a little bit about what it is? What is Sonic, what does it stand for? Why is it important? What does it do? What's the benefit to the customers? What are they, what what's going on around Sonic take a minute to explain what is Sonic. >>Absolutely. Yeah. So is Sonic stands for software for open talking in the cloud. It's a brain of Microsoft in, in 2016, they announced their contribution of Sonic to the open source community and, and through the networking technology to revolutionary set forward with the yet level of this aggregation by breaking the monolithic nos into multiple containers components. And, and through the use of ization, Sonic provides the, the network managers, the plug and place sensibility, the ability to run third party proprietary or open source application containers and, and perform those in-service updates with zero down time. Sonic is, is primarily designed across four main per principles. First one is the notion of control where, uh, Sonic is an open software organizations are deploying it, working on it. The network managers can decide what features they want to ship on a switch, so that there's less potential for bug and, and tailored for more of the use cases, right? >>Sonic was designed for extensibility for, uh, the developers to come and add new cable, roll those out rapidly on, on a platform. Uh it's it was designed for agility. The ability to take changes, roll those out rapidly, whether it's a bug fix or a new feature coming out, uh, which is significant. And finally Sonic was designed around this notion of open collaboration with such a diverse community around. We have Silicon vendors to ODM providers. It contribute is the more people work on it better and more like the software it becomes. Yeah. I mean, it has evolved considerably and, and since it's inception, it's, it's, uh, the growth is, is nurtured by an increasing set of users, uh, a vibrant open source community. Uh, and then there's a long, uh, trail of, of, you know, falling from, from the non hyperscalers where they like the value propers, you know, technology. And I want to adapt it for their environment. >>Yeah. And of course we love Silicon here at Silicon angle on the cube. Uh, but this is the whole new thing. Silicon advances is still software hardware matters. Dave LAN is doing a big thing called on why hardware matters with our team hardware and software together with open source really is coming back smaller, faster, cheaper. It's really good. So I want to ask you about Sonic, what types of customers mm-hmm <affirmative> would be looking to implement this, is this more of a, a reset in the data center? Is it a cloud scale team? Is it tributed computing? What's the new look of the customer who are implementing the like so, so, >>Well, uh, you know, it has evolved considerably since it's <inaudible> right. It was born into a hyperscale environment and we see a big end happening where, uh, you know, there's a wider appeal that is across non hyperscalers who want to emulate the best practices of the hyperscalers. They, but they want to do it on their own dumps. They want, uh, uh, a feature solution that is tailored for enterprise use cases. And, and, you know, looking at this whole contains architecture, Sonic kinda fits the build well where, you know, providing a Linux, no, that can be managed by the same set of automation management tools. Uh, and you know, these are the same teams, you know, uh, that have, you know, been acclimated world on website. Now with this all tool consolidation and consistent operations across the data center infrastructure, we, we see that Sonic brings a lot of value, uh, to these distributed application use cases, these modern data center environments, where you, you know, you have, you know, customers looking for cloud economics, multi vendor ecosystem, open and flexible architectures. And in fact, you know, uh, you know, we are told by the industry analyst that there's a strong possibility that, you know, during the next three to six years, Sonic is going to become analog as to Linux. Uh, now allowing the enterprises to, to sanitize on this. No, and, and, and, you know, they also predict that, uh, you know, 40% of the organizations that have, uh, you large data centers or 200 plus switches will deploy Sonic in production. And the market is going to be approximately 2.5 billion by, by 25. >>You know, we've Al we've always been riffing about the network layers, always the last area to kind of get the innovation, because it's so important. I mean, right. If you look at the advances of cloud and cloud scale, obviously Amazon did great work and what starts with networking lay what they did kind of with the, in the cloud, but even in the enterprise, it's so locked down, it's so important. Um, and things like policy, these are the concepts that have been moving up the stack. We see that, but also software's moving down the stack, right? So this notion of a network operating system kind of now is in play at the data center level, not just on the server, you're talking about like packets and observability monitoring, you know, more and more and more data coming in. So with data surging, tsunami of data, new, um, agile architectures changing in real time dynamic policy, this is what's happening. What's the role of Dell in all this? You guys got the hardware, um, you got the servers now it's open source, it's got community. What is Dell bringing to the table? What's your role in this development and the evolution of Sonic and, and what do you guys bringing to the table? >>Absolutely. So, so we are now, uh, enterprise Sonic distribution by Dell technologies, a commercial offering for Sonic in June last year. And our vision has been primarily to bridge the cap between hyperscale networking and enterprise networking. Right here we are, we are combining the stents and value proposition of Sonic and Dell technologies where the customers get an innovative, scalable, open source NA, which is hardened supported and backed by industry leader and open networking that has been, that has been our primary play into this where enterprise Sonic by Dell, we, we CU the customers, you know, get support and deployment services. Uh, we work with the customers in building out a roadmap that is, you know, a predictable software and hardware roadmap for them. Uh, we, we provide extended and validated use cases where, uh, you know, they can average, you know, Sonic for their, you know, specific environments, whether it's a cloud environment or the enterprise environment, uh, we've created a partner ecosystem where, uh, you know, with, with certain organizations that allow you to leverage the inherent automation, telemetric capabilities in the NAS, uh, to enhance the usability of the software, we have, uh, created an intuitive CLI framework called manage framework to allow you to better consume Sonic for your environment. >>We offer support for open conflict models and then also answerable playbooks for, for network automation. So, so it's been a journey, uh, you know, we are making the solution ready for enterprise consumption is a, a big fan falling that is happening from the non hyperscaler awards. And, uh, we've made significant in, in, in the community as well. Yeah. 1 million lines plus of code what fixes and, and helping with the documentation. So we are at the forefront of, of so journey. >>So you're saying that you, you're saying Dell for the folks watching you guys are putting the work in you're investing in opensource. >>Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we, we, we are, uh, you know, extending open source to the bottom market, you know, making it enterprise ready, uh, with, with feature enhancements and building a partner ecosystem. Uh, you know, we, we ensure that, you know, it advanced through extensive internal testing and validation for the customers. And then, uh, in order to allow the customers to absorb this new technology in house, uh, you know, we, we provide virtual to MOS. We have, you know, hands on labs for, for customers and channel partners. We, we also help them with, with a lot of documentation and reference architecture so that, you know, it's a knowledge repository across the board that can be leveraged for the modern use cases. So, yeah, so that's been a, it's been a journey with the customers and it's always in evolution where we, you know, get better of it with extended use cases and, and more capabilities on the portfolio. >>You know, I always, I always talk with Michael Dell at the Dell tech world every year. And sometimes we text back and forth. Uh, we kind of grew up together in the industry about the same age. Um, and we joke about the Dell early days of Dell, how supply chain was really part of their advantage. Um, and this is getting a little bit of a throwback, but you look back back then it was a of systems architecture. You have suppliers, you have chips, you have boards, you build PCs, you build servers. And the DNA of Dell, Dell technologies has always been around the system and with open source and tributed computing cloud data center edge, it's a system. And we're hearing words like supply chain in software, right? So when you start to think about Sonic and network operating systems and that kind of, those kinds of systems, when you modernize it, it's still gotta enable things to enable value. So what's the enabling value that Sonic has for the modern era here and comput as new kinds of supply chains emerge, new kinds of partnerships have to evolve. And the environment under the covers is changing too. You got cloud native, you got growth of containers. I think DACA was telling us that the container market there is pushing 20 million developers. I mean, massive cloud native activity and open source growth. This is a system. >>No, absolutely. I mean, uh, you know, the modern world has changed so much from, from, you know, the proprietary infrastructure and stacks. Now, uh, we Dell, you know, becoming, uh, uh, you know, more software focused now because that's a real value, uh, that you bring to the customers. Now, it's all about application centricity. Nobody is talking about out, you know, protocol stacks, or, you know, they, they want simplicity. They want ease of network management. And how do you expose all these capabilities? It's, it's with software, right? Sonic being open software. There's so much happening, uh, in, in the community around it. You know, we provide not bond interfaces that, you know, customers can hook up into their applications and get better at monitoring, get better at you managing that entire CIC CD pipeline in the infrastructure. So I think, you know, soft is, is a core in the heart of, you know, the modern data center infrastructure today. And, you know, we've been, uh, you know, uh, uh, at the forefront of this journey with, with Sonic and, uh, you know, bringing the real choice and flexibility for the customers. >>It's certainly an exciting time if you're in the data center, you're in, in architecture, cloud architecture, urine in data engineering, a new growing field, not just data science data is code. We did a big special on that recently in the cube, but also just overall scale. And so this, these are all new factors in C CXOs are dealing with obviously securities playing a big part of it and the role of data, uh, and also application developers all in the partner ecosystem becomes a really important part of, so I have to ask you, can you expand a little bit more on your comment earlier about the partner ecosystem and the importance of plays mm-hmm, <affirmative> in providing a best in class service because you're relying on others in open source, but you're commercializing Sonic with others. So there's a, there's a ecosystem play here. What's, what's talk more about that and, and the importance of it, >>Right, right. Yes, sir. As I mentioned earlier, right, the modern data center is no longer centered on protocol stack, right? So it's about agility, flexibility, choice, uh, network automation, simplicity, and based on these needs, we've built up, uh, portfolio with, with plethora of options, for, uh, you know, integrations into open source tool chains and, and also building enterprise partnerships for, uh, with, with technologies that matter to the customers. Right? So, uh, the ecosystem partners, uh, are, are, you know, apps are Juniper. Um, Okta, there are crews that offer solutions at simplify network management and monitoring of, of massive complex networks and leverage the, the inherent automation telemetry capabilities in Sonic. It comes to the open source tools. Uh, you know, these, these are tools that, you know, the broader, the, the tier two cloud of this point is the large enterprises also want, you know, based on how they're moving towards an open source based ecosystem. We have, you know, created ible modules for network automation. We have integrated into open source marketing tools like Telegraph or far and Promeus, and then we continue to, you know, scaling and expanding on easy integrations and ecosystem partners, uh, to bring the choice, flexibility, uh, to the customers where, uh, you know, they can leverage inherent software capabilities and leverage it to their application business needs. >>Rob, great to have you on the cube Sergeant Kabar, director of product management, Dell tech, Dell networking, Dell technologies, um, networking really important area. That's where the innovation is. It matters the most latency. You can't change the, the laws of physics, but you can certainly change architectures. This is kind of the new normal going on. Find final point final comment. What can people expect to see around Sonic and where this goes? What, what happens next? How do you see this evolving? >>Well, there's a, uh, you know, I think we start off a journey to an exciting, you know, evolution on a networking happening with Sonic so much. This, this technology has to offer with, you know, a lot of technical value prop and microservices, container architecture with such a diverse community around it. There's, uh, a lot of feature additions, extended use cases that are coming up with Sonic. And we, we, we actively engage in the community with lot of feature enhancements and help also helping stay the community in, in a direction that, you know, uh, brings Sonic to the wider market. So, you know, I think this is, this is great, you know, start to a fantastic journey here. And, uh, we look forward to the exciting things that are coming on the so journey. >>Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Great cube culture. We'll follow up more. I wanna track this Dell networking networking's important software operating systems. It's a system approach distributed computings back modernizing here with Dell technologies. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Awesome. Thank you, John. >>I'm John furry with the cube here at Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.

