>>We're back at the red hat summit, 2022, the Cube's continuous coverage. This is day one. We're here all day tomorrow as well. My name is Dave LAN. I'm here with Paul Gillon. Matt Hicks is here. He's executive vice president of products and technologies at red hat. Matt. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Nice to see you face to >>Face. Thanks. Thanks Dave. Thanks fall. It's uh, good to be here. >>So you took a different tack with your, uh, keynote today, had a homage to ate a love lace and Serena VA Ramian, which was kind of cool. And your, your point was they weren't noted at their time and nobody was there to build on their early ideas. I mean, ate a lovely, I think it was a century before, right. Ram illusion was a, you know, decade plus, but, and you tied that to open source. You can give us your kind of bumper sticker of your premise there. >>Yeah. You know, I think I have a unique seat in this from red hat where we see, we see new engineers that come in that sort of compete on a world stage and open source and the, the best, which is easy to track just in contributions are not necessarily from the background you would expect them from. And, and it, for me, it's always really inspiring. Like you have this potential in, in people and open source is a great model for getting that out. We told the history story, cuz it, I think when you look over history, just some of that potential that's been ignored before. Um, sure. It's happening right now. But getting that tied into open source models, we think can hopefully let us tap into a little more than, than we have in the past. So >>Greatly. So when you're thinking about innovation and specific to open source, is it a case where I wonder, I really know the history here of open source. Maybe you can educate me. Is it the case where open source observes, uh, a de factacto standard let's say, or some other proprietary approach and says, Hey, we can build that in open and that's so the, the inspiration, or is it an innovation flywheel that just invents? >>I think it's both at this stage. So in the, in the early days, if you take something like Linux, it was a little more of, you know, there was the famous memo of like, this is gonna be a hobbyist project. We're just gonna light up X 86 hardware and have an operating system we can work with. That was a little more of like this standards were there, but it was, can we just build a better operating system with it, be >>Better than Unix cuz would live up to the promise of units. >>That's right. Where in Unix you had some standardization to models, but it wasn't open in that same sense. Uh, Linux has gone well beyond a hobbyist project at this point. Uh, but that was maybe that clone model, um, to units these days though, if you take something like Kubernetes or take something like Ansible, that's just more pure innovation, you didn't necessarily have a Kubernetes model that you're building a better version of it was distributed computing and how can we really make that tick and, um, bring a lot of great minds into that to build it. Um, so I think you see both of 'em, which is it's one of the things that makes open source fun. Like it, it has a broad reach at this point. >>There's one major area of software that opensource has not penetrated yet. And that is applications. I mean, we, there have been, you know, sugar CRM there have been open E R P applications and, and such, none of them really taken off and in fact tend to be drawn back to being proprietary. Why do you suppose opensource has been limited to infrastructure and has hasn't branched out further? >>Yeah, I think part of it is, uh, where can you find a, a model where lots of different companies are, are comfortable contributing into, if you have one solution and one domain from one company you're gonna struggle more getting a real vibrant community built around that. When you pick an area like infrastructure or core platforms, you have a lot of hardware providers, the use cases span from traditional apps to AI. You have a lot of places to run that it's a massive companies. So >>Volume really, it, >>It really is. You just have an interest that spans beyond companies and that's where we've seen open source projects really pick up and build critical mass. How about crypto >>Dows? I mean, that's right. Isn't that the, a form of open source? I mean, is it, isn't that the application really what exactly what you're talking about? It is true or >>It, well, if you look at cryptography encryption algorithms even go to, um, quantum going forward, I think a lot of quantum access will be driven in an open source model. The machines themselves, uh, will be machines, but things like kids kit, uh, that is how most people will access that. So it is a powerful model for getting into areas that are, um, pretty bleeding edge on it as well. >>We were talking, go ahead. We were talking before Andy mentioned that hardware and software increasingly intersecting. That was the theme we heard at the, at the keynote this morning. Yeah. Why do you believe that's happening and how do you see that? How does that affect what you do? >>Uh, I, I think the reason that's happening is there is a push to make decisions closer and closer to users on it because on one side, like law of physics and then on the other of it's just a better experience for it. And so whether that is in transportation or it's in telecommunications, so you see this push outside of data centers to be able to get at that data locally for it. Uh, but if that's the draw, I think also we're seeing hardware architectures are changing. There are, um, standards like arm that are lower power that lets you run pretty powerful compute at the edge as well. And I think it's that combination saying we can do a lot at the edge now and that actually benefits us building user experiences in a lot of different domains is, is making this pull to the edge, uh, really quickly. But it's, it's a, it's an exciting time to be seeing that happening >>And, and, and pretty powerful is almost an understatement. When you think about what the innovations that are going on. Right. I mean, in, in, in, in particular, at the edge mm-hmm, <affirmative>, I mean, you're seeing Moore's law be blown. Everybody says Moore's law is dead, but you're seeing the performance of when you combine the GPU and the CPU and the NPU and the Excel. I mean, it blows away anything we've historically known. Yeah. So you think about the innovations in software that occurred as a result of Moore's law. What are the new beachheads that we could potentially see in open source? >>I think when you start taking the, um, AI patterns on this and AI is a broad space, but if you go even to like machine learning of optimization type use cases, you start, uh, leveraging how you're gonna train those models, which gets you into, you know, CPUs and GPU and TPUs in that world. And then you also have the, how am I gonna take that train model, put it on a really lightweight device and efficiently ask that model questions. And that gets you into a different architecture design. Uh, but that combination, I think we're gonna see these domains build differently where you have mass compute training type capabilities, and then push that as close to the user, as you can, to make decisions that are more dynamic than traditional codes. >>So a lot of the AI that's done today is modeling that's done in the cloud. Yep. And what you're talking about at the edge, and you think about, you know, vehicles is real time influencing. Yep. And that's, that's massive amounts of data. It's a different architecture. Right. And requires different hardware presumably and different software. So, and you guys, well, Linux is obviously there. Yeah. >>That's, that is the, where we get excited about things like the GM announcement you are in the square, in that, um, aspect of running compute right at the end user and actually dealing with sensor and data, that's changing there to help, you know, in this case, like driver's assistance capabilities with it. But I think that the innovation we'll see in that space will be limitless on it. So it's, it's a nice combination of it too. And you'll still have traditional applications that are gonna use those models. I think of it almost as it's like the new middleware, we have our traditional middleware techniques that we know and patterns. Um, they will actually be augmented with things like, um, machine learning models and those capabilities to just be more dynamic. So it's a fun time right now seeing >>That conversion a lot of data too. And again, I wonder how much of that is even gonna be persisted prob probably enough, cuz there's gonna be so much of it, how much it'll come back to the cloud a lot, but maybe not most of it, but it's still massive amounts relative to what we've seen before >>It is. And this is, you know, you've heard our announcement around OpenShift streams in those capabilities. So in red hat, what we do, we will always focus on hybrid with it because a lot of that data it'll be dropped at the edge cuz you won't need it, but the data you act on and the data you need, you will probably need at your indice and in your cloud. And maybe even on premise and capabilities like Kafka and the ability to pick and stream and stay consistent. We think there's a set of really exciting services to be able to enable that class of development where, um, hopefully we'll be at the center of, of that. >>You, you announced, uh, today an agreement with GM, uh, to, to build on their all to five platform, uh, auto industry, very proprietary historically, uh, with their technology. Do you think that this is an opportunity to crank that open? >>A absolutely. I think in, I've been involved with opensource for, for a while, but I think all of them started in a very proprietary model. And then you get to a tipping point where open source models can just unlock more innovation than proprietary models and you see 'em tip and flip. And I think in the automotive industry and actually in a lot of other industries, the capabilities of being able to combine hardware and software fast with the latest capabilities, it'll drive more innovation than just sticking to proprietary models. So yeah, I believe it will be one of many things to come there. >>You've been involved in open surf for a while. Like how long of a while people must joke about when they look at you, Matt, they must say, oh, did you start when you were five? Yeah. >>It's >>Uh, you get that a lot. >>I, I do, uh, it's my, my children, I think aged me a bit, but uh, but yeah, for me it was the mid nineties. That's when I started with, uh, with open source. >>It was uh, wow. So >>It's been a long, long >>Run. You made the statement in your keynote, that software development is, is, is messy. I presumably part of your job is to make it less messy. But now we talk about all this, these new beachheads, this new new innovations, a lot of it's unknown. Yeah. And it could be really messy. So who are the, who is there a new breed of developer that's emerging? Are they gonna come over from the cloud developers or is it the, is it the OT crowd and the, and the OT crowd? That's gonna be the new developers. >>I, I wish I knew, but I would say, I think you, I do think you'll get to almost like a laws of physics type challenge where you won't learn everything. You're not gonna know, uh, the depths of 5g implementation and Kubernetes and Linux on that. And so for us, this is where ecosystem providers are really, really critical where you have to know your intersection points, but you also have to partner really well to actually drive innovation in some of these spaces cuz uh, the domains themselves are massive on it. So our areas we're gonna know hybrid, we're gonna know, you know, open source based platforms to enable hybrid. And then we're gonna partner with companies that know their domains and industries really well to bring solutions to customers. So >>I'm curious about partnering, uh, cuz Paul cor may mentioned that as well as, as being critical, do you have sort of a template for partnering or is each partnership unique? >>Um, >>I think at this point, uh, the market's changing so fast that, uh, we do have templates of, uh, who are you going to embed solutions with? Who are you going to co-sell with? And co-create uh, the challenge in technology though, is it shifts so quickly. If you go back five years, maybe even 10 years, public cloud probably wasn't as dominant. Um, as it is now, now we're starting to see the uptick of edge solutions, probably being, having as much draw as public cloud. And so I think for us, the partnership follows the innovation on those curves and finding the right model where that works for customers is the key thing for us. But I wish there was more of a pattern. We could say it stays stable for decades, but I think it changes with the market on, we do that. >>But you know, it's funny cuz you you've, you see every 15 years or so the industry gets disrupted. I mean we certainly saw it with mainframes and PC and then the internet and then the cloud, uh, you guys have kind of been there. Well Linux throughout, I mean, okay. It built the, built the internet, built the cloud, it's building the edge. So it's almost, I don't wanna say your disruption proof cause that's just, that's gonna jinx you, but, but in, but you've architected the products in a way that they're compatible with these new errors. Mm-hmm <affirmative> of industry, >>Everything needs an operating >>System. Everything needs an operating system, but you've seen operating systems come and go, you know, and, and Linux has survived so many different waves. Why, how >>You know, I, I think for us, when you see open source projects, they definitely get to a critical mass where you have so much contribution, so much innovation there that they're gonna be able to follow the trends pretty well. If you look at a Linux, whatever the next hardware innovation that comes out is Linux has enough gravity that, um, it's open, it's successful, you're gonna design to it. The capability will be there. I think you're