>>We're here live in Las Vegas with a cubes coverage of Amazon re Mars. It's a reinvent re Mars reinforced. The big three shows called the res. This is Mars machine learning, automation, robotic and space. It's a program about the future it and the future innovation around industrial cloud scale climate change the moon, a lot of great topics, really connecting all the dots together here in Las Vegas with Amazon re Mars I'm John ER, host of the cube. Our first guest is Howard Hughes program manager, necess Ryan program. Howard is involved with all the action and space and the moon project, which we'll get into Howard. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Well, Hey, thanks for having me here this morning. Appreciate you guys inviting me here. >>So this show is not obvious to the normal tech observer, the insiders in, in the industry. It's the confluence of a lot of things coming together. It's gonna be obvious very soon because the stuff they're showing here is pretty impressive. It's motivating, it's positive and it's a force for change in good. All of it coming together, space, machine learning, robotics, industrial, you have one of the coolest areas, the space what's going on with your Orion program. You guys got the big moon project statement to >>Explain. Well, let me tell you, I'll start with Orion. Orion is our next human space craft. That's gonna take humans beyond low earth orbit and we're part of the broader Artis campaign. So Artis is our plan, our NASA plan to return the first person of color, first woman, back to the moon. And we're very excited to do that. We have several missions that I could talk to you about starting with in a very few months, Artis one. So Artis one is going to fly on the space launch system, which is gonna be the biggest rocket we call the mega rocket has been built since the Saturn five on top of the SLS is the Ryan spacecraft and that Ryan spacecraft houses four crew members for up to 21 days in deep space. And we'll have an unru test in a few months launch on the S SLS. And Orion's gonna go around the moon for up to 40 days on Aus two, we will have the first test of the humans on board Orion. So four people will fly on Aus two. We will also circle the moon for about 10 to 12 days. And then our third mission will be our landing. >>So the moon is back in play, obviously it's close to the earth. So it's a short flight, relatively speaking the Mars a little bit further out. I'll see everyone as know what's going on in Mars. A lot of people are interested in Mars. Moon's closer. Yes, but there's also new things going on around discovery. Can you share the big story around why the moon what's? Why is the moon so important and why is everyone so excited about it? >>Yeah. You, you know, you know, coming to this conference and talking about sustainability, you know, I mean it is exploration is I think ingrained in our DNA, but it's more than just exploration is about, you know, projecting human presence beyond our earth. And these are the stepping stones. You know, we talk about Amazon talked about day one, and I think about, we are on those very early days where we're building the infrastructure Ryans of transportation infrastructure, and we're gonna build infrastructure on the moon to learn how to live on a surface and how to utilize the assets. And then that's very important because you know, it's very expensive to carry fuel, to carry water and all the necessities that you need to survive as a human being and outer space. If you can generate that on the surface or on the planet you go to, and this is a perfect way to do it because it's very in your backyard, as I told you earlier. So for future mission, when you want to go to Mars, you're nine months out, you really wanna make sure you have the technologies and you're able to utilize those technologies robustly and in a sustainable way. >>Yeah, we were talking before you came on, came camera camping in your backyard is a good practice round. Before you go out into the, to the wilderness, this is kind of what's going on here, but there's also the discovery angle. I mean, I just see so much science going on there. So if you can get to the moon, get a base camp there, get set up, then things could come out of that. What are some of the things that you guys are talking about that you see as possible exploration upside? >>Yeah. Well, several things. One is power generation recently. We just released some contracts that from vision power, so long, sustainable power capability is very, very important. You know, the other technologies that you need utilize is regenerative, you know, air, water, things that are, you need for that, but then there's a science aspect of it, which is, you know, we're going to the south pole where we think there's a lot of water potentially, or, or available water that we can extract and utilize that to generate fuel. So liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen is one of the areas that are very interesting. And of course, lunar minerals are very exciting, very interesting to bring and, and, and be able to mine potentially in the future, depending on what is there. >>Well, a lot of cool stuff happening. What's your take on this show here, obviously NASA's reputation as innovators and deep technologists, you know, big moonshot missions, pun intended here. You got a lot of other explorations. What's this show bring together, share your perspective because I think the story here to me is you got walkout retail, like the Amazon technology, you got Watson dynamics, the dog, everyone loves that's walking on. Then you got supply chain, robotics, machine learning, and space. It all points to one thing, innovation around industrial. I think what, what, what's your, what's your, what's your take? >>You know, I think one of the things is, is, you know, normally we are innovating in a, in our aerospace industry. You know, I think there's so much to learn from innovation across all these areas you described and trying to pull some of that into the spacecraft. You know, when, when you're a human being sitting in spacecraft is more than just flying the spacecraft. You know, you have interaction with displays, you have a lot of technologies that you normally would want to interact with on the ground that you could apply in space to help you and make your tasks easier. And I think those are things that are really important as we look across, you know, the whole entire innovative infrastructure that I see here in this show, how can we extract some that and apply it in the space program? I think there is a very significant leveraging that you could do off of that. >>What are some of the look at what's going on in donors? What are some of the cool people who aren't following the day to day? Anything? >>Well, well, certainly, you know, the Artman's mission Artis campaign is one of the, the, the coolest things I could think of. That's why I came into, you know, I think wrapping around that where we are not only just going to a destination, but we're exploring, and we're trying to establish a very clear, long term presence that will allow us to engage. What I think is the next step, which is science, you know, and science and the, and the things that can, can come out of that in terms of scientific discoveries. And I think the cool, coolest thing would be, Hey, could we take the things that we are in the labs and the innovation relative to power generation, relative to energy development of energy technologies, robotics, to utilize, to help explore the surface. And of course the science that comes out of just naturally, when you go somewhere, you don't know what to expect. And I think that's what the exciting thing. And for NASA, we're putting a program, an infrastructure around that. I think that's really exciting. Of course, the other parts of NASA is science. Yeah. And so the partnering those two pieces together to accomplish a very important mission for everybody on planet earth is, is really important. >>And also it's a curiosity. People are being curious about what's going on now in space, cuz the costs are down and you got universities here and you got the, of robotics and industrial. This is gonna provide a, a new ground for education, younger, younger generation coming up. What would you share to teachers and potential students, people who wanna learn what's different about now than the old generation and what's the same, what what's the same and what's new. What's how does someone get their arms around this, their mind around it? Where can they jump in? This is gonna open up the aperture for, for, for talent. I mean with all the technology, it's not one dimensional. >>Yeah. I think what is still true is core sciences, math, you know, engineering, the hard science, chemistry, biology. I mean, I think those are really also very important, but what we're we're getting today is the amount of collaboration we're able to do against organically. And I think the innovation that's driven by a lot of this collaboration where you have these tools and your ability to engage and then you're able to, to get, I would say the best out of people in lots of different areas. And that's what I think one of the things we're learning at NASA is, you know, we have a broad spectrum of people that come to work for us and we're pulling that. And now we're coming to these kinds of things where we're kind getting even more innovation ideas and partnerships so that we are not just off on our own thinking about the problem we're branching out and allowing a lot of other people to help us solve the problems that >>We need. You know, I've noticed with space force too. I had the same kind of conversations around those with those guys as well. Collaboration and public private partnerships are huge. You've seen a lot more kind of cross pollination of funding, col technology software. I mean, how do you do break, fix and space at software, right? So you gotta have, I mean, it's gotta work. So you got security challenges. Yeah. This is a new frontier. It is the cybersecurity, the usability, the operationalizing for humans, not just, you know, put atypical, you know, scientists and, and, and astronauts who are, you know, in peak shape, we're talking about humans. Yeah. What's the big problem to solve? Is it security? Is it, what, what would you say the big challenges >>Are? Yeah. You know, I think information and access to information and how we interact with information is probably our biggest challenge because we have very limited space in terms of not only mass, but just volume. Yeah. You know, you want to reserve the space for the people and they, they need to, you know, you want maximize your space that you're having in spacecraft. And so I think having access to information, being able to, to utilize information and quickly access systems so you can solve problems cuz you don't know when you're in deep space, you're several months out to Mars, what problems you might encounter and what kind of systems and access to information you need to help you solve the problems. You know, both, both, both from a just unplanned kind of contingencies or even planned contingencies where you wanna make sure you have that information to do it. So information is gonna be very vital as we go out into deep >>Space and the infrastructure's changed. How has the infrastructure changed in terms of support services? I mean see, in the United States, just the growth of a aerospace you mentioned earlier is, is just phenomenal. You've got smaller, faster, cheaper equipment density, it solved the technology. Where's there gonna be the, the big game changing move movement. Where do you see it go? Is it AIST three? It kind of kicks in AIST ones, obviously the first one unmanned one. But where do in your mind, do you see key milestones that are gonna be super important to >>Watch? I think, I think, I think, you know, we've already, you know, pushed the boundaries of what we, we are, you know, in terms of applying our aerospace technologies for AIST one and certainly two, we've got those in, in work already. And so we've got that those vehicles already in work and built yeah. One already at the, at the Kennedy space center ready for launch, but starting with three because you have a lot more interaction, you gotta take the crew down with a Lander, a human landing system. You gotta build rovers. You've gotta build a, a capability which they could explore. So starting with three and then four we're building the gateway gateways orbiting platform around the moon. So for all future missions after Rist three, we're gonna take Aion to the gateway. The crew gets into the orbiting platform. They get on a human landing system and they go down. >>So all that interaction, all that infrastructure and all the support equipment you need, not only in the orbit of the moon, but also down the ground is gonna drive a lot of innovation. You're gonna have to realize, oh, Hey, I needed this. Now I need to figure out how to get something there. You know? And, and how much of the robotics and how much AI you need will be very interesting because you'll need these assistance to help you do your daily routine or lessen your daily routine. So you can focus on the science and you can focus on doing the advancing those technologies that you're gonna >>Need. And you gotta have the infrastructure. It's like a road. Yeah. You know, you wanna go pop down to the moon, you just pop down, it's already built. It's ready for you. Yep. Come back up. So just ease of use from a deployment standpoint is, >>And, and the infrastructure, the things that you're gonna need, you know, what is a have gonna look like? What are you gonna need in a habitat? You know, are, are you gonna be able to have the power that you're gonna have? How many station power stations are you gonna need? Right. So all these things are gonna be really, things are gonna be driven by what you need to do the mission. And that drives, I think a lot of innovation, you know, it's very much like the end goal. What are you trying to solve? And then you go, okay, here's what I need to solve to build things, to solve that >>Problem. There's so many things involved in the mission. I can imagine. Safety's huge. Number one, gotta be up safe. Yep. Space is dangerous game. Yes. Yeah. It's not pleasant there. Not for the faint of heart. As you say, >>It's not for the faint >>Heart. That's correct. What's the big safety concerns obviously besides blowing up and oxygen and water and the basic needs. >>I think, I think, you know, I think you, you said it very well, you know, it is not for the faint of heart. We try to minimize risk. You know, asset is one of the big, you're sitting under 8.8 million pounds of thrust on the launch vehicle. So it is going very fast and you're flying and you, and, and it's it's light cuz we got solid rocket motors too as well. Once they're lit. They're lit. Yeah. So we have a escape system on Orion that allows a crew to be safe. And of course we build in redundancy. That's the other thing I think that will drive innovation. You know, you build redundancy in the system, but you also think about the kind of issues that you would run into potentially from a safety perspective, you know, how you gonna get outta situation if you get hit by a meteor, right? Right. You, you, you are going through the band, Ellen belt, you have radiation. So you know, some of these things that are harsh on your vehicle and on, on the human side of this shop too. And so when you have to do these things, you have to think about what are you gonna protect for and how do you go protect for that? And we have to find innovations for >>That. Yeah. And it's also gonna be a really exciting air for engineering work. And you mentioned the data, data's huge simulations, running scenarios. This is where the AI comes in. And that seems to me where the dots connect from me when you start thinking about how to have, how to run those simulations, to identify what's possible. >>I think that's a great point, you know, because we have all this computing capability and because we can run simulations and because we can collect data, we have terabytes of data, but it's very challenging for humans to analyze at that level. So AI is one of the things we're looking at, which is trying to systematically have a process by which data is called through so that the engineering mind is only looking at the things and focus on things that are problematic. So we repeat tests, every flight, you don't have to look at all the terabytes of data of each test. You have a computer AI do that. And you allow yourself to look at just the pieces that don't look right, have anomalies in the data. Then you're going to do that digging, right. That's where the power of those kinds of technologies can really help us because we have that capability to do a lot of computing. >>And I think that's why this show to me is important because it, it, it shows for the first time, at least from my coverage of the industry where technology's not the bottleneck anymore, it's human mind. And we wanna live in a peaceful world with climate. We wanna have the earth around for a while. So climate change was a huge topic yesterday and how the force for good, what could come outta the moon shots is to, is to help for earth. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. Better understanding there all good. What's your take on the show. If you had to summarize this show, re Mars from the NASA perspective. So you, the essence space, what's the what's going on here? What's the big, big story. >>Yeah. For, for me, I think it's eyeopening in terms of how much innovation is happening across a spectrum of areas. And I look at various things like bossy, scientific robots that the dog that's walking around. I mean to think, you know, people are applying it in different ways and then those applications in a lot of ways are very similar to what we need for exploration going forward. And how do you apply some of these technologies to the space program and how do we leverage that? How do we leverage that innovation and how we take the innovations already happening organically for other reasons and how would those help us solve those problems that we're gonna encounter going forward as we try to live on another planet? >>Well, congratulations on a great assignment. You got a great job. I do super fun. I love being an observer and I love space. Love how at the innovations there. And plus space space is cool. I mean, how many millions of live views do you see? Everyone's stopping work to watch SpaceX land and NASA do their work. It's just, it's bringing back the tech vibe. You know what I'm saying? It's just, it's just, things are going you a good tailwind. Yeah. >>Congratulations. Thank you very much. >>Appreciate it on the, okay. This cube coverage. I'm John fur. You're here for the cube here. Live in Las Vegas back at reinvent reinforce re Mars, the reser coverage here at re Mars. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.

>>AWS public sector summit here in person in Washington, D. C. For two days live. Finally a real event. I'm john for your host of the cube. Got a great guest Howard Levinson from data bricks, regional vice president and general manager of the federal team for data bricks. Uh Super unicorn. Is it a decade corn yet? It's uh, not yet public but welcome to the cube. >>I don't know what the next stage after unicorn is, but we're growing rapidly. >>Thank you. Our audience knows David bricks extremely well. Always been on the cube many times. Even back, we were covering them back when big data was big data. Now it's all data everything. So we watched your success. Congratulations. Thank you. Um, so there's no, you know, not a big bridge for us across to see you here at AWS public sector summit. Tell us what's going on inside the data bricks amazon relationship. >>Yeah. It's been a great relationship. You know, when the company got started some number of years ago we got a contract with the government to deliver the data brooks capability and they're classified cloud in amazon's classified cloud. So that was the start of a great federal relationship today. Virtually all of our businesses in AWS and we run in every single AWS environment from commercial cloud to Govcloud to secret top secret environments and we've got customers doing great things and experiencing great results from data bricks and amazon. >>The federal government's the classic, I call migration opportunity. Right? Because I mean, let's face it before the pandemic even five years ago, even 10 years ago. Glacier moving speed slow, slow and they had to get modernized with the pandemic forced really to do it. But you guys have already cleared the runway with your value problems. You've got lake house now you guys are really optimized for the cloud. >>Okay, hardcore. Yeah. We are, we only run in the cloud and we take advantage of every single go fast feature that amazon gives us. But you know john it's The Office of Management and Budget. Did a study a couple of years ago. I think there were 28,000 federal data centers, 28,000 federal data centers. Think about that for a minute and just think about like let's say in each one of those data centers you've got a handful of operational data stores of databases. The federal government is trying to take all of that data and make sense out of it. The first step to making sense out of it is bringing it all together, normalizing it. Fed aerating it and that's exactly what we do. And that's been a real win for our federal clients and it's been a real exciting opportunity to watch people succeed in that >>endeavour. We have another guest on. And she said those data center huggers tree huggers data center huggers, majority of term people won't let go. Yeah. So but they're slowly dying away and moving on to the cloud. So migrations huge. How are you guys migrating with your customers? Give us an example of how it's working. What are some of the use cases? >>So before I do that I want to tell you a quick story. I've I had the luxury of working with the Air Force Chief data officer Ailene vedrine and she is commonly quoted as saying just remember as as airmen it's not your data it's the Air Force's data. So people were data center huggers now their data huggers but all of that data belongs to the government at the end of the day. So how do we help in that? Well think about all this data sitting in all these operational data stores they're getting it's getting updated all the time. But you want to be able to Federated this data together and make some sense out of it. So for like an organization like uh us citizenship and immigration services they had I think 28 different data sources and they want to be able to pull that data basically in real time and bring it into a data lake. Well that means doing a change data capture off of those operational data stores transforming that data and normalizing it so that you can then enjoy it. And we've done that I think they're now up to 70 data sources that are continually ingested into their data lake. And from there they support thousands of users doing analysis and reports for the whole visa processing system for the United States, the whole naturalization environment And their efficiency has gone up I think by their metrics by 24 x. >>Yeah. I mean Sandy carter was just on the cube earlier. She's the Vice president partner ecosystem here at public sector. And I was coming to her that federal game has changed, it used to be hard to get into you know everybody and you navigate the trip wires and all the subtle hints and and the people who are friends and it was like cloak and dagger and so people were locked in on certain things databases and data because now has to be freely available. I know one of the things that you guys are passionate about and this is kind of hard core architectural thing is that you need horizontally scalable data to really make a I work right. Machine learning works when you have data. How far along are these guys in their thinking when you have a customer because we're seeing progress? How far along are we? >>Yeah, we still have a long way to go in the federal government. I mean, I tell everybody, I think the federal government's probably four or five years behind what data bricks top uh clients are doing. But there are clearly people in the federal government that have really ramped it up and are on a par were even exceeding some of the commercial clients, U. S. C. I. S CBP FBI or some of the clients that we work with that are pretty far ahead and I'll say I mentioned a lot about the operational data stores but there's all kinds of data that's coming in at U S. C. I. S. They do these naturalization interviews, those are captured in real text. So now you want to do natural language processing against them, make sure these interviews are of the highest quality control, We want to be able to predict which people are going to show up for interviews based on their geospatial location and the day of the week and other factors the weather perhaps. So they're using all of these data types uh imagery text and structure data all in the Lake House concept to make predictions about how they should run their >>business. So that's a really good point. I was talking with keith brooks earlier directive is development, go to market strategy for AWS public sector. He's been there from the beginning this the 10th year of Govcloud. Right, so we're kind of riffing but the jpl Nasa Jpl, they did production workloads out of the gate. Yeah. Full mission. So now fast forward today. Cloud Native really is available. So like how do you see the the agencies in the government handling Okay. Re platform and I get that but now to do the reef acting where you guys have the Lake House new things can happen with cloud Native technologies, what's the what's the what's the cross over point for that point. >>Yeah, I think our Lake House architecture is really a big breakthrough architecture. It used to be, people would take all of this data, they put it in a Hadoop data lake, they'd end up with a data swamp with really not good control or good data quality. And uh then they would take the data from the data swamp where the data lake and they curate it and go through an E. T. L. Process and put a second copy into their data warehouse. So now you have two copies of the data to governance models. Maybe two versions of the data. A lot to manage. A lot to control with our Lake House architecture. You can put all of that data in the data lake it with our delta format. It comes in a curated way. Uh there's a catalogue associated with the data. So you know what you've got. And now you can literally build an ephemeral data warehouse directly on top of that data and it exists only for the period of time that uh people need it. And so it's cloud Native. It's elastically scalable. It terminates when nobody's using it. We run the whole center for Medicaid Medicare services. The whole Medicaid repository for the United States runs in an ephemeral data warehouse built on Amazon S three. >>You know, that is a huge call out, I want to just unpack that for a second. What you just said to me puts the exclamation point on cloud value because it's not your grandfather's data warehouse, it's like okay we do data warehouse capability but we're using higher level cloud services, whether it's governance stuff for a I to actually make it work at scale for those environments. I mean that that to me is re factoring that's not re platform Ng. Just re platform that's re platform Ng in the cloud and then re factoring capability for on uh new >>advantages. It's really true. And now you know at CMS, they have one copy of the data so they do all of their reporting, they've got a lot of congressional reports that they need to do. But now they're leveraging that same data, not making a copy of it for uh the center for program integrity for fraud. And we know how many billions of dollars worth of fraud exist in the Medicaid system. And now we're applying artificial intelligence and machine learning on entity analytics to really get to the root of those problems. It's a game >>changer. And this is where the efficiency comes in at scale. Because you start to see, I mean we always talk on the cube about like how software is changed the old days you put on the shelf shelf where they called it. Uh that's our generation. And now you got the cloud, you didn't know if something is hot or not until the inventory is like we didn't sell through in the cloud. If you're not performing, you suck basically. So it's not working, >>it's an instant Mhm. >>Report card. So now when you go to the cloud, you think the data lake and uh the lake house what you guys do uh and others like snowflake and were optimized in the cloud, you can't deny it. And then when you compare it to like, okay, so I'm saving you millions and millions if you're just on one thing, never mind the top line opportunities. >>So so john you know, years ago people didn't believe the cloud was going to be what it is. Like pretty much today, the clouds inevitable. It's everywhere. I'm gonna make you another prediction. Um And you can say you heard it here first, the data warehouse is going away. The Lake house is clearly going to replace it. There's no need anymore for two separate copies, there's no need for a proprietary uh storage copy of your data and people want to be able to apply more than sequel to the data. Uh Data warehouses, just restrict. What about an ocean house? >>Yeah. Lake is kind of small. When you think about this lake, Michigan is pretty big now, I think it's I >>think it's going to go bigger than that. I think we're talking about Sky Computer, we've been a cloud computing, we're going to uh and we're going to do that because people aren't gonna put all of their data in one place, they're going to have, it spread across different amazon regions or or or amazon availability zones and you're going to want to share data and you know, we just introduced this delta sharing capability. I don't know if you're familiar with it but it allows you to share data without a sharing server directly from picking up basically the amazon, you RLS and sharing them with different organizations. So you're sharing in place. The data actually isn't moving. You've got great governance and great granularity of the data that you choose to share and data sharing is going to be the next uh >>next break. You know, I really loved the Lake House were fairly sing gateway. I totally see that. So I totally would align with that and say I bet with you on that one. The Sky net Skynet, the Sky computing. >>See you're taking it away man, >>I know Skynet got anything that was computing in the Sky is Skynet that's terminated So but that's real. I mean I think that's a concept where it's like, you know what services and functions does for servers, you don't have a data, >>you've got to be able to connect data, nobody lives in an island. You've got to be able to connect data and more data. We all know more data produces better results. So how do you get more data? You connect to more data sources, >>Howard great to have you on talk about the relationship real quick as we end up here with amazon, What are you guys doing together? How's the partnership? >>Yeah, I mean the partnership with amazon is amazing. We have, we work uh, I think probably 95% of our federal business is running in amazon's cloud today. As I mentioned, john we run across uh, AWS commercial AWS GovCloud secret environment. See to us and you know, we have better integration with amazon services than I'll say some of the amazon services if people want to integrate with glue or kinesis or Sagemaker, a red shift, we have complete integration with all of those and that's really, it's not just a partnership at the sales level. It's a partnership and integration at the engineering level. >>Well, I think I'm really impressed with you guys as a company. I think you're an example of the kind of business model that people might have been afraid of which is being in the cloud, you can have a moat, you have competitive advantage, you can build intellectual property >>and, and john don't forget, it's all based on open source, open data, like almost everything that we've done. We've made available to people, we get 30 million downloads of the data bricks technology just for people that want to use it for free. So no vendor lock in. I think that's really important to most of our federal clients into everybody. >>I've always said competitive advantage scale and choice. Right. That's a data bricks. Howard? Thanks for coming on the key, appreciate it. Thanks again. Alright. Cube coverage here in Washington from face to face physical event were on the ground. Of course, we're also streaming a digital for the hybrid event. This is the cubes coverage of a W. S. Public sector Summit will be right back after this short break.

