(upbeat music) (logo shimmers) >> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to AWS re Invent 2022. We are live here from the show floor in Las Vegas, Nevada, we're theCUBE, my name is Savannah Peterson, joined by John Furrier, John, are you excited for the next segment? >> I love the innovation story, this next segment's going to be really interesting, an example of ecosystem innovation in action, it'll be great. >> Yeah, our next guests are actually award-winning, I am very excited about that, please welcome Alan and Becky from IBM. Thank you both so much for being here, how's the show going for ya? Becky you got a, just a platinum smile, I'm going to go to you first, how's the show so far? >> No, it's going great. There's lots of buzz, lots of excitement this year, of course, three times the number of people, but it's fantastic. >> Three times the number of people- >> (indistinct) for last year. >> That is so exciting, so what is that... Do you know what the total is then? >> I think it's over 55,000. >> Ooh, loving that. >> John: A lot. >> It's a lot, you can tell by the hallways- >> Becky: It's a lot. >> John: It's crowded, right. >> Yeah, you can tell by just the energy and the, honestly the heat in here right now is pretty good. Alan, how are you feeling on the show floor this year? >> Awesome, awesome, we're meeting a lot of partners, talking to a lot of clients. We're really kind of showing them what the new IBM, AWS relationship is all about, so, beautiful time to be here. >> Well Alan, why don't you tell us what that partnership is about, to start us off? >> Sure, sure. So the partnership started with the relationship in our consulting services, and Becky's going to talk more about that, right? And it grew, this year it grew into the IBM software realm where we signed an agreement with AWS around May timeframe this year. >> I love it, so, like you said, you're just getting started- >> Just getting started. >> This is the beginning of something magic. >> We're just scratching the surface with this right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> But it represents a huge move for IBM to meet our clients where they are, right? Meet 'em where they are with IBM technology, enterprise technology they're used to, but with the look and feel and usage model that they're used to with AWS. >> Absolutely and so to build on that, you know, we're really excited to be an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. We've had this relationship for a little over five years with AWS, I'd say it's really gone up a notch over the last year or two as we've been working more and more closely, doubling down on our investments, doubling down on our certifications, we've got over 15,000 people certified now, almost 16,000 actually- >> Savannah: Wow. >> 14 competencies, 16 service deliveries and counting. We cover a mass of information and services from Data Analytics, IoT, AI, all the way to Modernization, SAP, Security Services, right. So it's pretty comprehensive relationship, but in addition to the fantastic clients that we both share, we're doing some really great things around joint industry solutions, which I'll talk about in a few minutes and some of those are being launched at the conference this year, so that's even better. But the most exciting thing to me right now is that we just found out that we won the Global Innovator Partner of the Year award, and a LATAM Partner of the Year award. >> Savannah: Wow. >> John: That's (indistinct) >> So, super excited for IBM Consulting to win this, we're honored and it's just a great, exciting part to the conference. >> The news coming out of this event, we know tomorrow's going to be the big keynote for the new Head of the ecosystem, Ruba. We're hearing that it's going to be all about the ecosystem, enabling value creation, enabling new kinds of solutions. We heard from the CEO of AWS, this nextGen environment's upon us, it's very solution-oriented- >> Becky: Absolutely. >> A lot of technology, it's not an either or, it's an and equation, this is a huge new shift, I won't say shift, a continuation for AWS, and you guys, we've been covering, so you got the and situation going on... Innovation solutions and innovation technology and customers can choose, build a foundation or have it out of the box. What's your reaction to that? Do you think it's going to go well for AWS and IBM? >> I think it fits well into our partnership, right? The the thing you mentioned that I gravitate to the most is the customer gets to choose and the thing that's been most amazing about the partnership, both of these companies are maniacally focused on the customer, right? And so we've seen that come about as we work on ways the customer to access our technology, consume the technology, right? We've sold software on-prem to customers before, right, now we're going to be selling SaaS on AWS because we had customers that were on AWS, we're making it so that they can more easily purchase it by being in the marketplace, making it so they can draw down their committed spin with AWS, their customers like that a lot- [John] Yeah. >> Right. We've even gone further to enable our distributor network and our resellers, 'cause a lot of our customers have those relationships, so they can buy through them. And recently we've enabled the customer to leverage their EDP, their committed spend with AWS against IBM's ELA and structure, right, so you kind of get a double commit value from a customer point of view, so the amazing part is just been all about the customers. >> Well, that's interesting, you got the technology relationship with AWS, you mentioned how they're engaging with the software consumption in marketplace, licensed deals, there's all kinds of new business model innovations on top of the consumption and building. Then you got the consulting piece, which is again, a big part of, Adam calls it "Business transformation," which is the result of digital transformation. So digital transformation is the process, the outcome is the business transformation, that's kind of where it all kind of connects. Becky, what's your thoughts on the Amazon consulting relationships? Obviously the awards are great but- >> They are, no- >> What's the next step? Where does it go from here? >> I think the best way for me to describe it is to give you some rapid flyer client examples, you know, real customer stories and I think that's where it really, rubber meets the road, right? So one of the most recent examples are IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, in his three key results actually mentioned one of our big clients with AWS which is the Department of Veterans Affairs