(digital music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. Bren Briggs, joins me next, the Director of DevOps and Cybersecurity at Hypergiant. Bren, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey there, I'm glad to be here. >> You have a very cool background, which I wish we had time to get into your mandolin playing, but we don't. Tell me a little bit about Hypergiant this is a company that's new to me? >> So we are an AI and Machine Learning Company, and we had the slogan we talked about a lot, it's almost tongue in cheek, "Tomorrowing Today" where we want to build and focus on technology that advances the state-of-the-art and we want to, where this deep history and background in services, where we build custom solutions for companies that have data problems and that have AI and machine learning problems. And they come to us and we help them make sense of their data and we build a custom software solution from top to bottom. And we help them with their data problems and their really difficult problems that they have there in a very specialized way. And yeah, that's what we do. It's really fun. >> "Tomorrowing Today", I like that build T-shirts with that on that. (Bren chuckles) So talk to me about the work that you guys are doing with SUSE Rancher Government Labs. You're doing some very cool work with the air force, help me understand that. >> Sure, so about a year and some change ago, we had a government contract, an air force contract, to develop some new or just to basically write an experiment with some new sensing technology onboard a satellite. So we built this satellite, we were talking about how we're going to employ DevOps' best practices on the satellite and if that's even a thing that can be done. How we get these rights of space and really thinking through the entire process. And as we did this, we were getting more and more deeply involved with a very very new group. Actually, we kind of started at the same time. A new group within the air force called, Platform One. Platform One's mission is to bring DevSecOps to the DoD Enterprise. And so as we're kind of starting off together and getting to know each other, Rob Slaughter who started and ran Platform One for the first bit of his existence, he said, "hey, we're going to incorporate some Platform One stuff into this. Let's talk about just building an actual Platform One satellite and see what that looks like." And so that was kind of the start of this whole idea was what do we do and how do we do DevSecOps in low Earth orbit? Can we put Kubernetes on satellite and will it work? >> And tell me some of the results? So, I used to work for NASA, so I would geek out on anything that has to do with the space program. But talk to me about some of the things that you uncovered bringing Kubernetes, AI, machine learning to this, outer Edge of Earth? >> I think the first thing that we learned that I think, it's an understatement to say that space is hard. (Both laughing) But it really is. And that was the part that we learned about was it was hard in all of the ways that we did not expect. And a lot of it had to do with just government and logistics. We learned that it is difficult a lot of times to just to find a way to get into space and then once you're there, how you operate in the conditions that you're in and how you could even communicate with your satellite is it's just a logistical adventure on top of all of the other engineering problems that you have while you're on low Earth orbit? The other thing that we figured out was awkward things are difficult. While you're on orbit, they can be slow or fragmented and so it pays to get it right the first time but that's not the nature of modern software development is you'd never get it right and you're continually updating. So that was a problem that really nagged us for awhile was after we did the wider experiment, like how would we continuously update this and what would we do? And those ideas and questions fed into the experiment that became Sat One and then the follow one much bigger experiment that became the Edge One and Edge working group. >> Tell me a little bit about the wider experiment, give me some context of how that relates to Platform One, Sat One? >> I can't (laughing) I can't really go into details about what wider did or anything like that. It was not a classified mission, it's just not something that I can disclose. >> Okay, got it. >> Sorry. >> So talk to me about some of the work that you guys are doing together Hypergiant with SUSE in terms of pushing forward the next generation of Kubernetes to low Earth orbit and beyond. >> Sure, so SUSE RGS, specifically, Chris Nuber, like, one of the things that I have to do is I have to be a cheerleader for all of the amazing people that were on this project. And two people in particular, Chris Tacke and Chris Nuber, were instrumental in making this work. I was like almost tangentially involved where I was doing some input and architecture and helping debug but it was really Chris Tacke and Chris Nuber that made this thing, that built this thing and made it work. And Chris Nuber, was our assigned resource from SUSE RGS. And he said, "Obviously SUSE is going to prefer, or SUSE is going to prefer SUSE products." That it makes sense. But there's a reason because the products that he implemented and the patterns that he implemented and the architecture and expertise that he brought were second to none, I don't think that we could have done better with any other distribution of Kubernetes. He recommended a K3s is a very lightweight Kubernetes distribution that had really good opinions. It's a single binary. It was very easy to deploy and manage and update and it just, it really didn't break. That was the best thing that we were looking for (chuckles) it was one solid piece with no moving parts, relatively speaking. And so Chris Nuber was very essential in providing the Kubernetes architecture while Chris Tacky was the one who helped us write some of the demo applications and build the fail over and out of band interaction that we were going to have from the hardware on the satellite to the Kubernetes control plane. >> Very cool. It sounds like you had a great collaborative team there, which is essential in any environment. >> We deed. >> And I liked how you described space as a logistical adventure that reminds me very much of my days at NASA. (Bren laughing) It definitely is a logistical adventure to put it mildly. Talk to me a little bit about the work that you're doing to define the Edge for the Department of Defense? That sounds very intriguing. >> Yeah, so this was almost a direct result of what happened with the sat one experiment where Rob Slaughter and a few of the other folks who saw what we did with sat one, you know, were again, logistical adventure. We built this entire thing and we worked so hard and we're moving through fright flight readiness checks and as things happen, funding kind of went. And so you've got all this experience and this like, prototype that this really confident that it's space ready and everything and they said, "hey, listen, you know, we have the same problem on our flight with terrestrial environments, they're nearly identical the only difference is, you know, you don't have to worry about radiation nearly as much." (laughing) So then, you know, we joked about that and we started this new idea, this Edge One idea as part of the AVMs program, where they're figuring out this new, like battlefield communications pattern of the future. And one of the things that they're really concerned about is secure processing and how do you do applications at like where people are stationed, which could be anywhere in very remote locations. Then that's what turned into Edge One is, you know, we imagined initially Edge One as satellite one without wings and earth bound and that grew into, well, what about submarines? What about carriers? What about command and control squadrons that are stationed in cities? What about special operators that are far forward? What about first responders who are moving into, you know, hazardous environmental conditions? Can you wear a Kubernetes cluster with like super low power arm chips? And so we started thinking of all these different applications of what Edge could be anywhere from a five volt board all the way up to a data center in a box. And that caused us to realize that we're going to break Edge into really three categories based on the amount of material or resources needed to power it and how hard it is to get to. So we have the Near Edge, which is, you know, you have data center like capabilities, and it's easy to get to it, but you, because you have people stationed with it, but you may have reached back once every month or so. So think, you know, a shift that's underway or an air gap system or something like that. And then you have a Tiny Edge, which is exactly like kind of the more traditional idea that you think of when you think of Edge, which is really, really tiny compute, maybe it's on a windmill or something I don't really know, pick your thing to put Kubernetes on that should never have Kubernetes, that's the kind of thing. And then you've got Far Edge, which is, you know, if the control plane crashes, good luck, you'll never getting to it. And so that would be a satellite. And so the far it... so really a lot of these, it depends on the failure mode. Like what happens when it fails and that for the most part defines kind of what category you're going to be in. >> Tiny Edge, Near Edge and Far Edge. I think Sir. Richard Branson and his team went to the Far Edge (chuckles) low Earth orbit >> He did (laughing). >> This last weekend, I guess, yeah. That low Earth orbit does seem like it would be the Far Edge. Talk to me a little bit about, I mean, you talk about these applications then from a defense perspective that very dramatically, what are some of the important lessons that you've learned besides if it breaks in the Far Edge, you're not getting to it. >> Some of the important lessons that we learned. So I actually did this exact job in the air force. I was a combat communicator, which meant that we took, by pure coincidence I'm back in this, like, I did not intend for this to happen its pure coincidence, (Lisa laughing) but, you know, we communicate, we went out to the Edge, right. We went out to the Near Edge and we did all of this stuff. And the biggest lesson, I think learning from doing this or doing that and then going into this is that the world doesn't have to revolve around SharePoint anymore (Lisa laughing) because we can shape our own habitation (Both laughing) >> That is good to know. >> If it can be done on SharePoint, the air force and the army will do it in SharePoint, I promise you. They've done some actually terrifying things with it. All joking aside though, I think that one of the things that we learned was the difference between like something being complex and complicated when it came to systems engineering and management, like this is a very complex system it's actually orders of magnitude more complex than the current deployments that are out there which is effectively VMware and you're migrating virtual machines across multiple physical nodes in these remote data centers. But it's also complicated, it's really difficult to manage these deployments and the hardware. And I remember like when I was in combat comm, we had this 72 hour goal to get all of our systems up. And it was kind of like a 50-50, if we would make it, it felt like most of the time where you had priorities for getting things up and running. And obviously, you know, that certain applications weren't as important as others. So they were the ones that had to fall on the wayside if you're going to make your 72 hour mark. But I'm just thinking about like how difficult it was to deploy and manage all of this stuff and now with Kubernetes, yes, the complexity is far higher, but we can make it so it's not as complicated. We can offload a lot of that brain sweat, the people in the rear echelon, where they can connect in remotely after you come up and you get reached back, they push your config and your mission profile is there. And now you're focused on the mission you're not focused on debugging pods, and you're focused on the mission and not focused on, you know, why my virtual machine didn't migrate or something like that. And we can get applications that are built in-house and updated continuously, and we can verify and validate the sources of where these things are coming from. And all of these are important problems to everybody, not just the military, but the military tends to have the money and the ability to think about these things first, 'cause that's where these problems tend to get solved first. >> So interesting. You've sort of had this circular experience being in the air force, now coming back and working on projects like this, what are some of the things that Hypergiant has learned? And some of the things that are next next for Hypergiant as a company? >> I think that we are getting really good at being a small contractor in the Federal space where we actually were just awarded an IDIQ with a cap of $950 million in a small group of, I think, 23 other companies. And so that shows right there the investment that the Federal Government has in us and the potential that they see for us to build and deliver these highly tailored and specialized solutions. The other thing that we've learned is how to form like coalitions to collaborate with a lot of these other smaller companies. I think that the days of seeing the Defense Industrial Base dominated by the same four people or five people are over. And it's not that these people, I mean, they've been, they've basically been