seeing similar things in Kubernetes now where if you're going to try to drive application innovation, it is a model that gives you a ton of reach. You have thousands of contributors. That's been our model though is find those projects be influential in, 'em be able to drive value in life cycles. But I think it's that open source model that gives us the durability where it can keep changing and tracking to new patterns. So, so >>Yeah, there's been a lot of open source that wasn't able to sustain. So I think you guys obviously have a magic formula. That's true. >>We, there is a, there is some art to picking, I think millions of projects. Uh, but you've gotta watch for that. >>Yeah. Open source is also a place place where failed products go to die. Yeah. <laugh> so you have to be sure you're not, you're not in that corner. >>Yeah. Well >>Look at Kubernetes. I mean the fact that that actually happened is it's astounding to me when you think about it, I mean even red hat was ready to go on a different path. What if that had happened? Who knows? Maybe it never would've maybe to your point about Ava Lovelace, maybe it would've taken a decade to, or run revolution. >>You know, I think in some of these you have to, you have to watch really closely. We obviously have a lot of signals of what will make good long term health. And I, I don't think everyone looks at those the same. We look at 'em from trademark controls and how foundations are structured and um, who the contributors are and the spread of that. And it's not perfect. But I think for us, you have to have those that longevity built in there where you will have a spike of popularity that has the tendency to just, um, fall apart on it. So we've been yeah. Doing that pretty >>Well conditions for a long life is something that's a that's maybe it's an art form. I don't know if it's a data form. It's a culture. Maybe, maybe it's >>Cultural. Yeah. Probably a combination some days I think I'm like this could part art, part science. Yeah. But, uh, but it's certainly a fun space to be in and see that happen. It, um, yeah, it's inspiring to me. Yeah. >>Matt Hicks. Great to have you back on the cube and uh, good job on the keynote really, um, interesting angle that you took. So >>Congratulations. Thanks for having me. >>Yeah. You're very welcome. All right. Keep it right there. Dave ante for Paul Gillon red hat summit, 2022 from Boston. You're watching the cube.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today, having a Cube Conversation, you know, with the COVID situation going on we've had to change our business and go pretty much 100% digital. And as part of that process, we wanted to reach out to our community, and talk to some of the leaders out there, because I think leadership in troubling times is even more amplified in it's importance. So we're excited to be joined today by two leaders in our community. First one being John Chambers, a very familiar face from many, many years at Cisco, who's now the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. John, great to see you. >> Jeff, it's a pleasure to be with you again. >> Absolutely. And joining him is Umesh Sachdev, he's the co-founder and CEO of Uniphore. First time on theCUBE, Umesh, great to meet you. >> Jeff, thank you for having me, it's great to be with you. >> You as well, and I had one of your great people on the other day, talking about CX, and I think CX is the whole solution. Why did Uber beat cabs, do you want to stand on a corner and raise your hand in the rain? Or do you want to know when the guy's going to come pick you up, in just a couple minutes? So anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it. John, one of your things, that you talked about last time we talked, I think it was in October, wow how the world has changed. >> Yes. >> Is about having a playbook, and really, you know, kind of thinking about what you want to do before it's time to actually do it, and having some type of a script, and some type of direction, and some type of structure, as to how you respond to situations. Well there's nothing like a disaster to really fire off, you know, the need to shift gears, and go to kind of into a playbook mode. So I wonder if you could share with the viewers, kind of what is your playbook, you've been through a couple of these bumps. Not necessarily like COVID-19, but you've seen a couple bumps over your career. >> So it's my pleasure Jeff. What I'll do is kind of outline how I believe you use an innovation playbook on everything from acquisitions, to digitizing a company, to dealing with crisis. Let's focus on the playbook for crisis. You are right, and I'm not talking about my age, (John laughing) but this is my sixth financial crisis, and been through the late 1990s with the Asian financial crisis, came out of it even stronger at Cisco. Like everybody else we got knocked down in the 2001 tech bubble, came back from it even stronger. Then in 2008, 2009, Great Recession. We came through that one very, very strong, and we saw that one coming. It's my fourth major health crisis. Some of them turned out to be pretty small. I was in Mexico when the bird pandemic hit, with the President of Mexico, when we thought it was going to be terrible. We literally had to cancel the meetings that evening. That's why Cisco built the PLAR Presence. I was in Brazil for the issue with the Zika virus, that never really developed much, and the Olympics went on there, and I only saw one mosquito during the event. It bit me. But what I'm sharing with you is I've seen this movie again and again. And then, with supply chain, which not many people were talking about yet, supply chain crisis, like we saw in Japan with the Tsunami. What's happening this time is you're seeing all three at one time, and they're occurring even faster. So the playbook is pretty simple in crisis management, and then it would be fun to put Umesh on the spot and say how closely did you follow it? Did you agree with issues, or did you disagree, et cetera, on it. Now I won't mention, Umesh, that you've got a review coming up shortly from your board, so that should not affect your answer at all. But the first playbook is being realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much was market. This one's largely market, but if you had problems before, you got to address them at the same time. The second thing is what are the five to seven things that are material, what you're going to do to lead through this crisis. That's everything from expense management, to cash preservation. It's about how do you interface to your employees, and how do you build on culture. It's about how do you interface to your customers as they change from their top priority being growth and innovation, to a top priority being cost savings, and the ability to really keep their current revenue streams from churning and moving. And it's about literally, how do make your big bets for what you want to look like as you move out of this market. Then it's how do you communicate that to your employees, to your shareholders, to your customers, to your partners. Painting the picture of what you look like as you come out. As basic as that sounds, that's what crisis management is all about. Don't hide, be visible, CEOs should take the role on implementing that playbook. Umesh to you, do you agree? And have fun with it a little bit, I like the give and take. >> I want to see the playbook, do you have it there, just below the camera? (Jeff laughing) >> I have it right here by my side. I will tell you, Jeff, in crisis times and difficult times like these, you count all the things that go right for you, you count your blessings. And one of the blessings that I have, as a CEO, is to have John Chambers as my mentor, by my side, sharing not just the learning that he had through the crisis, but talking through this, with me on a regular basis. I've read John's book more than a few times, I bet more than anybody in the world, I've read it over and over. And that, to me, is preparation going into this mode. One of the things that John has always taught me is when times get difficult, you get calmer than usual. It's one thing that when you're cruising on the freeway and you're asked to put the brakes, but it's quite another when you're in rocket ship, and accelerating, which is what my company situation was in the month of January. We were coming out of a year of 300% growth, we were driving towards another 300% growth, hiring tremendously, at a high pace. Winning customers at a high pace, and then this hit us. And so what I had to do, from a playbook perspective, is, you know, take a deep breath, and just for a couple of days, just slow down, and calmly look at the situation. My first few steps were, I reached out to 15 of our top customers, the CEOs, and give them calls, and said let's just talk about what you're seeing, and what we are observing in our business. We get a sense of where they are in their businesses. We had the benefit, my co-founder works out of Singapore, and runs our Asia business. We had the benefit of picking up the sign probably a month before everyone else did it in the U.S. I was with John in Australia, and I was telling John that "John, something unusual is happening, "a couple of our customers in these countries in Asia "are starting to tell us they would do the deal "a quarter later." And it's one thing when one of them says it, it's another when six of them say it together. And John obviously has seen this movie, he could connect the dots early. He told me to prepare, he told the rest of the portfolio companies that are in his investment group to start preparing. We then went to the playbook that John spoke of, being visible. For me, culture and communication take front seat. We have employees in ten different countries, we have offices, and very quickly, even before the governments mandated, we had all of them work, you know, go work from home, and be remote, because employee safety and health was the number one priority. We did our first virtual all-hands meeting on Zoom. We had about 240 people join in from around the world. And my job as CEO, usually our all-hands meeting were different functional leaders, different people in the group talk to the team about their initiatives. This all-hands was almost entirely run by me, addressing the whole company about what's going to be the situation from my lens, what have we learned. Be very factual. At the same time, communicating to the team that because of the fact that we raised our funding the last year, it was a good amount of money, we still have a lot of that in the bank, so we going to be very secure. At the same time, our customers are probably going to need us more than ever. Call centers are in more demand than ever, people can't walk up to a bank branch, they can't go up to a hospital without taking an appointment. So the first thing everyone is doing is trying to reach call centers. There aren't enough people, and anyways the work force that call centers have around the world, are 50% working from home, so the capacity has dropped. So our responsibility almost, is to step up, and have our AI and automation products available to as many call centers as we can. So as we are planning our own business continuity, and making sure every single employee is safe, the message to my team was we also have to be aggressive and making sure we are more out there, and more available, to our customers, that would also mean business growth for us. But first, and foremost is for us to be responsible citizens, and just make it available where it's needed. As we did that, I quickly went back to my leadership team, and again, the learning from John is usually it's more of a consensus driven approach, we go around the table, talk about a topic for a couple of hours, get the consensus, and move out of the room. My leadership meetings, they have become more frequent, we get together once a week, on video call with my executive leaders, and it's largely these days run by me. I broke down the team into five different war rooms, with different objectives. One of them we called it the preservation, we said one leader, supported by others will take the responsibility of making sure every single employee, their families, and our current customers, are addressed, taken care of. So we made somebody lead that group. Another group was made responsible for growth. Business needs to, you know, in a company that's growing at 300%, and we still have the opportunity, because call centers need us more than ever, we wanted to make sure we are responding to growth, and not just hunkering down, and, you know, ignoring the opportunity. So we had a second war room take care of the growth. And a third war room, lead by the head of finance, to look at all the financial scenarios, do the stress tests, and see if we are going to be ready for any eventuality that's going to come. Because, you know, we have a huge amount of people, who work at Uniphore around the world, and we wanted to make sure their well being is taken care of. So from being over communicative, to the team and customers, and being out there personally, to making sure we break down the teams. We have tremendous talent, and we let different people, set of people, run different set of priorities, and report back to me more frequently. And now, as we have settled into this rhythm, Jeff, you know, as we've been in, at least in the Bay area here, we've been shelter in place for about a month now. As we are in the rhythm, we are beginning to do virtual happy hours, every Thursday evening. Right after this call, I get together with my team with a glass of wine, and we get together, we talk every but work, and every employee, it's not divided by functions, or leadership, and we are getting the rhythm back into the organization. So we've gone and adjusted in the crisis, I would say very well. And the business is just humming along, as we had anticipated, going into this crisis. But I would say, if I didn't have John by my side, if I hadn't read his book, the number of times that I have, every plane ride we've done together, every