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, you host of theCUBE. We're here with Howard Boville who's the Head of Hybrid Cloud Platform for IBM. He's been in the industry for many, many decades as a practitioner. Heading up organizations now at IBM, heading up the hybrid cloud. Howard, great to have you on theCUBE. >> Pleased to be here, John. Thank you for your time. >> Can you tell us a little bit about the digital transformation trends that you've seen over the past year as they have clearly shook the industry? Certainly, COVID. No one would have predicted provisioning VPN access or remote access for all the employees. I'm sure that wasn't on anyone's radar, but many more other disruptions and opportunities for accelerating these new, what are now obvious benefits. Can you take your time to explain what you've seen? >> Yeah, sure. So been a huge amount of acceleration of digital transformation. So VPN projects, as you mentioned, the people working from home, projects that, in the past, were taking many, many years to work through, then got done literally in weeks. And they're very complex when you get under the skin of them. And companies, therefore saw confidence in that and started to look at broader digital transformations. And you can kind of think about them in terms of their successes and their failures, or the lessons learned from them. So when it's done right, what I've observed from companies that have done it right, they've done it from a business process perspective. They've looked at their business processes that they want to transform as opposed to just the underpinning technology. But the companies that have been around for a while have also been understood that legacy's a problem. So God created the Earth is seven, or the world in seven days, but that's because He didn't have any legacy to deal with. So as companies have taken the confidence for the smaller projects to work through, they've found in these larger ones, where they've got legacy environments to work through, digital transformation's still very important but it's not as straightforward as they thought it might be. >> You know, one of the things that's coming out of the hybrid cloud discussion is a couple of things. One is everyone now agrees that this is the standard and multicloud's soon around the corner. Hybrid cloud is an operating model and it's a new kind of operating system with the ability to use Kubernetes and containers and microservices and other service meshes to integrate legacy. This is huge. What's the biggest pain points that you're seeing from an adoption standpoint that are blockers from clients? What's gettin' in the way of the obvious, now, path with hybrid cloud? >> Well actually, the first and foremost, the position that IBM's created by kind of calling it a hybrid cloud where companies will be on-premise and off-premise because of legacy, gives CIOs around the world a huge sigh of relief. And having sat in their seats, I've often thought I must be the dumbest person in the room because I don't understand this full on public cloud model because I can't see the benefits to my shareholders that that would deliver. I could see it to the pure player cloud service providers, but not to myself. So talking to CIOs, I think thank heavens for that. We're no longer as seen as Arondight when we're explaining that we'll be on-premise and off-premise, and it'll be heterogeneous environments we're operating within. But the simple way to think about the blockers and actually, you've done a nice job, yourself, John, in terms of explaining this, is cloud is just simply another resource pool that you use to run your applications or your datasets on. And in the past, you had a nicely curated environments when it was in your own environments but there are benefits that you can get by using more immersing technologies like cloud, particularly around developed productivity. But in chapter one of cloud with a pure player cloud providers, it was kind of a carbuncle that you kind of put onto the side of your organization which then became very difficult to this kind of Frankenstein's monster of piece parts to put together from an IT operations and a cyber security perspective. >> Okay, so you talk about this Franken-cloud model, before. I've heard that come from you. What is this about? You just referenced it, there. What is the Franken-cloud? >> Yeah, it's the simple way to think about it is in the old world when you ran all of your applications, your datasets, your developers, in your own data centers, you would create a curated model that would allow you to run it very strongly from an architectural perspective. Lots of different legacy environments, but the actual architecture you'd put around it would be clean and the IT operational environments would be clean, and the actually cyber security controls. You put on a third party capability whether that's a cloud service provider or a software as a service provider and you add a world of complexity where you have no controls over those environments, and you're certainly not driving the architectural standards. So you're putting together these piece parts in the same way as Dr. Frankenstein put together the monster that he created. And ultimately, that will turn upon you. It will create technical operational issues, it will create economic issues, and it absolutely will create cyber security issues. So the important thing to think about on these digital transformations is the architecture in a hybrid context is one that will work for you with a multicloud environment, whether that's from a software as a service provider or from a cloud service provider. >> It's interesting you bring up these other turning on you kind of the Franken-cloud, I get that. But let's bring that up to the positive. A client customer might say hey, you know, I did a great job of moving into the public cloud, I brought some stuff on hybrid. Oh my god, look at them pushin' some new stuff. And then they push new code and then things break. They call this day 2 operations or as you guys are referring to, AI ops. These are opportunities. So how does a company get their arms around that because that's going to be the next progression. Okay, I'm operating on a distributed basis. All right, great. I got an Edge, data center, whatever, but now I'm pushin' code all the time. I don't want it to break. >> I mean, most of my comments, John, are based upon the experiences and mistakes that I've made in my career. So that element that you talked about there, that day 2 operations, not only are we going through an inflection point in terms of the technologies that are used, and the architectures at a technical level you have to put together, the silicon that you think about, you got to really think about the carbon, the people, and the IT operating model that you have. 'Cause a lot of the actual manual work you did, previously, we'll be doing it in an automated fashion, so an AI fashion. So any transformation program needs to look at the actual transformation of the skills of the people that you have working for you. And the shouldn't feel fearful that it's a place where they actually won't have a role, they just won't have a role with the current skillset they've got. But there are adjacent skillset that you an have that they can actually get trained into or get on assignments where they get the experience to operate in that fashion. >> Hey, I'd love to get the comment on the Edge with the S system on a chip, SOC as it's called, as more and more capabilities are going to be at the Edge. But I want to stay on this quick cloud thing on Franken-cloud, because you know, one of the things that I see with the positives of cloud is that okay, get me more agile, but then I get worried that if I'm going too fast, I might break something or get fired. I got all this compliance, I don't want to get sued or you know, there's all kinds of regulations now, and compliance around distributed clouds, globally. So what's your take on that? What specific challenges do these companies face when they're either in regulated industries or don't want to go too fast? They got to watch that data and make sure it's not going to be misused. >> Yeah, so the philosophy that we have at IBM is different to chapter one in the pure player cloud providers which is we believe if you build the actual compliance controls in from the outset and have them as a standard of consumption for all customers, they can actual accelerate their adoption of cloud. So they can actually get to the benefits of cloud productivity, innovation far more quickly. And that's been evidenced by chapter one where all large institutions in multiple-year programs spend tens of millions of dollars and are building the compliance controls, themselves. You don't do that with IBM. You get that out of the box for the entire industry. We keep that fresh and current, and vibrant going forward so those non-functional requirements are no longer a consideration for you, and you can then focus your energy, your developers in terms of the actual point of innovation on the functional capabilities that you can provide. >> I want to get your reaction to something and a comment, if you don't mind. I mean, there's been a big trend of data clouds built on other people's clouds, and you got the needs of specialty in industries or critical needs. Do you see the need or do you see a path for specialty clouds or vertical clouds, specifically, as these, the AI in data can be relative to these verticals but you want, at the same time, horizontal scalability for a data plane or data access. What's your take on specialty clouds or vertical clouds? >> Yeah, I mean, that's at the heart of the thesis and the idea that we have here, at IBM, which is there is a need for specialty clouds in particular industries and their workloads. And really, as kind of people look back in the very near future, they'll say that's an evident thing because again, in the old world when it was in your own data center, you would have build types for specific types of applications and the processes that it supported and the risk posture of that, and then your associated datasets. So the capabilities that we build within our global availability zones is for the large enterprises and that's an area that's obviously at IBM's heritage. And then it's not just the software level, it's the hardware it runs on. So IBM provides the hardware from a mainframe power X86 so through all those kind of form factors, and then at an operating system level, obviously if you're Linux in terms of the capabilities that we have. So we can meet all of that stack but build them specifically for the applications and the datasets for the industries that we serve, and the AI capabilities necessary. >> That's great stuff. I want to get your take and shift gears to cyber security. I mean, every time you look, there's a headline of a breach. SolarWinds had more implications than anyone could imagine. Do you hire more firefighters to put out the fire? Do you make fire resistant materials? I mean, there's an optimization balance. What do you think is the best way we prevent cyber breaches goin' forward? What's your take on this? I'm sure you've had a perfect-- >> So in the world of cyber security, it's all of the above and then many more because you've got to put checks and balances in terms of every capability having kind of come from an environment where my old bank was named after the country that it was in, and therefore, nations states were to correct the light in terms of trying to breach the area. So all of those controls are necessary as you put them in. But the other element to think about on digital supply chains is again, if you actually have your supply chain on a cloud that has the compliance controls built in, they benefit in a Herodot, as well. Whereas, if you don't, you've got to actually ensure that they are actually attesting to the controls. The cloud that we built here, at IBM, give you continuous monitoring to ensure that those software as a service providers are actually adhering to the controls you want in real time. That is a massive game-changer in terms of the then logging information we can provide to customers to assure that their digital supply chain does not become compromised. >> Real quick while I got you here, as cyber standards become around hybrid, the early responses were specialized on AWS, Azure, or Google, and they pick one, I have a backup cloud, and then build your teams around that, your developer teams. Does that shift with hybrid? How does CSOs change with hybrid? >> So the benefit in terms of the entry to IBM has in the cloud space which is probably in terms of the current variants, two years old, is that we're not dealing with legacy. So we're kind of learning from the mistakes that these older cloud providers that have got a wealth of legacy in their environments both for the actual hardware level, but also at the code-base level, some more so than others in terms of the issues they have with their code bearers. And therefore, with the AI ops and the actual cyber security tools that we put in place we're building upon the bad experiences they've had but also other intelligence that we get in terms of threat factors as they come through, John. >> Howard, and the last question to end this segment, you've led a lot of digital transformation initiatives through your career. What have you found has been the best practice as that applies now, as companies are coming out of COVID, they want to have a growth strategy, they want to make sure the foundation's in place that's solid, that they can build upon. What's your lessons learned? What's your best practice advice? >> So you've got to deal with the difficult problems first, that sometimes are fundamental to get to pace. So controls appears to be a fairly mundane topic but unless you can deal with the controls, you can't actually get the accelerated pace. And then when you do these transformations you have to bring your people along with you at the same time as you're transforming the technology. So you need the silicon to be allied with the carbon and then you get people that are actually change hungry as opposed to change resistant. >> Howard Boville, thanks for comin' on theCUBE. Head of Hybrid Cloud Platforms at IBM. Thanks for joining us, today. >> You're welcome, thank you, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE for IBM Think 2021 coverage. Thanks for watching. (soft music) ♪ Dah de dah ♪ ♪ Dah ♪

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube with digital >>coverage of IBM >>Think 2020 >>one brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 john for your host of the cube we're here. Howard Belleville is the head of hybrid cloud platform for IBM been in the industry for many, many decades as a practitioner heading up organizations now at IBM heading up the hybrid cloud. Howard, great to have you on the cube. >>Pleased to be here, john thank you for your time. Can >>you tell us a little about the digital transformation trends that you've seen in the past year as they have clearly shook the industry? Certainly Covid no one would have predicted provisioning VPN access or remote access for all the employees. I'm sure that wasn't on anyone's radar but many more other disruptions and opportunities for accelerating these new what are now obvious benefits. Can you take your time to explain what you're seeing? >>Yeah, sure. So there's been a huge amount of acceleration of digital transformation. So VPN projects, as you mentioned, the people working from home projects that in the past were taking many, many years to work through then got done literally in weeks, um and they're very complex when you get under the skin of them. Um and companies therefore saw confidence in that and start to look at broader digital transformations um and you can kind of think about in terms of the successes and their failures or the lessons learned from them. So when it's done right, what I've observed from companies that have been it right, they've done it from a business process perspective, they looked at their business processes that they want to transform as opposed to just the independent technology, um but the companies that have been around for a while, I've also been understood that legacy is a problem. So God created the Earth in seven of the world in seven days, but that's because he didn't have any legacy to deal with. So as companies have taken the confidence for the smaller projects to work through, they found in these larger ones where they've got legacy environments to work through. Digital transformation is still very important, but it's not as straightforward as they thought it might be. >>You know, one of the things that's coming out of the hybrid cloud um, discussion is a couple of things. One is everyone now agrees that this is the standard and multi cloud soon around the corner. Um, Hybrid clouds and operating model. Um, and it's a new kind of operating system with with the ability to use kubernetes and containers and microservices and other service message to to integrate legacy. This is huge. What's the biggest pain points that you're seeing from an adoption standpoint that our blockers from clients, What's getting in the way of the obvious now path with hybrid cloud? >>Well actually the first and foremost the position that IBM is created by kind of calling out hybrid cloud where companies will be on premise and off premise because the legacy IFC IOS around the world, the huge sigh of relief and having sat in their seats, I often thought I must be the dumbest person in the room because I don't understand this full on public cloud model because I can't see the benefits to my shareholders that that would deliver. I could see it to the pure play cloud service providers but not to to myself. So talking to C I O S I think thank heavens for that were no longer seen as a Luddite when we're explaining that we'll be on premise and off premise and it'll be heterogeneous environments were operating with within the simple way to think about the blockers and actually done a nice job yourself, john in terms of explaining this is cloud, is is simply another resource tool that you use to run your applications or your data sets on and in the past you had nicely curated environment within it was in your own environment, but there are benefits that you can get by using more innocent technologies like cloud, particularly around developed productivity. But in chapter one of cloud with a pure flare cloud providers, it was kind of a carbuncle that you kind of put onto the side of your organization, which then became very difficult. This kind of Frankenstein's monster of piece parts to put together from an IT operations and cyber security perspective. >>Okay, so you talk about this Franken cloud model before, I've heard heard that come from you. What is this about? You just referenced it there. What is the Franken cloud? >>Yeah, that's the simple way to think about it is um, in the old world, when you run all of your applications, your data sets, your developers in your own data sensors, you would create a curated model that would allow you to very strongly from an architectural perspective, lots of different legacy environments. But the actual architecture put around it would be clean and the operational environment will be clean and the actual Cyprus security controls, you put on a third party capability, whether that's a cloud service provider or a software as a service provider. And you had a world of complexity where you have no control over those environments and you're certainly not driving the architectural standards. So you're putting together these peace parts in the same way as dr Frankenstein put together the monster he created and ultimately, that will turn upon you. It will create technical operational issues that will create economic issues and it absolutely will create cybersecurity issues. So the important thing to think about on these digital transformations is the architecture in a hybrid context is one that will work for you with a multi cloud environment, whether that's from a software as a service provider or from the cloud service >>provider. It's interesting you bring up these other turning on you kind of the Franken cloud. I get that. But let's bring that up to the positive a client customer might say, hey, you know, I did a great job of moving into the public cloud. I brought some stuff on hybrid. Oh my God, look at the push some new stuff and then I pushed new new code and then things breaks. They call this day to operations. Or as you guys are referring to a I ops. These are opportunities. So how does the company get their arms around that? Because that's gonna be the next progression. Okay. I'm operating on distributed basis. Alright, great. I got an edge data center, whatever. But now I'm pushing code all the time. I don't want it to break. >>Yeah, I mean most of my comments are based upon the experiences and the mistakes that I've made in my career. So that element that you talked about there that day to operations, not only are we going through an inflection point in terms of the technologies that are used and the architecture is at a technical level, you have to put together the silicon that you think about. You're going to really think about the carbon, the people and the operating model that you have because a lot of the actual manual work you did previously will be done in a in an automated fashion. So an Ai fashion. So any transformation program needs to look at the actual transformation of the skills of the people you have working for you and they shouldn't feel fearful that it's a place where they actually won't have a role. They just won't have a role with the current skill sets they've got. But there are adjacent skill sets that you can have that they can actually be trained into or get an assignment where they get the experience to operate in that fashion. >>I'd love to get the comment on the edge with this system on a chip soc as it's called As more and more capabilities are going to be at the edge. But I want to stay on this quick cloud thing on Franken cloud because you know, one of the things that I see with the positives of cloud is is that okay? Can be more agile. But then I get worried that if I'm going too fast, I might break something. I get fired. I got all this compliance, don't get sued or you know, there's all kinds of regulations now and compliance around distributed clouds globally. So what's your take on that? What specific challenges do these companies face when they're either in regulated industries or don't want to go too fast? I gotta, I gotta watch that day to make sure it's not gonna be misused. >>Yeah. So the, so the philosophy that we have at IBM is different to Chapter one and the pure player cloud providers, which is, we believe if you build the actual compliance controls in from the outset and have them as a standard of consumption for all customers, they can actually accelerate their adoption of cloud so they can actually get to the benefits of cloud productivity innovation far more quickly. And that's been evidenced by Chapter one where all large institutions in multiple year programs spend tens of millions of dollars and are building the compliance controls themselves. You don't do that with IBM, you get that out of the box for the entire industry. We keep that fresh and current and vibrant going forward. So there's non functional