propping up most of the defense industry for a very long time and I think a lot of people would argue that, you know, this is a problem, right, you have this near monopoly of a very few people, but the other thing is that they're not as nimble, they grow by acquisition and we have this ability to be highly tailored and specialized and we don't need to do everything in the world to survive. We can go and form coalitions with other groups to go solve a particular problem. Like we're great at AI and ML, and we're great at DevSecOps, then maybe we're not so great at, you know, hardware or you know, things like that. Like we can go partner up with these people and solve problems together and we don't have to be a Boeing to do it and you don't have to go hire a Boeing to do this. And I think that's really, really great, no slight to Boeing, but I think it's really great that it's a lot easier for smaller companies to do this and we are navigating this new world and we're bringing Agile into the government and that's, yeah, in some cases we have to drag them, kicking and screaming into this decade, but, you know, that's what we're doing and I'm very excited to see that because when I was in Agile and DevOps, those were words you didn't say, you weren't allowed to do that. >> No. >> Now they've done a complete 180, it's really cool. >> That's cool. I have a minimum that brings in thought diversity, having more companies to work with, but to your point, the agility that you bring in as a smaller company helping them to actually embrace Agile, that's huge because to your point, that's kind of historically not what government organizations are used to. So it sounds like a little bit they've learned a tremendous amount from working with small companies like Pepperdine. >> I like the thing so. Platform One is a fantastic example. So it was really started as a what we're calling software factories within the air force and within the DOD and other DOD branches have now started to replicate the pattern. So we have several software factories within the air force and Platform One is like the DevSecOps Software factory, and we have the ski camp and space camping, Kobayashi Maru and you're noticing a theme here (laughing) and so they're very nerdy names, but so we have these software factories and there's all these projects are being worked. But one of the amazing things I noticed when I showed up to work on the first day was that I had no idea who was uniformed and who was civilian. It was a completely badge off rank, off situation. Very few people showed up in uniform and the ones that did typically had their blouse off so you had no idea what their rank was. Everybody went by first name and we behaved like a start-up. And these civilians were coming from other startups like Hypergiant or a Timo or other very small, very specialized groups and SUSE RGS, of course they were there too and they're embedded in several different teams. And so you have this, like this quasi company that got this startup really that got formed and the culture is very, you know, very varies, you know, bay area startup type in some ways, for both better and worse. There's, I mean, we're, definitely full tilt on (laughs) on the Agile train there, but it's just, it's like nothing I've ever seen inside the DOD. And they're not just learning from these small companies and from Agile companies, but they're behaving like them. And it's spreading, they're seeing what work is getting done and what can be accomplished and how you can continuously deliver value instead of working for, you know, six or eight months and then showing the customer something and them hating it and you sending it back and, you know, it's more of a continuous improvement type thing. And I think that they're embracing that and I'm very excited to see it. >> That's important 'cause changing a culture is incredibly hard but seeing and hearing that they're embracing that is exciting. And I'm sure there's going to be many more things you could talk about generally, but I got to ask you if somebody like SUSE gave you $250,000, and you could buy one of the tickets on Branson's next flight, would you do it? >> I mean, yeah, why would I not? Like, how can I pass up a trip, (Lisa laughing) you know, go to the Edge of space. >> The Far Edge. >> Like yeah, the Far Edge, maybe I'll just, you know, hurdle the satellite out the window, as you know, we're up there, you know, peak and probably could throw it quite that fast, but we'll see. (Lisa laughing) But yeah, no, I think I would take the trip, yeah, that'd be fun. >> You're brave. Brave than I'm, I don't know. Well, Bren it's been delightful talking to you. Thank you for sharing what you guys at Hypergiant and SUSE have been doing together, the Department of Defense, the exciting things going on there and for the new definitions and my lexicon of the Edge, it's been great talking to you. >> Thank you, have a great day. >> You too. For Bren Briggs, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a CUBE Conversation. (digital music)

>> Announcer: From CUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everybody and welcome to this CUBE conversation, you know in our last breaking analysis we worked with ETR and they put out a new forecast on IT spending for 2020. The consensus coming into 2020 was for 4% increase, based on the survey work they've done with CIO's it's now down to 0%. Surprisingly about 40% of the the CIO's and IT practitioners that they interviewed said they expected no change in IT budget for 2020. A surprising 21% say they actually expect to increase spending as a result of work from home infrastructure. Still a very large portion of the survey sample said they're going to decrease spending and that's why they're now calling, ETR's calling for a flat spending in 2020. Clearly one of the challenges or those companies that are exposed to supply chain disruptions, whether it's manufacturing or retail or certain CPG or industrial. And with me today to talk about specifically supply chain within the storage market and within pure storage is Mike Fitzgerald, who's the VP of Operations at Pure. Mike thanks so much for coming on and talking about this important topic. No thank you Dave. Good to see you and good afternoon and good morning. >> So take us through what your seeing, well first of all what's your roll? VP of operations, your in charge of supply chain is that correct? >> Yeah, I have all of the supply chain, all of the manufacturing logistics, distribution network at PURE. >> So what's going on with, what are you seeing in the industry, talking to your colleagues. I'm sure that your discussing this with your peers. Give us the high level and the macro and then we'll get into what's going on with PURE specifically. >> Well certainly they're you know within early January we started to hear whispers out of the parties that there were going to be some potential implications with the supply chain. So at that point in time we did a lot of actions and activated at PURE to try to stay ahead of that with speed being gone of the key things that we wanted to make sure we we're focusing on. But the industry as a whole, there was a lot of focus over the last several months in how do we make sure that not only do we understand what our risk is in the Far East/China but how do we mitigate that risk? And then as we transpired and things have gotten to where we are now, the risk has become more of a global risk in terms of a supply chain management role. >> So is it really was it the exposure to China? Was it really NAND supply? Because that's been sort of zigging and zagging for the last you know several periods. Can you give us a little more color on really what you were paying attention to in terms of some of those hotspots? >> Yeah well one of the things we tried to do early on is the design of our supply chain at PURE, we've tried to diversify that. We've got a portfolio-based foot print across the globe. Early on we took a lot of steps to minimize the amount of reliance on China. A lot of that was driven by tariff implications but certainly it's become our friend as we've gotten into the situation with the COVID. So lot of actions and activity in that space to make sure that we've got a responsive supply chain in place from a global perspective. On the NAND there's a lot of discussion , lot of actions and activities in relationship to NAND, certainly with the rising price, the market demands, whats going on with the supply versus demand ratios , but one of the things that we have a huge advantage of at PURE is that we build our own SSDs. So NAND is a component is what we're buying which is not directly related to what I'll call China shortages. A lot of the NAND that's not built in China that we consume and put into our SSDs. >> So are you saying PURE's not having any kind of supply chain disruption or your managing that? What are you doing there specifically and how much of that is just sort of reduced demand versus so your approach, the supply chain? Can you address that? >> Yeah we are not seeing a reduced demand right now. One thing, kind of an overarching statement is we have plenty of supply available right now. We are, our portfolio is at standard lead time and so we've got product in place as a matter of fact we've seen an uptick in some of the demand streams, specifically in VDI, as well as PURE as-a-Service in less human element. The VDI certainly for the work-from-home type of scenarios. We're actually seeing what I would call a more of an increase in demand with shorter lead times bribing us to put product onsite in emergency situations. >> That's interesting because a lot of suppliers that I've talked to have said look we are going to manage this by communicating increased lead time to our customers. Your saying PURE is actually seeing the opposite. You've got good supply and your seeing strong demand and your able to meet either on time or even at an accelerated pace? Did I get that right? >> Yeah absolutely Dave, actually over the last three days, the weekend, we've had three separate installs in the locations on an emergency basis where we've responded in less than 24 hours and gotten product onsite, installed and saved the customers from running into situations where their work from home staff was not able to come up. >> You know Mike, you've obviously got a lot of experience in this space, operations and supply chain, you've done this for awhile. PURE as a company does a lot of things differently, I've been following them since the early days of PURE but I have to be honest I've never really dug into PURE's supply chain you know approach in any differentiation you have there. How would you compare PURE's approach to others that you've seen in the industry's maybe historically or what your seeing today. What are you guys doing that's different? >> We've designed our supply chain to be a responsive supply chain. With the recognition we're growing roughly 20% year-over-year. We're leaning into the supply chain to be able to not only be enable that growth but be able to enable surge. So some of the things that we do in designing the responsive supply chain, we talked earlier about making sure we have the right manufacturing footprint and that we've got the right risk mitigation so that we can have that portfolio coach related to diversity in this footprint but we've actually staged material in the supply chain intentionally to enable us to be able to surge in response to demand increases. We've done the same with capacity. So we've actually leaned into our network and increased capacity to be able to absorb surges in demand which is certainly paying off for us now in this situation where early on in January we started seeing the signs that we we're going to have some demand constraints. So we went out and placed buys, we went long is probably the best way to put it and try to make sure that we were stocking up accordingly. So that if indeed there was a constraint that happened or constrained environment that we had product available and that's what's paying off for us right now. >> Mike is that a brute force decision making process? In other words is it more gut feel from your tribal knowledge and experience at this? Are you using analytics in anyway to inform sort of where to turn those knobs? >> Well it's a little of both Dave, some of it is I've been in this game for awhile, I've seen these before. So we knew early on that it was time to pull the trigger. So we did. One of the advantages we've got at PURE is that we're a small team, we're a nimble team, decisions can be made today and implemented this afternoon and that is basically the way that we did it. We got the right stakeholders together we made some conscious decisions on what we were going to do to try to mitigate the risk going forward. Pulled the trigger and now we have supply available and we continue to ship. >> I wonder if we could talk a little bit about, I'll come back to that, VDI. As I said at the top of this we saw from the ETR survey data that work from home was one of the few areas that was really you know picking up. And it wasn't just video conferencing it was VPN, it was networking bandwidth, it was security infrastructure to support that work from home capability etcetera. And obviously VDI is part of that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that, not only in terms of what your seeing for your customers but what is PURE doing just in terms of you know, remote support and other things. Where are you focused there? >> Two things, I'll talk about the VDI solution. We've got solutions certainly that we're offering into the marketplace, we've had as I said a significant uptick in demand and I think many would say that storage is the