place we've gone together, John has spoken about war stories. About the 2001, about 2008, and until you face the first one of your own, just like I did right now, you don't appreciate when John says leadership is lonely. But having him by our side makes it easier. >> Well I'm sure he's told you the Jack Welch story, right? That you've quoted before, John, where Jack told you that you're not really a good leader, yet, until you've been tested, right. So you go through some tough stuff, it's not that hard to lead on an upward to the right curve, it's when things get a little challenging that the real leadership shines through. >> Completely agree, and Jack said it the best, we were on our way to becoming the most valuable company in the world, he looked me in the eye and said "John, you have a very good company." And I knew he was about to give me a teaching moment, and I said "What does it take to have a great one?" He said a near death experience. And I thought I did that in '97, and some of the other management, and he said, "No, it's when you went through something "like we went through in 2001, "which many of our peers did die in." And we were knocked down really hard. When we came back from it, you get better. But what you see in Umesh is a very humble, young CEO. I have to remember he's only 34 years old, because his maturity is like he's 50, and he's seen it before. As you tell, he's like a sponge on learning, and he doesn't mind challenging. And what what he didn't say, in his humbleness, is they had the best month in March ever. And again, well over 300% versus the same quarter a year ago. So it shows you, if you're in the right spot, i.e. artificial intelligence, i.e. cost savings, i.e. customer relationship with their customers, how you can grow even during the tough times, and perhaps set a bold vision, based upon facts and a execution plan that very few companies will be able to deliver on today. So off to a great start, and you can see why I'm so honored and proud to be his strategic partner, and his coach. >> Well it's interesting, right, the human toll of this crisis is horrible, and there's a lot of people getting sick, and a lot of people are dying, and all the estimations are a lot more are going to die this month, as hopefully we get over the hump of some of these curves. So that aside, you know, we're here talking kind of more about the, kind of, the business of this thing. And it's really interesting kind of what a catalyst COVID has become, in terms of digital transformation. You know, we've been talking about new ways to work for years, and years, and years, and digital transformation, and all these kind of things. You mentioned the Cisco telepresence was out years, and decades ago. I mean I worked in Mitsubishi, we had a phone camera in 1986, I looked it up today, it was ridiculous, didn't work. But now, it's here, right. Now working from home is here. Umesh mentioned, you know, these huge call centers, now everybody's got to go home. Do they have infrastructure to go home? Do they have a place to work at home? Do they have support to go home? Teachers are now being forced, from K-12, and I know it's a hot topic for you, John, to teach from home. Teach on Zoom, with no time to prep, no time to really think it through. It's just like the kids aren't coming back, we got to learn it. You know I think this is such a transformational moment, and to your point, if this goes on for weeks, and weeks, and months, and months, which I think we all are in agreement that it will. I think you said, John, you know, many, many quarters. As people get new habits, and get into this new flow, I don't think they're going to go back back to the old ways. So I think it's a real, you know, kind of forcing function for digital transformation. And it's, you can't, you can't sit on the sidelines, cause your people can't come to the office anymore. >> So you've raised a number of questions, and I'll let Umesh handle the tough part of it. I will answer the easy part, which is I think this is the new normal. And I think it's here now, and the question is are you ready for it. And as you think about what we're really saying is the video sessions will become such an integral part of our daily lives, that we will not go back to having to do 90% of our work physically. Today alone I've done seven major group meetings, on Zoom, and Google Hangouts, and Cisco Webex. I've done six meetings with individuals, or the key CEOs of my portfolio. So that part is here to stay. Now what's going to be fascinating is does that also lead into digitization of our company, or do the companies make the mistake of saying I'm going to use this piece, because it's so obvious, and I get it, in terms of effectiveness, but I'm not going to change the other things in my normal work, in my normal business. This is why, unfortunately, I think you will see, we originally said, Jeff, you remember, 40% maybe as high as 45% of the Fortune 500 wouldn't exist in a decade. And perhaps 70% of the start-ups wouldn't exist in a decade, that are venture capital backed. I now think, unfortunately, you're going to see 20-35% of the start-ups not exist in 2 years, and I think it's going to shock you with the number of Fortune 500 companies that do not make this transition. So where you're leading this, that I completely agree with, is the ability to take this terrible event, with all of the issues, and again thank our healthcare workers for what they've been able to do to help so many people, and deal with the world the way it is. As my parents who are doctors taught me to do, not the way we wish it was. And then get your facts, prepare for the changes, and get ready for the future. The key would be how many companies do this. On the area Umesh has responsibility for, customer experience, I think you're going to see almost all companies focus on that. So it can be an example of perhaps how large companies learn to use the new technology, not just video capability, but AI, assistance for the agents, and then once they get the feel for it, just like we got the feel for these meetings, change their rhythm entirely. It was a dinner in New York, virtually, when we stopped, six weeks ago, traveling, that was supposed to be a bunch of board meetings, customer meetings, that was easy. But we were supposed to have a dinner with Shake Shack's CEO, and we were supposed to have him come out and show how he does cool innovation. We had a bunch of enterprise companies, and a bunch of media, and subject matter expertise, we ended up canceling it, and then we said why not do it virtually? And to your point, we did it in 24 different locations. Half the people, remember six weeks ago, had never even used Zoom. We had milk shakes, and hamburgers, and french fries delivered to their home. And it was one of the best two hour meetings I've seen. The future is this now. It's going to change dramatically, and Umesh, I think, is going to be at the front edge of how enterprise companies understand how their relationship with their customers is going to completely transform, using AI, conversational AI capability, speech recognition, et cetera. >> Yeah, I mean, Umesh, we haven't even really got into Uniphore, or what you guys are all about. But, you know, you're supporting call centers, you're using natural language technology, both on the inbound and all that, give us the overview, but you're playing on so many kind of innovation spaces, you know, the main interaction now with customers, and a brand, is either through the mobile phone, or through a call center, right. And that's becoming more, and increasingly, digitized. The ability to have a voice interaction, with a machine. Fascinating, and really, I think, revolutionary, and kind of taking, you know, getting us away from these stupid qwerty keyboards, which are supposed to slow us down on purpose. It's still the funniest thing ever, that we're still using these qwerty keyboards. So I wonder if you can share with us a little bit about, you know, kind of your vision of natural language, and how that changes the interaction with people, and machines. I think your TED Talk was really powerful, and I couldn't help but think of, you know, kind of mobile versus land lines, in terms of transformation. Transforming telecommunications in rural, and hard to serve areas, and then actually then adding the AI piece, to not only make it better for the front end person, but actually make it for the person servicing the account. >> Absolutely Jeff, so Uniphore, the company that I founded in 2008. We were talking about it's such a coincidence that I founded the company in 2008, the year of the Great Recession, and here we are again, talking in midst of the impact that we all have because of COVID. Uniphore does artificial intelligence and automation products, for the customer service industry. Call centers, as we know it, have fundamentally, for the last 20, 30 years, not have had a major technology disruption. We've seen a couple of ways of business model disruption, where call centers, you know, started to become offshore, in locations in Asia, India, and Mexico. Where our calls started to get routed around the world internationally, but fundamentally, the core technology in call centers, up until very recently, hadn't seen a major shift. With artificial intelligence, with natural language processings, speech recognition, available in over 100 languages. And, you know, in the last year or so, automation, and RPA, sort of adding to that mix, there's a whole new opportunity to re-think what customer service will mean to us, more in the future. As I think about the next five to seven years, with 5G happening, with 15 billion connected devices, you know, my five year old daughter, she the first thing she does when she enters the house from a playground, she goes to talk to her friend called Alexa. She speaks to Alexa. So, you know, these next generation of users, and technology users will grow up with AI, and voice, and NLP, all around us. And so their expectation of customer service and customer experience is going to be quantum times higher than some of us have, from our brands. I mean, today when a microwave or a TV doesn't work in our homes, our instinct could be to either go to the website of the brand, and try to do a chat with the agent, or do an 800 number phone call, and get them to visit the house to fix the TV. With, like I said with 5G, with TV, and microwave, and refrigerator becoming intelligent devices, you know, I could totally see my daughter telling the microwave "Why aren't you working?" And, you know, that question might still get routed to a remote contact center. Now the whole concept of contact center, the word has center in it, which means, in the past, we used to have these physical, massive locations, where people used to come in and put on their headsets to receive calls. Like John said, more than ever, we will see these centers become dispersed, and virtual. The channels with which these queries will come in would no more be just a phone, it would be the microwave, the car, the fridge. And the receivers of these calls would be anywhere in the world, sitting in their home, or sitting on a holiday in the Himalayas, and answering these situations to us. You know, I was reading, just for everyone to realize how drastic this shift has been, for the customer service industry. There are over 14 million workers, who work in contact centers around the world. Like I said, the word center means something here. All of them, right now, are working remote. This industry was never designed to work remote. Enterprises who fundamentally didn't plan for this. To your point Jeff, who thought digitization or automation, was a project they could have picked next year, or they were sitting on the fence, will now know more have a choice to make this adjustment. There's a report by a top analyst firm that said by 2023, up to 30% of customer service representatives would be remote. Well guess what, we just way blew past that number right away. And most of the CEOs that I talked to recently tell me that now that this shift has happened, about 40% of their workers will probably never return back to the office. They will always remain a permanent virtual workforce. Now when the workforce is remote, you need all the tools and technology, and AI, that A, if on any given day, 7-10% of your workforce calls in sick, you need bots, like the Amazon's Alexa, taking over a full conversation. Uniphore has a product called Akira, which does that in call centers. Most often, when these call center workers are talking, we have the experience of being put on hold, because call center workers have to type in something on their keyboard, and take notes. Well guess what, today AI and automation can assist them in doing that, making the call shorter, allowing the call center workers to take a lot more calls in the same time frame. And I don't know your experience, but, you know, a couple of weekends ago, the modem in my house wasn't working. I had a seven hour wait time to my service provider. Seven hour. I started calling at 8:30, it was somewhere around 3-4:00, finally, after call backs, wait, call back, wait, that it finally got resolved. It was just a small thing, I just couldn't get to the representative. So the enterprises are truly struggling, technology can help. They weren't designed to go remote, think about it, some of the unique challenges that I've heard now, from my customers, is that how do I know that my call center representative, who I've trained over years to be so nice, and empathetic, when they take a pee break, or a bio break, they don't get their 10 year old son to attend a call. How do I know that? Because now I can no more physically check in on them. How do I know that if I'm a bank, there's compliance? There's nothing being said that isn't being, is, you know, supposed to be said, because in a center, in an office, a supervisor can listen in. When everyone's remote, you can't do that. So AI, automation, monitoring, supporting, aiding human beings to take calls much better, and drive automation, as well as AI take over parts of a complete call, by the way of being a bot like Alexa, are sort of the things that Uniphore does, and I just feel that this is a permanent shift that we are seeing. While it's happening because of a terrible reason, the virus, that's affecting human beings, but the shift in business and behavior, is going to be permanent in this industry. >> Yeah, I think so, you know it's funny, I had Marten Mickos on, or excuse me, yeah, Marten Mickos, as part of this series. And I asked him, he's been doing distributed companies since he was doing MySQL, before Sun bought them. And he's, he was funny, it's like actually easier to fake it in an office, than when you're at home, because at home all you have to show is your deliverables. You can't look busy, you can't be going to meetings, you can't be doing things at your computer. All you have to show is your output. He said it's actually much more efficient, and it drives people, you know, to manage to the output, manage to what you want. But I want to shift gears a little bit, before we let you go, and really talk a little bit about the role of government. And John, I know you've been very involved with the Indian government, and the French government, trying to help them, in their kind of entrepreneurial pursuits, and Uniphore, I think, was founded in India, right, before you moved over here. You know we've got this huge stimulus package coming from the U.S. government, to try to help, as people, you know, can't pay their mortgage, a lot of people aren't so fortunate to be in digital businesses. It's two trillion dollars, so as kind of a thought experiment, I'm like well how much is two trillion dollars? And I did the cash balance of the FAANG companies. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet, just looking at Yahoo Finance, the latest one that was there. It's 333 billion, compared to two trillion. Even when you add Microsoft's 133 billion on top, it's still shy, it's still shy of 500 billion. You know, and really, the federal government is really the only people in a position to make kind of sweeping, these types of investments. But should we be scared? Should we be worried about, you know, kind of this big shift in control? And should, do you think these companies with these big balance sheets, as you said John, priorities change a little bit. Should it be, keep that money to pay the people, so that they can stay employed and pay their mortgage, and go buy groceries, and maybe get take out from their favorite restaurant, versus, you know, kind of what we've seen in the past, where there's a lot more, you know, stock buy backs, and kind of other uses of these cash. As you said, if it's a crisis, and you got to cut to survive, you got to do that. But clearly some of these other companies are not in that position. >> So you, let me break it into two pieces, Jeff, if I may. The first is for the first time in my lifetime I have seen the federal government and federal agencies move very rapidly. And if you would have told me government could move with the speed we've seen over the last three months, I would have said probably not. The fed was ahead of both the initial interest rate cuts, and the fed was ahead in terms of the slowing down, i.e. your 2 trillion discussion, by central banks here, and around the world. But right behind it was the Treasury, which put on 4 trillion on top of that. And only governments can move in this way, but the coordination with government and businesses, and the citizens, has been remarkable. And the citizens being willing to shelter in place. To your question about India, Prime Minister Modi spent the last five years digitizing his country. And he put in place the most bandwidth of any country in the world, and literally did transformation of the currency to a virtual currency, so that people could get paid online, et cetera, within it. He then looked at start-ups and job creation, and he positioned this when an opportunity or problem came along, to be able to perhaps navigate through it in a way that other countries might struggle. I would argue President Macron in France is doing a remarkable job with his innovation economy, but also saying how do you preserve jobs. So you suddenly see government doing something that no business can do, with the scale, and the speed, and a equal approach. But at the same time, may of these companies, and being very candid, that some people might have associated with tech for good, or with tech for challenges, have been unbelievably generous in giving both from the CEOs pockets perspective, and number two and three founders perspective, as well as a company giving to the CDC, and giving to people to help create jobs. So I actually like this opportunity for tech to regain its image of being good for everybody in the world, and leadership within the world. And I think it's a unique opportunity. For my start-ups, I've been so proud, Jeff. I didn't have to tell them to go do the right thing with their employees, I didn't have to tell them that you got to treat people, human lives first, the economy second, but we can do both in parallel. And you saw companies like Sprinklr suddenly say how can I help the World Health Organization anticipate through social media, where the next spread of the virus is going to be? A company, like Bloom Energy, with what KR did there, rebuilding all of the ventilators that were broken here in California, of which about 40% were, out of the stock that they got, because it had been in storage for so long, and doing it for all of California in their manufacturing plant, at cost. A company like Aspire Foods, a cricket company down in Texas, who does 3D capabilities, taking part of their production in 3D, and saying how many thousand masks can I generate, per week, using 3D printers. You watch what Umesh has done, and how he literally is changing peoples lives, and making that experience, instead of being a negative from working at home, perhaps to a positive, and increasing the customer loyalty in the process, as opposed to when you got a seven hour wait time on a line. Not only are you probably not going to order anything else from that company, you're probably going to change it. So what is fascinating to me is I believe companies owe an obligation to be successful, to their employees, and to their shareholders, but also to give back to society. And it's one of the things I'm most proud about the portfolio companies that I'm a part of, and why I'm so proud of what Umesh is doing, in both a economically successful environment, but really giving back and making a difference. >> Yeah, I mean, there's again, there's all the doctor stuff, and the medical stuff, which I'm not qualified to really talk about. Thankfully we have good professionals that have the data, and the knowledge, and know what to do, and got out ahead of the social distancing, et cetera, but on the backside, it really looks like a big data problem in so many ways, right. And now we have massive amounts of compute at places like Amazon, and Google, and we have all types of machine learning and AI to figure out, you know, there's kind of resource allocation, whether that be hospital beds, or ventilators, or doctors, or nurses, and trying to figure out how to sort that all out. But then all of the, you know, genome work, and you know, kind of all that big heavy lifting data crunching, you know, CPU consuming work, that hopefully is accelerating the vaccine. Because I don't know how we get all the way out of this until, it just seems like kind of race to the vaccine, or massive testing, so we know that it's not going to spike up. So it seems like there is a real opportunity, it's not necessarily Kaiser building ships, or Ford building planes, but there is a role for tech to play in trying to combat this thing, and bring it under control. Umesh, I wonder if you could just kind of contrast being from India, and now being in the States for a couple years. Anything kind of jump out to you, in terms of the differences in what you're hearing back home, in the way this has been handled? >> You know, it's been very interesting, Jeff, I'm sure everyone is concerned that India, for many reasons, so far hasn't become a big hot spot yet. And, you know, we can hope and pray that that remains to be the case. There are many things that the government back home has done, I think India took lessons from what they saw in Europe, and the U.S, and China. They went into a countrywide lockdown pretty early, you know, pretty much when they were lower than a two hundred positive tested cases, the country went into lockdown. And remember this is a 1.5 billion people all together going into lockdown. What I've seen in the U.S. is that, you know, California thankfully reacted fast. We've all been sheltered in place, there's cabin fever for all of us, but you know, I'm sure at the end of the day, we're going to be thankful for the steps that are taken. Both by the administration at the state level, at the federal level, and the medical doctors, who are doing everything they can. But India, on the other hand, has taken the more aggressive stance, in terms of doing a country lockdown. We just last evening went live at a University in the city of Chennai, where Uniphore was born. The government came out with the request, much like the U.S., where they're government departments were getting a surge of traffic about information about COVID, the hospitals that are serving, what beds are available, where is the testing? We stood up a voice bot with AI, in less than a week, in three languages. Which even before the government started to advertise, we started to get thousands of calls. And this is AI answering these questions for the citizens, in doing so. So it goes back to your point of there's a real opportunity of using all the technology that the world has today, to be put to good use. And at the same time, it's really partnering meaningfully with government, in India, in Singapore, in Vietnam, and here in the U.S., to make sure that happens on, you know, John's coaching and nudging, I became a part of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which is truly a premier trade and commerce body between U.S. and India. And I, today, co-chaired the start-up program with, you know, the top start-ups between U.S. and India, being part of that program. And I think we got, again, tremendously fortunate, and lucky with the timeline. We started working on this start-up program between U.S. and India, and getting the start-ups together, two quarters ago, and as this new regulation with the government support, and the news about the two trillion dollar packages coming out, and the support for small businesses, we could quickly get some of the questions answered for the start-ups. Had we not created this body, which had the ability to poll the Treasury Department, and say here are questions, can start-ups do A, B, and C? What do you have by way of regulation? And I think as a response to one of our letters, on Monday the Treasury put out an FAQ on their website, which makes it super clear for start-ups and small businesses, to figure out whether they qualify or they don't qualify. So I think there's ton that both from a individual company, and the technology that each one of us have, but also as a community, how do we, all of us, meaningfully get together, as a community, and just drive benefit, both for our people, for the economy, and for our countries. Wherever we have the businesses, like I said in the U.S., or in India, or parts of Asia. >> Yeah, it's interesting. So, this is a great conversation, I could talk to you guys all night long, but I probably would hear about it later, so we'll wrap it, but I just want to kind of close on the following thought, which is really, as you've talked about before John, and as Umesh as you're now living, you know, when we go through these disruptions, things do get changed, and as you said a lot of people, and companies don't get through it. On the other hand many companies are birthed from it, right, people that are kind of on the new trend, and are in a good position to take advantage, and it's not that you're laughing over the people that didn't make it, but it does stir up the pot, and it sounds like, Umesh, you're in a really good position to take advantage of this new kind of virtual world, this new digital transformation, that's just now waiting anymore. I love your stat, they were going to move X% out of the call center over some period of time, and then it's basically snap your fingers, everybody out, without much planning. So just give you the final word, you know, kind of advice for people, as they're looking forward, and Umesh, we'll get you on another time, because I want to go deep diving in natural language, I think that's just a fascinating topic in the way that people are going to interact with machines and get rid of the stupid qwerty keyboard. But let me get kind of your last thoughts as we wrap this segment. Umesh we'll let you go first. >> Umesh, you want to go first? >> I'll go first. My last thoughts are first for the entrepreneurs, everyone who's sort of going through this together. I think in difficult times is when real heroes are born. I read a quote that when it's a sunny day, you can't overtake too many cars, but when it's raining you have a real opportunity. And the other one that I read was when fishermen can't go out fishing, because of the high tide, they come back, and mend their nets, and be ready for the time that they can go out. So I think there's no easy way to say, this is a difficult time for the economy, health wise, I hope that, you know, we can contain the damage that's being done through the virus, but some of us have the opportunity to really take our products and technology out there, more than usual. Uniphore, particularly, has a unique opportunity, the contact center industry just cannot keep up with the traffic that it's seeing. Around the world, across US, across Asia, across India, and the need for AI and automation would never be pronounced more than it is today. As much as