requirements and no longer a consideration for you and you can then focus your energy, your developers in terms of the actual points of innovation, on the functional capabilities that you can provide. >>I want to get your reaction to something and you comment if you don't mind. I mean, there's been a big trend of data clouds built on other people's clouds and you've got the needs of special specialty and industries or vertical needs. Do you see the need or you see a path for specialty clouds or vertical clouds? Specifically as these? The A. I. And data can be relative to these verticals but you want at the same time horizontal scalability for data plane or data access. What's your take on specialty clouds? >>That's at the heart of the thesis. And the idea that we have here at IBM, which is there is a need for specialty clouds of particular industries and their their workloads. And really it's kind of people look back in the very near future. That's a that's an evident thing because again in the old world when it was in your own data center, you would have build types for specific types of applications and the processes that are supported and the risk posture of that and then the associated data sets. Um so the capabilities that we built within our global availability zones is for the large enterprises and that's an area that's obviously being heritage and then it's not just the software level, it's the hardware it runs on. So IBM provides the hardware from a mainframe power X 86. So for all those kind of form factors and an operating system level, obviously through Lennox in terms of the capabilities that we have so we can meet all of that stack but build them specifically for the applications and the data sets for the industries that we serve and the capabilities necessary. >>That's great stuff. I want to take your take shift gears to cybersecurity. I mean every time you look at the headline of a breach, solar winds had more implications than anyone could imagine. You do you hire more firefighters to put out the fire? Do you make fire resistant materials? I mean, there's optimization balance. What do you think is the best way to prevent cyber breaches going forward? What's your take on this? I'm sure you have >>a person, the world world of cyber security, it's all of the above and them anymore because you've got to put checks and balances in terms of every capability having kind of come from an environment where my old bank was named after the country it was in and therefore Nation state to take great delight in terms of trying to breach the area. So all of those controls are necessary um as you, as you put them in the other element to think about on digital supply chains is again, if you actually have your supply chain on a cloud that has the compliance controls built in, they benefit and inherit that as well. Whereas if you don't, you got to actually ensure that they are actually attesting to the controls. The cloud that we built here at IBM gives you continuous monitoring to sure that those software as a service providers are actually adhering to the controls you want in real time. That is a massive game changer. In terms of the, the logging information we can provide to customers to ensure that their digital supply chain does not become compromised >>real quick. While I've got you here as cyber standards become around hybrid. Uh, the early responses were specialized on AWS as your google and they pick one to have a backup cloud and build your teams around that your developer teams. Does that shift with hybrid? How does seesaws change with hybrid? >>Yeah. So, the benefit in terms of the entry to IBM has in the cloud space, which is probably in terms of the current variants, two years old is that we're not dealing with legacy. Um so we're kind of learning from the mistakes of these older cloud providers that have got a wealth of legacy and their environments, both at the actual hardware level, but also the code base level, some more so than others in terms of the issues they have with their code base um and therefore with the ai ops and the actual cyber security tools that we put employers were building upon, the bad experiences they've had, but also other intelligence that we get in terms of threat vectors as they come through, john >>howard. In the last question to end the segment, you've led a lot of digital transformation initiatives through your career. What have you found has been the best practice as that applies now as companies are coming out of covid, they wanna have a growth strategy. You want to make sure the foundations in place, that's solid that they can build upon. What's your, what's your lessons to learn, What's your best practice advice. >>So you've got to deal with the difficult problems first that sometimes a fundamental to get to pierce. So controls appears to be a fairly mundane topic. But unless you can deal with the controls, you can't actually get the accelerated pierce. And when you do these transformations, you have to bring your people along with you at the same time as your transfer transforming the technology. So you need the silicon to be allied with the carbon and then you get people are actually change Hungary as opposed to change resistant. >>Howard bravo. Thanks for coming on the cube head of hybrid cloud platforms at IBM. Thanks for joining us today. >>You're welcome. Thank you, john. >>Okay. I'm John Free with the Cube for IBM think 2021 coverage. Thanks for watching. Mhm Yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes wall to wall coverage of Dell Technologies World, The digital experience 2020. The Virtual Cube is coming at you. I'm Dave Volonte. And with me or two Great guest, my colleague and longtime business friend Howard Elias. He's the chief customer officer and president of services and digital Adele. And also joining me is Sri Raj, aka Sri Can't him Nene, who is the managing director of digital insights at Cargo, which is one of the world's largest privately held companies in the top maker and distributor of agricultural products and the things that we eat every day. Gentlemen, thanks so much for your time and coming on the Cube. Great to see you. >>Great to see you, Dave. And three. Great to see you again as well. >>Good to be with you both. So >>I wanna Howard, I wanna talk about start by talking about digital transformation. I'm gonna make it laugh. So I was talking to a customer every day or the other day, and we all talk about, you know, digital transformation. And I said, What's digital transformation to you? He said, Dave, my S a P system was 15 years old and I have to upgrade. It was like, Okay, there's eso There's a spectrum, as you know, but what do you seeing as digital transformation? What does that mean to your customers? >>Well, what we're seeing is a glimpse of the future. And first of all, Dave, Great to be with you again, uh, free and all of you out there hope everybody's safe. And, well, thanks for joining us, Adele Technologies World today. But digital transformation from our customers perspectives the technology enablement of experiences with customers, partners and employees, a swells automating processes to deliver value to the all key stakeholders. And we've just seen a glimpse of the future. Customers are accelerating their adoption of technology. We see this through necessity, right when everybody had to pivot from or toe work from home, especially those professional workers and for the most part, whether companies plan forward or not, we all embraced and learned new ways of being productive remotely, and that was all enabled by technology. But we've seen it in every walk of life. It's really an acceleration of trends that were already underway, whether it was the remote experience for professional employees, whether it's e commerce experience, whether it's telemedicine, distance learning. All of these things have been available for a while, but we've seen them be embraced and accelerated tremendously due to what we've seen over the last six months in all industries. And free will talk about what's happening specifically in the agricultural industry, and what we've seen is customers that have made investments over the years have been ableto move even faster in their specific industries. We've just on a survey of about 4600 customers around the world, and 80% have accelerated their investments in digital technology to improve the experience of their employees of their customers and of their partners. >>Yes, so So thank you for that, Howard. Three. I mean, a lot of people might think of cargo. There's physical business, but it's anything but. I mean, you've got such a huge data component to your business, but I wonder what you would add. I mean, we're maybe talk a little bit. I mean, it's such amazingly, you know, rich and deep company. But maybe talk about your digital transformation journey and at least in your sphere of the world where you're at. >>Yeah, thanks, David. You know, Howard's absolutely right. What? What Cove it has done is just accelerated the need for technology on farm and with our customers. And and certainly in the last few months, we've seen that accelerate tremendously, right? A t end of the day. Agriculture has been a technology first, um, industry for for hundreds of years, and and so we're seeing that take fold in the form of digital adoption, the use of analytics, the use of really unique sensor technologies like cameras and computer vision. Um, sound I liken it to the senses that we all have every day that we used to make decisions. Well, we're now seeing that adopted with our with our customers. And so it's a really interesting time, and I think an opportunity for for the industry to really move forward. >>I mean, in terms of the three in terms of the pandemic, you know, we we talked to a lot of customers. Howard just mentioned a survey. You certainly saw the pivot in tow work from home you know, increase in laptop momentum. And in Dell's business, we saw that you're seeing identity access, management, cloud security and point security. Even even VD I These were big tail winds early on. What did the pandemic due to your business and just in terms of your your priorities did you have to obviously shift to those things to support work from home? What happened to your digital transformation was was anything put on hold and is restarting. Can you just Yeah, I don't know what you could tell us about that, but anything you could describe and add some color to that narrative would be really helpful to our audience. >>Certainly. Yeah. You know, I think overnight we had, ah, workforce that went from being in the office toe working from home and and that just accelerated the need for for collaboration tools. Things like like teams and and Skype and Zoom have just taken off right? But also technologies that allow for virtual engagement, like white boarding and brainstorming sessions that we used to do in the office with customers and suppliers. We're now having to do in a virtual setting. So so that has just transformed how we do business on the customer. And, you know, technologies like computer vision and and sound really transform the need to to leverage labor differently. Right? One of the biggest challenges that the cove it has has placed is how labor interacts with animals and and with food production. And we've just seen a significant adoption of technology to help alleviate some of those stresses. >>Now you guys probably have seen the tongue in cheek cartoons, the covert wrecking ball, you know, the guys in the audience or the building saying digital transformation. Not on my watch in the cove, it comes in. I've often joked, uh, I guess we have to have a sense of humor in these times, but But if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We'll cove. It kind of broke everything. And Howard, when you think about digital transformation, yes, was going on before co vid. But But there are a lot of industries that hadn't been disrupted. I think about health care. I think about financial services. I think about defense. I mean, the list goes on unlike publishing, for instance, which got totally disrupted by the Internet. But now it seems like If you're not a digital business, you're out of business. Eso Are you seeing like virtually every industry adopting digital? Or are you seeing any trends that are different by industry? What are you seeing out there >>were absolutely seeing every company in every industry adopted in their own way, thinking through their business models. I mean, even think about what's happened in your local town. How technology is able enabled restaurants to dio, you know, uh, take out and delivery through digital tools, your local dry cleaner, your your local butcher and your baker. I mean, everybody's having toe be creative and reinvent. It's not just the, you know, large professional industrial financial services companies who are also reinventing. But I go back to what I said before what we're seeing. These trends were already underway. They've just been put into hyperspeed what folks were thinking about doing in two or three years we're doing into two or three months. The pivot toe work from home worldwide happened in two or three weeks, and it's not the crisis we planned for, but we're always preparing for the future. The groundwork was laid, and now it's just been accelerated. We're seeing it everywhere, including inside Adele. You know, I think about all the processes and the way we serve our employees, our customers and partners we've accelerated were adopting the product model within our own Del digital organization, for example, that's been accelerated. The move to multi cloud on having a cloud operating model no matter where the infrastructure has been accelerated. And you know, everything we've talked about on the client experience. Security models, networking model software, defined models, every every industry, every company has had to embrace this >>so sorry. I mean, I'm fascinated by your business. I mean again, I think a lot of people think of it as a real physical business. But there's so much data. You're the head of digital insights, which is You've got data running through your your entire operations. There's other things. There's there's double take words I see in your your background like aqua culture. So So how are you re imagining the future of your industry? >>That's Ah, that's a fascinating question, Dave. You know, think, Imagine this. You could listen to a shrimp eat and then turn that into unique insights about the feeding patterns on behaviors of shrimp, right? Who would have imagined 10 years ago that we would have technology that enabled us to do things like that? Right? And so, from aquaculture thio the dairy industry to, you know, grain origination. We're leveraging digital and data to really help our customers and producers make better, more informed decisions where in in the past it was really experience that allowed them toe be good farmers and and good stewards of our planet. Now we're using technology, so it's really an opportunity toe harness, the power of digital for our industry. >>Well, you know, and it's critical because we have people to feed and actually it's working. I mean, the yields that air coming out of the industry or are amazing. I know there's a lot of discussion now, but hey, you know, we're actually getting a lot of food to people. And now there's a discussion around nutrition that's that's front and center, and I presume technology and data fit in there as well. Three. I wonder if you could comment. >>Yeah, you know, by 2050 day there will be nearly 10 billion people on this planet. And to feed that growing population, we're gonna need 70% more protein on DSO. As you think about the impacts that that that growing population has on the planet. There's also, you know, nutrition. But think about sustainability. How do we how do we grow this food and get it from the place that it's produced to the place where it's consumed in a way that's a resource efficient and effective? So there's nutrition in just the middle class in Asia, you know, having a higher propensity to spend and dealing with that challenge on one end of the spectrum and then on the other end of the spectrum, being ableto really deal with with sustainability. >>I would have watched your career over the decades, and you've had so many roles, and I always used to joke with you. They give you the hardest problems if you want. If you want to get stuff done, you give it to the busiest guy. It was always Howard, you know, help us with with our own transformations. Help us do the integrations, whether it was m and a or the course, the largest in just >>industry I love a good challenge is you know, >>I do know and so I want to get. Get the update on Dell's own transformation. I've been talking to a number of your executives this week, and it looks like you know, you guys air, drinking your own champagne, dog food and whatever you wanna call it. But but bring us up to date on what you guys are doing internally. >>We are, and we're no different than any of our customers. And having Thio focus on our digital transformation agenda, I mentioned earlier the adoption of our product model, you know, moving from a project based Dell Digital and I T Organization to one that's a product model. So these are balanced teams with a product manager, a designer and developers working closely with the business and the function in an agile manner and the C I. C. D pipeline manner. And all of this again has been accelerated. We have our own del digital cloud, which is our hybrid cloud that we leverage internally. We're software defining everything, and it's really paying dividends because what we've seen literally in the last 6 to 8 months is higher levels of security, higher levels of availability, higher levels of resiliency. We've been able to handle all of the increased transactions on our e commerce engines, all at higher quality and lower costs. Now we the groundwork for this with Jen Felch in the team over the last couple of years, but again, by necessity, had to accelerate. And we've done that. And we're even moving faster now on data pipelines and really understanding all of our key processes and understanding the work flows and the data flows, working with machine learning and artificial intelligence again, exactly the way Cargill and other of our customers are doing in their businesses. I know you're talking or have talked to Doug Schmidt. You know, we've digitized and automated thousands of processes and our services organization Theobald bility on a remote basis to service our customers were we've invented new and innovative ways the service our customers remotely versus going on site, not just in break fix, deployment, remote change, management, manage services, consulting. It's just, you know, great to see all this wonderful innovation come together serving our customers. >>Thank you for that, Howard. And you, you said something that triggered me in a good way. Data pipelines. I use that term a lot. And three I wonder if you could talk about this because you're You guys have been around since the 18 hundreds, I think the largest privately held company in United States, I think, right, and probably close to one of the largest in the world. And so >>you >>got a lot of data and a lot of different places. So a huge challenge for you is okay. How do you manage those data pipelines? Those data, the data lifecycle, And I would think the company the size of cargo to the extent that you can reduce the end to end time it takes to go from raw data to insights E. That's gonna be telephone numbers for for your business and your bottom line that you can then reinvest and get back to customers, etcetera and be competitive. I wonder if you could talk about >>you >>know, that whole concept of the data pipeline And how are you using data and and some of the challenges of compressing that end to end cycle time and Leighton >>see, to >>get to insights >>that day. You know, Carlos, 155 year old company and and at our core were a supply chain company. Right? Um, you know, taking food from where it's produced, getting it through the manufacturing process, toe customers. And so at the end of the day, I I joked that not only are we have physical supply chain company, but we're also a data supply chain company. So the data value chain right is really about taking all the different inputs in data that we have in turning that into unique insights. And I don't think there's ah company on the planet in the food space that has the ability to connect those dots in the way that we dio. And so our ability to create unique, actionable insights for our customers is going to be really powerful, especially in the in the coming years. >>So talk about let's talk about Dell a little bit. I always ask, uh, technology leaders how your vendors doing for you? How did they help you through the pandemic? How would you grade del uh, in terms of its support through the pandemic? >>Dell has been absolutely fantastic, right? I mean, I think it is really need to have partners like Dell helping us achieve our mission for our customers. And I know they feel that way about us as their customers. So it's really wonderful. Toe have the type of collaboration and partnership that we do. >>Alright, Howard, Same question for you. How would you grade Del Onda? How you guys have done through the through the pandemic with regard to supporting your customers. I mean, you're you're never one toe overhype, uh, in my experience with you. But give us the your take. >>Why would grade del by what our customers say? And we do it both through direct conversations as well as the data and telemetry we get and the data and telemetry we have in terms of our NPS r R C sat scores or service level objectives that were delivering all have remained in profile. The team has really risen to the occasion. Been super creative, passionate, full of grit. We heard Alison and Angela talk about that the Dell Technologies world this morning, and our team is embodied that spirit and that great to be able to deliver. But in the conversations we're having with customers three and his peers, uh, you know, look, it's it's been a challenging time, but as you know, Dell has always focused on delivering value for the long term. We're not in it for the short term, and that has served us well. That philosophy Theobald active. We have with working with customers, eyes always about what's in the best interests of our customers in the long term. Because if we do that, it will ultimately be in the best interest of Dell. >>Well, it's It's been amazing to just watch. I mean, it's just ironic that we got hit with this at the beginning of this decade. It's gonna It's obviously gonna define. You know what we do going forward. I think we've all talked about it. It's funny. Everybody in our business and the technology business. We've become covert experts in some way, shape or form overnight. But we've talked a lot about the the things that we see as as permanent, and I think that >>you >>know you clearly the your two companies are examples of agility leaning into technology. And, as you said, Howard here for the long term, 155 years old, I think story said so well, here's to another 155 years. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming to Cuba. Awesome guests. >>Thanks. Day. Appreciate it. >>Thank you for watching everybody. Our continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. You're watching the Cube?