backbone of an effective VDI solution, that's what we do for a living. We've also got several different solutions that we're implementing or having customers implement and simplify. The implementation of the VDI. And one of our key things is we're simple, we're easy, we can put things in place quickly. As I said we're loading data centers in hours versus days. The other question Dave about the support and I'll view that in two different areas. One the implementation of existing product, or the support related to that. Our support network is 100% up and running right now, we have componentry, we've actually forward stock incremental a componentry into the depots to make sure that we're able to support our key customers. One of the motto's that we've got is "We're an essential business that is in the business of supporting other essential businesses." Critical infrastructure, focusing on that to make sure that if for some reason we lose a logistics channel in the country that we've got components there so that the support infrastructure stays in place so we're able to keep our customers up and running. >> So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the assumptions that your making. We have a saying sometimes hope for the best plan for the worst. In your business that's probably apropos. What are some of the assumptions your making just in terms of you know planning for the worst. >> We're doing, early on it was all about making sure that you could get blind side on supply and making sure that we've got capacity available. We did a lot of work on making sure that our alternate site across the globes were able to absorb what we couldn't get out of our China suppliers for the time being when we got the constraints there. But at the same time we are now recognizing as the COVID expands, the COVID, excuse me the incident that we're in now, that there may be some demand delay or demand destruction in the future. So what is our risk profile in relation to that? So that's something we're doing as well but right now we're more focused on what's it going to take to make sure we've got supply available to customers that need supplying now? >> So what are the, I mean I'm sure you've got a lot of KPI's but if you had to really focus in on the top ones, the two or three that your really focused on you know you look at every morning when you wake up. Where's your focus in terms of KPI's? >> Right now its, we're in a different environment than we were in let's say three months ago. And right now it's product availability. And that's in responsiveness to customer needs. In a normal environment I'd say its cost, quality and delivery, that's a typical supply chain mantra. The three legs of the stool. But right now certainly we're not minimizing the of having to have excellent quality but what we're really focused on now is making sure we are providing product into critical infrastructure, essential customer sites, so it's all about availability. I'd say the majority of my day is focusing on what do we need to do to make sure we got product available for the market place. >> Well Mike, we're seeing you know the people around the world, not only in United States but globally respond to this crisis we're all doing our own part. Clearly your, I assume before you we're waking up that assumes you we're sleeping but I know your not getting much sleep but I want to thank you for coming on and sharing with is some of the things that are going on with PURE. You know keep up the great work, your customers need this, I mean storage is part of critical infrastructure and really appreciate all the effort. Thanks to you and all the team at PURE. >> Well thank you Dave, I appreciate it, have a great day. >> You too, it's great to have you. Thank you everybody for watching. We'll keep broadcasting here daily from the CUBE studios, this is Dave Vellante. This CUBE conversation we'll see ya. (bouncy music)

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem barters >> Welcome back. We're here, Cisco Live San Diego. You're watching the Cubans to minimum. My co host is Dave Volante and happy to welcome to the program. First of all, I have to tell Valente, no relation was the vice president of product management who are Cloud Platform in Solutions group at Cisco. And joining us is also Santana Dasgupta, who's a distinguished systems engineer at Cisco. We're gonna be talking about service Friday. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Of course. Alright, so jail let let's start the service. Freida Group, Of course. You know, we've heard for a long time how important service fighters are out there. Everything from service writers were going to become the new channel. A Sze Yu know customers less unless they're building their own data centers. You know, service fighters become a bigger environment. Tell us a little bit about you know your organ the latest What's going on in your customers? >> Yeah, So you know what? Cisco Obviously they are trying to help Ray in the transformation to actually multi cloud leveraging. Actually, the cloud benefits not only for enterprises and public sectors, but also for the service providers so that they can also reaped the benefit off the new actually trans technologies coming out, including five g on in that context. Obviously, if you really want to take advantage of Far Gina proper way going forward, starting actually with an evolution of architectures, you really have to look at the clouds and specifically what we call the telco cloud. >> Yeah, so the Espy market is going through a mass killed transformation, transformation in the business model and architecture and how you take the services to the market on one key. And it blew up the transformation that we believe is virtual elation, adopting the whole notion of telco cloud very virtualized your core functions for enabling the delivery of services in a more agile fashion into the market. But also it's all about transforming the court services construct itself. How do we push on the services element into the age of the net for being closer to the proximity of the Indians so that it enables much? Lord didn't see a new monitor visible applications, which is where service order to have a lot of open right now. >> So if I could just dig in on that for 1st 2nd you talk about services. So we watched that wave of network functions virtual ization, NFI where before it was I just had lots of appliances and rolling out each service individually, as opposed to what people want is they want, you know, the basically, you know, at market for the enterprise. And, you know, I just want to be able to get my services. You know, when I'm a consumer and you know, I want to do things well, I've got the Internet and I get those things. I need a similar environment from the service fighters going out to the Enterprise. Do I have that kind of high level, right? >> Yes, actually, we had on that bath. I mean, they're completely years as an industry were on the journey to actually get there on go. We initially talked about most of the core functions, like think ofthe armory packet corner policy or some some value added engine at the back end. But the world is evolving faster. To actually also think through that how we can add more consumer facing applications and services on top of it, like augmented reality, virtual reality, cloud gaming and all that sort >> of stuff. Dale, this is a real imperative for telcos, and it's a complicated situation, right, because they've got decades and decades of infrastructure built up. Don Tapscott famously said one time that God may have created the world in six days, but he didn't have an install base. And so the telcos they have of kind of a fossilized, hard installed based built around making sure it's up and not necessarily agile. Now you got all these over the top players coming in, and all these value other services on top of dumb pipe, the price is air coming down. The demand for data is going up, so they gotta change. That's right, right? So what? What do they have to do and what role this Cisco play? >> So again, it told about that software defined transformation and win that is required. And they, you know, we talked already a bit more about the record, an example that was actually even showcase briefly this morning because certainly, obviously it's a greenfield operator, so it's a bit of difference, but We think that there is a lot off applique ability to brown field as well tow the legacy. You have to actually chuck into the different domains what, that service provider environment and really start looking at how you can offer both consumer services and business services at a price point at a level of automation and agility that makes sense. And that is pretty much comparable to a large extent to what the cloud providers of the week. Um, you know, there are advantages the service providers hive in terms ofthe. Obviously, the services they deliver today thie assets that they own, the proximity, the locations as well, that they have the relationships. But really, there is a, as we said earlier, Nassif transformation that start with the network, but also with those pockets where you need to Software eyes will turn to software many of those assets >> essentially talking about a specialized telco cloud, if you will. So how is that different from you know, the clouds that we know the private clouds, the hybrid clouds, the public clouds, one of the attributes that are different in how do people get on the company's getting telcos? Get in that journey. >> Yeah, well, I mean, if you look at, uh, the telco industry in general, including ourselves, like the vendors. I mean, I call myself for ourselves as, like, you know, coming back from the era of dinosaurs, right? So, I mean, if you look at the access technology for last three decades, what have changed? Nothing way have been moving from one G Tito Tito treaty to 40. Now we're talking a five g without talking off. A fundamentally destructive are differentiated architecture. So that's something which is actually being coming up all in the front front at the moment on, that's changing the way the networks can be built. How you can build on how you can break the monolithic supplication and adopt a more decomposed, desegregated our conjecture and also, at the same time, drive all the services and applications in a more distributed manner with a flexible placement capability, so that you can enable all sort of new applications and services. And again, I mean at the other. And given the fact that this is mostly a brown Fillon moment, it is largely all about culture transformation, given the fact that you know, unless the people process on, the culture revolves. This would be a very tough journey. Moving for >> one of the point back to your question is wellies. Though there are nuances big ones between a 90 cloud, uh, today in the cloud that are generally club general purpose Cloud that offered, you know, buy are obviously partners ws Microsoft, Google it and really a telco clan based on the nature ofthe those network functions. The workload on the nature of this were close. The traffic demand that they have the understanding or cliff There are how the hardware itself or the underpinning the infrastructure needs to have some specific attributes to make this work at scale. But we're trying to mimic as much as possible the scaling capabilities, the flexibility, agility, the elasticity of a cloud so that service providers can read the prophet off pretty much a general cloud >> involvement. Conceptually, there are a lot of similar out similarities. I presume that from a developer standpoint, there's a Dev ops analog, analog, maybe a cloud native, maybe serve earless. Something like server list functions absolutely in Telco cloud. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So what we see is the idea under Telco World are actually coming together because I need a lot ofthe telco expertise were also at the same time. I need a lot of expertise because that's what exact exactly right now happening. I mean, there's some fundamental differences between a standard righty private, our hybrid Claude and tell the cloud like I deploy our thousands or hundreds of locations are set a few locations. The applications are different. It's highly Io intensive. You're dealing with a lot of packets like millions of packets which are mostly are transiting function going in and out. But having said that while this initial deployment wave is being targeted for mostly for those delicate type of obligations, we're seeing a very clear demand on a journey towards a common goal of setting up our one unified cloud, right so that you can host it and telco all in the same cloud on that's exactly what they want sexually takes a reality. >> Well, in one of the things I'm surprised we haven't touched on yet is EJ Computing is, you know, critical for these environment. And I can't just have bespoke solutions for all of them. From my corrida edge toe, you know, Telco, there need to be communications amongst all of these because data is going to flow between them and therefore, it can't be. You know, Moz, in between them, I need to be able to pass data and have my applications access these various pieces. >> Absolutely. In fact, the way we have he'll concede some of the systems is a unified architecture that is distributed as a Delco plowed. So that actually from the new service managers or the new ways says B. S s. They see, actually, one unified cloud with placement capabilities based on constraints where you can actually put the workload where they need to be based on Soleil is based on the requirements in technical resources that are available, you know, from forage to a central DC and all the way to actually a public cloud because we're starting seeing some of the customers around the world. It's really a massive transformation that is global. Some of them are starting to look at how they can leverage the public cloud for bursting purposes, for disaster recovery, or even for other functions for specific applications that maybe less demanding, actually on the side. >> Well, since I know you were talking about how that one of the differences that hell cozier more distributed, you know, greater io intensity. My question is, can we learn from the telco clouds from a security model standpoint? Because normally if they go tell coz we're kind of behind traditional i t. But from a security model astounds maybe more challenging. And you always hear the traditional i t. So we it's going to the edge, the telcos already there. So is the security model actually more advanced than what can we learn from that? And how is it >> evolving? Yeah, the security model is still evolving. So in fact, I would say for the total cloud which is being done at the more Court Central Data Center location, the security model is pretty advanced. But when things go towards the edge, especially its computing, which is huge, the security model is actually evolving. And we see a lot of promises with things such as, you know, secure chain of trust, or even block Chinn actually coming there and trying to play a huge role. So I think that's one area which we expected you all over the next few years. It's a lot of challenge but also you know, it's very exciting in that particular space. >> And actually those. This is a very key point because that infrastructure from service providers is actually usually many of the country's part of the national assets the cyber securities. The agencies in those countries work actually with Cisco Security Trust officer letters to really make sure that we do have a level of security that goes beyond maybe even the boundaries of what we've seen on enterprise. So yes, to your point, there is a lot of advances in that area as well. >> All right, so jail, half the shows I've been to this year have had a breakout for Telco. There's there's no denying that there's a lot of growth and a lot of change happening in that environment. What differentiates Cisco's approach from the rest of the people looking at the multi cloud and software pieces >> so more people are murky? Pool area is first. Obviously we have these murky cloud or this hybrid cloud view in which we have worked with the best out there. The Web scale providers, the cloud providers. In fact, if I look at racket and others there are even mimicking this notion off a sorry the Google approach to, you know, really the reliability enginering the transformation off those class cloud in a very specific way. Theater aspect is we're doing it. We have a holistic view at the Telco Cloud. It's not just the infrastructure, it's the automation. The automation is absolutely critical that there is absolutely no touch from humans to be able actually to manage of that scale even more so if you deploy it in 1,000 of edge points, it has to be completely actually automated. So the aspect ofthe automation, the aspect of security, the aspect of people transformation, organizational as well is something that, between the service component to this other solution and the products is very unique. And what we do, it's Cisco. >> Yeah, if I may just add one thing on top of that, just chill said right. So if you look at our playing the Espy or telco market, we have a comprehensive solution. We are solutions right from routing Optical Jacinto Compute Telco, Claude Watch television automation, melodic or being gcm. Here's a bunch of stuff, right? But what becomes very interesting is if you look at 55 g and we all are talking up. The five G is going to be all about enterprise services now. Think about it for a while, right? Who is the number one dominant player in the market for a better price, with the deepest portfolio absolution and the farthest reaching there? No price market that Cisco. So that's what we believe, that we can actually really, you know, creator right confluence of border side of the technology to create the right offer for our customers and held them to take to the market. >> In fact, we've taken a number off our very large enterprise customers that journey to understand, from their point of view as well how they could leverage five g wife like six in the context off a mobile first cloud first type environment. And it's across permeates, actually, obviously what those service providers need to offer to grow again beyond customer services, which is not where, actually the you know, the hyper growth will be as faras Service school sir, >> Well, jail in Santa Ana. Thank you so much for sharing the updates. What happened? Tell Cho service provider space. Thanks so much for joining us. Everybody alright, We'll be back with lots more water wall coverage here at Cisco alive. San Diego 2019 for David Dante on stew Minimum. And thank you for what? Thank you.

>> live from Miami Beach, Florida It's the que covering demon 2019. Brought to you, by the way. >> Welcome back to Miami. Everybody watching the Cube, The leader in live tech coverage. This is Day two of the mon 2019 3 cubes. Third year at V mon, We did New Orleans. We did Chicago last year. Course here at the Fountain Blue in Miami. Great venue for an event like this. I'm Dave a lot. It was my co host, Peter Burroughs. Abba Dabbas. Eye is Adi is here. He's the head of a Charles Russell speech. Liza London based law firm. How about great. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thankyou. So you tell us about this judge. Interesting name. Charles Russell. Speech lease. It was a merger of two firms, Right. Tell us how it all came about. >> Back in 2,014 Charles, loss of species performed for a merger between two different companies. Charles docile and speaks Lee Burcham from a 90 perspective. That was very interesting for the two departments coming together s So we have a limited time period where we had to merge these two companies Two different systems different data centers, different data sets. So it was formed by emerging back in 2,014 for five years on way here today >> that we see this a lot, you know, Emanate goes down. The acquiring company of this sounds like it was a merger. You know, they sort of battle. Okay, who's going toe? Really? Which framework is going to win? Because I'm sure had that conversation. But so to take us through that merger, what it entailed what? What the scenario looked like and how you plan for it. Sure. >> So I was part of the Charles. Also legacy Charles Russell team on, then obviously speaks about. Some had their own team as well. So initially, when we first found out about the merger, it was essential for the two teams to get together to work out. Okay, What systems? You have free mail. What systems you have for document management system playing trump cards. Which is who's got the best system and which way do we wantto move forward? A little. >> Ah, >> so but being a law firm, most law firms around the world and in the UK especially used the same types of software so essentially that from that perspective it was It was it was quite simple. But then way had to work out. How do we How do we go forward with this? Because two different headquarters in the London area. Which office do we move into? Sort of logistics around that. Can we fit in pre merger? It was six. Charles Lawson had sickle. Roughly 600 people, especially birds, had roughly 500 people. So pretty comparable. Yeah, yeah. So working out space logistics was was an issues >> making that even even more complicated, right? Yeah. >> One of the things that's interesting about a law firm, like versus a traditional manufacturer or AW financial services firm that has a lot of very fast right writing systems and have to scale on those lines is a law firms feature very complex dogs, very complex in from out of files, a lot of files that are written. But at the same time, you have to be repurposed to a lot of different work flows very sensitive to external contingent regulatory change. And so you have all of that happening, especially, I mean, two years ago from now on MySpace steak, and it was you're getting into brexit stuff, too, so that also had to be a source of uncertainty. So how has it been combining external regulatory issues the way that technology is being used in law firms and some of the new work clothes that you guys trying to support? And then adding, On top of that, the complexity of bringing these two firm GPR >> GPO itself was It was a year old project for us on. Obviously, we've got offices. The Middle East, but obviously is in the Far East on DH in Central Europe has well, so data logistics or where it sits, is an issue for us as well. So GDP, ours being a big project for us in terms of the merger itself. It was it was very, very difficult for the two I T departments to come together on actually work out. How how do we go to one unified systems? Essentially one doctor man, just in one email system. All of that took a lot of plan in law project management on essentially within the legal press itself. We got doubted in the time frames that we had that we can achieve it on within. I think It was 18 month period. We had merged order, different systems and various offices because speech the Bertram and Time is what I had. Offices in Zurich and Geneva were to merge with different offices together as well. So it was. It was a big, big task for the i T department on the firm itself. >> They're very tight migration deadlines. And and as you started to approach those deadlines you had to worry about, Okay, When we're going to cut over, how do we avoid downtime? How do we make sure that we don't? You know, I have bad data, data, corruption and the like. So how did you plan for that? And how did it go? >> So wait, we're here. C'mon on DH. Veen was It was it was a big part of our migration process. So where we had two different parts of the business Different storage systems, Different actualization system's way used to mean a CZ. The middleman basically, to my great data, from one day to center to another, using swink it. So where there was a large amount of terabytes and terabytes, amount of data way had swing kit available to us using team were able to be to be essentially a love the environments into the swing care and then bring them over to the other side of the business. And vain was essentially part on on top of that, making sure that the data that we were coming that will bring in a cross is true and not corrupt on DH, that using some of their technology is sure backups and stuff like that really, really was essential to, you know, do migration going well >> And was was Wien installed and both organizations at the time? Or was that something that you had to sort of redeploy? >> And yeah, So Legacy Charles also had way was actually myself going back probably eight years ago. Version For a time, I think team had 20,000 customers. So to here >> there were version 10 now 33 150 >> 1,001,000, 4,000 month. >> That makes me proud that we invested in vain when we did good car. So yeah, it was It was a good call from us, and essentially three other side of the business did not have. But then we just wait. Expanded our Venus State to look at both sides and then bring him across on. And then, ever since then, we've grown our vamos state across the world, across all of officers. So >> So how did you do that? So that was that was another migration that had to occur. And did you? You kind of do those simultaneously. Did you do the theme of migration first, and then bring the two systems together? >> Do you seem to do Stouffer special sauce in the migration? >> Yeah. So Veen was essentially a tool that we used to my great data sensors from one data center to another using their backup technology using their replication technology, we were able to replicate all of one side's virtual machines to the other. And then that gave us that gave us the flexibility as well. When when we had the limited down time periods that we've had, they give us the flexibility to actually Circe the business is during these particular ours. We're not gonna be able to You're not gonna have access to these systems because we're going to bring up systems from point A to point B. So veen was essential to them if >> you had to do it over again. If he had a mulligan, what would you have done differently? What what advice might you give to somebody who's trying to go through a similar migration? >> I would say Give your partners and lawyers more realistic time. Pray the time frame that we would get. >> Or don't let them give you an unrealistic time for him. >> Exactly. Yeah, so says ensured that the amount of work it's it's not just day to itself. You know, we're talking network and we're talking security. We're talking, you know, to to similar sized companies coming together. We were very, very limited time frame, consolidating all of their systems into one which is essential for the two parts of the business to collaborate together because, you know, way could have taken our time. We could have got to take this free four years a CE, far as we're concerned. But the fact that we did do it in such a quick time for him and that business to parts of the business from Day one can collaborate much better with each other. So >> we talked a lot about digital business transformation and you know, our approach or our observations on the digital business transformations, the process by which you altar and change your firm to re institutionalize the work. Change your game. Tomato Grover. All governments model as you use data as an asset, so that's affecting every firm everywhere. How's it