in the US and is an AI solution that's helped automate claims processing. So the veterans are trying to get their benefits, they submit the claims, snail mail, phone calls, you know, some in person, some over email- >> Savannah: Oh, it gives me all the feels hearing you talk about this- >> It's a process that used to take 25 to 30 days depending on the complexity of the claims, we've gotten it down with AWS down to within 24 hours we can get the veterans what they need really quickly so, I mean, that's just huge. And it's an exciting story that includes data analytics, AI and automation, so that's just one example. You know, we've got examples around SAP where we've developed a next generation SAP for HANA Platform for Phillips Carbon Black hosted on AWS, right? For them, it created an integrated, scalable, digital business, that cut out a hundred percent the capital cost from on-prem solutions. We've got security solutions around architectures for telecommunications advisors and of course we have lots of examples of migration and modernization and moving workloads using Red Hat to do that. So there's a lot of great client examples, so to me, this is the heart of what we do, like you said, both companies are really focused on clients, Amazon's customer-obsessed, and doing what we can for our clients together is where we get the impact. >> Yeah, that's one of the things that, it sounds kind of cliche, "Oh we're going to work backwards from the customer," I know Amazon says that, they do, you guys are also very customer-focused but the customers are changing. So I'd love to get your reaction because we're now in that cloud 2.0, I call that 2.0 or you got the Amazon Classic, my word, and then Next Gen Cloud coming, the customers are different, they're transforming because IT's not a department anymore, it's in the DevOps pipeline. The developers are driving a lot of IT but security and on DataOps, it's the structural change happening at the customer, how do you guys see that at IBM? I know we cover a lot of Red Hat and Arvind talks to us all the time, meeting the customer where they are, where are they? Where are the customers? Can you share your perspective on where they are? >> It's an astute observation, right, the customer is changing. We have both of those sets of customers, right, we still have the traditional customer, our relationship with Central IT, right, and driving governance and all of those things. But the folks that are innovating many times they're in the line of business, they're discovering solutions, they're building new things. And so we need our offerings to be available to them. We need them to understand how to use them and be convenient for these guys and take them through that process. So that change in the customer is one that we are embracing by making our offerings easy to consume, easy to use, and easy to build into solutions and then easy to parlay into what central IT needs to do for governance, compliance, and these types of things, it's becoming our new bread and butter. >> And what's really cool is- >> Is that easy button- >> We've been talking about- >> It's the easy button. >> The easy button a lot on the show this week and if you just, you just described it it's exactly what people want, go on Becky. >> Sorry about that, I was going to say, the cool part is that we're co-creating these things with our clients. So we're using things like the Amazon Working Backward that you just mentioned.` We're using the IBM garage methodology to get innovative to do design working, design thinking workshops, and think about where is that end user?, Where is that stakeholder? Where are they, they thinking, feeling, doing, saying how do we make the easier? How do we get the easy button for them so that they can have the right solutions for their businesses. We work mostly with lines of business in my part of the organization, and they're hungry for that. >> You know, we had a quote on theCUBE yesterday, Savannah remember one of our guests said, you know, back in the, you know, 1990s or two 2000s, if you had four production apps, it was considered complex >> Savannah: Yeah. >> You know, now you got hundreds of workloads, thousands of workloads, so, you know, this end-to-end vision that we heard that's playing out is getting more complex, but the easy button is where these abstraction layers and technology could come in. So it's getting more complex because there's more stuff but it's getting easier because- >> Savannah: What is the magnitude? >> You can make it easier. This is a dynamic, share your thoughts on that. >> It's getting more complex because our clients need to move faster, right, they need to be more agile, right, so not only are there thousands of applications there are hundreds of thousands microservices that are composing those applications. So they need capabilities that help them not just build but govern that structure and put the right compliance over that structure. So this relationship- >> Savannah: Lines of governance, yeah- >> This relationship we built with AWS is in our key areas, it's a strategic move, not a small thing for us, it covers things like automation and integration where you need to build that way. It covers things like data and AI where you need to do the analytics, even things like sustainability where we're totally aligned with what AWS is talking about and trying to do, right, so it's really a good match made there. >> John: It really sounds awesome. >> Yeah, it's clear. I want to dig in a little bit, I love the term, and I saw it in my, it stuck out to me in the notes right away, getting ready for you all, "maniacal", maniacal about the customer, maniacal about the community, I think that's really clear when we're talking about 24 days to 24 hours, like the veteran example that you gave right there, which I genuinely felt in my heart. These are the types of collaborations that really impact people's lives, tell me about some of the other trends or maybe a couple other examples you might have because I think sometimes when our head's in the clouds, we talk a lot about the tech and the functionality, we forget it's touching every single person walking around us, probably in a different way right now than we may even be aware- >> I think one of the things that's been, and our clients have been asking us for, is to help coming into this new era, right, so we've come out of a pandemic where a lot of them had to do some really, really basic quick decisions. Okay, "Contact Center, everyone work from home now." Okay, how do we do that? Okay, so we cobbled something together, now we're back, so what do we do? How do we create digital transformation