it's a great business opportunity, it's more of a responsibility, as I see it. There can be scale up as fast as the demand is coming, and really come out of this with a much stronger business model. John has always told me in final words you always paint the picture of what you want to be, a year or two out. And I see Uniphore being a much stronger AI plus automation company, in the customer service space, really transforming the face of call centers, and customer service. Which have been forced to rethink their core business value in the last few weeks. And, you know, every fence sitter who would think that digitalization and automation was an option that they could think of in the future years, would be forced to make those decisions now. And I'm just making sure that my team, and my company, and I, am ready to gear to that great responsibility and opportunity that's ahead of us. >> John, give you the final word. >> Say Jeff, I don't know if you can still hear me, we went blank there, maybe for me to follow up. >> We gotcha. >> Shimon Peres taught me a lot about life, and dealing with life the way it is, not the way you wish it was. So did my parents, but he also taught me it always looks darkest just before the tide switches, and you move on to victory. I think the challenges in front of us are huge, I think our nation knows how to deal with that, I do believe the government has moved largely pretty effectively, to give us the impetus to move, and then if we continue to flatten the curve on the issues with the pandemic, if we get some therapeutic drugs that dramatically reduce the risk of death, for people that get the challenges the worst, and over time a vaccine, I think you look to the future, America will rebound, it will be rebounding around start-ups, new job creation, using technology in every business. So not only is there a light at the tunnel, at the end of the tunnel, I think we will emerge from this a stronger nation, a stronger start-up community. But it depends on how well we work together as a group, and I just want to say to Umesh, it's an honor to be your coach, and I learn from you as much as I give back. Jeff, as always, you do a great job. Thank you for your time today. >> Thank you both, and I look forward to our next catch up. Stay safe, wash your hands, and thanks for spending some time with us. >> And I just want to say I hope and pray that all of us can get together in Palo Alto real quick, and in person, and doing fist bumps, not shake hands or probably a namaste. Thank you, it's an honor. >> Thank you very much. All right, that was John and Umesh, you're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto Studios, thanks for tuning in, stay safe, wash your hands, keep away from people that you're not that familiar with, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in the waterfront in Seattle, Washington, it's absolutely gorgeous here the last couple of days. We're here for the AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit event. We were here a couple weeks ago for the education event, now they have a whole separate track for nonprofits, and what's really cool about nonprofits is these people, these companies are attacking very, very big, ugly problems. It's not advertising, it's not click here and get something, these are big things, and one of the biggest issues is human trafficking. You probably hear a lot about it, it's way bigger than I ever thought it was, and we're really excited to have an expert in the field that, again, is using the power of AWS technology as well as their organization to help fight this cause. And we're excited to have Brad Myles, he is the CEO of Polaris and just coming off a keynote, we're hearing all about your keynote. So Brad, first off, welcome. >> Yeah, well thank you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so Polaris, give us a little bit about kind of what's the mission for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> Yeah, so Polaris, we are a nonprofit that works full-time on this issue. We both combat the issue and try to get to long-term solutions, and respond to the issue and restore freedom to survivors by operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline for the United States, so, it's part kind of big data and long-term solutions, and it's part responding to day-to-day cases that break across the country every day. >> Right, in preparing for this interview and spending some time on the site there was just some amazing things that just jump right off the page. 24.9 million people are involved in this. Is that just domestically here in the States, or is that globally? >> That's a global number. So when you're thinking about human trafficking, think about three buckets. The first bucket is any child, 17 or younger, being exploited in the commercial sex trade. The second bucket is any adult, 18 or over, who's in the sex trade by force, fraud, or coercion. And the third bucket is anyone forced to work in some sort of other labor or service industry by force, fraud, or coercion. So you've got the child sex trafficking bucket, you've got the adult sex trafficking bucket, and then you've got all the labor trafficking bucket, right? You add up those three buckets globally, that's the number that the International Labour Organization came out and said 25 million around the world are those three buckets in a given year. >> Right, and I think again, going through the website, some of the just crazy discoveries, it's the child sex trafficking you can kind of understand that that's part of the problem, the adult sex trafficking. But you had like 25 different human trafficking business models, I forget the term that was used, for a whole host of things well beyond just the sex trade. It's a very big and unfortunately mature industry. >> Totally, yeah, so we, so the first thing that we do that we're kind of known for is operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline. The National Human Trafficking Hotline leads to having a giant data set on trafficking, it's 50,000 cases of trafficking that we've worked on. So then we analyzed that data set and came to the breakthrough conclusion that there are these 25 major forms, and almost any single call that we get in to the National Hotline is going to be one of those 25 types. And once you know that then the problem doesn't seem so overwhelming, it's not, you know, thousands of different types, it's these 25 things, so, it's 18 labor trafficking types and seven sex trafficking types. And it enables a little bit more granular analysis than just saying sex trafficking or labor trafficking which is kind of too broad and general. Let's get really specific about it, we're talking about these late night janitors, or we're talking about these people in agriculture, or we're talking about these women in illicit massage businesses. It enables the conversation to get more focused. >> Right, it's so interesting right, that's such a big piece of the big data trend that we see all over the place, right? It used to be, you know, you had old data, a sample of old data that you took an aggregate of and worked off the averages. And now, because of big data, and the other tools that we have today, now actually you can work on individual cases. So as you look at it from a kind of a big data point of view, what are some of the things that you're able to do? And that lead directly to, everyone's talking about the presentation that you just got off of, in terms of training people to look for specific behaviors that fit the patterns, so you can start to break some of these cases. >> Exactly, so, I think that the human trafficking field risks being too generic. So if you're just saying to the populace, "Look for trafficking, look for someone who's scared." People are like, that's not enough, that's too vague, it's kind of slipping through my fingers. But if you say, "In this particular type of trafficking, "with traveling magazine sales crews, "if someone comes to your door "trying to sell you a magazine with these specific signs." So now instead of talking about general red flag indicators across all 25 types, we're coming up with red flag indicators for each of the 25 types. So instead of speaking in aggregate we're getting really specific, it's almost like specific gene therapy. And the data analysis on our data set is enabling that to happen, which makes the trafficking field smarter, we could get smarter about where victims are recruited from, we could get smarter about intervention points, and we could get smarter about where survivors might have a moment to kind of get help and get out. >> Right, so I got to dig into the magazine salesperson, 'cause I think we've all had the kid-- >> Brad: Have you had a kid come to you yet? >> Absolutely, and you know, you think first they're hustlin' but their papers are kind of torn up, and they've got their little certificate, certification. How does that business model work? >> Yeah, so that's one of the 25 types, they're called mag crews. There was a New York Times article written by a journalist named Ian Urbina who really studied this and it came out a number of years ago. Then they made a movie about it called "American Honey," if you watch with a number of stars. But essentially this is a very long-standing business model, it goes back 30 or 40 years of like the door-to-door salesperson, and like trying to win sympathy from people going to door-to-door sales. And then these kind of predatory groups decided to prey on disaffected U.S. citizen youth that are kind of bored, or are kind of working a low-wage job. And so they go up to these kids and they say, "Tired of working at the Waffle House? "Well why don't you join our crew and travel the country, "and party every night, and you'll be outdoors every day, "and it's coed, you get to hang out with girls, "you get to hang out with guys, "we'll drink every night and all you have to do "is sell magazines during the day." And it's kind of this alluring pitch, and then the crews turn violent, and there's sometimes quotas on the crew, there's sometimes coercion on the crew. We get a lot of calls from kids who are abandoned by the crew. Where the crew says, "If you act up "or if you don't adhere to our rules, "we'll just drive away and leave you in this city." >> Wherever. >> Is the crews are very mobile they have this whole language, they call it kind of jumping territory. So they'll drive from like Kansas City to a nearby state, and we'll get this call from this kid, they're like, "I'm totally homeless, my crew just left me behind "because I kind of didn't obey one of the rules." So a lot of people, when they think of human trafficking they're not thinking of like U.S. citizen kids knocking on your door. And we're not saying that every single magazine crew is human trafficking, but we are saying that if there's force, and coercion, and fraud, and lies, and people feel like they can't leave, and people feel like they're being coerced to work, this is actually a form of human trafficking of U.S. citizen youth which is not very well-known but we hear about it on the Hotline quite a lot. >> Right, so then I wonder if you could tell us more about the Delta story 'cause most of the people that are going to be watching this interview weren't here today to hear your keynote. So I wonder if you can explain kind of that whole process where you identified a specific situation, you train people that are in a position to make a difference and in fact they're making a big difference. >> Yeah. So the first big report that we released based on the Hotline data was the 25 types, right? We decided to do a followup to that called Intersections, where we reached out to survivors of trafficking and we said, "Can you tell us about "the legitimate businesses that your trafficker used "while you were being trafficked?" And all these survivors were like, "Yeah, sure, "we'll tell you about social media, "we'll tell you about transportation, "we'll tell you about banks, "we'll tell you about hotels." And so we then identified these six major industries that traffickers use that are using legitimate companies, like rental car companies, and airlines, and ridesharing companies. So then we reached out to a number of those corporate partners and said, "You don't want this stuff on your services, right?" And Delta really just jumped at this, they were just like, "We take this incredibly seriously. "We want our whole workforce trained. "We don't want any trafficker to feel like "they can kind of get away with it on our flights. "We want to be a leader in transportation." And then they began taking all these steps. Their CEO, Ed Bastian, took it very seriously. They launched a whole corporate-wide taskforce across departments, they hosted listening sessions with survivor leaders so survivors could coach them, and then they started launching this whole strategy around training their flight attendants, and then training their whole workforce, and then supporting the National Human Trafficking Hotline, they made some monetary donations to Polaris. We get situations on the Hotline where someone is in a dangerous situation and needs to be flown across the country, like an escape flight almost, and Delta donated SkyMiles for us to give to survivors who are trying to flee a situation, who needs a flight. They can go to an airport and get on a flight for free that will fly them across the country. So it's almost like a modern day Underground Railroad, kind of flying people on planes. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So they've just been an amazing partner, and they even then took the bold step of saying, "Well let's air a PSA on our flights "so the customer base can see this." So when you're on a Delta flight you'll see this PSA about human trafficking. And it just kept going and going and going. So it's now been about a five-year partnership and lots of great work together. >> And catching bad guys. >> Yeah, I mean, their publicity of the National Human Trafficking Hotline has led to a major increase in calls. Airport signage, more employees looking for it, and I actually do believe that the notion of flying, if you're going to be a trafficker, flying on a Delta flight is now a much more harrowing experience because everyone's kind of trained, and eyes and ears are looking. So you're going to pivot towards another airline that hasn't done that training yet, which now speaks to the need that once one member of an industry steps up, all different members of the industry need to follow suit. So we're encouraging a lot of the other airlines to do similar training and we're seeing some others do that, which is great. >> Yeah, and how much of it was from the CEO, or did he kind of come on after the fact, or was there kind of a champion catalyst that was pushing this through the organization, or is that often the case, or what do you find in terms of adoption of a company to help you on your mission? >> That's a great question. I mean, the bigger picture here is trafficking is a $150 billion industry, right? A group of small nonprofits and cops are not going to solve it on their own. We need the big businesses to enter the fight, because the big businesses have the resources, they have the brand, they have the customer base, they have the scale to make it a fair fight, right? So in the past few years we're seeing big businesses really enter the fight against trafficking, whether or not that's big data companies like AWS, whether or not that's social media companies, Facebook, whether or not that's hotel companies, like Wyndham and Marriott, airlines like Delta. And that's great because now the big hitters are joining the trafficking fight, and it happens in different ways, sometimes it's CEO-led, I think in the case of Delta, Ed Bastian really does take this issue very seriously, he was hosting events on this at his home, he's hosted roundtables of other CEOs in the Atlanta area like UPS, and Chick-fil-A, and Home Depot, and Coca-Cola, all those Atlanta-based CEOs know each other well, he'll host roundtables about that, and I think it was kind of CEO-led. But in other corporations it's one die hard champion who might be like a mid-level employee, or a director, who just says, "We really got to do this," and then they drive more CEO attention. So we've seen it happen both ways, whether or not it's top-down, or kind of middle-driven-up. But the big picture is if we could get some of the biggest corporations in the world to take this issue seriously, to ask questions about who they contract with, to ask questions about what's in their supply chain, to educate their workforce, to talk about this in front of their millions of customers, it just puts the fight against trafficking on steroids than a group of nonprofits would be able to do alone. So I think we're in a whole different realm of the fight now that business is at the table. >> And is that pretty much your strategy in terms of where you get the leverage, do you think? Is to execute via a lot of these well-resourced companies that are at this intersection point, I think that's a really interesting way to address the problem. >> Yeah, well, it's back to the 25 types, right? So the strategies depend on type. Like, I don't think big businesses being at the table are necessarily going to solve magazine sales crews, right? They're not necessarily going to solve begging on the street. But they can solve late night janitors that sometimes are trafficked, where lots of big companies are contracting with late night janitorial crews, and they come at 2:00 a.m., and they buff the floors, and they kind of change out the trash, and no one's there in the office building to see those workers, right? And so asking different questions of who you procure contracts with, to say, "Hey, before we contract with you guys, "we're going to need to ask you a couple questions "about where these workers got here, "and what these workers thought they were coming to do, "and we need to ID these workers." The person holding the purse strings, who's buying that contract, has the power to demand the conditions of that contract. Especially in agriculture and large retail buyers. So I think that big corporations, it's definitely part of the strategy for certain types, it's not going to solve other types of trafficking. But let's say banks and financial institutions, if they start asking different questions of who's banking with them, just like they've done with terrorism financing they could wipe out trafficking financing, could actually play a gigantic role in changing the course of how that type of trafficking exists. >> So we could talk all day, I'm sure, but we don't have time, but I'm just curious, what should people do, A, if they just see something suspicious, you know, reach out to one of these kids selling magazines, or begging on the street, or looking suspicious at an airport, so, A, that's the question. And then two, if people want to get involved more generically, whether in their company, or personally, how do they get involved? >> Yeah, so there are thousands of nonprofit groups across the country, Polaris is in touch with 3,000 of them. We're one of thousands. I would say find an organization in your area that you care about and volunteer, get involved, donate, figure out what they need. Our website is polarisproject.org, we have a national Referral Directory of organizations across the country, and so that's one way. The other way is the National Human Trafficking Hotline, the number, 1-888-373-7888. The Hotline depends on either survivors calling in directly as a lifeline, or community members calling in who saw something suspicious. So we get lots of calls from people who were getting their nails done, and the woman was crying and talking about how she's not being paid, or people who are out to eat as a family and they see something in the restaurant, or people who are traveling and they see something that doesn't make, kind of, quite sense in a hotel or an airport. So we need an army of eyes and ears calling tips into the National Human Trafficking Hotline and identifying these cases, and we need survivors to know the number themselves too so that they can call in on their own behalf. We need to respond to the problem in the short-term, help get these people connected to help, and then we need to do the long-term solutions which involves data, and business, and changing business practice, and all of that. But I do think that if people want to kind of educate themselves, polarisproject.org, there are some kind of meta-organizations, there's a group called Freedom United that's kind of starting a grassroots movement against trafficking, freedomunited.org. So lots of great organizations to look into, and this is a bipartisan issue, this is an issue that most people care about, it's one of the top headlines in the newspapers every day these days. And it's something that I think people in this country naturally care about because it references kind of the history of chattel slavery, and some of those forms of slavery that morphed but never really went away, and we're still fighting that same fight today. >> In terms of, you know, we're here at AWS IMAGINE, and they're obviously putting a lot of resources behind this, Teresa Carlson and the team. How are you using them, have you always been on AWS? Has that platform enabled you to accomplish your mission better? >> Yeah, oh for sure, I mean, Polaris crunches over 60 terabytes of data per day, of just like the computing that we're doing, right? >> Jeff: And what types of data are you crunching? >> It's the data associated with Hotline calls, we collect up to 150 variables on each Hotline call. The Hotline calls come in, we have this data set of 50,000 cases of trafficking with very sensitive data, and the protections of that data, the cybersecurity associated with that data, the storage of that data. So since 2017, Polaris has been in existence since 2002, so we're in our 17th year now, but starting three years ago in 2017 we started really partnering with AWS, where we're migrating more of our data onto AWS, building some AI tools with AWS to help us process Hotline calls more efficiently. And then talking about potentially moving our, all of our data storage onto AWS so that we don't have our own server racks in our office, we still need to go through a number of steps to get there. But having AWS at the table, and then talking about the Impact Computing team and this, like, real big data crunching of like millions of trafficking cases globally, we haven't even started talking about that yet but I think that's like a next stage. So for now, it's getting our data stronger, more secure, building some of those AI bots to help us with our work, and then potentially considering us moving completely serverless, and all of those things are conversations we're having with AWS, and thrilled that AWS is making this an issue to the point that it was prioritized and featured at this conference, which was a big deal, to get in front of the whole audience and do a keynote, and we're very, very grateful for that. >> And you mentioned there's so many organizations involved, are you guys doing data aggregation, data consolidation, sharing, I mean there must be with so many organizations, that adds a lot of complexity, and a lot of data silos, to steal classic kind of IT terms. Are you working towards some kind of unification around that, or how does that look in the future? >> We would love to get to the point where different organizations are sharing their data set. We'd love to get to the point where different organizations are using, like, a shared case management tool, and collecting the same data so it's apples to apples. There are different organizations, like, Thorn is doing some amazing big data-- >> Jeff: Right, we've had Thorn on a couple of times. >> How do we merge Polaris's data set with Thorn's data set? We're not doing that yet, right? I think we're only doing baby steps. But I think the AWS platform could enable potentially a merger of Thorn's data with Polaris's data in some sort of data lake, right? So that's a great idea, we would love to get to that. I think the field isn't there yet. The field has kind of been, like, tech-starved for a number of years, but in the past five years has made a lot of progress. The field is mostly kind of small shelters and groups responding to survivors, and so this notion of like infusing the trafficking field with data is somewhat of a new concept, but it's enabling us to think much bigger about what's possible. >> Well Brad, again, we could go on all day, you know, really thankful for what you're doing for a whole lot of people that we don't see, or maybe we see and we're not noticing, so thank you for that, and uh. >> Absolutely. >> Look forward to catching up when you move the ball a little bit further down the field. >> Yeah, thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. >> All right, my pleasure. He's Brad, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS IMAGINE Nonprofits, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (futuristic music)

thanks Dave I'm Stu minimun and we're here at Cisco live 2018 in Barcelona Spain happy to be joined on the program by Nigel Moulton the AMIA CTO of Dell EMC and Siva Siva Kumar who is the senior director of data center solutions at Cisco gentlemen thanks so much for joining me thank you great so looking at you know a long partnership of Dell and Cisco Siva talk about the partnership first said absolutely I mean if you look back in time when we launched UCS the very first major partnership we brought and the converged infrastructure we brought at the market was we blocked it is it really set the trend for how customers should consume compute network and storage together and we continue to deliver world-class technologies on both sides and the partnership continues to thrive as we see tremendous adoption from our customers so we are here several years down still a very vibrant partnership in trying to get the best product for the customers yeah Nigel would love to get your perspective so I she was right I think I'd adds it defined a market if you think what true conversion infrastructure is it's different and we're going to discuss them all about that as we go through the UCS fabric is unique in the way that it ties a network fabric to a to compute fabric and when you bring those technologies together and converge them and you have a partnership like Cisco you have a partnership with us yeah it's gonna be a fantastic result for the market because the market moves on and I think Vblock the X block actually helped us achieve that all right so so Steve oh we understand there's billions of reasons why Cisco and Dell would want to keep this partnership going but talk about from an innovate innovation standpoint there's the new BX block 1000 what's new talk about what would what's the innovation here absolutely if you look at the VX block perspective the 1,000 perspective first of all it simplifies an extremely fast successful product to the next level it simplifies the the storage options and it provides a seamless way to consume those technologies from a Cisco perspective as you know we are in our fifth generation of UCS platform continues to be a world-class platform leading blade mark blade servers in the Indus but we also bring the innovation of rack mount servers as well as fatigue fabric larger-scale fibre channel technology as well as we bring our compute network as well as a SAN fabric technology together with world-class storage portfolio and then simplify that for a single pane of glass consumption model that's absolutely the highest level of innovation you're gonna fight Nigel I think back in the early days the joke was you can have a V block any way you want as long as it's black yeah it's obviously a lot of diversity product line but what's new and different here how is this impact new customers and existing custom so I think there's a couple of things to pick up on what Trey said what would shiver sets of a simplification piece the way in which we do release certification matrix the way in which you combine a single software image to