(uptempo music) >> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California it's The Cube! Covering Nutanix dot Next 2019 brought to you by Nutanix >> Welcome back everyone to The Cube's live coverage of Nutanix dot Next here in Anaheim California, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost John Furrier. We are joined by Dr. Ayanna Howard, she's the professor and chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Welcome Dr. Howard to The Cube! Thank you, thank you. I'm excited about this conversation. >> Yeah so you, you're a fascinating person, when you were a little girl, watching Bionic Woman you said "I wanna be a scientist," you started your career at NASA. >> Ayanna: Correct. >> You are an entrepreneur, a researcher. Tell us what you're doing today. >> So what I'm doing today, and what I'm really excited about is bringing robots into the home of children with special needs. So one of the things about kids and those that may have a developmental disability is that there's not enough contact hours with human clinicians. And so, how do you augment that in the home environment? How do you bring technology into the home to do therapy with them, to do even education? And so that's what I focus on. >> So, we want to hear so much more about that, but what are you gonna be talking about at this conference? It's the future of AI, and robots. >> Yes, I'm gonna talk about the things that make my robots work. And so, the future of AI and robotics and where it leads, it's a combination of things like wearables. So if you think about all the data around us, we have wearables with our phones, and our smart watches, all that data that's being collected about us, allows our machines to do very interesting personalized things with us and for us. The other thing is that if you think about collaborative AI, collaborative machines, we're going to the place where the workforce and how you do your work, you're going to have an AI as a companion, a robot as an assistant, so you might not be sitting next to a human, you might be sitting next to a robot. And so, what does that look like? And then, of course, emotional AI, and so, yes, machines do have emotions, which is, counts kind of weird, but in order for us to work with others, we typically have a bond, so why not have a bond with our machines? >> What's the software look like? I'm rifting in my mind here, I'm just thinking about, I'm gonna write some software that might be dynamic, a neural network, these kinds of words have been kicked around in the industry. How do you make software have emotion in AI? Because it has to be random, but yet not, it has to be programmable. >> It does. But think about it. Emotions are not necessarily random. Emotions are pretty repetitive, i.e., if you're hurt, what do you do? If you're young you cry, if you're older you hide the cry, right? I mean, it's very repetitive, if you're happy there's a certain emotion, what makes you happy? There are certain things that we can all say if I suddenly woke up and I won a prize, I'd be happy. Emotions are actually very predictable, they're not that hard to model. >> And the data sources could be coming off my Fit Bit, facial recognition, you know the morning... >> Well facial recognition, you can see it in the face, in fact your pulse, and you sweat a little bit when your emotions change. Remember the mood rings back in the day? (laughter) >> Sure! >> OK those were fake, but still, their concept about them was that your body gives a response based on the emotions inside. >> Yeah, that's so cool. So what's the state of the art, you look at bleeding edge and state of the art kind of mainstream, where are people with software, machine learning, AI, what's some of the things that are notable to you that are important to highlight? >> Yes, so I think that the two areas that are the furthest ahead, one is facial recognition and emotion detection, and it's because the application are out there. As an example, airports are putting in these systems, and so imagine, I mean, the positive is, is that you don't have to book or print out your ticket, right? You just walk into the airport, you walk though security, you don't get padded down, and you walk to your gate and get on the plane. I mean, just imagine that. You're like How would you do that? Well, if I know who you look like, and I can model you, and I grab your wearable, and your data, I know who you are! So, I don't have to make sure that you are who you are, I know. I mean, so that's kind of a benefit. Of course, there's some negatives, which we won't talk about, but that's one area, this facial recognition aspect. The other I think it's in healthcare, I think it's in the fact that our data, and about us, about our health, it's so much there, and as we mine it we just get better. There's, for example, some research that shows stress can be detected and I can then have a, think about it, I can have an AI that if I know you're stressed like, I'm not going to send you that email, I'm going to halt a little bit, until I realize that your stress level is a little bit better, and then I will give you the bad news. Right? Like, because we don't want to be stressed. >> I need that, I need that app. >> Rebeca: But that's a manager with really good intentions, I mean, you can really see the perils of this going... >> No, that's, that's the negative. That's the aspect of, all these things are, really have good return on investment, good quality, but the negatives are is that if you have nefarious manager or an organization like I just wanna make money, money, money, you can sway that, and I think, though, that most organizations are thinking about this. I think there's this push now to do things like regulations, to basically protect us, but still insure that we have a positive relationship with AI and robotics. >> What's the coolest thing you've seen or built recently that could tie into the robotics? >> So, I will personally say it's one of our machines, that has, it emotionally responds to you based on what you're doing, and so what does this mean? It means I have robots that are just looking so cute, right? You look at them, and anyone looks at them, and it's just , it's like, it's real, it's intelligent, it like understands me. Of course, it's programmed based on modeling but it's just as fascinating, and I watch people interact with robots, and it's like oh, my gosh, this person, this individual, is really engaged with my robotic creation. >> And you mean, in conversation or just in feeling the comradery? >> In conversation, in interaction, and the robots, they have a limited script, but people will adapt to that, right? And they will, it's just like when you talk to your phone, have you noticed that when your phone doesn't understand you, what do you do? You speak a little slower. You might choose different words, right? I see that with the robots, you change your behavior based on the limitations. >> Speaking with someone who doesn't speak lour language natively. >> Correct. Same thing with robots. >> So describe what you see... Returning to the beginning of our conversation talking in particularly with kids with special needs. >> Ayanna: Yes. >> Describe what you see, the changes in the child, who is developing a relationship, a bond with a robot. >> Yes, so what we've actually shown, not just seen and observed, is that when we have a child interacting with a robot their, and what we call, whatever milestone we're doing, so maybe it's movement therapy, which means I want them to say, move a little faster than their normal space of moving, what I see is with the robot there is a partner encouraging, guiding, providing them input on how well they're doing, or in terms of correcting, the child improves their behavior, and so between day zero and day n, the child has gotten better. We see that. We have the data that shows that. >> Incredible. I wanna also ask about women in technology, and this is, this is really a theme at every single tech conference you go to because it's such a problem, it's such an issue that is finally getting the attention it deserves. We know about the dearth of women leaders, the dearth of underrepresented minorities, particularly in management leadership positions, what do you see as you role in tackling this problem, as the head of an important department in technology and also as a woman of color? >> Yeah, so I think there's always been kind of two dilemmas, one is what they call the pipeline, which is now the pathway, like how do you get women to come into stem? And the data has shown that is not that girls are not interested in stem, it's that they lose interest because of their society, right? So that's one thing. It's like make sure that where they are in the society is encouraging. The other is that when you get older, you look up, you're like, okay there's no one there. Obviously, I'm not supposed to be here, or when things get tough, it's like, okay, I need to move out. And so the other is, how do you do mentorship and sponsorship, so that women are pushed forward as managers and supervisors. So those are kind of the two things. And so, as a, and I consider myself a leader in this space, I actually feel it's my duty to be up front, and be a mentor, and be a lead, and actually be vocal, and make others realize like, if I'm in a room, and we're deciding on, you know, a student or a candidate, and there's no representation, you know, I'm comfortable enough to say, hey, I should not be the one that says this, right? And eventually what you see is that people start looking and thinking about this, at every instance of time. >> Do you feel like it's getting better? >> I do. It's getting better. And it's not perfect but it's getting better. Like, if I look in the classrooms, I look in the computer science curriculums, I see more female students coming in, and lasting, and then going into corporate America and continue on to grad school. I see it being better, of course it's not on parity, but is is better. >> That's awesome. And the technology has shifted the definition. It's not programming, or electrical engineering, the surface area for tech is gaming to analytics, data science, it's huge. >> Human-centered interaction. >> There's new artistry around us, so I think it's a great surface area. >> It is, and I think one of the reasons why it's so important is that the world is diverse, I mean, in terms of all the different aspects. An so, if you're gonna create products for a diverse world, you should have individuals that are also diverse, creating them for everyone so that there's some equality in the process. >> As the analog world connects with the digital world, fascinating we talked before we came on camera around the technology in digital. So the human experience for me, whether having robots, detecting emotions, and having some sort of new notifications, like hey, you know, cheer up, or do something clever... >> Right >> Is that you can now immerse, so augmented reality has been the first killer app before virtual reality, but gaming is an indicator of what's happening onscreen, so, the onscreen digital realm is intersecting with our lives. >> Ayanna: It is. >> What's your view on this? Because this is an area that's new, it's cutting edge, it's a first generation problem, an opportunity. >> Opportunity. I think this, this blending of the, I would say, even, I would say the blending of the digital and physical and the gamefication aspects, is really gonna enhance two areas. One is education, and the retraining, and so what does that mean? It means that, instead of me having to, not to say go to college for four years, but instead of me trying to study everything in this one-semester course, it's like, I just need some basic knowledge and I can then work in the field, and I have my augment reality and so I see things and there's some scaffolding, there's some indication of here's step one, here's step two, ahh, you did that step two a little bit wrong, let's revise it. So you learn with real-time training and that's with doctors, well except for live patients, but you know, with doctors or residents, factory workers, or even teachers, teachers who are teaching say, calculus, that may have an English background. That's where it is. >> The progressions are not linear like they used to be. >> Ayanna: No! >> They are different, and now you have dated instrumentation with on-demand digital robots... >> Robots, agents... >> John: Agents, assistants... >> Adaptation, taking things from other places, so if I, for example, learn the best way to provide information to this human and this factory, well guess what, I can take that information, connect to the cloud, connect to the data centers, and apply that information to another worker in a different factory, but very similar characteristics, and so you have this transfer of knowledge as well. >> So education was one. What's the other one? Healthcare? >> Of course it's healthcare! (laughter) Of course. >> As someone who is immersed in it and a believer in technology, what do you do to disconnect? Well, first of all, do you disconnect? Do you worry about our over reliance on these little devices in our pockets, and what do you do to sort of leave the digital world behind for a while? >> Yeah, so I do worry about our over reliance because we've shown, and other researchers have shown, that there's actually an over trust factor. We will use devices, and of course these devices they have errors, right, even if it's you know 1% of the time, and that 1% of the time when they have errors we find that a lot of individuals will trust those errors, because they're over relying, they kind of go in zone mode, they're like, it worked all this time, so that 1%, they just don't question it. >> It must be real news! (laughter) >> But it's scary! >> Yeah, it is. >> It's scary. I do worry about that. And we're thinking about ways to try to mitigate that, 'cause that does worry me. How do I disconnect? I think that with anything mind, body and soul, so I love listening to music, although that's not disconnecting from technology 'cause I'm using technology to listen, but it's this zone period. Exercise, I think most of us think about exercise I'm fairly religious, even when I'm traveling, like okay, I'm going to find the gym and at least walk on the treadmill because we do have to have that combination, in order to be healthy ourselves. >> Finally, for that little girl, the little girl you, who's watching Bionic Woman I think that's the thing, we need more shows like that, to get, to get >> Click us interested >> Well exactly, what would be your advice to the smaller you, who says I want to be a scientist someday? >> So I would, and this is like some advice that people told me as I was growing up, and I didn't realize I had really good mentors, is one is, don't listen to the naysayers, i.e., believe in yourself, right? And I think that's the one thing we sometimes forget to do, like believe in that dream, even if others say that it's not possible, and it's like, no, everything is possible if you believe in yourself. >> Words to live by. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> Rebeca: This was great conversation. >> Awesome! >> I'm Rebeca Knight for John Furrier. We will be back here tomorrow with more from Nutanix dot Next. We hope to see you then. (electronic music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners >> Hello and welcome to Day three Live coverage of the Cube here in Las Vegas Fridel Technologies World twenty nineteen I'm jut forward, David Lot They Davis del Technologies world. This is our tenth year If you count DMC World twenty ten first ever Cube event where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. Now we're the number one and tech coverage. Howard Elias has been with us the entire way. Our next guest. Keep alumni Howard allies who is currently the President of Services and Digital for Del Technologies. Howard, great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. Dave. Always great to be back with you. Thank you. >> You've been with us throughout our entire cube jury. It's our tenth year has been great ride and one of the benefits of doing the queue besides learning a lot and having great conversations is as the industry of balls from true private private cloud to, you know, big day that meets technology, all the different iterations of the business. We're gonna have the conversation and look back and see who's right. You >> get to go back and see what we said and holds you >> accountable. Not that you guys said anything crazy, but you were unique because we've had many conversations and most notably during the acquisition of the M. C. You're on the team leading the effort with your partner in crime from the del side to make sure the acquisition goes smoothly. And, you know, a lot of people were saying, Oh my God, icebergs ahead. We're pretty positive. So history treats us fairly in the queue way. Tend to got it right. But you said some bold things. That was pretty much the guiding principle of the acquisition, and I just I just tweeted it out this morning. So you got it right. You said some things. Looking back two years later, almost two, three years later. >> Well, look, you know John first, I appreciate that. Appreciate the opportunity to be back with with you, and it's amazing. It's been ten years, but yeah, so, you know, over the last couple of years, I did help Kohli the integration, and we said, Look, first and foremost, we're going to do no harm the way customers transact with us byproducts. The way we service them, that's not going to change. But then, that's not enough, right? It's not just about doing no harm. It's how do we add value? Over time, we talked about aligning our teams in front of our customers. Then we talked about unifying the approach not just in the go to market, but in services and in technology and ultimately delivering Mohr integrated solutions. And we've accepted here down that a CZ you rightly say so thank you for pointing that out. And you know, this week was a great embodiment of that. Because not only are we listening, Tio, what our customers want we're delivering on it were actually delivering these integrated solutions the Del Technologies Cloud unified workspace for client, these air things that we've delivered over time, you know, we stitch it together, and now we're unifying it, integrating it, actually now even embedding services into it. So that's the journey we've been on. And we've been very pleased with the reception, >> and Michael to also was very bull. But the key on all the conversations we had on this was and we'LL get to the current situation now because that's important is that you guys saw the growth opportunities on the synergies we did, and we kind of had those conversations. So a line you align the team's unify and integrate you're the integration phase. Now we're starting to see some of the fruit come off the tree with business performance significant. Well, we appreciate >> that we're gaining market share across the board, and we had a hypothesis with, you know, coming together. We had a complementary product, portfolios, complimentary customer segments way. We're very thoughtful and how we organized our go to market, and we're seeing that we're seeing that and market share games. But more importantly, we're seeing the customer conversation saying Thank you for that. Now I want more. How do you deliver more value faster? So I think we're past the integration stays. Now we're into the accelerating the value stage. >> Howard, you've been through and seen a lot of acquisitions, large acquisitions. I mean, I think of the compact digital, you know, not a lot of not a lot of overlap. HP with compact, much more overlap maybe didn't go so as well. Or maybe a smoothly massive acquisition here. Why do you think it worked so well here? Because there was a failure. A fair amount of overlap, you know, definitely some shared values, but maybe some different cultures. You've been on both sides. It's just seems to be working quite well. You seem to be through that knothole of maybe some of that uncomfortable early days. Why do you think it works so well? What was kind of the secret sauce there? >> I think a couple of reasons. First, the hypothesis of coming together was all very customer centric. Customers wanted fewer more strategic partners. They ultimately from infrastructure, want Mohr integration. Mohr automation. They wanted a CZ. Pat said yesterday on states they wantto look upto absent data and somebody else worry about looking down and taking care of the infrastructure. So the hypothesis was very strong. Michael had a bold vision, but the boldness of actually execute on that vision as well, I would say second we have. Yeah, while the cultures, in terms of how things got done were a bit different, the values were frankly not just similar. They were identical. We may have talked about this before, but When we did the integration planning, we actually surveyed half the population of about Delanie emcee. The top five values in order were the same from both team members. Focus on customers Act with integrity. Collaborate When is a team results? Orientation? It was phenomenal. I would say. You know, third, it's just the moment in time. Uh, and it's really a continuation. You think about the ten year partnership that Dell and GMC had back in the two thousands that actually helped us get to know each other, how we worked and helped form those shared values. So and then, finally, approximate one hundred fifty thousand team members signed up to the mission. You know, the tech industry is starved for star for tech talent. On the fact of the matter would that we have approximately one hundred fifty thousand team members of prostate all technologies signed up to our vision, signed upto our strategy, executing every day on behalf of customers. It's just awesome to see >> So digital transformation, of course, is the big buzz word. So we're gonna put on you guys what do you do it for your own digital transformation? You know, proof of the pudding. What gives you the right to even talk about that? What do you doing? Internal? >> Yeah, you know, it's a great question. And to your point, we talked with customers all the time. In addition to looking after our services businesses worldwide, I also am responsible for Del Digital inside of Del Technologies. That's our organization. We purposely named Adele Digital because we are on our digital journey as well. And so we are transforming everything that we do the way we do. We actually call it the Del Digital Way. We've had a couple of nice breakouts. Our booth in the showcase has got Ted talk style conversations around this, and it's really embracing this notion of agile, balanced team's getting close to the business, actually, the business in the dojo, with our developers moving more to a product orientation versus a project orientation, and it's really focused on outcomes on T. You hear us talk about this all the time. Technology strategy is now business strategy, and whether it's in sales or marketing or services. Doug's doing great work and support assist using telemetry and artificial intelligence and machine learning recommendation engines in our dotcom. The on boarding within hours. Now with what we used to take weeks with our business customers in our premier portal, Wei are looking at every opportunity everything from the introduction of bots and our p a all the way through machine learning. Aye aye and true digital transformation. We are walking that talk. >> Really? You're going hard after our p A. That's what Do Yu result. We've >> actually been doing arpa for many, many years and for you know, especially when you have a complex system complex ecosystem As you're rewriting and developing either re platform, every factoring or cloud native, you still got to get work done. So I'll give you a great example. You know, in a online world of today, it's amazing to know that we still get millions of orders by email and facts. And instead of outsourcing that and having humans retyped the order, we just have robotics, read it automatically translated. And >> so the narrative in the media you hear a lot of coordination is going to kill jobs. But I've talked to several our customers and they've all said the opposite. We love this because it's replacing mundane tasks it allows us to do other things. What's your experience you are >> spot on? I'm a technology optimist, and I believe that a machine learning robotics will do the task that humans are either not good at or don't want to do or don't like to do and allow humans to be more human. Creative thinking, creative problem solving, human empathy, human compassion. That's what humans are good at. And we need more people focused on those things and not row test. >> One of the things that Michael Dell on key themes in The Kino Day one and Day two in some day. Three lot of societal impacts of I Love That's kind of touchy feely. But the reality is of Reese killing people. The skills gap is still a huge thing. Culture in the Enterprise is moving to a cloud operation was his favors your strategy of end to end consistent operational excellence as well as you know, data driven, you know, value of the AP player. Great straight, but we've been seeing in the queue with same thing for years. Horizontally, scaleable, vertically specialized in all industries. Yeah, with data center so good. Good strategy, gaps in culture and skills are coming up How are you guys doing services? You mean you've got a lot of people on them on the streets? A lot of people that need to learn more about a I dashboards taking the automation, flipping a new opportunity to create a value for people in the workplace. We >> have this conversation continuously inside of our teams and inside of our company. Look, we have a responsibility to make sure that we bring everybody along this journey. It starts by painting the vision being that technology optimist. Technology is a force for good on how do we apply the technology and the digitization and, you know, creating our digital future, bringing our team members along. So setting that vision, it is about culture behavior. Set the tone from the top. But we also have a responsibility and retraining and re skilling and bringing you know, team members. New opportunities, new ways to learn our education services team, for example. You see it here, the certifications, the accreditations. We do the hands on labs that we do. It's all about allowing opportunities for people to up skill, learn new skills, learn new opportunities that are available, and customers need this higher value. Helping support? What >> about the transformation that's been impacting the workflow on work streams of your services group with customers as they are? Maybe not as far ahead as you guys are on the transformation. Maybe they're They're cloud native in one area kind of legacy in the other. How was the impact of delivering services? One. Constructing them services, formulating the right products and service mix to delivering the value. How is technology change that you mentioned Rp? What if some of the highlights in your mind >> Well, it's It's a journey and you know it. Mileage varies here, right? Depends on what you're trying to accomplish, but we never do wrong by focusing on what's right for the customers. So what our customers looking for? What are their business outcomes they're looking for? Uh, here's a great example in the unified workspace. You know, we've been doing PC has a service for a while even before PC has a service. We're delivering outcomes, delivering Peces, doing some factory into get gration Cem image management, lifecycle management deployment services. But now what we've done is really taken not just the end and view, but we packaged it and integrated it into a single solution offering across the life cycles. So now, once we understand the the customer and users personas weaken factory, image the configuration, ship it to the team members deaths not just to a doctor the place but right to the team members desk have auto deployment auto support telemetry back and manage that life cycle, we package that up now. End to end this a new capability that customers are really looking for >> before I know. Do you have a question? I want to get your reaction to a quote I'm reading from an analyst. Bigtime firm New Solutions launched at Del. World Show that worked to align seven businesses for the last eighteen months is starting to pay off. We just talked about that. Cross Family Solutions minimizes time on configurations and maintenance, which opens up incremental, total addressable market and reduces