around that so that we are going forward in a really positive way that works for our clients or for our contact center reps who are maybe used to working from home now versus what our clients need, the response times they need, and AWS has all the technology that we're working with like Amazon Connect to be able to pull those things together with some of our software like Watson Assistant. So those types of solutions are coming together out of that need and now we're moving into the trend where economy's getting tougher, right? More cost cutting potentially is coming, right, better efficiencies, how do we leverage our solutions and help our clients and customers do that? So I think that's what the customer obsession's about, is making sure we really understand where their pain points are, and not just solve them but maybe get rid of 'em. >> John: Yeah, great one. >> Yeah. And not developing in a silo, I mean, it's a classic subway problem, you got to be communicating with your community if you want to continue to serve them. And IBM's been serving their community for a very long time, which is super impressive, do you think they're ready for the challenge? >> Let's do it. >> So we have a new thing on theCUBE. >> Becky: Oh boy. >> We didn't warn you about this, but here we go. Although you told, Alan, you've mentioned you're feeling very cool with the microphone on, so I feel like, I'm going to put you in the hot seat first on this one. Not that I don't think Becky's going to smash it, but I feel like you're channeling the power of the microphone. New challenges, treat it like a 32nd Instagram reel-style story, a hot take, your thought leadership, money clip, you know, this is your moment. What is the biggest takeaway, most important thing happening at the show this year? >> Most important thing happening at the show? Well, I'm glad you mentioned it that way, because earlier you said we may have to sing (presenters and guests all laughing) >> So this is much better than- >> That's actually part of the close. >> John: Hey, hey. >> Don't worry, don't worry, I haven't forgotten that, it's your Instagram reel, go. (Savannah laughs) >> Original audio happening here on theCUBE, courtesy of Alan and IBM, I am so here for it. >> So what my takeaway and what I would like for the audience to take away, out of this conversation especially, but even broadly, the IBM AWS relationship is really like a landmark type of relationship, right? It's one of the biggest that we've established on both sides, right- >> Savannah: It seems huge, okay you are too monolith in the world of companies, like, yeah- >> Becky: Totally. >> It's huge. And it represents a strategic change on both sides, right? With that customer- >> Savannah: Fundamentally- >> In the middle right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So we're seeing things like, you know, AWS is working with us to make sure we're building products the way that a AWS client likes to consume them, right, so that we have the right integration, so they get that right look and feel, but they still get the enterprise level capabilities they're used to from IBM, right? So the big takeaway I like for people to take, is this is a new IBM, it's a new AWS and IBM relationship, and so expect more of that goodness, more of those new things coming out of it. [John] Excellent, wow. >> That was great, well done, you nailed it. and you're going to finish with some acapella, right? (Alan laughs) >> You got a pitch pipe ready? (everyone laughs) >> All right Becky, what about you? Give us your hot take. >> Well, so for me, the biggest takeaway is just the way this relationship has grown so much, so, like you said, it's the new IBM it's the new AWS, we were here last year, we had some good things, this year we're back at the show with joint solutions, have been jointly funded and co-created by AWS and IBM. This is huge, this is a really big opportunity and a really big deal that these two companies have come together, identified joint customer needs and we're going after 'em together and we're putting 'em in the booth. >> Savannah: So cool. And there's things like smart edge for welding solutions that are out there. >> Savannah: Yes. >> You know, I talked about, and it's, you know you wouldn't think, "Okay, well what's that?" There's a lot to that, a lot of saving when you look at how you do welding and if you apply things like visual AI and auditory AI to make sure a weld is good. I mean, I think these are, these things are cool, I geek out on these things- >> John: Every vertical. >> I'm geeking out with you right now, just geeking- >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, so- >> Every vertical is infected. >> They are and it's so impactful to have AWS just in lockstep with us, doing these solutions, it's so different from, you know, you kind of create something that you think your customers like and then you put it out there. >> Yeah, versus this moment. >> Yeah, they're better together. >> It's strategic partnership- >> It's truly a strategic partnership. and we're really bringing that this year to reinvent and so I'm super excited about that. >> Congratulations. >> Wow, well, congratulations again on your awards, on your new partnership, I can't wait to hear, I mean, we're seven months in, eight months in to this this SaaS side of the partnership, can't wait to see what we're going to be talking about next year when we have you back on theCUBE. >> I know. >> and maybe again in between now and then. Alan, Becky, thank you both so much for being here, this was truly a joy and I'm sure you gave folks a taste of the new IBM, practicing what you preach. >> John: Great momentum. >> And I'm just, I'm so impressed with the two companies collaborating, for those of us OGs in tech, the big companies never collaborated before- >> Yeah. >> John: Yeah. Joint, co-created solutions. >> And you have friction between products and everything else. I mean's it's really, co-collaboration is, it's a big theme for us at all the shows we've been doing this year but it's just nice to see it in practice too, it's an entirely different thing, so well done. >> Well it's what gets me out of the bed in the morning. >> All right, congratulations. >> Very clearly, your energy is contagious and I love it and yeah, this has been great. Thank all of you at home or at work or on the International Space Station or wherever you might be tuning in from today for joining us, here in Las Vegas at AWS re Invent where we are live from the show floor, wall-to-wall coverage for three days with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson, we're theCUBE, the source for high tech