affecting a law firm and you know your law from specifically on? How is that going to change your stance in your approach to data protection >> Data is incredibly important to unlawful. A zit is to most most organizations, but in terms of, you know, one of one of the things that's quite important in terms of law firms. We work with the financial institutions, so we held information by that. We hold personal data way hold all times of information. Charles Oscar speech leads works with Aware is of law apart from Kunal. So the areas of law that they worked with his vast in terms of the amount of data that we hold and essentially I mean, for us data is the most important thing that runs the firm and having visibility tow our data. How do we How do we work that data? How do we then market based on the data that we have? How do we market ourselves from that data. You know, there might be one area the business that's dealing with a family issue, family law. But then, you know that that could correspond with the litigation issue. You know, how do we work that data? To be to be an advancing to our businesses is extremely important. For >> what? What do you think of the announcements this week? I'm kind of curious. I was liketo ask the practitioners of what they think about. You know what was announced. You had, uh, well, you had the ve made $1,000,000,000. That's kind of fun and cool, but But you had the with the program, which was kind of interesting. The whole ap I look the beam availability orchestrator, where they're really talking about recovering from backups as a host that needed to recover from, you know, a replicated instance. You know, some of the automated testing stuff was kind of interesting. They talked about dynamic documentation, things you saw this week that you'll actually go back and say, Hey, I can apply that to solve a problem. Sure. >> So, essentially, I think I've been a really good question is very relevant to us many of not just ourselves law firm but many of the other law firms around the world are now looking at cloud based services now for us. I mean, this was a big thing five years ago way you know, everyone was talking about public clouds. Us. We're now we're now looking clouds and where basically, we've bean pushed by the vendors themselves to go towards cloudlike Citrix, for example. Their licensing model was based around their services. So is Microsoft in Mike's off? You don't you don't really have, you know, exchange anymore. Within premises you have off 365 A lot of the SAS applications are moving toward the cloud on DH. What wrote me? I had to say doing the keynote in regards to act, too. And how team are trying to be the visionaries in terms of look at that cloud is their next big thing for the next 10 years, offering often a crucial and for businesses like ours who have limited exposure to cloud technologies limited understanding, essentially having a tool that could migrate from one cloud to another. It's fantastic, you know, we've offered, you know I've spoken to, obviously are United directors around the other law firms where I wanted to have gone to the public cloud. But they don't know how to come back in and having a tall that essentially gives you that flexibility to bring it back in house to go form a ws to zoo. Or if there's a particular assess application, for example, that piers better with a W s. But you've got your other application that piers with that particular application is your Why would you want to have in the door? You'll probably want to move into a W eso for us, I think. What? The message coming out of'em on this year has bean really, really helpful for us. >> So So when you started with theme, they had it said 20,000 custom You like the 20001st customer on DIT was coincided with the virtual ization, you know, craze. Do you feel like the team knowing what you know about them, you have a lot of experience with them Consort of Replicate that success in this town intendant and in Act two, >> I think when I first looked at them, Wow, this is really, really simple. It's a bit like an iPhone. You know you given iPhone to your grandmother or to your children, and they have to play with it. And I see the beam as an intuitive piece of software that easy fighting professionals to get on with it, as their slogan said a few years ago. It just works. It does just work. Wear were great advocates of him. It's worked wonders for us. We've acquired smaller businesses using we've managed companies using and when I see you know, when you go to the sessions and you see the intelligence behind their thinking, I think going back to your question I think Wei si oui, si, vamos a strategic partner for us when we see their vision and we believe in their vision, and I think what they're doing in terms of what they working on next few years, I think we're well favor there, and I think, you know, essentially, that's where the most of their business is going to come from, >> where you sit down with, you know, rat mayor over over vodka and he says, Tell me the one thing I could do to make your life you know, easier, better you can't say cut prices s a hellhole. But what would you advise him to >> make my life better >> other than Jim instead of >> yeah, eyes that >> would make you crazy. >> So in terms of a zoo, a technology, >> your business relationship or something, she'd like to see them do that would. I >> think in terms of mergers and acquiring companies, seen license rentals will be a good thing. I know, I know. They give you a valuation license keys, and that's something that you can use. So, for example, if we were to acquire a company that has hundreds of servers and PM's having license rentals for a period of time, able >> to spin it up and spin it down actually allowed >> Exactly. Yeah, that would be an advantage. I think in terms of what you know what they're doing in the marketplace, and a lot of law firms use him. I feel I can't do any more than they are doing now. And in all the years that we've used to be my fingers on eight years now, but we've only had one serious problem, and the way they got that problem, you know the way, the way they communicated to reverse the way they a lot of different teams across the the Europe and the US go involved. I think, you know, in terms of service, in terms of software, in terms of what they what they do for us. I don't think there's anything more to add. Teoh. Right? Maia's vision. >> That's great for their custom of it. Well, thanks so much for coming on. The Cube is not heavy. Really? Thank you very much. You're welcome to keep it right there, buddy Peter, and I'll be back with our next guests right after this short break. We're live from Miami at the front of Blue Hotel. You're watching the Cube from Vienna on 2019 right back.

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum, DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> We are back this afternoon here in Washington, D.C., at the Walter Washington Convention Center. As we continue our coverage here of Inforum 2018 along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, and we now welcome Mr. Cormack Watters to the program today, EVP of Emea and APAC at Infor. Cormack, good to see you sir. >> Nice to be here. >> So, we're going to talk about Guinness, over in Ireland (chuckling). Cormack's from Dublin, so we had a little conversation. We're getting a primer here. >> It's actually the best conversation we should have, right? >> Right, we'll save that for the end. How about that? So, you're fairly new, right? About a year or so. >> Ten months or so, not that I'm counting it by the day >> No no no, always going forward, never backward. But a big plate you have, right, with EMEA and APAC? Different adoptions, different viewpoints, different perspectives... We've talked a lot really kind of focusing domestically here for the past couple of days. Your world's a little different than that though, right? >> It is. It is. And it's very good that you've actually recognized it because that's actually the biggest challenge that we have. To be a little bit humble about it, I think we've got world-class products and solutions. I actually fundamentally believe that. But we have lots of different languages, cultures, and localization requirements in the multiple Countries that we look after. So, it's great to have great products, but it needs to be in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finish, Arabic, which most of them are. Customers realize that we are actually international and localized for many, many markets. But now we've become an intriguing option for them, if you're a multi-national business, with subsidiaries all over the world. So, it's good that Infor is big enough to do that. We need to do a better job of letting everybody know that we've done that, if that makes any sense. >> Sure. >> So what's happening in Europe? Europe's always pockets, there's no..I mean.. Yes, EU but there's really still no one Europe. What's going on? Obviously, we have Brexit hanging over our head. I felt like U.S. markets are maybe a little bit overheated in Europe has potential upside. >> Yeah >> And it seems like others seem to agree with that. What happening on the ground? Any specific, interesting areas? Is Southern Europe still a concern? Maybe you can give us an update? >> Yeah, so Brexit is quite a dominant conversation. I am from Ireland. I live in Dublin, but I'm working all over Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Far East. So, I don't get to be at home very often, except the weekends. London is really our regional headquarters from a European perspective, and Brexit is on everybody's mind. Interestingly, when you go outside the UK, Brexit is not such a big topic because... That's Europe. And they kind of go, "Well if you don't want to be here, then you don't need to be here." Right? So it's a little bit of that, and they're saying, "Well, we'd like for them to stay, but if they don't want to stay, well, don't wait around." But in the UK, it's causing a lot of uncertainty. And the UK's one of our biggest markets. It's a lot of uncertainty, and what would be best is if we just knew what was going to happen, and then we could deal with it. And actually, once we know what's going to happen, that's going to bring a degree of change. And change, from our industry perspective means there's going to be some requirements that emerge. So, we need to be ready to serve those, which is opportunity. But the uncertainty is just slowing down investment. So, we need that to be resolved. >> So, clarity obviously is a good thing obviously a good thing in any market. Are there any hotspots? >> Yeah, actually for us, we're doing, for us the Hotspots right now, we're doing incredibly well in Germany. Which, one of our lesser known competitors is a small Company called SAP. And they're headquartered in Germany. It's quite interesting to see that we're actually taking a lot of market there in Germany, which is fantastic. That's a little bit unexpected, but it's going very well right now. We're seeing a ton of activity in the Asia Pacific, I would say that region is probably our fastest growing in all of Infor. And consistently so for several quarters and maybe past a year at this point. So Asia Pacific, Germany, U.K., and then as it happens, we are doing very well in Southern Europe, which is a combination of countries really. France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. Hard to put it down to which particular Country is doing well, but there seems to be a general uplift in that region. Because they were hit the hardest, arguably, by the crash back in 2008. So they've definitely come out of that now. >> And when they come out, excuse me I'm sorry John, but, they come out, Cloud becomes more important to them, Right? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Anyone who's been delaying investment for years, can actually leapfrog what's been happening and jump straight to what you might call the future. So lots of Companies, lots of our Customers, are trying to simplify their Business. So Cloud is a great equalizer. We believe in your, what we call Last Mile of Functionality per industry. And that should make the projects shorter, more compact more predictable and the infrastructure worries go away, because that's our responsibility to the Customers. >> We definitely so that in the U.S., 2008-2009, CFO's came in said shift to the Cloud, because we want to shift Capx to Opx, and when we came out of the downturn, they said "wow this stuff works pretty well, double down on it" and then there were other business benefits that they wanted to accelerate, and so maybe Southern Europe was a little bit behind >> I think that may be the case right, and they are picking up. And what we're seeing are a lot of other advantages. Not to make this a sale's pitch, but, I am here so >> Go for it >> You've got a microphone >> I've got a microphone and I'm Irish, so I've got to talk right? What the Cloud is actually doing is, lots of Companies have put in big ERP over the years, the decades. And then they get stuck at various points and maybe years behind, because upgrades become painful and really want to avoid them. So what they're seeing is, if they can get onto the Cloud, they never need to upgrade again. Because it's always current, because we upgrade it every week, or every month and they're never falling behind. So they want to be ready to take advantage of the innovations that they know about and those that they don't even know about. So by keeping on the latest version, that opportunities open to them. Also, there's a big issue in Europe specifically about a thing called GDPR, which is data protection. Security. So we believe that we can do a better job of providing that, than any individual Company. Because we provide it for everybody, our resources can be deployed once and then deployed many times. Where as if you're an individual customer, you've got to have that speciality and put it in place. So GDPR is a genuine issue in Europe, because, the fines are absolutely huge if a Company is found to breach it. >> It's become a template for the globe now, California's started moving in that direction, GDPR has set the frame work. >> Well and just to follow up on that, and now you're dealing with a very different regulatory climate, then certainly here in the United States. And many U.S. Companies are finding that out, as we know. Overseas right now. So how do you deal with that in terms of, this kind of balkanized approach that you have, that you know that what's working here doesn't necessarily translate to overseas, and plus you have, you know, you're serving many masters and not just one or two. >> What's happening is the guys in our RND have done very well, is they understand the requirement of, in this instance, GDPR. They look at the other regulatory requirements, lets say in Australia, which is subtly different, but it is different, and they can take, well what do we have to do? What's the most extreme we have to achieve? And if we do that across our suite into our platform suite, the N4RS, that can then be applied to all the applications. And then becomes relevant to the U.S. So it's almost like some requirement across the seas, being deployed then becoming really relevant back here because over here you do need to be aware of the data protection, as well, it's just not as formalized yet. >> It's coming >> A Brewing issue right? >> What about Asia Pacific? So you have responsibility for Japan, and China, and the rest of the region. >> Right >> Which you are sort of re-distinct... >> Really are right? There are several sub regions in the one region. The team down there, as I say, arguably the most successful team in Infor right now, so Helen and the crew. So you see Australia, New Zealand then you see Southeast Asia, then you see China, Japan and so on. So different dynamics and different markets, some more mature than others, Japan is very developed by very specific. You do need very specialized local skills to succeed. Arguably Australia, New Zealand is not that similar from say some of the European Countries. Even though there are differences and I would never dream to tell an Australian or a New Zealander that they are the same as Europeans, cuz I get it. I smile when people say "you're from the U.K and you're not from Ireland?" I understand the differentiation. (laugher) And Southeast Asia, there's a ton of local custom, local language, local business practice that needs to be catered for. We seem to be doing okay down there. As I say, fastest growing market at scale. It's not like it's growing ridiculously fast but from a small base. It's as a big market already and growing the fastest. >> And China, what's that like? You have to partner up? >> Oh yeah >> To the JV in China? >> You have to partner up, there are several of the key growth markets that it's best to go in with partners. Customers like to see we've got a presence. So that they can touch and feel that Infor entity. We can't achieve the scale we need, and the growth we want fast enough without partnering. So we have to go with partners to get us the resources that we need. >> And in the Middle East, so my business partner, Co-Host, John Furrier, is on a Twenty Hour flight to Bahrain. The Cube Bahrain. Bahrain was the first Country in the Middle East to declare Cloud first. AWS is obviously part of that story, part of your story. So what's going on over there? Is it a growing market? Is it sort of something you're still cracking? >> No, no, again it's growing. We have several key markets down there, big in hospitality in that part of the world. Hotels, tourism obviously. Shopping, very interesting markets, and Healthcare, interestingly enough. I think arguably some of the worlds best Hospitals are in that region. Definitely the best funded Hospitals. >> Probably the most comfortable. (laughter) >> So again part of our stent is the number of industries we serve, so if you can put in our platform as it were, then you could have multiple of the industry flavors applied. Because what's interesting in that part of World, there seem to be a number of, I guess we call them conglomerates. So maybe family owned, or region owned, and they have just a different array of businesses all under the one ownership. So you would have a retailer that's also doing some tourism, that's also doing some manufacturing. So we can put our platform in, and then those industry flavors they can get one solution to cover it all. Which is a little bit unusual, and works for us. >> Your scope is enormous. I mean essentially you're the head of Non-U.S. I mean is that right? >> Yeah, and Latin America as well. >> That's part of it? That's not... >> Excluding the Americas. So there's Americas and then everything else, and you're everything else. >> I missed a meeting you see so they just gave it to me >> What you raised your hand at the wrong time? >> I wasn't there (laughter) >> So how do you organize to be successful? You obviously have to have strong people in the region. >> Right. So the key is people, right. We organize somewhat differently to over here. We've gone for a regional model, so I have six sub-regions, that I worry about. So four in Europe, the Nordic Countries. Scandinavian, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark. We call Western, which is Ireland, U.K. and the Benelux. Germany is Central and East, and then Southern is the Latin Country, Spain, Portugal, Greece and so. Then we've got the Middle East, and Africa, and then we got Asia Pacific. I've got six regional teams, all headed by a regional leader, and each of them are trying to be as self contained as they can. And where we see we've got an opportunity to move into something new, we've got one team working with me directly as an incubator. For example, we're driving a specific focus on Healthcare, in our part of the world, because it's very big over here. We haven't quite cracked the code over there. When we get some scale, then it'll move into the regions, but for now that's incubating under me. >> And, what about in Country? Do you have Country Managers? One in the U.K., one in France, one in Germany. >> We have what we call local leaders, right? So in some cases it could be a sales oriented individual, it could be consulting, others it could be the local HR guy. So that's more for us to make sure we're building a sense of community within Infor. Rather than it being more customer facing. We're still trying to make sure that there is a reasonably scarcity of senior skills. So regionalizing lets us deploy across several Countries, and that works with the customer base, but for employees we need local leaders to give them a sense of feeling home and attached. >> So the regions are kind of expertise centers if you will? >> Yes >> So I was going to ask about product expertise, where does that come from? It's not parachuted in from the U.S. I presume? >> No, we're pretty much self-sufficient actually, which is great. So from both what we call solution consulting, which is the product expertise, and then consulting which is the product deployment. And we're doing more and more of our deployments with Partners. As I say, we need to really rapidly embrace that partner ecosystem to give us the growth opportunity. RND, is all over the World. That's not under my direct control. So for a major suites, take for example, LN, happens to be headquartered out of Barneveld, in the Netherlands. From a Historic perspective, which is great. And Stockholm, which is also great. But a lot of the development resource room in Nila and in India. So we work closely with the guys, even though they don't actually report to me. >> And out of the whole area, the area of your responsibility what's the best growth opportunity? We all think of China, but that's been fits and starts for a lot of people. >> Yeah, yeah I think we've got multiple opportunities, you can look at it a few ways. You can look at it geographically, and you would say China. You can look at Eastern Europe, and you can look at Africa. There's a ton of opportunity in those regions, geographically. Interestingly we are also at a point where I think the Nordics, and we've got a very solid base Historically, and so on. But we probably haven't put enough focus on there in recent times, that the opportunities are really scaled in Nordics is really quite significant. And then they can look at it from a Product Perspective. So for example, we have, what we believe to be World Leading, and actually a Company called Gartner would equally agree with us. Enterprise Asset Management, EAM, that's a product suite that can fit across all of our industries. I think that could well be the significant growth area for us across the entire six regions. And it's a huge focus for us here at the conference actually. So we can do it by product, EAM, Healthcare, or by Region. I think Eastern Europe, China, and Africa, as well as the Nordics. >> And the other big opportunity is just share gains, market share gains, particularly in Europe, I would think, with your background. >> Yup. Completely, I mean, that's why I said, it's really interesting that we are winning market share in Germany. Who'd of thought that a few years ago? That's a big market, I mean, Germany, U.K., France, Italy. They're huge. Right, I mean U.K., is what, Sixty-Five Million People? It's a big economy, so we've got many of the worlds G7, in our backyard. So we just really need to double down on those, and give them the opportunities to grow that we need. >> And just back to Japan for a second. Japan has traction, it takes a long time to crack Japan. I know it first from personal experiences. >> Yeah, Okay, Interesting. >> Yeah you just got to go many many times and meet people. >> That's it, Right. And it's a different culture, of when you think they're saying yes and you think they're there, that's just yes to the next step. (laughter) >> Alright, so it does take time to get there. We've actually cracked it to some extent, that we've now got some solid referenceability, and some good wind. We need local leaders in Japan, to really crack the code there. >> And then once you're in, you're in. >> I think that once you've proven yourself, it's a lot of word of mouth and referencing. >> Well I hope you get home this weekend. Are you headed home? >> Yes! Actually I'm lucky enough. My Wife is originally from Chicago. So she and our Daughter have come over for the weekend, to go sight seeing in Washington. So that'll be fun. So we'll be going home on Sunday. >> Your adopted home for the weekend then. >> That's exactly right. >> Well we'll talk Guinness in just a bit. Thanks for the time though, we appreciate it. >> Thank you Gentlemen. >> Good to see you, Sir. Alright, back with more here from Inforum 2018, and you're watching Live, on theCube, here in D.C. (electronic music)

from Seattle Washington extracting the signal from the noise it's the cube on the ground at OpenStack days Seattle 2015 now here's your host John furrier hello and welcome to Seattle this is a special Q presentation cube on the ground OTG we call it on the ground we go out to the event and talk to all the thought leader I'm John far with the QNX arendelle with SolidFire also the famous cloudcast podcast great to see you again I know good to see John cloudcast is a hot podcast all the thought leaders are listening customers are listening guys are really the signal out there on cloud and also SolidFire growing yes all flash storage you gotta kick in some but they're always keeping tabs on you guys new approach the cloud what's going on with cloud give us the update of OpenStack what's the bottom line I mean is it failing is it winning is it growing is it stalled what do we expect to see ya know so it's at an interesting point because it absolutely is growing but it still has some operational challenges that's the number one thing we're seeing right now is actually just talking to some folks in the hall of common theme is you're still trying to figure how to upgrade it easily still figuring how to operate it easily right and the gentleman from canonical made that made the the reference you know ketchup right everyone has the in green stuff in your kitchen but no one makes their ketchup right and I thought that was fantastic because it's you know everyone's kind of looking for that easy button and it's starting to show up you know you've got you the blue box folks you've got the platform nine folks you've got some interesting startups actually coming into the OpenStack space which shows us there is some definitely some innovation and some new things going on but it's because of the challenges we faced until now the question is the ketchup good I mean is that last ingredient going to make it so that it's not too watery I mean is Cooper Nettie's is containers so truly is it good ketchup and yeah what's the next was the key ingredient well yeah and that's that's a fantastic point because we are at this inflection point where OpenStack was a necessary next that without a doubt we had to get that first step into cloud native applications had to do it but where we're going with Mesa sand cabrion at ease with mesa con going on down the street is that the true next evolution is it like the OpenStack Murano project where you're kind of getting containers built into OpenStack we'll have to wait and see because that anytime you talk to burn a DS anytime you talk Mesa that's is so cutting edge so at this point I'm