complexity. Michael Dell yesterday said that there's a huge swath of market opportunity revenue wise in kind of these white space gap areas that were servicing, whether its image on PCs and you kind of mentioned peces of service analysts. E this is tam expansion, your common reaction. >> I couldn't say it better myself and look. The to integrate solutions we announced this week is a great example of that of the seams. It's workspace won its security from SecureWorks. It's the you know, del Endpoint management capabilities. It's the PC hardware itself. It's the services life cycle from Pro support Pro Deploy Pro Manage, all integrated in the end and easily Mohr consumable were even Do any are consulting business with our new pro consult advisory offer offer. But look at the Del Technologies Cloud del Technology infrastructure. With VM wear we'LL be adding PC after as a service. On top of that, this is exactly what customers >> So what's your marching orders to the team? Take that hill. Is it a new hills? The same hill? What's the marching orders down to the >> teaching orders is Get out and visit customers every single day. Make sure we understand how our technology and services are being utilized, consumed and impacted. And where do we add more value over time? >> So I wantto askyou for from a customer standpoint, we were talking about digital transformation earlier, and, you know the customer's always right is the bromide. You guys are very customer focused However, when it comes to digital, a lot of customers is somewhat complacent about obviously technology companies like yours embrace digital transformation. But I hear from a lot of companies. Well, we're doing really well. You know, I'm gonna be long gone, but before this really disrupts my industry, it's somewhat of a concern. Now, do you see that? And and how do you I mean, I think one of the reasons just so successful in your careers you take on hard problems and you don't freak out about it. You just have a nice even keel. What do you do when Because you reached you encounter that complex, Eddie, do you coach them through it? You just say okay. Customer's always right. But there's a concern that they'LL get disrupted in there. Your customer, they're spending money with you today. So how do you get through breakthrough? That complacence >> adds a great question and you know, one of the other marching orders I give tow my team is that things were going so well is time to change. And so this is what we have to take to our customers as well. And, uh, look, way have to be respectful about it. But we also have to be true telling, and so we will meet with our customers, hear them out and where they're doing well, well pointed up. But where they're not or where we've got different examples, we'LL just lead by example our own internal example, other customer examples in a very respectful way, but in a very direct way, especially at the senior levels where that's what they need to hear sometimes. >> So you have a question, because I got I wantto sort of switch topics like >> one of us falls on the one problem statement I heard it was really announces a problem statement, but it was a theme throughout all the breakout sessions in the keynotes, and you guys are aware of it. So it's not a surprise to the Del senior people. You guys recognize that as things are going well on the acquisition and the integration tell technologies there's still a focus on still working better with customers taking away the friction of doing business with del technologies. It's a hard problem statement. You guys are working the problem. What's your view on that? Because we hear that from your customers and partners we'd love work with. Kelly's going to get easier. We >> still have more work to do. Actually, Karen Contos and I are partnered up our chief customer officer on easy doing business and look it it. We are a complex company. We have a lot of different business units. Technologies brands were working toe, bring them together, and Mohr integrate solutions like we saw this week. But we still can be complex, sometimes in front of our customers, and we're working on that. It's a balance because on the one hand, customers want Maura line coordinated, sometimes single hand to shake. We get that. But the balance is they also want access to the right subject matter experts at the right time. And we don't want Teo inhibit that either. Either way, so whether it's with our customers directly with our partners were on that journey, we will find the right balance here. We've got new commercial contract mechanisms in place now to unify our Cordelia, AMC as we're packaging Mohr VM were content more security content into the offer and be able to delivered is a package solution. In one quote one order one service dogs doing some great thing and in the back end of services connecting our service request systems are CR M systems, actually, even with VM wear and Cordelia emcee technicians co locating and support centers to solve the custom of customers problem in one call, not in three calls. We still have a ways to go, but we are making progress. >> So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and you and I, Howard have known each other for decades, and you've never wanted to talk about yourself. You always wanna talk about the team, your customers, your company. But I wanted to talk about your career a little bit because John Ferrier did an interview with John Chambers, and it was an amazing interview. We talked about when he was, you know, Wang and one one twenty eight. There is no entitlement, and you've seen a lot of the waves. You started out your career, your electrical engineer back when, you know that was like *** physics assembly language. It was sort of the early days of computer science, awesome, and then you had a number of different roles. You as I mentioned there was digital, there was compact. It was h p and then you'LL Forget RadioShack Radio second. Alright, That's right, Theo PC days on. And then you joined the emcee in two thousand three, which which marked the next era. We were coming out of the dot com boom, and You and Joe Tucci and a number of other executives built, you know, and the amazing next chapter of AMC powerhouse. And then now you're building the next new chapter with Del. You've really seen a lot of major industry shift you see have been on the wave. I wonder if you could reflect on that. Reflect on your career a little bit for our audience. >> I'm just amazed and blessed to be where I am. I couldn't be more pleased. Sometimes I wonder how even got here. But when I do reflect back, it is my love of the technology. It's my love of what technology Khun do for businesses, for customers, for consumers and, frankly, my love of the customer interaction. This is, you know, from that first time in the Radio Shack retail store and you know, the parent coming in and learning about this new TRS eighty and I've heard about this and what does this really mean and being able to help that person understand the use of the technology? How Teo, you make it happen for them, it has always given me great satisfaction. And so, you know, from those early days and I've worked with a lot of great people that I just, you know, listen and learn from over the time. But, you know, when I mentor, you know, people coming up in their career, I always say, Look, you know, it's not at work. If you get up every morning, you love what you do, you see the impact that you make you'LL like the people you're working with. You're making a little money and having some fun on DH. Those things have always been true for me. I have been so lucky and so blessed in life to be able to have that be the case >> and your operational to you understand, make operations work, solve problems, Day pointed out. It's been great for my first basic program I wrote was on a TRS eighty in high school. So thank you for getting those out here and then I've actually bought a Tandy, not an IBM with a ten Meg Hard drive. I bought my motive. Peces Unlimited. Some small company that was selling modems at the time. Michael, remember those date Howard? Great to have you on The key was the Distinguished Cube alumni. Great career and always we got We got it all documented. We have all the history. There you go, calling the shots. Howard Elias calling the future, predicting it and executing it Living is living the dream here in the Cube More keep coverage here, del technology world after >> this short break

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine A Better World. A global education conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Educate Show. It's a public sector show. It's the first time they've ever done it really focusing just on education as opposed to the regular public sector show or the AWS Summits and re:Invent that you're very familiar with. We're excited to be here. One of the big themes here is colleges partnering with high schools. And we're excited to have our next guest really talk about how that's working in this program. We have Howard Stahl. He's a professor at Santa Monica College. Howard, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> And with him is Koda Kol. He's a teacher at Roosevelt High in East L.A. and also an adjunct professor at Santa Monica College. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So, let's just jump into it. There's a big conversation about training people for the next generation of cloud skills. It's good for the kids, it's also good for the employers, it's good for Amazon, it's good for their customers and their partners. How are the kids feeling about this? How is this program being accepted by kids? Is it cool, is it something they want to do? How hard of a sell is it? >> The students are engaged. They're learning something that is immediately relevant to societal's demand. Our students, they're setting up, spinning up web servers, file servers, even VPN, and the VPN servers is going to disrupt the way schools strategize and implement security, because now when they go back to the high schools they're bypassing all these web securities using VPN. >> Right. >> But they really do love it. The students seem to really drink it up. >> They get it. >> Yeah, they do. >> So is there a particular classification of app or of all the different things that you're teaching 'em, database, security, this or that, that resonates more than others or what is it that connects to what they do every day that makes them think, "Hey, this is cool, I engage "these things every day. "What a great career to get into." >> Yeah, I think, they see Amazon in their daily life every day. Delivering them stuff, making them buy stuff, having them deliver things. And they can see as they peel apart the layers and see behind the scenes how Amazon actually gets that done. >> Right. >> And it seems immediately relevant to them. >> Right. >> And so the student interest has been fantastic. >> Been fantastic. And Koda too, I think it's always the thing too with, especially the kids when they're in high school, 15, 16 right, they're starting to get a little bit of attitude. "Why should I read 400-year English novels Dad, "how's that going to help me in my job?" or "Why am I taking chemistry, I don't want to be a doctor? "I get it I got to take it to get into college "but I don't really want to take Chemistry." This is probably something a little bit different in terms of direct visibility into the application. I mean, those other things have applications too, you just don't see it when you're 15. But this they can see, right? They can see how it's going to directly impact them in a positive way. >> Yes, and it also puts everyone at the same playing field. Students that normally fail their English classes, Math classes, now they're in the same classroom and learning content where everyone is on the same page. So, you got your high performing students also with your students that are failing a class, trying to discover what they want to do in life. >> Right. >> They're together, they're working together. Find a common interest and excelling, engaged and asking for more. "Where can we take more classes? "This is what I want to do, "this is where I want to be." >> That's great. Another thing, we were just at a high school competition called Technovation earlier this week where mainly girl's teams from all over the world building applications. Same kind of a thing. Get 'em involved in an application that they can really see a difference and they get it. And I wonder if some of your kids talk about, everybody wants to be mission driven today, and kids want to do stuff that has a higher impact on society, right? We've got four different garbage cans we have to sort our stuff in 'cause we want to be renewable and take care of the environment. Do they see that software is the easiest way to make a huge impact globally, do they get that? >> They get that, they see it. They're instantly creating servers in 5-10 minutes. Going on their servers, setting up websites. They see the relevance. They're taking advantage of the technology. >> Yeah, that's great. So Howard, I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how a partnership with AWS enables you to do things that you wouldn't be able to do if they weren't helping in this whole process? >> At SMC we've been working with AWS for about four years now to spin up this program. The partnership has been fantastic. AWS has been really giving and helpful. They helped train faculty. So we got professional development from them. Now, as part of this program students get credits on the platforms. Faculty get credits on the platform. They've been helping us with advertising and all kinds of other great things and it's really been a wonderful, wonderful partnership, really fantastic. And that industry connection really makes a big difference in making the program succeed. >> You mentioned something I want to follow up on in terms of the staff. We talk a lot about the kids here and the impact on the kids and their education, but I'm curious to get your take on how this has impacted the staff. This new classification of learning if you will, around cloud computing specifically. This subset of computer science which has had a hard time squeezing in between science and math, especially at the high school level. But how are the staff, the teachers taking to this? Do they see this as a great new opportunity? A bunch of new skills to learn? That's got to be kind of invigorating for them, I imagine as well. >> I think so. I think it's really invigorated people who've been around. It keeps us on our toes, makes us learn new things. It's very exciting for many of us and it has been great. And the wonderful thing about computer science is that it changes a lot. As I often say in math, "They haven't invented any new numbers." But in computer science, what I learned when I was in school. Oh my gosh, things have changed a great deal. And so there's a commitment to keep current. And in the community colleges definitely we try to keep our curriculum current with what industry needs. >> Right, I think it's a really great statement on the role of community colleges, in a very specific role to help match skills with needs in jobs. I mean just really concrete, really straightforward, really kind of a simple mission. >> Yeah, and Amazon actually has connected us with local employers near SMC that have helped us validate our curriculum and actually are very interested in hiring the graduates out of our program right away, 'cause there is such a dearth of industry talent in this particular field. >> Which is great, just to close that loop, right. And if I recall, your certificate program is the model now that's been rolled out to all 19 of the L.A. community colleges. >> Yeah, so this program has really spun up, and become much, much bigger than just one particular college. So we developed a number of classes at SMC and a certificate, and we're using that now as a model throughout L.A. county to bootstrap AWS skills in all the local community colleges. 19 other colleges are working with us. >> Right, right. Agreeing to run the same classes at their institutions. And that's very exciting as well. They've also agreed to find local partner high schools to work with as well. So we're really trying to build a hub of AWS experience down in L.A. in what we call "Silicon Beach". >> Right, right. And then the goal ultimately is to get an associate program, right, over some period of time when you get whatever the certification is, or that process. >> Yeah, so we're working on building an AA Degree in cloud computing as well. >> That's great. Koda, you look like you had something to jump in there. All good? >> All good. >> Okay, good. So I want to give you the last word in terms of what would you say to educators that are not in L.A. about what this type of program has brought to you, and more importantly your students in your everyday life at Roosevelt High? >> It has changed the lives of many students. It's changed my perspective on how I see education because in fact it was a little difficult getting the students to be engaged initially, but ever since we launched this cloud computing every student, we can't get enough classes, sections, open. We open one section up and it gets filled. The students are in class. They want to learn the material. It's a good time to be in education. I love it. >> Well good. Well thanks for sharing the passion, it comes through. >> Well the passion starts with our department chair, Howard Stahl here. He's very passionate and it resonates with all the staff members, which resonates with the students. So now we have the synergy that's happening that we hope to eventually distribute to all the other campuses, and make a model. Use Santa Monica as a model. >> Great. Well Koda, Howard, thanks for taking a few minutes. And, really enjoy this story. I look forward to the follow up next year. >> Thank you. >> Alright he's Koda, he's Howard, I'm Jeff! You're watching theCUBE from downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live, 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partnership. >> Welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman is my co-host. Three days, we're in our third day. Our next guest, Lee Howard, Chief Technologist Global Industry Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Oh, absolutely love any chance I get to hang out with you two, so. >> Love the technologist angle because I gotta ask you first questions. Cisco really kinda put the hard stake in the ground in their opening keynote. Old way, an architecture slide. Everyone's like "Oh yeah, a slide, yeah, firewall." New way, circle, cloud, a lot of services. They recognize the world's changed. Network's not going away, you guys are in the storage business, that's not going but it's changing. What's the key change that your customers and your Cisco, the customers, should know about going on right now that they should pay attention to? >> Yeah, I think from NetApp's perspective, the big focal area we have is turning the corner that we're no longer an infrastructure or a hardware provider. We're data management, we're software driven. And I think that story, if you've been watching us on Wall Street, has resonated very well, very positively received, but it's not just more architecture We're really rearranging ourselves, putting our money where our mouth is, and the focal point going forward is you know, how do we change from a mean time between failure as the measuring stick to mean time to resolution? How do we do it more intuitive, you know? The messaging here at Cisco Live has been absolutely around that, of how do we do policy-driven automation? How do we do so in an intuitive fashion? And then have the adaptability to where it's not a three or five year refresh cycle, but how are we continually developing and delivering insights and helping improve environments on a daily basis? >> One of the things that's pretty consistent we're seeing is obviously, as the market understands what you guys are doing you guys have been doing this for a while. We've been following NetApp. You were doing cloud very early on with AWS. Certainly, you're very customer-driven as well. But you're seeing some change happen because of the scale aspect with the cloud, change is constant. So really having managing the change with the tech is critical. And that's more software science. Can you just share your vision on that? Because to have evolutionary change from a scale standpoint, meaning not the same as it was yesterday, more data growing, what is the core tenets of the architecture? What should customers be thinking about? Because if change is the constant, the tech can't be a one size fits all, what's going on? What makes this model work for you guys? >> We have more key constituents out there than what we did five years ago. And so, in that comes more concerns, more factors on how we need to do our development cycles going forward. And so instead of this, you know, every three years there's a refresh and that's our big update push, we're on a six month cadence. And if you look from, you know, ONTAP moving from 8.x to 9.1 we're seeing, at times, 40% improvement. That customer has purchased nothing, that environment has changed zero. But we're continuing to develop a better product on a software-based developmental scale rather than, you know, having to wait for the hardware to get swapped out. And I think that's where we're seeing a lot of success. >> One follow up question, so before, I know Stu's got a question, I'll get in there, but how has that changed your relationship to the customers? What has changed, 'cause we know the old way, what's the new engagement model with the customers? >> There were absolutely growing pains because, you know, there was perceptions out there whenever George first took us down this road that you guys are old guard, you know, you're a filer company and that's it. And it took a while to gain the credibility to be able to enter into these newer conversations and really be up-leveled, higher up in the org chart to be able to say, you know, this no longer just an execution partner. We're a strategic partner to really be able to go to market with and build that out. And it's that data pipeline from edge to core to cloud with an application pipeline on top of it. I view it like a utility grid within a city. You know, if you walk into any room in that city, you flip on a light switch, you expect for that light to turn on and illuminate the room like the top of my head is in this environment right now. But, you know, it's understanding that you have to have that data availability regardless of who your constituency is out there. And from, you know, our sensor endpoint, be that a person, be it a device, to where that is consumed, that entire continuum, we're the only people out there that are going to be able to deliver that in as efficient way and as seamlessly as we do. >> Yeah, Lee, and I love the vision that you talk about there. We're talking about multi-cloud, IoT, it's not the network appliance that I knew of 20 years ago. Help connect the dots for us. Because when I look at the Cisco NetApp partnership, the biggest piece of that is FlexPod, and many people will be like, "oh Flexpod has been around for eight years, "I take filers, I take networking, I take servers, "I wrap 'em all up together, put together a solution." It's simple, but, you know, maybe not, you know, it's not multi-cloud, it doesn't fit into some of these new paradigms. Where's the modern applications? Where is the multi-cloud? How does the software message and, you know, this convergent infrastructure solution fit together? >> We've got kind of three real key constituents that you have to be able to deliver a solution to nowadays. You've got the traditional IT curators and stewards, you've got the software devs, and you have operations. And if you can go through and find ways for them to collaborate and speak the same language, it comes down to a dialect. And if you can be that Rosetta Stone, to be the translation layer between those, that's how businesses can start planning and taking you going forward. So, yeah, we're gonna have those traditional pieces of the stack that are gonna be in there. Those are necessities. But it's layering in the, you know, app dynamics from Cisco and giving folks a way to say, here is what our growth plan needs to be to start migrating to the cloud. You have our partnerships that we've set up with AWS, Amazon, Google Cloud. You have Cisco's partnerships that they've set up there to where, you know, they're choosing to run NFS on us. You know, we're getting pulled into deals on that. >> Yeah, no, I love that. One of the patterns we've been seeing from customers is step one is you have to modernize the platform and that has to have a lot of the same pieces of what I'm doing if I'm in public cloud. And then I can modernize the applications on top of it. >> And the refactoring of those applications as you're evaluating that, is I don't wanna just bolt on a capability. I want to extend my existing presence out into this new realm. And I think that's been the delineating factor whatever you're looking at, it's not a heavy lift from adding proficiencies. You're just changing the location where you're executing your applications. >> Lee, I wanna get your thoughts on the tech, now you mentioned before that you guys are changing your relationships, certainly you have a technology advantage, there's some good tech there, hardware and software, even though you're emphasizing more software, but there's also now business impact. You're now becoming a business partner. And there's, I won't say business technology, but there's the outcomes are driving everything if it's the system holistically with cloud. So, in the successful models today, open source has proven through generations that co-development has become a very big part of today's collaboration where you don't have to have the other guy to lose to win. >> Yes. >> And, so collaboration and co-creation is a big part of why DevNet's successful. >> Absolutely. >> A big why cloud is successful, open source is successful, you guys are kind of alliance program that requires integration. You have that kind of a posture there. What's the secret sauce for you guys going forward? How do you see the trajectory of the alliances, the partners? 