coverage. (cheerful upbeat music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is our second full day of coverage of theCUBE. Lots going on, lots of announcements. We always love talking to customers, hearing the voice of the customer, and we have a couple of guests, one from Dell Customer at Lowe's, John Dabek is here, the senior director of infrastructure. Ali Biers also joins us, marketing director of edge solutions at Dell Technologies. Welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for inviting us. Appreciate it. >> So John, let's go ahead and start with you. Let's talk about what the heck is going on in retail. Tremendous change, tremendous transformation, lot of pressures. The last two years have been quite influential. Talk to us about some of the trends that you're seeing in retail, some of the challenges that are going on. >> Absolutely, so COVID has put everything on steroids in terms of the omnichannel experience, so we no longer think of digital as something that's separate. It's all integrated with the store experience. So, interestingly enough, two thirds of our customers shop online before they come into the store, so that shows you the power of having the digital working in harmony with the store. >> So how does that affect your technology strategy? What changes do you see? >> That's a very good question, so we've had to accelerate a number of our new technologies to really create that frictionless experience for the customer. So for example, I'll give you a great example of a technology that we deploy today called pickup lockers. So you order online and then there's a set of pickup lockers right in the vestibule of the store. You go up and you scan it, the locker opens, and then you can take your merchandise and go on, so it's a great experience as to how the technology has changed, and everything from utilizing the mobile applications where customers can now text us when they're in the parking lot, we can deliver their merchandise. Michael Dell put it very well in terms of the strategy in his keynote yesterday. What he talked about was today it's the public cloud, it's the private cloud within the data centers, and it's the edge, and the edge has become very, very important for us because that's where we want to put all of our technologies in the store, closer to the store. >> Ali talk to us about from an overall a Dell vision lens perspective the challenges overall that you're seeing in retail and where the edge is really advantageous for organizations to be competitive. >> Yeah, I mean, really what you're seeing is you've got these incredibly savvy customers who really want to have an experience when they go into the store, and on the other hand, you have the retailer that wants to develop that loyalty but yet they're dealing with tremendous complexity in their footprint, as well as just the pace of change, so trying to modernize and do that at a really fast pace just like what John was talking about and still stick to all the imperatives like being secure and manageable at scale. It's really a big challenge. >> Yeah, and when you talk, Ali, about modernizing at a fast pace, the first 600 stores that we did with VxRail, and we'll go into a little more detail I'm sure about that, we did in three months with the help of Dell technology. >> Lisa: 600 stores in three months? >> In three months, right, and the key was zero disruptions in the store. Now we're talking about 100,000+ square foot stores, so we're talking big stores, and we have a very short window. We can go from midnight to 5:00 AM because 5:00 AM the contractors are there to pick up their materials and we have to be open and ready, so we didn't miss a beat. >> So that's interesting. I heard your CEO the other day talking about how you guys really focused on the contractors, especially during COVID. So that was also another shift. I mean, the volume from contractors probably increased 'cause we give them such great focus. So there's this concept of the intelligent factory. Is there a similar one with the intelligent store? >> John: Oh, without a doubt. So I'll give you an example. We have 140,000 mobile devices deployed in our stores for our employees that can do everything from find merchandise, talk, receive calls. You're going to the store to pick up mulch, and they can take the device and do a checkout from the device instead of you having to come into the store and then go out to pick up your mulch. It doesn't get better than that. >> I love that example cause that one's so relatable, and I think like once you start thinking about how all this to technology in the store can really help, so all of a sudden you know where your customers are spending their time in the store. You can position your customer service people to help in the aisles where people are getting stuck, so it really just puts so many more insights in the hands of retailers to be able to action and make decisions. >> You know, it's funny, sometimes people, when they talk to people in IT, technology like ourselves say, "You know, you guys always talk about, oh, permanent changes. Nah, it's going to be the same. You watch in a few years." Here's an example, there's no way we're ever going back. You know, it's permanent. >> It's permanent, and you know what? All the bad things about about COVID and the pandemic, the great thing is it really accelerated that omnichannel journey. It forced many retailers to do that, including Lowe's. >> Silver lining, but it also, from a forcing factor perspective, it was critical from a competitive standpoint. I mean, we have these expectations as consumers that we can have this consumer experience everywhere which means I want to be able to do my transaction in real time. I want to go onto the website and make sure that they have what I want inventory wise in real time. Real time we learned in the pandemic, not a nice to have anymore. >> No, absolutely. >> Lisa: That is a competitive advantage for every industry, especially retail. >> Yeah, and if you think about it, we have a mini data center inside the store with the VxRail, so it was very important for us because we were not able to leverage the new application development on the old platform, so we absolutely need the power of the new platform to enable the stores. It's very, very, critical. >> Paint a picture of what it's like inside of a store. I mean, what's the infrastructure look like, the apps that are running, the data flow? >> John: So if you picture a dedicated room for the technology, unfortunately in a store you don't build a data center, so it's a concrete floor, as you can imagine. But through the help of Dell, they've really helped us