still Silicon Valley home so OpenStack obviously meme of a sec being dead is kind of falls we saw some things happen last year so it opens dec sv some people aren't going to be there this year that were there last year yes either went out of business or executives have left but yet a lot of dynamics going on palma risks is stepping down as CEO of cloud pivotal cloud foundry cleans 100 million dollars in revenue leather to see those books but but the question now see amazon is doing their thing and but it's really a dynamic market right now so so it's there yes the question is who's doing what in revenue what's the numbers is it all professional surgery and cloud found your hundred million that's a huge number i just is that all professional services do they actually selling product yeah and that's a fantastic moment because the m the cloud cast we saw this consolidation coming for a long time we really started covering OpenStack about four years ago and we were just waiting for at some point you know when we first started there was 15 plus startups in the OpenStack space and there just wasn't enough customers there there wasn't enough revenue there and you just saw this natural consolidation come to a head last year and yeah some are no longer here a lot of them were sucked up into the various vendors and what you're seeing now is especially at the OpenStack summits and like these events here you have a much more mature ecosystem it's almost like the new legacy of you know all of these vendors are there they're all mature they're trying to play in this space they're trying to make money off of it and time will tell and then it's an evolution anybody brought to point you right over the easy button what is that easy button now is it just deployment in a box is it like just give me prefabricated OpenStack is it tooling is it management we're hearing a lot of different things yeah and I think time will tell but I do think the preference we're seeing in our customers is definitely moving towards that easy button as a service if you will of some of those companies where the operations have open stack because it hasn't gotten easier at the same level of the adoption people are looking to what is that next step if the operations were to get easier i don't think we'd see that market be as popular as it is right now is it is the market still in early adopter that's the thing that's on my mind has it crossed over yet I think it has I think we're at least in OpenStack context where we're beyond early adopter phase there is a lot of folks out there using it but what's interesting is is to kind of go back around to the previous question a little bit the district's taken off like I think they probably should have most of the large customers I've seen are still roll your own and it is still that staff of Engineers really keeping up and running and again because the what was the value-added the distributions we're starting to see the Red Hat distribution get a you know to that point where we're getting good adoption of that we're seeing the marantis one with all the fuel work they're doing we're getting good adoption with that so the question on adoption is it's either not Oh people aren't aware of it or the product sucks so is it mix of both is it awareness issue or is it a product issue oh that's a great question i think it's a it's a question of differentiation I don't know that it's differentiated enough at this point in time it's it's you know if you go build your own versus you farm it out if you will completely big differences right but it's almost like shades who could be fear yeah it could be a third dimension you could absolutely be fear well that's the thing you've been the issue solution of operators we hear a lot of an operator so the question is if I'm an engineering team I might want to have my tire kickers go through the motions and that's not necessary approval con so that's just core competency building so that fear could be an issue of cork opera so maybe they're aware of it maybe the products decent maybe it's just that their team's not core enough to do that yeah when it comes to the folks in house um yeah again going back to the easy button what we really need in the opposite community is that POC in a box and that's probably there today don't get me wrong but but everyone sees that POC in a box but then they're afraid of does that mean can I scale it out to 100 nodes a thousand nodes and will it be as easy and it's almost gotten a reputation now of know and and so how do we get it to grow to 100 notes thousand nodes whatever you want and do the business value out of I don't need a big staff of people and how do I get you know the underlying infrastructure to be simpler at the end of the day a little cloud cast we got going on here I mean I think in my opinion my opinion I think it's just a matter of the customers having the ability to execute and have the total cost of ownership equation nailed I think there's still this gray area of there's no straight and narrow on on the execution what's my cost i'm gonna be locked into that vendor what's going to be the lock-in oh my god yeah the shark fin the iceberg whatever metaphor you want to use yes no is that reading is their visibility on the ownership side because downstream what's the impact well it what's interesting there too is the biggest thing I'm seeing is for again from an operation standpoint how do we make this as simple as possible because what happens is you have this weird convoluted thing if you have the whole legacy apps versus cloud native apps and you take that put it aside for a second rank if we take that and put it aside well what what do they really want doesn't matter what kind of app it is well the developers want API driven infrastructure you can call it cloud but the end of the day it's it's an infrastructure that's driven by api's and then as simple as possible you know being able to really guarantee the uptime guarantee the performance and that's where OpenStack at times it gets a bad rap I don't and I'm not even necessarily agreeing with that might not even be worthy of a bad rap in that agreed absolutely because there are known customers out there that are doing it and doing it very well but again is how do you get beyond that room well Stu miniman I'm Wikibon and Brian Grace Lee and now Wikibon and and I Robin conversation about this and I think Dave vellante even chimed in and we were debating was up across the board different opinions yes what the hell is cloud native app mean you know is it is amazonas cloudy of course they're cloud Facebook a cloud native app okay but what does that mean for enterprises that mean that the app was built for just API so to me it just doesn't seen it's been a lot of there's not a lot of cloud native apps out there right now or are now what is a cloud yeah and and it's a fantastic question and my opinion have always been you know there's there was this kind of trend in the industry how do I take these legacy apps and make them cloud native well the simple answer is you don't the way I look at it is it's really more of like a star of the old build the new mentality you you want to maintain those legacy systems but the same time as those kind of age off the books if you will you're going to have to build a new infrastructure so if you're going to build new infrastructure you might as well build it the new way but that has to happen over time that is not something that happens you know most businesses out there today they don't do technology for the sake of technology there has to be a business reason and a business driver if that legacy app is still out there making them money they're going to keep using I not untrue to your point it's you cloud native is the future the soil asked of you know yeah yield some fruit on that tree if you will so that's going to take some time exactly so so you know I very much see this as a longer tail that most people would like without a doubt it is just a matter of how are we going to get their long-term and yeah there's lots of terminology and the cloud native and what does that mean big picture and architectural II that's all solved it's getting the businesses to rewrite the apps and really give them Aaron we're in Seattle right now on the ground so quickly describe to the folks out there what's the vibe here what's it like a Seattle it's been it is so it's been interesting I've been in here since tuesday now and i've done lenox con cloudstack day OpenStack day and mesa con all in the in three days now so it's what did you learn yeah it's been a world in 30-second I know yeah so it the biggest thing is there is still a lot of confusion in yes people are starting to get legacy versus cloud native but when it comes to which technologies do i use why would i use them what are the actual business drivers to actually go adopt some of these new technologies massive amounts of confusion around that and that's probably the biggest reason for you know trying to get knowledge out in the industry without a doubt okay we are OTG on the ground this is the cube in Seattle I'm John for thanks for watching and all the coverage here at OpenStack innovation day thanks for watching

I see a number of hands in in Orlando so it will come over there right there yeah I John far is SiliconANGLE thanks for having us again guys appreciate it one of the things and that last question was some of my question about the database and one of things we're finding here in the cube this week is extracting out that there's a misconception and it's not just a database on us there's more to it so the question is and the other thing that we found out is it's not just for large SI p companies that have your stuff it's maybe new business opportunities so can you guys elaborate on those new business opportunities may be getting competitive displacements around say Oracle or and then just greenfield new opportunities because analytics is capturing the world by storm big data is is mainstream you guys have been kind of hiding behind that not putting that out forward enough in my opinion but want to get your take on new opportunities so I think that's a great question and I think the biggest misperception at the beginning was that Hannah is for AP stuff and you just mentioned that as well the first customers using Hana we're using Hannah for data that would never go in an essay p system like DNA data in healthcare or seismic data and oil and gas exploration this is not typical erp stuff and how to proved its value and and these examples we have we have customers who proved a hundred thousand times faster response times on Hannah they are all in the category of non SI p big problems to solve now solvable and i see three applications for this there is the traditional SI p where we can radically accelerate and reduce costs of ownership at the same time then you have these optimization opportunities which is all about business predictive analytics big data and then i think there's a third category chiz about solving problems that so far were unsolvable and we are pursuing all three of them so you're right Hannah is much more than a database I try to argue it's a unified next generation platform for business and can do all these three things yesterday my keynote I had a company by name under armour on the panel and he went from 281 million to you know a few billion because he could expand on a common platform globally and when he adds new categories of business it simply snaps on to a common platform and everybody knows what to do in its scales I had a meeting with the CEO yesterday and this is a very common conversation he grew his business by acquisition and now he's got a Federation of a whole bunch of companies and he feels like a holding company what he wants to do is consolidate these businesses onto a common platform he won't do it overnight because you can't shut down businesses but the vision over the next few years is consolidate everything onto one common SI p platform and take all the databases out and standardize everything on Hana because he loves the vision of not just transactional information that's great but it's the wisdom of the crowds that he's going to get from social and the predictive analytics that's built right into Hana so now he's got a real time business he can get it on a common platform everybody will have a common mobile architecture and the vision is to put it into the Hana Enterprise Cloud and let s ap run it that is a very common conversation that we're having right now and they're very disillusioned out there by the alternatives because they may you know have been best to breed in their day but now they figured out years later they may be best but they never breed it the mclaren story is similar right they start with the business we'd they're running their company but then we do a Formula One Hana based app that's not a typical enterprise application it takes data from 140 sensors on the car and gives you the ability to change outcomes during a one and a half hour race now for that you need real-time pneus and and and the decision they made now is to say okay I'm running my business on SI p a Formula One car changes its bill a material in average every 20 minutes that's how fast they change the engineering of every car otherwise they cannot keep up with competition and so you run that complexity on ASAP on Hannah and now you just extend that Hannah to include all this other data from the cars and you build new apps on top that solve different problems one platform all problems solved for company and by the way they brought that into the Hana Enterprise Cloud right because they don't want to deal with infrastructure they want to deal with cars and competition in Formula One races