'Cause at the end of the day, integration becomes critical. >> Absolutely. >> The cloud, what's your vision on this direction? >> So we had to take a step back and really get to know who we were at the time. And there was a mentality of make the world NetApp. And we wanted to be disruptive as much as possible, and you can't have the monarchies of IT anymore. It has to be a democracy. You have to have a coalition of folks that are bringing best of breed to bear and especially in the open source model out there, you're getting new titles, new ways of being able to innovate that are being posted daily and curated daily. So if we can be that common broker between these, it's no longer a layer one through four conversation. It's not layer one through seven. It's that layer eight, speaking the dialect of the end user, and if you can articulate those eight layers and be able to do so in a way saying that, you know, we're great at what we do, we also need you to be great as well and put that best foot forward and be that willing partner. You find that if you can be at the central junction point of that, that, you know, the rest of the business, the rest of the org starts going and then that message really starts resonating. >> So the next question I wanna ask you is obviously enabling technology is kind of what you're getting at, let's have that enablement where people can do development whatever that is, solution and/or code or whatever it could be. What should people know about NetApp? What's the one thing or few things that makes NetApp an enabling capability for this new world order that's happening around this new development environment? >> Well, I think it's the focus that's out there that, you know, we're not trying to push a box or a skew. We are a portfolio company with a lot of different ways to be able to consume, and the focus has always been on the end user. How do you want to interface with your data on a day-to-day basis? And then collecting the feedback loops. I think that's something a lot of companies out there want to pontificate and force solutions out there. Ours are how can we co-opt together? You know, we're taking a lesson. >> So the data is the key? >> The data is the key. And if you can rally around that and pool the right resources together, I think you end up with a solution that everybody's able to get ahead with. >> Lee, one of the areas where that's critically important is IoT. >> Yes. >> Most customers we talked to, they're early in the discussions, some of them are rolling out, a lot of listening, a lot of figuring out, lot of diversity in what people are doing. Where are the customers at and how is NetApp engaging? >> Well, you're finding that you're not, you know, ten years ago, you would go very deep into one specific vertical and that's how solutions were set up. That's completely fell on its side to where we're seeing machine learning IoT as a data pipeline that's going horizontal and going across all customers out there, and those that it's either you are above the line and you're taking advantage of this or you're gonna be fledgling in two to three years. And so, where we're really wanting to go with this is articulating from that end point, you can get into ONTAP, and you're able to carry this and go regardless of where you need to execute those applications. And we've got co-opt with Jasper, we have co-opt with Kinetic from Cisco to help securely onboard that data at the edge, at the fog, depending on what the use case is. And then being able to normalize it and be able to move it, sort it, curate it, and move, because data, right now, I mean, that's the new oil. And so if you can combine that and turn it into information which is adding understanding to that data, you've got a recipe to really start delivering as I said in the keynote out there, it's changing the I in IT from information to innovation. It's innovation technology. >> What's the data-driven story? Obviously, data-driven has been around, it's been one of those things that's kind of in, like, digital transformation. It's been kicked around as a, you know, management practice and also a technical architecture concept. You talked about data-driven in your talk here at Cisco Live. What did you talk about in your session? >> Yeah, the big focal point out there was that there are new IT imperatives that require us to change the way that we approach defining problems. And if you can change the way that you define a problem, it's gonna set you on the road to come up with a more intuitive solution. And so going through, we've got use cases of hospitals that are out there where readmission rates are being dropped. Sepsis mortality rates are being dropped. Because we're no longer having a bifunctional area or bidepartmental silo in environments. We're trying to go through and shatter silos out there so that we have a good standard platform for information sharing. You know, consumer or patient, regardless of where you're at, that value chain of how they're able to get data from source to innovation has been the primary focal point of what we've been driving towards. >> Lee, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate your insight. Very candid, very direct and articulate on that app. I gotta ask you the question around the show, for the people that couldn't make Orlando this year, what's the big story coming out of Cisco Live? You know, if you step back and look down at the show, what's the big story? >> I mean, we're coming off of five back-to-back quarters of double-digit growth according to IDC, and so, you know, there's a trajectory, but we're wanting to get to that next gear and ramp up. So you've heard some of the other of my party come on here and speak of managed private cloud, talk about, you know, the industry focus and I think what you're gonna see out of us is continuing to be that data authority, but doing so in an easy to consume fashion so that, you know, the layperson out there is gonna be able to garner the same insights the way that, you know, any large industry player would be able to as well. It's the democratization of data. >> Democratization of data. Lee Howard, Chief Technologist in theCUBE breaking it down for you. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, more coverage, stay with us as we are going into the end of day three coming up. Stay with us. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone. You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Tom Yates. He is the Deputy CIO of Howard County. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Sure. It's great to be here. >> Tell our viewers a little bit about your role. >> I'm the Deputy CIO for Howard County, and anything that you receive in terms of services, from a county government from trash pick up, to emergency responder services, police, fire, emergency notification, rec and parks, all of those departments are our clients inside our IT. >> Okay so you've just, that's absolutely, you just painted this version of being a citizen, and all of the things that you go to, all the services that you receive, so now tell me the idea that you had in the CIO department to change that. >> Well it started with pain, so when I started about three years ago, our IT department really didn't know what we didn't know, in terms of what was on our network. I was the new guy, and I started running the change management meeting, which is an internal IT meeting, and I approved a change that ended up causing a four hour outage. That's when we really started looking for a platform that would give us visibility into our network. It really started out internal IT, focus on uptime. I got a demo of Discovery from a vendor in the area, and I was hooked at that point because that's exactly what I was looking for to run these change meetings. I want to know what's connected to what. I want to be able to map business services to our particular configuration items. That was really important to me but then once you start getting into the platform, it's very sticky, and it's very work flow oriented and you see all of these processes across your organization that are siloed, that are paper based, and so we just saw the platform as a great place to aggregate that type of work flow and business process automation and it sort of evolved from there and what we have recently thought about is a way to connect our citizens to a portal using the CSM platform that would allow them to have one place, one sign on where they could go in and have access to the full range of services that our county government provides. >> How will that work? I mean, can you describe what it's like to be a citizen in Howard County? >> Sure Howard County, for those of you who don't know, is located right between Washington DC and Baltimore. We're a fairly affluent county. The citizenry is very connected and involved and they have high expectations of government. We provide services like trash, water bills, you name it. People will come on to our website and they'll want to pay their water bill, or they want to check the status of a permit, or a license request that they have, or they'll want to get information on their property tax bills. Just normal stuff. You have to go to different system and have a different login account for each one of those services. So the feedback that we're getting, and for me as well as a Howard County citizen, is that's not really the best way to present our county. What if there were a way to have a single sign on and provide access with transparency and accountability, where you could go in and see the status of your permit request in real time without having to call anyone, because the younger you are the less desire you have to talk on the telephone. We're looking at different ways to interact with our citizens and to have government be there when they are ready to interact with government, not when government is ready to be interacted with. >> And government has a tough reputation. I mean, you think about any government, any time you have to interact with the government it's tedious, it's time consuming, it's inefficient. What is your, sort of, mission in all of this? What's your over arching objective? >> I would like to treat our citizens like they're human beings. >> That's a worthy goal. >> I have a memory of what it's like to go to the DMV and wait in line and not be treated as customer service oriented as you feel like you should be treated. One of the nice things that we have in our county is our government employees really care and we're looking to build some of these automations so that they don't get distracted by the busy work, and they can really focus on what matters and what matters is taking care of our clients, the citizens of the county. >> Are you hoping that it will drive civic engagement, too? >> Absolutely, so one of the things that we're doing is we're piloting a CSM implementation for one of our council districts. Howard County's broken into five council districts and the council is like the legislative branch. The county executive is like the governor. They all receive questions, issues, complaints from the citizens that are in their particular districts and we're looking at having this platform as a way for the citizens to interact with their legislators as well as report trees down, pot holes, and things like that. Where then the council person interacts back with the administration, so it can get really interesting. Especially if you have state legislators that are involved that are outside of our county. So now we have external resources and finding out, just discovering the work flows of what the process is to most efficiently take care of some of these issues, is the information that we're looking to extract put in a business process, and then automate that work flow. >> Now, how are you going to measure the return on investment? Is it really just shortening the time to value or how else are you thinking about how you're going to measure it's value? >> With government measuring, value is a lot different than it is in the private industry. What I look for inside IT is uptime. If there is a tool that we can have that will prevent us from shooting ourselves in the foot in IT, and accidentally causing an outage, that has value. That's actual value in terms of people's hours of lost productivity that we can not have. In terms of value to the citizens, I think it would be you hear the feedback from people that they're able to interact with the government more smoothly and efficiently and have that level of transparency and accountability that people, during election cycles, talk about. Then after the election, we need to deliver. >> How are you at this this conference? I mean, you hear so much about customers being here, this is a really customer centric event. Are you talking to other customers, learning from them? Are best practices emerging? Are you getting ideas that you're going to take back with you to Howard County? >> Absolutely, and I have a lot of friends in local government and state government that are here, but I get more value really talking from the commercial clients because we are going to be, just by definition of government, a little bit farther back on the adoption curve. For a government I think we're on the cutting edge, but there are things that are being done by private companies. I saw what Comcast is doing and Comcast is another one of the companies that has a reputation. (host laughing) I'll leave it at that. >> Don't get me started. >> But they're taking active measures to improve their customer response, and as a Comcast customer I totally appreciate that because I would have issues sometimes, finding the time to block off, say an hour, to be on a call with Comcast during business hours, right? So, the things that they're doing are really cool. Chatbot, machine learning, AI to help people self-discover what the answers to common problems are. Building knowledge into their platform. I think seeing that and seeing how I, as a customer, interact with that and appreciate that, we just take that and flip it over to the government side. >> What's next for you? >> Well, I would really like to get that 311 system. It's going to be a journey because we do have a lot of systems with a lot of different logins. I think the step that we would like to take first is create that portal where the citizen can register, and then after that we just take the applications that they're using, and we bring them in behind the covers. So, we're basically skinning those applications with one login. It might be a little clunky at the beginning until we get them more integrated. Over time, the idea is we just drive that traffic to that one location, so regardless of what new service we offer or what you're looking for, you'll know that there's one place that you can go to get it and you get it when you want it, not when we want to give it to you. >> Finally, we've heard so much about this transforming role of the of the CIO, and it's a much broader role today than it was even five or ten years ago. What's your personal experience with that? >> I have been with Howard Country government for three years and during those three years, I've seen a big change in the way IT is viewed inside government because we are now business partners with our client departments, as opposed to that shop that you call when something's broken, or I need a computer. Technology is everywhere now and I think it's so permeated, every facet of our organization, that people want to have those conversations now. They want to say, what can we do with technology that could help us. Especially in the age of budget freezes and hiring freezes. Everybody needs to do more with less and the only way to do that consistently is with technology. >> Tom, that's a great final note to close on. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it's been really fun talking to you. >> Thank you. My pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. This has been theCUBE's coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. (energetic music playing)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And we are indeed in Las Vegas for day two of Dell Technologies World 2018. Some 14,000 strong in attendance and a show with a lot of vibrancy, a lot of energy, and certainly it's reflected in what's happening on the show floor. Along with Stu Minaman, I'm John Walls, and we're now joined by a couple of guests. It's an honor to bring to the set Howard Elias, president of services, digital and IT at Dell EMC. Howard, how are you sir? >> Great, I'm doing fantastic. As you said, the energy's super high. >> John: Absolutely, and also joining us is Jun Sawada, who is the CFO of NTT and the CEO of NTT Security. Sawada-san, nice to have you with us, sir. >> Yeah, nice to meet you, so a very exciting such a time. Thank you very much. >> You bet, thank you for being here. So Howard, let's just kick off, I'm curious. You've thought about the show. Bigger, better than ever. So many people here, so much conversation and dialogue. And how do you feel and what are you hearing from people? >> Well you know, it's our first Dell Technologies World. We continue to believe we're better together, and we're getting great energy and feedback from our customers and partners. And I couldn't be more pleased to be with Sawada-san here today. A great partner, an NTT group of companies, where we're going to talk about some interesting solutions, which is what we've been talking about with all of our customers today. >> Especially right here in Las Vegas. It's certainly no coincidence, right, the show, and then some work that the two companies have done and are announcing. Tell us a little bit about that. What is the project that involves Las Vegas and your perspective involvement? >> Well I'll let Sawada-san, but this is all about an initial POC that we're doing for the city of Las Vegas. Utilizing the IOT technologies combined between NTT group and Dell Technologies. >> Yes, and also, we want to realize the situation awareness of a city of Las Vegas. That's our issue in including three features. One, with the reactive analysis, analyzing and also a site. It may H, H. We are going to realize, such as indicating that some instance has occurred. And the second feature is a proactive analyzing that adds a center, data centers. It's been providing also a trend or investigation, or the predictions. Lastly, third feature is very interesting. It's a deployment automatically all over the ICT lethal seeds, simultaneously. So based on the several technologies. >> So we love this smart cities theme. I've had the opportunity to interview people from different cities and see governments actually getting involved. I wonder if we can get into some of the key technology pieces that are involved here between NTT and the Dell family. >> We are developing ways, actually, at Dell technologies that we call the Cognitive Foundation. It consists of two technologies, one in times for, very focused to multi, much orchestration. It's been a cover up, so March beta, March domain, March layers, lots of the March we can integrate it. The other one is a software defined ICT lethal system, based on the batchilisation technology coming from Dell Technologies, we're in warehouse. >> Howard, sounds like this fits in with a lot of themes we've been hearing at the show. IOT, of course, I would expect to be heavily involved, but maybe explain some of the Dell standpoint, where some of this fits in. >> Well that's exactly right. So as you know, our IOT strategy is a very comprehensive end-to-end one around edge, to the distributed core, to the cloud. And then, working with NTT in terms of bringing that solution to market for a particular use case, like a smart city, in Las Vegas. And we're going to learn a lot together about how all of this comes and comes to fruition. But it really is about that edge to distributed core to cloud. And it's really based on the Dell technologies around our gateways, our hyper conversion infrastructure, some of the VM-ware software foundation capabilities, together with all of the solutions that Sawada-san has talked about. >> Yeah, I would think, it seems like this is a great test case, great test bed if you will. So, where does this go from here? What are your strategic intents in terms of what you plan to learn here and how it will apply elsewhere? >> That's basically, we were starting that this proof of a concept is a form of this coming September. After the two months, we will go into a market offering with two, both companies. But basically, our business plan is a business to business to anything. In that case, the Las Vegas city is a center bean. Dell Technologies and the NTT is a fast bean, as an enabler to support the center bean. Center bean providing a barrier to the anything, anywhere. So those type of package of concepts that we want to deploy to the other United States cities, not only United States, in the world. >> Globally? >> Globally. >> Howard: Yeah, globally, including in Japan, of course. >> Of course. (laughs) I am very familiar Japan. (laughs) >> And it's great because it's not just about the IOT strategy that we've talked about, but it really is about all of the transformation strategies we have. If you think about building a smart city, it's every aspect of digital, IT, workforce, and security transformation, all coming together into a complete, comprehensive solution. >> Alright, where does it go from here? Talk about the vision for the future, as to what we see in the future, Sawada-san. >> Yeah exactly, so not only are we very focused at the time, with public safety. But both company is we can extend those solution to other solution of smart ones. For instance, education, for instance, the retails, or entertainment, including stadium solutions, or other medical. There's no leftover area that we can extend our solution. You're driving a cognitive foundation. >> Yeah, and we're going to learn a lot from the POC. We also have been working on other projects around the world. And we're going to take all of those learnings and roll that into new products and services that we can deliver to our customers. >> Yeah. >> Well, it's a fantastic laboratory, no doubt about that, Las Vegas is, and I'm sure what you learned here will be applicable, as you said, to cities, not only in the United States, in Japan and all over the world. >> All over the world. >> Great project. Gentlemen, thank you for being with us. I appreciate your, and I look forward to hearing back. Check in a year from now. >> We'll do that. >> Let's see where we are. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. >> Back with more from Dell Technologies World 2018. You're watching theCUBE, we're live, and we're in Las Vegas. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Dell Technologies Wold 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's Ecosystem partners. >> We are back in Las Vegas. This is Dell Technologies World, the first ever Dell Technologies World. Last year was Dell EMC World, of course before that was EMC World a merge of these two giants, I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. And we're here with Howard Elias, long time Cubilum, >> Great to be back with you. >> Dave: Howard's the president of Services, Digital and IT at Dell EMC, they give you all the hard stuff. >> All the fun stuff, I would say. (Dave laughs) >> See, that's why they give you the hard stuff (Howard laughs). You look great, >> Oh thank you. >> Always done such a great job with complex integrations, you just must be a patient man (giggles). >> Well you know what, they don't call it work when you love what you do, right? >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> It's been great , I know you've heard from Michael and the whole team. It's been a great first year that we closed in February, momentum strong, customer reactions phenomenal and we're delivering and it's just a great time to be in IT. >> Stu said earlier today, when we were doing our keynote analysis, one of the things the EMC never did, it never went out and bought a big services company. You kind of grew things up from within, you kept your swim lanes, >> Howard: Yep! >> relative to your partners, that always worked well for you guys. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit-- >> And it's still working well. Look, our goal in life is to provide the strategic guidance and technology expertise around the products and the technologies and the solutions that we offer. Now, we'll certainly want to monetize those services around where it makes sense for us, But we also work with a very broad ecosystem of partners and that's very important to us. We stick to our knitting, we provide that strategic guidance, that technologies expertise. We're the experts around our technology and our solutions but it's a much broader market beyond that. And so we play very, very well, sticking to what we do well and then leveraging what our partners do well. >> So you've seen it all, I mean you and I grew up in the mainframe era when IBM was sort of the dominant position. And with Compact you saw huge awesome PC business, then you saw the internet and how that changed competition and now we're entering, it feels like, on the cloud era, forgot about that, and we're entering it feels like a new era, this digital era. >> Yeah the next big era of IT as we call it and we've seen this pendulum swing, centralized, decentralized, distributed back to the cloud, but with IOT, and censors everywhere and data being created at the edge and the core and the cloud, this really requires computing everywhere. And so you've got to have realtime data analytics at the edge whether it's the autonomous car, the robot in the factory, the healthcare systems in the hospital and so on, smart buildings, smart cities. And that needs both edge and distributed core, the ability to do those realtime or near realtime analytics. And then you'll use cloud for trend analysis, deep learning, improving the algorithm, sending that to the edge. And the opportunities there are immense and it's really awe-inspiring to us as we talk about who's the digital leader in IT, it's really our customers. They're really doing some really cool stuff. >> Yeah, we heard some of that this morning. >> Yeah, Howard it's something I remember we said when the whole trend of big data came out, we were like, Hadoop's interesting and it's useful, but it's the businesses that will be spawned off of that that will be truly important. Maybe tell us of data is at the core of it, it's always been at the core of EMC but you look at ML and AI and even Edge, it's all about that data and how does the Dell family really help customers get the value, transform with that data? >> Well here's the difference, right? Because when we were talking about data years ago and those big Hadoop clusters, it was really more about enterprise data and analyzing that enterprise data. Now it's really about those systems of engagement and systems of insight. It's all about that data being generated by our customers, our customers' customers, all the devices that are being used and it's really gaining those insights. And it's really analyzing that data that customers collect with external data and developing new patterns and insights that were just never possible before. So what we do is we help our customers frame their transformation. We talk about digital IT workforce and security and we help them think about where are they in that journey, what are the business outcomes, because is jus6t an enabler, this is really about business outcomes. And technology being business technology and business enabler, so whether it's our consulting organization to help a customer plan those journeys, our implementation business, our support business, even or manage business again, ourselves and with partners, we'll help our customers every stage of that journey. >> We often talk about the difference between the business and a digital business is the way in which a digital business uses data. So in thinking about the way in which you as a digital practitioner use data, how is that evolving, how is that changing? >> Well let's use one real example in our services business. We have an internal capability we call Support Assist. It is analyzing billions and billions of events every single day with all of our connected devices. And it's understanding the use cases how it's being used, what's working, what's not working, develop themes and semantics, and so we actually build better products and services, because of that data. Now this is a traditional call center, connected devise, break-fix business, support business, that is being completely digitized. >> A little of all from phone homes. (laughter) >> A little bit. (laughter) >> I want to ask you Howard, you've been a accomplished leader for many, many years, digital leadership. We talked earlier with Pat, CEOs are trying to figure out, how do I get digital right? How do they get digital right? Who's leading the digital charge within your customer base. >> Well, as I mentioned before, you saw it on stage with our trailblazer and innovator awards, we literally have hundreds and thousands of customers all around the world that are embracing. And what it means to really be digital is to get in with the technology practitioners, the data scientist, the people that understand what technology can do, embedded in the business, but it's getting the business, embedded in IT and technology. It's no more setting the requirements and throwing it over the wall and waiting a few months to get requirement documents back and the waterfall project in your two years later, and then the customer says, "Well that's not what I asked for." Or the markets change or the customers move. And so it's really building these balanced teams now where the business in the technology and the product owners are really getting together and saying, "What we need to do? "Let's go get it out there in the marketplace "and lets iterate, fast fail, learn quickly," that's what digital means. >> How has has Dell EMC consulting evolved, changed, in this digital era? >> Yeah, that's a great point. We've had a consulting business for a while but what we've done is focus them around our transformation journeys. We call it our three by three by one matrix. So we're focused on three specific offers in each of our IT transformation, digital transformation and workforce transformation. So three core offerings, you can IT transformation in Hybrid Cloud is an example or workforces collaboration. We of course embed security all throughout all three of those and then we have a transformation program office. So we focus down on 12 markets around the world, those three disciplines, hyper focus where we have great expertise and then we leverage our partner ecosystem beyond that. >> So that's a simpler approach than-- >> Howard: It is. >> what you need, we can we can do it. Which really