harden the environment as well, to put in technologies that help with intelligent power distribution units and other types of technology because we're making such a big investment that we don't want to have power be a disrupter. You get six nines on our network, six nines on our, on our compute infrastructure. We don't want power to be an impact. But in terms of the apps, everything that you need to run a store from a POS perspective runs in the environment, and it's being enhanced every day, because now the communication from the mobile device of the consumer to what happens in the store is integrating, so it really requires a lot of compute power. >> What I really like about the way you guys have done it too is that you guys have really thought about it in terms of planning for the future. So you thought about how to create that foundation that's really going to scale over time. >> And Ali you've brought up a good point because one of the things that we didn't anticipate when we started was the fact that we would need GPUs in the future. and the power of the GPU was required for things like video analytics, AI, and it came to light as we had one of our innovator, person in the lab saying, "Hey in the test system, we want 300 gigs of memory to do a test," and we're going like, oh my God, this would never run in production. So that's when we got into the whole concept of GPU so all of our stores are GPU enabled, so as we need them, we can add that to the store, but thanks for bringing that. >> That's really interesting. So for what, security? Other use cases? AI, you're saying. How are you applying that? Dig into that. >> It could be security, so think of having cameras in the store that watch what people do from a checkout perspective, and it's tied in with the system so it knows the weight of an item, it knows the cost of an item, and it's able to spot potential frauds and alert people. But to do that, you need video analytics, and that requires a lot of processing power. >> How much of that data do you persist? >> We could talk about that for another hour. >> Oh, okay. >> With respect to that. But generally we utilize the data to handle what we're looking to accomplish. We do capture other data for AI and other analytic purposes as well. >> Ali I think I interrupted you. >> Ali: Oh, no worries. I think one of the things about the edges, people have a tendency to go build a technology stack to address the business problem that they're trying to address in that moment, and it's usually driven by the people that are working in the store. They see an opportunity for advancement, but all of a sudden, if you have a lot of those, how now are you going to deploy it, secure it, manage it, and do them all separately? So I think what you're talking about is you've really figured out a way to do that across all those different use cases, and maybe even for the ones that you don't know exist yet so. >> And that's the good point is that we don't know what exists, because we have to, as we build it, we have to build the business case for what makes sense to put into the stores. So you you'll see a lot of continued innovation with inventory aids to help stock shelves, applications that help the customer journey. I saw some deployment of some new apps in the stores where we can tell where people are located real time in the store, so wouldn't it be great if you know that you can dispatch customer service personnel to that area and great opportunity to plus sell in that environment. >> I can't wait for my next trip to Lowe's. This is going to be so fantastic. But John, I got to ask you, you're sitting here with the marketing director, I'm a marketing girl myself, future proof. It's a term that is always interests me because it can mean so many different things. You're working with Dell, I've been working with Dell for a while, how is what you've architected for the connected store? Intelligence store, excuse me. How do you feel like when you don't know what's coming, but do you really feel like we've got a future-proof architecture capabilities and a partner that's going to allow us to scale and grow as things, obviously we couldn't have predicted what happened in the last two years. >> So not too recent in the past where you would primarily have appliances in stores and single purpose servers, separate storage. So now with the VxRail technology, you have hyper converged infrastructure. So things are virtualized, your storage is virtualized, your server host infrastructure is virtualized, and the power of the VxRail is that as we grow and have different needs, we can change out the processor, we can add memory, we can add storage all while we're still running in a store. >> Dave: Bring a GPU in if you need to, right? >> Bring a GPU in, so it was architected to handle the growth and the simplicity of running the store. So we only have a handful of people that manage the stores from a technology standpoint, and thanks to the the technologies that are provided. >> So you could scale it, and you got the blueprint, what's the network look like? >> And that's some good advice for folks who are looking at this. You have to address the network first, so we deployed a software defined network that gave us the capacity and the future growth capacity and the backup we're using. We're transferring to from 4G to 5G for backup purposes, and we're trying to figure out what's the role of 5G in the future? 'Cause it gives you tremendous flexibility. But remember the VxRail and the edge can run independently, so if the network goes down, we operate a store. >> Lisa: And you had that frictionless experience which as consumers, we all had this expectation that it's going to be frictionless, it's going to be seamless, I'm going to be able to get what I want. >> Absolutely. >> Not quite 24/7. Well, yeah, with online, yeah. >> With online, 24/7. >> So last question as we grab, and I wish we had more time to dig into this. What's next? What are some of the future directions as hopefully things return back to "normal". What are some of the things that Lowe's and Dell are going to do next together? >> We have to finish the stores. We'll be done by October. And by the way, we're experiencing supply chain issue, but not with Dell. We're having trouble getting network switches, but last week we had a breakthrough, and right now we're on track to finish all of the stores by October of 2022. But what's next? Continuing to now leverage the platform that we've put in place, to bring the applications and to start working with our innovators to experiment with the GPUs and put it into effect, and I'm sure Ali's got some great things planned as