manage these multiple discrete components that is greatly simplified in BX well in V Xbox one thousands secondly you remove a model number because historically you're right you bought a three series of five series of seven series and that sort of defined the architecture this is now a system-wide architecture so those technologies that you might have thought of as being discrete before or integrated at an RCM level that was perhaps a little complex for some people that's now dramatically simplified so those are the two things I think that we'd amplify one is a simplification and two you're moving a model number and moving to a system-wide architecture I want to give you both the opportunity give us a little bit you know what what's the future when you talk about the 1,000 system future innovations new use cases sure you know I think if you look at the very enterprise are consuming the demand for more powerful systems that will bring together more consolidation and also address the extensive data center migration opportunities we see is very critical that means the customers are really looking at whether it is a you know in-memory database that scales to much larger scale than before or in a large scale cluster databases or even newer workloads for that matter the appetite for a larger system and they need to have it in the market continues to grow we see a huge install base of our customers as well as new customers looking at options in the market truly realize the strength of the portfolio that each one of us bring to the table and bringing the Best of Breed whether it is today or in the future from our innovation standpoint is is absolutely the way that we are approaching building our partnership and building new solutions here Nigel I mean when you're talking to customers out there or they come in saying hey I'm gonna need this for a couple of months I mean if this is investment they're making for a couple years why is this a partnership built to last so an enterprise-class customer certainly is looking for a technology that's synonymous with reliability availability performance and if you look at what we x-block has traditionally done what the 1,000 offers you see that right but shippers write these application architectures are going to change so if you can make an investment in their technology set now that keeps the premise of reliability and available performance to you today but when you look at future application architectures around high-capacity memory adjacent to our high-performance CPU you're almost in a position where you are preparing the ground for what that application architecture will need and the investments that people make in the vx box system with the UCS power underneath it the computer is significant because it lays out a very clear path to how you will integrate future application architectures with existing application object Nigel Moulton Siva Siva Kumar thank you so much for joining talking about the partnership in the future so thank you pleasure sending it back to Dave in the u.s. st. thanks so much for watching the cube from Cisco live Barcelona thank you

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone welcome to this special presentation, The Future of Converged Infrastructure, my name is David Vellante, and I'll be your host, for this event where the focus is on Dell EMC's converged infrastructure announcement. Nearly a decade ago, modern converged infrastructure really came to the floor in the marketplace, and what you had is compute, storage, and network brought together in a single managed entity. And when you talk to IT people, the impact was roughly a 30 to 50% total cost of ownership reduction, really depending on a number of factors. How much virtualization they had achieved, how complex their existing processees were, how much they could save on database and other software licenses and maintenance, but roughly that 30 to 50% range. Fast forward to 2018 and you're looking at a multibillion dollar market for converged infrastructure. Jeff Boudreau is here, he's the President of the Dell EMC Storage Division, Jeff thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. So we're going to set up this announcement let me go through the agenda. Jeff and I are going to give an overview of the announcement and then we're going to go to Trey Layton, who's the Chief Technology Officer of the converged infrastructure group at Dell EMC. He's going to focus on the architecture, and some of the announcement details. And then, we're going to go to Cisco Live to a pre-recorded session that we did in Barcelona, and get the Cisco perspective, and then Jeff and I will come back to wrap it up. We also, you might notice we have a crowd chat going on, so underneath this video stream you can ask questions, you got to log in with LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, I prefer Twitter, kind of an ask me anything crowd chat. We have analysts on, Stu Miniman is hosting that call. We're going to talk about what this announcement is all about, what the customer issues are that are being addressed by this announcement. So Jeff, let's get into it. From your perspective, what's the state of converged infrastructure today? >> Great question. I'm really bullish on CI, in regards to what converged infrastructure and kind of the way the market's going. We see continued interest in the growth of the market of our customers. Driven by the need for simplicity, agility, elasticity of those on-prem resources. Dell EMC pioneered the CI market several years ago, with the simple premise of simplify IT, and our focus and commitment to our customers has not changed of simplifying IT. As our customers continue to seek for new ways to simplify and consolidate infrastructure, we expect more and more of our customers to embrace CI, as a fast and easy way to modernize their infrastructure, and transform IT. >> You talk about transformation, we do a lot of events, and everybody's talking about digital transformation, and IT transformation, what role does converged infrastructure play in those types of transformations, maybe you could give us an example? >> Sure, so first I'd say our results speak for themselves. As I said we pioneered the CI industry, as the market leader, we enabled thousands of customers worldwide to drive business transformation and digital transformation. And when I speak to customers specifically, converged infrastructure is not just about the infrastructure, it's about the operating model, and how they simplify IT. I'd say two of the biggest areas of impact that customers highlight to me, are really about the acceleration of application delivery, and then the other big one is around the increase in operational efficiencies allowing customers to free up resources, to reinvest however they see fit. >> Now since the early days of converged infrastructure Cisco has been a big partner of yours, you guys were kind of quasi-exclusive for awhile, they went out and sought other partners, you went out and sought other partners, a lot of people have questions about that relationship, what's your perspective on that relationship. >> So our partnership with Cisco is strong as ever. We're proud of this category we've created together. We've been on this journey for a long time we've been working together, and that partnership will continue as we go forward. In full transparency there are of course some topics where we disagree, just like any normal relationship we have disagreements, an example of that would be HCI, but in the CI space our partnership is as strong as ever. We'll have thousands of customers between the two of us, that we will continue to invest and innovate together on. And I think later in this broadcast you're going to hear directly from Cisco on that, so we're both doubling down on the partnership, and we're both committed to CI. >> I want to ask you about leadership generally, and then specifically as it relates to converged infrastructure and hyper converged. My question is this, hyper converged is booming, it's a high growth market. I sometimes joke that Dell EMC is now your leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrants, 101 Gartner Magic Quadrants out of the 99. They're just leading everything and I think both the CI and the HCI categories, what's your take, is CI still relevant? >> First I'd say it's great to come from a leadership position so I thank you for bringing that up, I think it's really important. As Micheal talks about being the essential infrastructure company, that's huge for us as Dell Technologies, so we're really proud of that and we want to lean into that strength. Now on HCI vs CI, to me it's an AND world. Everybody wants to get stock that's in either or, to me it's about the AND story. All our customers are going on a journey, in regards to how they transform their businesses. But at the end of the day, if I took my macro view, and took a step back, it's about the data. The data's the critical asset. The good news for me and for our team is data always continues to grow, and is growing at an amazing rate. And as that critical asset, customers are really kind of thinking about a modern data strategy as they drive foreword. And as part of that, they're looking at how to store, protect, secure, analyze, move that data, really unleashing that data to provide value back to their businesses. So with all of that, not all data is going to be created equal, as part of that, as they build out those strategies, it's going to be a journey, in regards to how they do it. And if that's software defined, vs purpose built arrays, vs converged, or hyper converged, or even cloud, those deployment models, we, Dell EMC, and Dell Technologies want to be that strategic partner, that trusted advisor to help them on that journey. >> Alright Jeff, thanks for helping me with the setup. I want to ask you to hang around a little bit. >> Jeff: Sure. >> We're going to go to a video, and then we're going to bring back Trey Layton, talk about the architecture so keep it right there, we'll be right back. >> Announcer: Dell EMC has long been number one in converged infrastructure, providing technology that simplifies all aspects of IT, and enables you to achieve better business outcomes, faster, and we continue to lead through constant innovation. Introducing, the VxBlock System 1000, the next generation of converged infrastructure from Dell EMC. Featuring enhanced life cycle management, and a broad choice of technologies, to support a vast array of applications and resources. From general purpose to mission critical, big data to specialized workloads, VxBlock 1000 is the industry's first converged infrastructure system, with the flexible data services, power, and capacity to handle all data center workloads, giving you the ultimate in business agility, data center efficiency, and operational simplicity. Including best-of-breed storage and data protection from Dell EMC, and computer networking from Cisco. (orchestral music) Converged in one system, these technologies enable you to flexibly adapt resources to your evolving application's needs, pool resources to maximize utilization and increase ROI, deliver a turnkey system in lifecycle assurance experience, that frees you to focus on innovation. Four times storage types, two times compute types, and six times faster updates, and VME ready, and future proof for extreme performance. VxBlock 1000, the number one in converged now all-in-one system. Learn more about Dell EMC VxBlock 1000, at DellEMC.com/VxBlock. >> We're back with Trey Layton who's the Senior Vice President and CTO of converged at Dell EMC. Trey it's always a pleasure, good to see you. >> Dave, good to see you as well. >> So we're eight years into Vblock, take us back to the converged infrastructure early days, what problems were you trying to solve with CI. >> Well one of the problems with IT in general is it's been hard, and one of the reasons why it's been hard is all the variability that customers consume. And how do you integrate all that variability in a sustaining manner, to maintain the assets so it can support the business. And, the thing that we've learned is, the original recipe that we had for Vblock, was to go at and solve that very problem. We have referred to that as life cycle. Manage the life cycle services of the biggest inner assets that you're deploying. And we have created some great intellectual property, some great innovation around helping minimize the complexity associated with managing the life cycle of a very complex integration, by way of, one of the largest data center assets that people operate in their environment. >> So you got thousands and thousands of customers telling you life cycle management is critical. They're shifting their labor resource to more strategic activities, is that what's going on? Well there's so much variation and complexity in just maintaining the different integration points, that they're spending an inordinate amount of their time, a lot of nights and weekends, on understanding and figuring out which software combinations, which configuration combinations you need to operate. What we do as an organization, and have done since inception is, we manage that complexity for them. We delivery them an outcome based architecture that is pre-integrated, and we sustain that integration over it's life, so they spend less time doing that, and letting the experts who actually build the components focus on maintaining those integrations. >> So as an analyst I always looked at converged infrastructure as an evolutionary trend, bringing together storage, servers, networking, bespoke components. So my question is, where's the innovation underneath converged infrastructure. >> So I would say the innovation is in two areas. We're blessed with a lot of technology innovations that come from our partner, and our own companies, Dell EMC and Cisco. Cisco produces wonderful innovations in the space of networking compute, in the context of Vblock. Dell EMC, storage innovations, data protection, et cetera. We harmonize all of these very complex integrations in a manner where