was never your business anyway, but you kind of bled into that a littl&e bit. >> Yeah, well this gets back to re-examining what we're really good at. And what we wanted to focus on was that strategic guidance in technology expertise around our products and technologies, how we do that best, how we integrate into other ecosystems and then leverage the partners for the rest. >> Howard, one of the things that we heard from Alison this morning is people are bit skeptical as to how much the technology can help. I know one thing that your group helps a lot on is the career tracks. How do we move from being an admin of the silo to working closer with the business, being an architect or moving there. What are you see on your customers' journey from a career stand of point? >> That's a great point, cause one of the things we do focus on in our consulting practices, technology is necessary but woefully insufficient. You also have to transform people, process and operating model. That doesn't just mean structure, but the way that people operate within the business and within technology. And we've seen a huge increase in requirement for the transformation of people and process. This is where our education services teams come in, not just training about product and technology technology, but the accreditations, the certifications, around cloud, around data science, around what does it really mean to do analytics in an AI, ML world? And were seeing a tremendous trajectory in that. >> And the data model is changing. You maybe have a lot of backend systems around Oracle or SAP, but it doesn't necessarily tell the story of what's really happening in the field or closer to the customer. Do you discern a difference between those customers who, sorry, "get digital" and maybe those that are not as advanced in terms of the way they treat data closer to the customer? >> Well I think we're all learning. And this is really that notion of the systems of engagement because the data analytics are no longer just in the core or just at the edge, it's distributed data, and distributed data analytics and figuring out where the processing power needs to be to do the right set of analytics, for the right data set for the purposes needed at that time. And were all learning through that and it'll be different depending on the use case. >> What's your sense of let's talk about disruption a little bit. Everybody talks about it, but I'd like to put some substance behind it. It seems like every industry has its own disruption scenario. Some industries, music, certainly publishing, now taxis, hotels, have been highly disrupted. Others, banking, other financial services, insurance, healthcare, not so much disrupted yet. >> But it's coming, it's happening in different flavors at different paces, look at what FinTech's doing. Goldman Sachs getting into retail bank with Marcus, have built ground-up digital bank from the ground up. Look, every business in every industry is going to be disrupted at some level, and it's all about understanding your customer better, addressing those needs faster, learning quicker than the competition of what works for customers, what needs to change for customers and actually finding those value points even before the customers realize it themselves. And we've seen this in industry after industry and yeah, some of the big heavy infrastructure industries might take a little bit longer, but it's common to all of us. >> Wow, we agree, there is no industry that's safe, which implies that there's going to be new winners and some losers. >> And this is the opportunity for all of us, embrace! And have the courage of your conviction to go try new things. Not everything's going to work. The best hitters in baseball never bat a thousand, they don't even bat over 500, we need to do better in that business for sure, but you're not going to bat a thousand. And in fact if all you do, is if everything you did work perfectly, you're not trying enough stuff. >> Howard, we here so much about the change that's happening here, internally while change just went on. You were critically involved in all of the integration pieces. How do you help the teams inside embrace change, be aware of it, knowing that there's going to be some ups and downs, how does the cultural help? >> Well, first of all in the technology industry, we're the bastion of lots of change and disruption for many years. Other industries are going to be going through what we've been going through for decades, right? And so first of all it takes a certain kind of person to be in this business already, so they understand change is the new normal. But the more important thing we can do is have clear vision and strategy. What were trying to accomplish for our customers, we're very clear about what we measure our customer NPS, RT member MPS, our relative market performance, which then leads to our financials. We have we call Strategy Cascade, where we're very clear of our purpose which you heard Michael talk about, developing the technologies that drive human progress, our strategy to become the essential infrastructure company for today's application and the cloud-native era that we're entering, and then what are the key things were doing and what does every team member inside of our company do? And there's only two kinds of team members we have at Dell, those who serve our customers directly and those who serve, those who serve our customer. >> So Dell Technologies World, first ever? >> First-ever. >> Obviously a lot of synergies with previous Dell EMC World, EMC World at the root6 of this, Dell World brought in, but what what what should we expect here, what are the learnings, what are the things you want your customers to take away? >> Well you've seen a progression since we've come together, we refer to it as better together. It's important that we understand that we have businesses, technologies and brands. They operate at different rhythms, some of them have different business models, some of them have different ecosystems, some of our platform versus product. And so that's the reason why we got the structure we do, but our customers are better off when we're better together. And so what Dell Technologies World is meant to show is, the power of all of our capabilities. Not every customer will use everything, but those that want that full end-to-end experience, we want to learn, how we could deliver that better. >> You guys use that as a competitive advantage. >> We do. >> I mean granted, if you're a one product company and you got what's perceived as the best widget, you're going to sell some. But you guys of change the way in which you compete (giggles) the cross-selling that were seeing, obviously VMware is a huge piece of that, your security businesses, you mentioned Pivotal earlier, >> And we do it in a way that is open at every level. So it's not something that the customer, that we require them to go a certain way. Cause you think about a typical stackable hybrid cloud, PCF with PKS, on VMware Cloud foundation, running on Dell infrastructure underneath, secured by RSA and Secure Works, maybe delivered as a cloud by Virtue Stream. Those are all choices. And customers can make different choices at different levels with open interfaces and open APIs, but we do believe customers that are looking for more integrated solutions, we are better together. >> Well I think your secret is you're having fun, I mean it shows, Howard. You've gone through so many transformations, such as successful exec and have a great friend of theCube so thank you so much-- >> My pleasure, thank you. Great to see you, and thank you everybody. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back, with our next guest. We're live from Dell Technologies World, 2018 in Vegas. Be right back. (digital music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE's Ecosystem Partner. >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain. We are live at Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder SiliconANGLE. My co-host Stu Miniman, analyst at WikiBon.com. Our next two guests is Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director Data Center Solutions at Cisco and Lee Howard, Chief Technologist, Global Industry Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. Great partnership here to talk about the tech involved in the partnership. Obviously, in the industry, it's pretty well known that NetApp's doing really well with Cisco. Congratulations. You guys have been enabling great partner dynamics lately, but all the action's been on the intersection between a raise, better, faster, cheaper storage, but also enabling software defined stuff, value. What's the check involved in the partnership? Why is it going so well? Lee, can you start? >> I think offering choice out there is the best thing that we can do. You've got data fabric from a NetApp perspective is that super interconnected highway and as many on ramps as we can build for folks to get on that highway. The more successful you're going to be able to see. I mean, the IDC numbers speak for themselves, prolific, double digit growth. I think we were at 56% last quarter, listed together on there. That's how tight this partnership's been. Leveraging that combined portfolio has given us a very competitive offering out there in the industry. >> Siva, I want to get your thoughts because actually Cisco, we've been... Stu and I love talking about networking, in Cisco in particular because the old days, provision the network and good stuff happens. Apps get built. Things get done. But with the Cloud, you see the shift where you've got DevOps culture, you got cloud-native happening. The real enabling technologies have to be beyond the network, so you guys have been successful with a variety of other things. What's the key things that's making you guys key partners in the ecosystem? What are you guys truly enabling? Is it network programmability? What's the secret sauce from Cisco's standpoint? >> If you look at the way Data Center has evolved in the last decade or so, the way customers are consuming technology is much more at a platform level. They want things simplified. They want to, as you just said, the innovation that's happening in the above layer, in terms of the software's tech and use cases, is just tremendous. They really want the platform to become simple and that's what Cloud did to you anyways. That level of simplification, that level of optimization, but still a best of breed, it is what got us together. We have continued to build world class platforms that started one way, started mainly looking at virtualization in those place over time. In the last four or five years or so, the amount of innovations we have brought on top of a FlexPod, which is a joined solution together, has been right at the cutting edge of where technology is going and where applications are landing. That, in a very large way, has become the key for the success between the two of us. >> We had talked Brandon on here earlier and he validated our thesis and WikiBon actually had a report that came out last year, in the middle of the year, called "True Private Cloud." It was the only research analyst firm that actually got this one right, in my opinion, which validated by you guys is that... Certainly any (mumbles) would argue that everything is moving to the Cloud, tomorrow. Certainly there's some cloud migration and some stuff in the Public Cloud, no problem. But what WikiBon did is they looked at the true Private Cloud numbers, meaning that the action where the spend is and where the buyers are doing the most work both refreshing and retooling is on premises. Because they're actually changing the operating model on premises now as a way, as a way, as a sequence, to hybrid and then maybe full Multi-Cloud or full Public Cloud, whatever they want to do. So that being said, Lee, what does that mean? Because certainly, I understand what a Cloud operating model is, but I'm talking about storage and networking. >> Yeah. >> What does that look like? Is that a full transformation? How long is that going to take? Your thoughts? Comment on that. >> We're seeing, you saw on the key note this morning them referencing brand new titles and new personnel, new human capital that's coming in. I think that is, both you're enabling and your barring the factor to changing how you're consuming resources on site. Cloud architects as they're coming in to prominence enterprise architects. I think we're getting to a point where there's enough of a intuition to the software that's enabling those consumption trends to shift, that it's now a way for not just those that have the inside information, but it's something that's consumable for the masses. I think 2018, you guys hit on DevOps, highly versatile model going forward and I think Multi-Cloud is going to be the right answer. >> John: The roles are changing. >> Roles are changing and we have been seeking to be that technology provider that regardless of where you're at in that journey, you're able to leverage our portfolio to be able to do it. >> John: Does the product change? >> The product, the tenets behind the product, not so much but I think the way that it's being leveraged does end up changing. >> Siva, your thoughts on this. >> You know, if you start to think about the earlier generation of Cloud, it was mainly seen as a capacity argumentation, mainly on the IS. It really started people to think that everything is moving to Cloud, but if you look at the innovation that happens in the Cloud, the Cloud in itself is a massive ecosystem and people want to go do that. So there is a huge reason why the cloud is successful, but that's not necessarily just taking everything on. That's not the trend. What you really see is customers now starting to reach that level of maturity to say hey, there is a tremendous value in what I can do and on-prim, the data gravity and the latency and those things. >> So you agree with the "True Private Cloud" report, the on-prim action is where? >> We continue to see that from our customers, you see it as option and things like that. We absolutely see that is real as well. >> Let's go back to the data center for a second because some people look at it, and it's like oh, well CI's been happening now for gosh, almost a decade now. HCI has a lot of buzz out there. We want to hear what you're hearing from customers because first of all, what we see is there's still the majority of people, still building their own. They're taking the pieces. FlexPod is a little bit different than say hyper-converged from a single skew, but you've still got to build your own CI. Big partnership >> Absolutely. >> There's a huge revenue. HCI has both Cisco and NetApp have pieces there. Where are the customers today? Why is CI still a meaningful part of the discussion today? >> I think it all comes down to scale and how you want to be able to interface. What do you want your data center to be like today? How are you staffed and proficient at implementing a solution and where do you want that data center to go tomorrow? I think CI and HCI absolutely have a place together in the data center, but as we see RFPs fundamentally shift to reflect the new way that infrastructure's being consumed, a cookie cutter approach that you get with a lot of HCIs isn't always going to be the answer. You want to have that full modularity, that full flexibility. It's in the title, it's FlexPod. You want to be able to have that versatility to address not just the initial scoping project but with Flash and able data centers, assets are staying on the books longer and longer. Those depreciation schedules are getting stretched out. Having the versatility, not just to live in today's operating environment, but the operating environment of tomorrow, I think is what's really driving that main stay of CI. >> Siva, we heard in the key notes this morning a lot of discussion about Multi-Cloud and management. Talk about Cisco and NetApp. How do you view those together? Where do you go to market together, co-engineer, things like that? >> Absolutely. If you guys look at what we did in the FlexPod, we created what we would fundamentally call or say code platform for data center. That was the biggest success. We had a lot of work loads and news cases. But in the last two to three years, what we have both done, because individually we have portfolio products that allow a Cloud journey. Cisco is a big proponent of Multi-Cloud and the journey to Cloud and proving customer the right platform so they can pick and choose when to go to Cloud and how to go to Cloud. There are similar assets from NetApp. What we have done is we have built FlexPod solutions that builds on top of on that leverage, is the Cloud Center products, NetApp's data fabric, some of their technology that's call location within the equinox and so on and so forth. What that has allowed is FlexPod as a platform has blossomed as the Cloud has grown because we now offer the choice. That also brought more customers to realize while these guys really provide me the journey to Cloud model. That is more new solution that we are building that continues to drive that mindset from both companies. >> Stu: Lee, you want to build on that? >> Yeah, providing that operational excellence to where you're able to come in and leverage these assets, not just day zero but through the entire lifespan of that asset and that's the... Quality of life improvements is a big thing from NetApp and Cisco's perspective as we're coming together and we're planning what the future state is going to look like. It's not just hey, this is the specific drive capacity you're putting in, that's yesterday's infrastructure. Tomorrow is all about what quality of life, how much time can we give back to those end users out there? >> So I have a question for you guys both. Lee, we'll start with you. You got the storage compute and switching cause you're leaders in those areas, what's next? What's driving the partnership? You talk about how you present the partnership with Cisco to customers. What's in it for me? What's new? What's fresh? What's the deal? >> The conversation we have out there a lot of times there's perception issues that we are the old guard of technology. FlexPod's been around seven going on eight years and they say what's fresh out there? Well, we're so much more than just the infrastructure piece. It's a combined portfolio. Cisco recently announced their partnership with Google Cloud. We have our NFS Native on Azure going forward. Leveraging those better together stories and each other's Rolodex to be able to come in and truly engineer next generation solutions, that's what's getting people excited. How are you going to set me up for success tomorrow, not just how are we going to be successful today on today's technology? >> Siva, how are you guys successful with that? How do you talk about the relationship because they have a unique capabilities, been around the block for awhile in the storage business? Look at the history of NetApp. Very interesting, very engineering oriented, very customer focused. >> Lee: 25 years. >> What's your position in this? >> I think you have two companies who have a tremendous technology focus in building, but what keeps this partnership going together is easily our customers. We are not young anymore in the partnership. We have over $10 billion of install based customers. We have over 8,000 customers. Just keeping up with those customers and providing them the journey however they want to go, it absolutely becomes our, it's our prerogative to make these customers successful in wherever they want to go next. That's a big driver for how we look at innovation. We continue to provide the capabilities that allows our customers to continue their journey and at the same time, we bring our innovation to make this platform successful. >> So I'm going to put you on the spot here, both of you guys. I know Stu's got a question. I got a couple minutes left. Kubernetes has put a line in the sand and separates the two worlds of developers. App developers, really just looking as a fabric of resource, they're creative, doing cool things. Then you've got the network storage software engineering going on under the hood, it's like a car. You're now an engine. You got to work together. What are you guys doing specifically to make that work, make the engine really powerful? >> In the context of Kubernetes, we are-- >> Under the hood. What's under the hood? Kubernetes is the line there, but you got to sit with that app. You got to make the engine powerful. You guys are working together. What's the sound like for the customers? Why NetApp and Cisco together? >> If you look back at our containerization, micro services that journey, we certainly again, same logic, same model. We are building an ecosystem there. We are developing joint solution that optimizes how Kubernetes and Cisco and Google have made several announcements on how we are bringing innovation and infrastructure automation level, network scale level, that allows a massively scalable container environment of Kubernetes environment to be deployed on top of a Cisco infrastructure. NetApp's innovation around Kubernetes, around building the plug-ins for how the plug-ins interact with the storage subsystem that allows us to say if you are deploying a Kubernetes environment, if you are deploying the best of breed, you certainly need the platform that understands and scales with that. >> All right, Lee. Your differentiation for that power engine under the hood with Cisco. >> It's infrastructure is code. That's what we are together and I don't think that across the competitive landscape that they are, everybody else is really embracing it in such a fashion. It's speaking the language that these developers are wanting to do and we're marrying that up with the core tenets that made us an IT powerhouse together. >> It was the developer angle John- >> All right. (laughs) >> We've been doing so many of these together. Absolutely where we wanted to go. >> Stu and I get the-- Infrastructure is code. The great shows. We do the cloud-native, got Kubernetes, we do under the hood. This is a big journey for customers. There's a lot of fud out there and they want to know one thing. Who's going to be around in the future? Having the partnerships is really key. You guys have been very successful. I'll give you guys the final word. Each of you share what customers should expect from the relationship. Siva, we'll start with you. >> I think continued greatness, continued commitment to making customers successful with the innovation that keeps them worry much more about the above the layer, the application, the business critical elements and make the infrastructure as simple and as versatile as possible is absolutely our commitment. >> I'd boil it down to the human capital out there, the human element and that is bringing conviction to your decisions. We've both been here multiple decades together in our partnership. FlexPod's coming up on a decade. It's conviction and knowing that you can rely on the lifeblood of your business being secure with us together. >> Well, congratulations. Certainly, the developers are going to be testing the hardware under the hood and we got a DevOps culture developing all on-prim and in the Cloud hybrid. It's going to be an interesting couple years. Interesting times we live in. Lee Howard, Chief Technologist with NetApp and Siva Sivakumar, Senior Director Data Center Solutions. Here on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman. Live from Barcelona. Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More live coverage from theCUBE after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. (bright music) >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Ayanna Howard. She is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and also Chief Technology Officer at Zyrobotics. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> So start to tell our viewers a little bit about Zyrobotics. I know it was a spin-off of your research that you were doing at Georgia Tech. >> Yeah, so interesting enough Zyrobotics, so at Georgia Tech I focus on working in technologies, robotics for children with special needs. Primarily children with motor disabilities, cerebral palsy for example, children with autism. And so one of the things as we had developed was the ability to access computing technology because I was running robot programming camp. So I was running camps for all children, so an inclusive camp and I had typical children and children with special needs, and what happened was people kept asking me, "Oh, can we take this home?" It was like, "Yeah, no, (laughing) "that's got to stay in the lab, sorry. "But you can bring your kid back." And so the company really came out of trying to commercialize that special technology that allows inclusiveness for kids in this kind of STEM education. So that's how Zyrobotics came about. >> So talk a little bit about the technology. What does it do? How does it help kids with these different learning needs? >> So imagine you have a child who has motor limitation, and if you look now, so much is on tablets. Tablets, smartphones, even education. And if I have a motor disability, have you ever tried swiping with your fist? Right, or even if you're an older adult, and taking your finger, and if you have a tremor, like moving things around, so this is very difficult. And yet that is the way the technology is made, which isn't a service. It's just not made for everyone. And so what we've done is we've created these devices, very fun, think of it as a stuffed animal, that allows you to, if you want to stomp, if you want to do your finger, if your access point is in your foot, and you just tap your foot, it allows you to interact with the different educational apps. But what we found is that typical kids also like (laughing) playing with the toys. >> Rebecca: Right, right, right. >> So it's like, oh what is this? This is interesting. And so that's why it provided this nice blend of kids of any ability the ability to access these educational apps. So but you also are a full-time professor at Georgia Tech, and you run a traineeship in healthcare robotics. Tell our viewers a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, so I run a program called ARMS, so it's funded by the National Science Foundation. And what I've found is, a long time ago, the way that we were training our computer science students, our engineering students in robotics was typically I would say ad hoc. So I'd have a student, and they were like, "I'm interested in healthcare robotics." And I would call up my clinician friend and say, "hey, can we do an observation?" And my student would go there and basically shadow a therapist or a doctor for the day. And then they go back. And so this is what I was doing. And I found out that most professors who had students in healthcare-related activities were doing the same thing. And I was like, wait, hold it. This sounds like it's more than just me. Maybe we can formalize this a little bit more. And so the trainee-ship program actually takes roboticist students and immerses them in the medical side. And so for example this past summer, they spent the entire summer over in the clinic and the hospital watching surgeries, I mean actually scrubbing up, following patients, understanding what is Parkinson's and how do you do assessments. And so they were fully immersed as if they were medical resident students, or resident person in the clinic. And what happens is, then, and this is all in their first year, they come back into their studies, and now they understand, "okay, if I'm designing "this technology, what does it mean "if I'm designing for someone who's recovering from stroke? "What does that really mean?" And they have a vision of the patients, not just their own, I mean, they have a real vision of Mister Joe, that they've worked with and how he might have struggled with some concept and what they're doing can actually enable. And so it gives engineers, scientists, roboticists that power. >> And the empathy to really understand how it will be used. >> Yes, and understand that and not build or design in a box, which is really unfortunate that sometimes we do that. We design based on our own beliefs, not taking into account that there are other users and you are not the user, necessarily, of your own technology. >> So I want talk a little bit about this conference. This is your third Grace Hopper Conference. What does it mean to you to be here, and what do you get out of it? Are you here for Zyrobotics? Are you here for Georgia Tech? >> I am here for women in computing. And so it's actually not linked to a specific company or an organization. It's the fact that I feel a responsibility, they call me a role model, but- >> Rebecca: We're going to go with it, we're going to go with it. >> We're going to go with it. (laughing) I mean, I had a lot of mentors growing up. Not many were women. It's only at my later age that I've actually met some great, great women mentors. And so I feel a responsibility to come to Grace Hopper and just talk, share my experiences, sometimes be vulnerable and open to the trials and tribulations, but then the pure joy you get from staying in the field and the pure joy you get from actually impacting the world with your mind, with your technology, with your stuff. And I think it's amazing how, to be here and see all these young ladies, both students and older, well-established women leaders, and say, "yeah, we got this. "We can change the world with our power." >> So we're really at this inflection point in technology where problems, the biases, the barriers that have kept women from progressing, from first of all getting into the field and also progressing, are really front-page news. And sort of the problems that women have faced in the industry, the sexism, is really being talked about. But is that a good thing in the sense, I mean, yes, it's one thing to get these problems out there, but are we also discouraging women because it's showing women how tough it is to be in this industry and this bro-grammer culture? >> I think it's a two-edged sword. So in one instance, these things were happening anyway. And if you actually look at retention, which is surprising, retention of women who've been in the computing field for a longer period of time, a lot of them were dropping out. It's like, wait, hold it. You got through the pipeline, what happened? And so we all knew a lot of this stuff was going on. We have first-hand experience with it. And so the conversation now is letting everyone know about it. And I think that's how anything happens. It's that others are like, "I didn't realize." others start empathizing. "I didn't realize that this is what you were "going through. "What can I do to help?" Even if they are not necessarily a woman or a minority. And so I think what happens is by having that conversation, it makes everyone aware of it so that things can start changing. It's a negative, the fact that maybe young women are like, "oh, I don't want to go through that." I think by having role models that are like, "hey, yeah, that's what it's like, "but guess what, I'm running the company. "I'm the CEO, and so imagine what it'd be like "if you come in now that the conversation is open "versus what I was going through "when nobody was talking about it." We didn't have anyone to say, "hey, can you help me? "I just need some assistance, just to talk about something." Now you can, you can be open about it. >> So what is your advice? I mean, we know that the numbers are bleak. Tech is comprised of 25% women, 15% in leadership positions. For black and Latina, it's abysmal. What do you tell your students about this industry? >> So I tell my students, one is, if you want to change the world, and usually students that take my course and work with me are ones that want to have an impact with their minds and their technology, and so my thing is if you want to change the world, computer science, engineering is the only way that you can because the world is based on you and your technology. And in fact, if you don't, I put in the guilt, if you don't get involved in this, then the world is not going to change. And your kids' kids will have to live in this world that you have. So it's really your responsibility (laughing) to get into this space. >> The guilt is good, that's good, yeah. >> It is, for women, guilt is really good. >> I know, it's powerful, so powerful. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I want to talk a little bit about funding because I know that your trainee program, it's partly funded by the National Science Foundation. So funding is such a hot topic here, and whether you're a female entrepreneur who's trying to get money for your idea or you're a scientist trying to fund your research, tell us a little bit about the landscape, what you're seeing, what you're feeling. >> I would say that government funding, so the National Science Foundation, I would say NIH, there is more equality in the representation. >> Rebecca: There is more equality. >> It's not 50-50. But you have a fighting chance, right? I would argue, though, that in the startup world, you need to go for government funding and non-profits that may be angels because honey, VCs are not going to look at you. I truly believe that, and being a startup company, I talked to a lot of women entrepreneurs who have broke in the VC field, and they tell me basically how many frogs they had to kiss, you know? And so I think that landscape has not changed as much. But I think funding as a scientist for government grants, I think it's more, it's not fair, but it's more equal because in government, it's okay for you to say, as a program manager, "hey, something's wrong here." Because the government represents the population. So it's okay as a program manager to say that. I don't know that it's as safe to say that as a VC, like, "hey, our company portfolio doesn't look "like the rest of America." >> Right, right. So your advice there for female entrepreneurs or female researchers trying to get money is to go first to either angels or the government. >> I say that will help you keep your company alive. But you still have to kiss a lot of frogs. You still do. And eventually you will find a frog that turns into a princess and will fund you. But if you think about, how do you survive through this company and how do you keep it to the next levels, you go through any type of funding resource that you can. And so if the angel funding world in terms of government, it's not a guarantee, but it's easier, grab that, non-diluted, by the way, typically, until you go the VC direction. >> Now, in terms of the funding environment, though, NIH and NSF, do you feel they're giving as much money right now? We have an administration that is... >> Yeah, no, so overall the budgets themselves are, so NSF and NIH, this last cycle they kind of weathered a cut. But if you look overall over the last umpteen years, you see that the rate of acceptance has dropped because there's a lot more researchers going for funding, the budget doesn't keep up, necessarily, with the cost of living expenses kind of thing, cost for tuition, cost for grad students. And so overall the funding has declined. But that is not a gender issue. That is a issue just about the value of basic research in general. And the US, a lot of us understand but a lot of us do not. And so we feel that in terms of the funding process. >> So as a professor but then also as someone who's working in industry, how do you make sure that women can see themselves and see potentially rich and rewarding careers? >> So I do a couple of activities. For example, I'm going to talk about one, which CRWA grad cohort. And so what that focuses on is graduate students, women, either PhD, Master's wanting to be a PhD, and what we do is we provide those mechanisms for them to interact with community members. So we bring in these- >> Rebecca: So this is not just at Georgia Tech. This is nationwide. >> This is nationwide. Young women, they come in, like, "oh, what is this?" First off, they get to see other of their peers at other schools. Second is we bring in senior women that are doing exceptionally well, and they do things like one on one mentorship. They share. So we select these women who are open to sharing their experiences, both the good and the bad, and so it provides that network of, "okay, look, it might be hard in grad school, "but we have a peer network, take advantage. "And there are senior women you can take advantage, "to talk to and kind of ping them on different issues "that you have." So I think programs like that, and we're not the only one, but programs like CRWA grad cohort, CRAW URM, undergraduate cohort, are ways to ensure that you don't get discouraged at a younger age. >> So Zyrobotics, it's founded in 2013. What is the future of it? I mean, it's such an exciting technology and one that I think really has a lot of uses because as you said, it's not only for children but it could be for stroke victims, for aging people who are sort of losing some of their mobility. >> So my goal, I always say five years, right? So when I started it was like, five year goal cause that's like the holy grail, you make it for five years. So we're at year four, we just crossed. So we're in that five years. But what I see more as the vision, what I would say the secret magic of Zyrobotics is to make sure that accessibility is an integral part of the conversation. It's not an afterthought, it's not a someone designed technology, oh, let's think about accessibility and inclusiveness after the fact. And so I'm hoping that one, the product of course takes off, but also that it starts changing the conversation a little bit. So for example, I go out, I talk about how do you design technology that is really, really cool, is cutting edge, that's accessible at its core. It's accessible to the different learning ways, different access ways that people have of interacting with technology. How do you get that message across that, "hey, you can so this and you can still make money." So it's not like oh, accessibility, we can't make any money. Like, no, you can actually still make money even if it's a core value. So that's my vision is to have basically, have Zyrobotics lead that but then have other companies adopt it as, "oh, yeah, why haven't we done this? "Yeah, this makes total, total sense." >> Great, Ayanna Howard, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE. >> Thank you, this was fun. Thank you for the invite. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, here in Orlando, Florida at Grace Hopper. We will have more just after this. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live in San Francisco for theCUBE's special exclusive coverage of Cisco's inaugural event, DevNet Create, a foray into the developer opensource world as they extend their classic DevNet core developer program, three years old now, going into the opensource world, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with my cohost, Peter Burris, our next guest is Matt Howard, EVP and CMO of Sonatype, knows something about opensource, Matt, great to have you on theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So first, talk about Sonatype, what do you guys do? Give a quick minute to describe the company, then I got some pointed questions for you. >> Well, we provide tools and intelligence to modern development organizations to basically reinvent how opensource components are flowing through the pipeline, through the value chain, through the development lifecycle. >> You guys are a service, SaaS service, are you guys a subscription? >> It's a subscription service, and we provide two products, there's a product which is a repository manager called Nexus where you store, organize, and distribute software binaries into the development lifecycle, and then there's a second server product called Nexus IQ, which provides intelligence on top of those binary, so think of it as like FDA food labeling database, so if you're looking at a bag of potato chips as a consumer, you can see that there's calories, sugar, salt, it's gluten-free. If you're looking at a software binary, you're able to see metadata that we provide, which allows you as a developer to make intelligent decisions with respect to, this component's good for my application 'cause it's properly licensed, or this component's good for my application because it doesn't have any-- >> So you're a verifying code, basically, in a way. >> Yeah, absolutely. Verifying and qualifying the opensource-- >> John: And the problem you solve for the customer as well. >> The customer basically gets to build applications at scale, at speed, with quality opensource components. >> So you take the worries off, like, with the licensing, does it work well, you're like Yelp for software? There're comments? >> Sort of, more like Amazon reviews for opensource binaries. >> Okay, great, cool, thanks for taking the time. So we was just talking in our intro, opensource, I'm old enough to know when we used to pirate software, and then opensource, woo, this is great, and then it became a tier two in the enterprise player, Red Hat brought it to tier one. It's booming. Communities are changing. You're in the middle of it, what's happening? Give us your take on how opensource is evolving, because it's the classic case of cliche, opensource, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants before me, and now the next generation is standing on the current generations of shoulders, a new generation's happening, what's going on? >> So, just think of supply and demand, simple supply. We live in a world right now where development organizations are facing an infinite supply of opensource, there's a thousand new opensource projects a day, 10,000 new versions and 14 releases per year. The supply is massive. And in a world where supply is incredible, consumption is equally incredible, last year alone, there were 52 billion download requests from Maven Central for Java binaries, 50 billion-plus requests for NPM packages in the JavaScript ecosystem, so we are basically dealing with a world where software is no longer a marginal cost to doing business, it is the business. Developers are king, developers are the lifeblood that's flowing through every great enterprise today, because innovation is ultimately the thing that will allow companies to compete and win on a global playing field! >> I mean, it's almost intoxicating for these guys who are just drinking from the trough of free software, because if you compound the new projects with the fact that Google and these guys are donating awesome libraries, Amazons, machine-learning stuff, it's not something to shake a stick at, it's great software! >> Yeah! >> TensorFlow, Spanner, I mean, all this stuff-- >> It's great software, and just think, in a world of infinite choice, which is the world we're living in, how do you make the best choice? >> So where's the growth coming from? Peter and I were speculating that, in talking to Abby Kearns yesterday from Cloud Foundry, and then with the Cloud Native Foundation, a lot of money's coming in so the business model for players and vendors are coming in, and suppliers now helping out and donating software, but we're speculating that there's a whole growth area that's different than we've seen before. Are we on that? Your comment to that, your thoughts on where this evolution's coming from, the next wave, is it horizontal? >> Our view is that the devops transformation from waterfall-native development to devops-native software development is happening and it's real, and it's arguably in the early days, but it's no stopping that train now. As organizations continue to reconcile demand from board members and shareholders and CEOs, how do you remain relevant, how do you be, put yourself into a position where you're innovating with software fast enough to remain competitive? And that's a tremendous pressure, and it's driving transformational change like devops, and so as that demand for speed continues to grow, we think it only increases the appetite for opensource, and it creates opportunities for organizations like ours to basically automate how that opensource innovation happens. >> We do a lot of crowd chats, to surface the landscape and the common theme that comes up is, oh, your organizational mindset has to change, and were commenting, Peter and I were talking yesterday about, if your org's not set up, you'll have, what's the law? >> Conway's law. >> Conway's law, where the output matches the organization, but the bigger question is, Ford CEO got fired, he's been in the job for less than four years, he didn't have time to transform, so the question is, how does opensource help people transform faster, do you have any observations around that? Because that's the number one question we get is, okay, I need to configure resources to do that, and then the other theme that we're hearing, I'd love to get your reaction on is, "Oh my God, I'm going to lose my job through automation." And certainly Cisco has networking guys who are looking down the barrel of potentially being irrelevant if they don't make the network programmable, so this is, we've lived through cycles, is it the mainframe guys who kind of lose their jobs, kind of thing going on? Or is it a transformative opportunity for the people as well? >> Yeah, it's a great question, there's a lot there, but I think the notion that they say software eats the world, a different way of viewing is automation eats the world, and if you look at, we refer to the 100-10-1 rule, today, in every large IT organization, you got 100 developers for every 10 IT operations professionals for every one security professional. It's impossible for the application security professionals to maintain governance over 100 software developers. If the old way of doing something like application security in this world where we're talking about infinite supply of opensource, needs to be automated with machine intelligence, it needs to be scalable early, everywhere, and throughout the entire development lifecycle, and unless it's not, you're going to basically get some of the benefit of opensource, but not all of the benefit of opensource. >> I want to push you a little bit in this, Matt, because, one might argue, and I'm going to be a little bit apocryphal here for a second, but one might argue that we also have an infinite supply of different types of bubblegum. And at the end of the day, one can say, "Well, do we need another bubblegum?" And we may or may not, and yet we do. So the reason why I'm bringing that up is I want to square the infinite supply, which I don't disagree with, with the idea that, certainly our clients, especially the big data side, are still concerned about the fact that they can't find tooling, or combinations of opensource tooling, that can help them with their use case. And so as you think about, one of the things that intrigued me about what your company does is the idea of to what degree can you start with a business problem, use that business problem to do some design work, and then based on that, start finding the tooling that will be most appropriate for solving the problem. >> Yeah, it's a great question, and I think it goes back to this idea of automation, let's just give a real world use case, this is one of many, but if the demand for speed and innovation is what shareholders, boards, and CEOs are looking for out of their IT organizations and their development teams, then the first thing you do, in the theory of constraints is you look for where is the friction, right? So theory of constraints basically points to something like the process inside of a large financial organization that involves a developer requesting approval for using an opensource component. How long does that take? How many people are involved in that process? How many hours, how many dollars? Does it have to be that hard? Or can you basically create policy, and define policy, and build, effectively, a firewall that then automatically governs the flow of opensource, healthy opensource components, into the development lifecycle? With no human intervention at pace, right? And that's the idea of what we're doing when we talk about scaling opensource innovation early, everywhere, and across the entire development lifecycle, it starts at the perimeter, the moment the development requests the opensource component for use, it has to be automated, you can't afford to take three months to approve it, he needs it now! >> So let me turn that around, and see if this is a service that you are providing, or actually could provide. Given that you probably visibility into a lot of the problems that the developer's trying to solve, and therefore, their ability to check opensource in and out from a variety of different sources, are you also gaining visibility in the types of stuff that people can't find, and making that information available to the world about, here's some of the places where the opensource world could step up and do perhaps a better job of delivering that software? And I'm specifically thinking of the big data universe, because there's so many, for example, I got a client, big financial institution, who is tearing his hair out right now trying to come up with some standard components for complex machine-learning pipelines. Real, real hard job, a lot of different tools, they work together at some level, but they're not solving the problem, 'cause they're more focused on solving each other project's problem. Am I making this? >> You are making a lot of sense, and you should introduce us to your friend, because we would love to have a conversation and talk exactly how it is that you can create prescriptive architectures with opensource components to remove friction back to the theory of constraints concept, I mean, this process of innovation has to flatten out, and we are very narrowly focused on one particular piece of that pipeline, and it is the making sure that the development organization is benefiting from all of the greatness that opensource has to offer, but none of the bad, and you have to do that with automation. >> So just really quick, John, for those of you who don't know, the theory of constraints, to a computer science person, looks like Amdahl's law. Speed up that which you do most frequently, for those of you who've ever done computer design. >> Herbie the Boy Scout. >> Exactly, so it's speed up the thing that is causing the most pain. >> Right, right, right. >> So the question I have for you this, okay, given what you guys do, which is a great service, cutting edge, it's in the devops wheelhouse, so, what is, in your opinion, the most important metric for your customer's success, vis a vis devops, okay, I'm in, I've been hearing about this cloud native thing and devops, we've got to change to Agile, we wrote a manifesto, we changed the organization, what is the important metric that you think they should look for for success? >> You know, there's a lot of metrics, there's no one answer, but I'll give you a really great one, since you mentioned Red Hat earlier. Red Hat is an amazing company that has probably done more for the evolution of opensource than anyone. They have a phenomenal track record of managing RHEL, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux stack, upstream and downstream, to the point where today, they publicly tell that the Red Hat Summit just recently in Boston, I think it's a day or two meantime to repair for a zero-day vulnerability. They understand the supply chain for RHEL extremely well, and from our perspective, we are trying to create the same type of hygiene for custom software development that RHEL has long practiced in support of Red Hat, Red Hat has long practiced in support of RHEL, and so meantime to repair, for example. If a zero-day vulnerability hits, do you have a software bill of materials? Are you wondering where that particular component is? Do you even have the component? How many applications in production are affected? I mean, this is a real-world scenario, just two weeks ago, with Struts 2, how many organizations are still working today to figure out the answer to that question? You'd be surprised, it takes organizations months-- >> Peter: But this is more than a library. >> This is more than a library. >> So explain why it's more than a library. >> Struts 2? >> No, what you're doing. >> What we're basically doing is imagining a software supply chain, so step back and imagine a world where you could build software applications the same way that Toyota builds cars. You have Deming's principles, which says you basically take and source the components or the parts from the fewer suppliers, and you source the absolute best parts, and you track and trace the location of those parts to every step of the supply chain all the way into production, so that Toyota recently had to conduct an orderly and effective recall for four million Takata airbags. Right? In software terms, the next time you're basically sitting on top of a zero day, you need the equivalent of that orderly effective recall so you can in a matter of minutes, not months, patch that vulnerability. >> Hence why you use Goldratt's theory of constraints, so in many respects, this is a digital supply chain tool? >> We believe it's software supply chain automation. >> What about digital? Can I also think about how digital objects can be included in that? Again, going back-- >> Containers? >> Going back to the big data notion? >> Yeah, absolutely, this is, supply chain theory is well understood in a physical goods world, certainly, if you look at how physical goods move through a supply chain, and you come to grips with what's happening in digital transformation today and the evolution of devops and the proliferation of opensource, continuous integration, continuous delivery, speed is king, it's all going in the direction of a supply chain. >> So, when you have so much bubblegum, as Peter said, after it loses its flavor, you get a new piece, right? So, same with software. Final question for you. You guys are doing well, I can imagine that operationally, as coming to operational as opensource, you're a key component there, and that seems like a good opportunity. How early are you on that operational progress? I mean, you just get started, you're making some money, which is good. >> To be frank-- >> You're the customer on the journey, in other words, people realize, "I got a operation on," so they're just doing it, not having a checks and balance. >> Our business is really interesting in the sense that product market fit for any young company can take quite a while, and we're fortunate enough to have a CEO who is remarkably patient and savvy and experienced, his name is Wayne Jackson, for anybody knows, here at the Cisco conference, he was previously the CEO of Sourcefire, so an interesting connection there, but patience is key, and we're being rewarded right now because all of the trends that you guys have already talked about here, and everything we've talked about at Cisco DevNet point to a simple fact, which is that software is key to how companies will compete and win in the future, and as long as that's true, they're going to be looking for ways to improve innovation. Right now, our business is early, we're still creating budget in some situations, but that's increasingly changing, and I would say that you should expect our business to continue to grow-- >> So people are operationalizing opensource, and they're getting serious about some of these things-- >> We're seeing budget now that we didn't see last year, for operationalizing the flow of opensource into a devops-- >> Final, final question, since I want to get your take on the show, Cisco's moves here into this world, obviously, a good move in our opinion, I'm sure you agree, risky for them, a good move, progress, what should they do next? Your thoughts and reaction to DevNet Create, 'cause man, they got DevNet, a growing, robust community of Cisco developers. DevNet Create, a new opportunity, what's your thoughts? >> I've learned a lot, I'm glad to be here, and just saw some things yesterday that make it very, very clear that DevNet Create and what Cisco's doing with it is a great move, I mean, my personal belief is that developers are king, and as you expose core services, network services to developers, an innovation happens, and value gets created, and so they've done so much at the network layer for so many years, and if they're now exposing that network sort of innovation to developers, it'll be exciting to see what kind of innovation happens. >> Matt, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, I'm glad we got you in, great to meet you last night, and congratulations on your startup that you're working with, and growth, and been around the industry a long time, you've seen a lot of waves, and appreciate the insight here on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Appreciate you having me. >> Alright, we are live in San Francisco for exclusive coverage of Cisco's inaugural event DevNet Create, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, stay with us for more day two coverage after this short break. >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy and Planning for Cisco.