well on the edge with the technology which we're look to take advantage of. >> Yeah I mean, our goal is really to help customers to simplify their edge because it's incredibly complex. They're dealing with an ecosystem of partners, software, hardware, networking, so really being that partner that they can rely on, having that broad end to end portfolio, and being the person and the company that can architect and bring all of that together in a way that you can life cycle manage it over time. >> John: And the great thing is by being software defined, it's all seems very complicated, but it's simple to manage, and that's the key and that's the power that Dell brings to us. >> Simple to manage, famous last words. John, thank you, Ali you as well for joining us, sharing what Dell and Lowe's are doing together to really enable this intelligent store. I really can't wait for my next trip. (everyone laughing) >> Thank you so much. >> Yes, I got to hit the mulch pile. Want 'em to bring into my car's, it's too heavy to carry. Guys thank you so much for sharing your insights. We appreciate the story. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas at the Venetian. Day two of our coverage of Dell Tech World continues right after this short break. (soft music)

>> Man: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. (energetic music) >> Bryan, good to see you again. >> Bryan: Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. I said, "Good to see you again." We thought we had you on before, but maybe not. But anyway-- >> Bryan: I have lots of Rackers. >> We feel like Rackspace is one of ours, with theCUBE alone. Red Hat Summit, obviously a big show for the industry. Big show for Rackspace. But your focus is on OpenStack, you're the general manager of the OpenStack business. You guys started OpenStack, I mean, you and some others. But it was really the seed and the vision of Rackspace. So bring us up to date as to where you are now. >> Yeah, I see your point. It kind of goes back to 2010, where Rackspace and NASA essentially co-invented OpenStack and opened it up as a community project, and made it open source. Again, the intent was, how do you help leverage the innovation of a community to help build cloud infrastructure? At that time, it was really focused on public and private cloud. Rackspace over the years, certainly, our public cloud was built on OpenStack and we continue to do a lot of that focus in upstream innovation and contributing in, how do you make this platform scale very massively? Over the last several years, where we've seen great adoption of OpenStack specifically, though, is in private cloud solutions. We have built a practice over the last several years building, deploying, and operating private clouds for customers in our data centers, in their data centers, third party data centers. And that's where we've seen a lot of growth in that. >> Bryan, I wonder if you could help us unpack that a little bit. I know you and I are going to be back here in Boston down the road at the Hynes for OpenStack Summit next week. But when you hear the general discussion, OpenStack has changed a lot in the last few years. So there are people that throw stones and are like, "Oh, well, it's done, it's over." Sounds like you've got a good, robust business. Tell us where are people using it, how are they using it, what is it replacing, or helping them grow their business? >> OpenStack itself, if you think of this arc of an open source project in the rapid innovation, how quickly it's matured, over the last couple years OpenStack itself has really become a solid platform. Infrastructure as a service. In fact, I think I heard a comment as of the Barcelona summit where an analyst or media or somebody said, "OpenStack is now boring." Because a lot of the drama or rapid change has really come out of it, many of the core projects have very much matured. You do hear, "Is OpenStack dead? "Are people going straight to containers on bare metal? "Is this the end of the space?" In practice, we are seeing it is still, how am I consuming or building cloud-native apps? I'm consuming cloud services, and certainly in a private cloud context I'm looking for that power and agility that I see from a public cloud, but delivered in a private cloud form factor. We're still seeing huge adoption for OpenStack in that use case. >> Well, there's a lot of misconceptions about OpenStack over the years, and part of it is it was just sort of put out there and said, "Okay, let's see what happens." But I remember when it went public, John Furrier, other co-host of theCUBE, called it a Hail Mary against Amazon. >> Bryan: Yeah. >> Okay, well, in a way, people needed some kind of alternative. And it's really emerged as the only, correct me if I'm wrong, really the only open platform to build private clouds on. >> Bryan: Yeah. >> And when you say you hear, "Oh, is OpenStack it?", you hear that from a lot of the legacy enterprise companies who are sort of doing their own proprietary private cloud. To your point, it's become a platform with momentum. Further thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I think to your point that those that are really saying it's dead and they're doing their own proprietary cloud, that's really just virtualization at scale. They're not really consuming cloud services in the same framework that OpenStack delivers it. It is still a vibrant and growing platform. We're seeing it as the platform of choice for not just, how do I move virtualized workloads, but even for containers and other orchestrated solutions on top of that as well. It really is this underpinning technology that people are consuming for private and hybrid types of scenarios. >> Red Hat would argue, I wonder if you could weigh in on this, that in order for you to build a true hybrid cloud, we use the term true private cloud, we can extend that to true hybrid cloud, you've got to have a sort of modern infrastructure that's open on-prem. Or else you're going to be just force-fitting square pegs in round holes. >> I think there's a lot of validity to that. Especially when you think about the concept of portability or leveraging moving applications between different platforms. If I have a truly siloed infrastructure, I don't have that capability. Whereas if you look at leveraging these open platforms of OpenStack and the tooling that I could use on top of that, cloud forms and ether services, and certainly as I move into paths and containers, I now have much more portability on where I can deploy and operate these different technologies. >> Bryan, congratulations. You guys are an Innovation Award winner. Can you talk a little bit about