an organization can put those advanced integrations into solving business problems immediately. So there's two vectors of innovation. There are the technology components that we are acquiring, to solve business problems, and there's the method at which we integrate them, to get to the business of solving problems. >> Okay, let's get into the announcement. What are you announcing, what's new, why should we care. >> We are announcing the VxBlock 1000, and the interesting thing about Vblocks over the years, is they have been individual system architectures. So a compute technology, integrated with a particular storage architecture, would produce a model of Vblock. With VxBlock 1000, we're actually introducing an architecture that provides a full gamut of array optionality for customers. Both blade and rack server options, for customers on the UCS compute side, and before we would integrate data protection technologies as an extension or an add-on into the architecture, data protection is native to the offer. In addition to that, unstructured data storage. So being able to include unstructured data into the architecture as one singular architecture, as opposed to buying individualized systems. >> Okay, so you're just further simplifying the underlying infrastructure which is going to save me even more time? >> Producing a standard which can adapt to virtually any use case that a customer has in a data center environment. Giving them the ability to expand and grow that architecture, as their workload dictates, in their environment, as opposed to buying a system to accommodate one workload, buying another system to accommodate another workload, this is kind of breaking the barriers of traditional CI, and moving it foreword so that we can create an adaptive architecture, that can accommodate not only the technologies available today, but the technologies on the horizon tomorrow. >> Okay so it's workload diversity, which means greater asset leverage from that underlying infrastructure. >> Trey: Absolutely. >> Can you give us some examples, how do you envision customers using this? >> So I would talk specifically about customers that we have today. And when they deploy, or have deployed Vblocks in the past. We've done wonderful by building architectures that accommodate, or they're tailor made for certain types of workloads. And so a customer environment would end up acquiring a Vblock model 700, to accommodate an SAP workload for example. They would acquire a Vblock 300, or 500 to accommodate a VDI workload. And then as those workloads would grow, they would grow those individualized systems. What it did was, it created islands of stranded resource capacities. Vblock 1000 is about bringing all those capabilities into a singular architecture, where you can grow the resources based on pools. And so as your work load shifts in your environment, you can reallocate resources to accommodate the needs of that workload, as opposed to worrying about stranded capacity in the architecture. >> Okay where do you go from here with the architecture, can you share with us, to the extent that you can, a little roadmap, give us a vision as to how you see this playing out over the next several years. >> Well, one of the reasons why we did this was to simplify, and make it easier to operate, these very complex architectures that everyone's consuming around the world. Vblock has always been about simplifying complex technologies in the data center. There are a lot of innovations on the horizon in VME, for example, next generation compute platforms. There are new generation fabric services, that are emerging. VxBlock 1000 is the place at which you will see all of these technologies introduced, and our customers won't have to wait on new models of Vblock to consume those technologies, they will be resident in them upon their availability to the market. >> The buzz word from the vendor community is future proof, but your saying, you'll be able to, if you buy today, you'll be able to bring in things like NVME and these new technologies down the road. >> The architecture inherently supports the idea of adapting to new technologies as they emerge, and will consume those integrations, as a part of the architectural standard footprint, for the life of the architecture. >> Alright excellent Trey, thanks very much for that overview. Cisco obviously a huge partner of yours, with this whole initiative, many many years. A lot of people have questioned where that goes, so we have a segment from Cisco Live, Stu Miniman is out there, let's break to Stu, then we'll come back and pick it up from there. Thanks for watching. >> Thanks Dave, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at Cisco Live 2018 in Barcelona, Spain. Happy to be joined on the program by Nigel Moulton the EMEA CTO of Dell EMC, and Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks Stu. >> Looking at the long partnership of Dell and Cisco, Siva, talk about the partnership first. >> Absolutely. If you look back in time, when we launched UCS, the very first major partnership we brought, and the converged infrastructure we brought to the market was Vblock, it really set the trend for how customers should consume compute, network, and storage together. And we continue to deliver world class technologies on both sides and the partnership continues to thrive as we see tremendous adoption from our customers. So we are here, several years down, still a very vibrant partnership in trying to get the best product for the customers. >> Nigel would love to get your perspective. >> Siva's right I think I'd add, it defined a market, if you think what true conversion infrastructure is, it's different, and we're going to discuss some more about that as we go through. The UCS fabric is unique, in the way that it ties a network fabric to a compute fabric, and when you bring those technologies together, and converge them, and you have a partnership like Cisco, you have a partnership with us, yeah it's going to be a fantastic result for the market because the market moves on, and I think, VxBlock actually helped us achieve that. >> Alright so Siva we understand there's billions of reasons why Cisco and Dell would want to keep this partnership going, but talk about from an innovation standpoint, there's the new VxBlock 1000, what's new, talk about what's the innovation here. >> Absolutely. If you look at the VxBlock perspective, the 1000 perspective, first of all it simplifies an extremely fast successful product to the next level. It simplifies the storage options, and it provides a seamless way to consume those technologies. From a Cisco perspective, as you know we are in our fifth generation of UCS platform, continues to be a world class platform, leading blade service in the industry. But we also bring the innovation of rack mount servers, as well as 40 gig fabric, larger scale, fiber channel technology as well. As we bring our compute, network, as well as a sound fabric technology together, with world class storage portfolio, and then simplify that for a single pane of glass consumption model. That's absolutely the highest level of innovation you're going to find. >> Nigel, I think back in the early days the joke was you could have a Vblock anyway you want, as long as it's black. Obviously a lot of diversity in product line, but what's new and different here, how does this impact new customers and existing customers. >> I think there's a couple of things to pick up on, what Trey said, what Siva said. So the simplification piece, the way in which we do release certification matrix, the way in which you combine a single software image to manage these multiple discreet components, that is greatly simplified in VxBlock 1000. Secondly you remove a model number, because historically you're right, you bought a three series, a five series, and a seven series, and that sort of defined the architecture. This is now a system wide architecture. So those technologies that you might of thought of as being discreet before, or integrated at an RCM level that was perhaps a little complex for some people, that's now dramatically simplified. So those are two things that I think we amplify, one is the simplification and two, you're removing a model number and moving to a system wide architecture. >> Want to give you both the opportunity, gives us a little bit, what's the future when you talk about the 1000 system, future innovations, new use cases. >> Sure, I think if you look at the way enterprise are consuming, the demand for more powerful systems that'll bring together more consolidation, and also address the extensive data center migration opportunities we see, is very critical, that means the customers are really looking at whether it is a in-memory database that scales to, much larger scale than before, or large scale cluster databases, or even newer workloads for that matter, the appetite for a larger system, and the need to have it in the market, continues to grow. We see a huge install base of our customers, as well as new customers looking at options in the market, truly realize, the strength of the portfolio that each one of us brings to the table, and bringing the best-of-breed, whether it is today, or in the future from an innovation standpoint, this is absolutely the way that we are approaching building our partnership and building new solutions here. >> Nigel, when you're talking to customers out there, are they coming saying, I'm going to need this for a couple of months, I mean this is an investment they're making for a couple years, why is this a partnership built to last. >> An enterprise class customer certainly is looking for a technology that's synonymous with reliability, availability, performance. And if you look at what VxBlock has traditionally done and what the 1000 offers, you see that. But Siva's right, these application architectures are going to change. So if you can make an investment in a technology set now that keeps the premise of reliability, availability, and performance to you today, but when you look at future application architectures around high capacity memory, adjacent to a high performance CPU, you're almost in a position where you are preparing the ground for what that application architecture will need, and the investments that people make in the VxBlock system with the UCS power underneath at the compute layer, it's significant, because it lays out a very clear path to how you will integrate future application architectures with existing application architectures. >> Nigel Moulton, Siva Sivakumar, thank you so much for joining, talking about the partnership and the future. >> Siva: Thank you. >> Nigel: Pleasure. >> Sending back to Dave in the US, thanks so much for watching The Cube from Cisco Live Barcelona. >> Thank you. >> Okay thanks Stu, we're back here with Jeff Boudreau. We talked a little bit earlier about the history of conversion infrastructure, some of the impacts that we've seen in IT transformations, Trey took us through the architecture with some of the announcement details, and of course we heard from Cisco, was a lot of fun in Barcelona. Jeff bring it home, what are the take aways. >> Some of the key take aways I have is just I want to make sure everybody knows Dell EMC's continued commitment to modernizing infrastructure for conversion infrastructure. In addition to that was have a strong partnership with Cisco as you heard from me and you also heard from Cisco, that we both continue to invest and innovate in these spaces. In addition to that we're going to continue our leadership in CI, this is critical, and it's extremely important to Dell, and EMC, and Dell EMC's Cisco relationship. And then lastly, that we're going to continue to deliver on our customer promise to simplify IT. >> Okay great, thank you very much for participating here. >> I appreciate it. >> Now we're going to go into the crowd chat, again, it's an ask me anything. What make Dell EMC so special, what about security, how are the organizations affected by converged infrastructure, there's still a lot of, roll your own going on. There's a price to pay for all this integration, how is that price justified, can you offset that with TCO. So let's get into that, what are the other business impacts, go auth in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, Twitter is my preferred. Let's get into it thanks for watching everybody, we'll see you in the crowd chat. >> I want IT to be dial tone service, where it's always available for our providers to access. To me, that is why IT exists. So our strategy at the hardware and software level is to ruthlessly standardize leverage in a converged platform technology. We want to create IT almost like a vending machine, where a user steps up to our vending machine, they select the product they want, they put in their cost center, and within seconds that product is delivered to that end user. And we really need to start running IT like a business. Currently we have a VxBlock that we will run our University of Vermont Medical Center epic install on. Having good performance while the provider is within that epic system is key to our foundation of IT. Having the ability to combine the compute, network, and storage in one aspect in one upgrade, where each component is aligned and regression tested from a Dell Technology perspective, really makes it easy as an IT individual to do an upgrade once or twice a year versus continually trying to keep each component of that infrastructure footprint upgraded and aligned. I was very impressed with the VxBlock 1000 from Dell Technologies, specifically a few aspects of it that really intrigued me. With the VxBlock 1000, we now have the ability to mix and match technologies within that frame. We love the way the RCM process works, from a converged perspective, the ability to bring the compute, the storage, and network together, and trust that Dell Technologies is going to upgrade all those components in a seamless manner, really makes it easier from an IT professional to continue to focus on what's really important to our organization, provider and patient outcomes.