the solutions and what you guys are working closely with Red Hat to give to your customers? >> It's really exciting. We were awarded one of their Innovator of the Year awards for cloud infrastructure. The way this came about is, Rackspace and Red Hat have a mutual customer that really came to us where they were looking for a private cloud delivered as a service. They're looking for the operational expertise that Rackspace brings in operating these technologies at scale, but were looking for a fully certified Red Hat stack. At that time, we didn't have an offering around the Red Hat OpenStack platform. We obviously have a long-standing relationship with Red Hat, and support a number of Red Hat technologies across our businesses, but in the OpenStack space we had not productized or brought to market a main service around the Red Hat OSP Platform. And so we partnered very closely with them to bring this solution to market. But it's not as simple as just saying, "Voilà, now we have our Red Hat offering." Our focus is really to bring the operators' perspective to it. So we spent eighteen months in total, if you think about from when we really kicked off this effort with them, deploying and operating and scaling and testing, and going through all the stages of patching, and upgrading and running different workload profiles and really, scalability testing. And feeding back a lot of innovation into the Red Hat team. It led to a number of enhancements that have come in later releases of RHEL OSP, which allowed us to really get to a platform that we could stand behind, provide as a main service and deliver a four nines availability SLA around it. This is the offering that we brought together. We're being recognized for some of those innovations that we fed back into it. We consume their Distributed Continuous Integration environment, so through the DCI platform we execute over 1500 tests on a daily basis, which allows us to deliver the latest release of RHEL OSP to our customers within two weeks of a given major release. We made a number of networking plainly-needed enhancements in how can we break out the bouncing from the control plane? Things that allow us to deploy and operate these solutions at a much larger scale. >> Maybe if you could speak to one of the challenges we've heard for OpenStack for years is, it's kind of complicated, and how do we do this? And I have to think, the Red Hat service and support model partnered with the fanatical support from Rackspace should be able to address some of those concerns for customers. >> That's honestly where I think we've found the most success with customers is, OpenStack itself is a very powerful tool. But it is complex. It's not something that you're just going to download and run on a VM in your laptop to gain experience with it. >> Stu: Built by rocket scientists! What do you expect? >> Literally, quite literally! So the complexity does continue to be a barrier to adoption for many enterprises. That's where our focus of being the operators and delivering it as a service has been so key for many customers. And then, given that fully compliant or certified stack from Red Hat, the software assurance that comes with that has been a great fit to a lot of customers who really grow. >> You mentioned platform as a service. Stu, earlier, you made the comment of The Platform Formerly Known As PaaS. There's a lot of discussion about PaaS, well, it's really not here anymore. Can you guys, at least start with Bryan, maybe Stu, you can chime in, what's happening with PaaS? Is it getting subsumed? I often say infrastructure's a service plus, or a SaaS minus. What's happening with PaaS? 'Cause when you talk to companies like Oracle, it's like, "Oh, our PaaS business is rockin'!" So what's really happening out there? >> I'm sure you have thoughts on this, too. I believe that PaaS is still a very strong plane. That's where many organizations, now they're embracing cloud and cloud-native development, are looking to move up the step and leverage more fabric-like services. Things that a PaaS can provide them, that integrated development environment. How do I make it easy to consume different data services? Removing the coarse-grained building blocks that I would otherwise have to orchestrate or manage myself. So we do see a lot of adoption for that. It's kind of that progression, as I'm moving up, I'm moving into cloud-native designs and architectures. Now I'm looking to really empower and enable my developers to consume these fabric services. Moving up the stack. >> Comment I'll make on it is, if you look at what's happening with the container space, you heard about what Red Hat talked, is how they take that piece. I want to be able to take my application, have how I built that and have some flexibility as to where that lives. And that was one of the core values of what PaaS was going to offer because, if I want to do Red Hat as the AMP with OpenShift, I want to do it on-premises, I want to do it in AWS, I want to do it with Google, I have that flexibility. Maybe we're just not calling it PaaS anymore. >> Yeah, I think that's good. I think if you look at the move to containerization, there are still those other components or services that I need to consume. How am I solving for identity and networking and storage and all these other components that go into it? This is where some of the PaaS frameworks can help that. >> Just one piece. Rackspace has a really interesting portfolio of services. You're partnering with all the big cloud guys. You've got private cloud. What do your customers think when you say hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud, how does that fit in to where they are today and where they're making their strategy for cloud going forward? >> Again, Rackspace does represent a very large portfolio. We are the managed cloud company. I obviously am very focused on our private cloud and OpenStack, but we have as practices, we help enable customers to either migrate to, deploy or operate on Amazon web services. Certainly, the Azure platform, and recently we announced Google Compute, providing support for that. We have customers that are coming to us looking for help in architecting or moving to these. But the reality is almost all customers, and they touched on that during the keynote here, we live in a multi-vendor strategy or multi-cloud strategy. Certain clouds, either geographically or feature-set-wise are better suited for certain applications or workloads. Many of our customers are living in that hybrid cloud world, where I'm leveraging multiple different platforms depending on workload placement or other rules to that. Where Rackspace has really stepped it is providing that cloud expertise and helping them leverage that, providing tooling to help them deploy and operate in these different environments. In some cases where it's portability, move the same application around, but oftentimes it's really workload placement and how do I more effectively use it. >> We were talking in our open about the bromide from Marc Andreessen in Software's Eating The World, and the implication, tying that into Benioff's statement that there'll be more SaaS companies coming out of non-tech companies than tech companies. You're seeing some big SaaS tech companies like Workday and Salesforce, and Infor's always been there, moving to the Amazon cloud. And others who are maybe saying, "Well, I'm not sure I want to move to the Amazon Cloud." So my specific question is, relative to SaaS takeup on things like OpenStack, what are you seeing there? >> Ironically, certainly in private cloud, that's probably one of our biggest areas of growth is companies that are launching SaaS platforms for all the same reasons that they would be using an AWS to back that, right? They have the agility and rapid growth and elasticity that they can build into it, but they're running their platform, and depending on HR, you mentioned Workday, we have another great example. Ultimate software. They run their platform. Again, it's HR management and other services they want to run in a private cloud context, but deploying that framework where they can leverage cloud-native deployment. OpenStack has been a great fit for that, and helped them grow and scale. >> What's next for you guys in your world of OpenStack? Can you give us a little road map, and what we should expect going forward? >> For us, very specifically, if you focus on the IaaS layer, we continue to be very focused on operational efficiencies. How are we helping customers get the right unit economics out of a private cloud? Getting to greater densities, higher performance, more optimal usage of their cloud as we bring more visibility to actual capacity planning and capacity management, and make sure they're really leveraging or growing their cloud as they can. And then certainly from a feature set where we continue to move up and adopt these other services. I know we touched on earlier on the PaaS. This is an area where we're starting to get a lot of customer demand saying, "Can you help us in this area? "Are there things that you could be doing?" Going straight to native Kubernetes or looking at the different PaaS frameworks like OpenShift or Cloud Foundry. These are areas that we're starting to work more and more to potentially bring services to help customers really leverage these platforms. >> Paul Cormier was talking about how, you know, early days of the Cloud everybody thought everything was going to Amazon and so forth. But everything is going to the Cloud. Whether it's a private cloud or a public cloud, I know somebody told me the other day they're running an application in VMS. Okay, so some stuff never dies. But generally, the world will be cloud. Maybe we'll stop using the words like cloud and digital. Look at a camera! It's not a digital camera. Your thoughts on that? You buy that? >> No, I think you're spot-on. There's a long tale, there's still a lot of AS/400 out there. Although with OpenPOWER, maybe you could make the argument it's coming to OpenStack anyway. It is. If you think about any greenfield development, it's all being done in cloud-native ways. If you look at folks coming out of school and new application development, nobody's developing in the context of bare metal or legacy client/server apps that are built in that framework. I think even as enterprises continue to replatform services, they're moving into that cloud way. So they can take the long-term benefits of agility and cost-savings they're looking for. So we'll become ubiquitous. You're right, at some point, we're going to stop calling it cloud. It's just the way you're consuming infrastructure. >> Final question I have for you. A piece that I hadn't heard enough about when it comes to OpenStack is that kind of application modernization and replatforming. How does OpenStack fit into that discussion with your customers? I'm worried we talked in the keynote this morning about, it's like, oh, okay. We're going to do new stuff, but we might move the old stuff. We're not just moving the old stuff and leaving it, right? >> You're absolutely right. If you think of enterprises that are adopting or going all-in on OpenStack, they have, if you go back to the pets vs. cattle analogy everybody knows, they have lots of pets that they need to care for. We've looked at it and we've actually worked very hard with many customers on, how do I leverage things like Ceph to back Nova, and help bring things like live migration and other services that help OpenStack still cater to those pets and not force them in a full cloud-native model. How can I still deliver some amount of resiliency and failover in the infrastructure so the app doesn't have to be aware of it, and that way they can have one environment to run both new cloud development, but also still care for those legacy apps. >> Excellent. Bryan, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you guys. >> Enjoy the rest of the show. >> Bryan: Thank you. >> Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest at theCUBE. We're live from Red Hat Summit in Boston. Be right back. (energetic music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Everyone, welcome to our special Mobile World Congress 2017 coverage. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE for two days of wall-to-wall coverage. Monday and Tuesday, February 27th and 28th, and we have on the phone right now, Lynn Comp, who's the Senior Director of the Network Platforms Group within Intel, part of the team doing the whole network transformation. The big announcements that went out prior to Mobile World Congress and hitting the ground on Monday and Tuesday of all next week in Barcelona. Lynn, great to have you on the phone. Thanks for taking the time to walk through some of the big announcements. >> Lynn: Thanks, John, for having us. It's a really exciting Mobile World Congress. We're seeing more and more of the promise of the next generation networks starting to take solution form from ingredient form a couple years ago, so it's a great, great time to be in this business. >> So 5G is happening now. You're seeing it in the network and the cloud and at the client, that you guys use the word "client" but essentially, it's the people with their smartphones and devices, wearables, AIs, and now the client is now cars, and flying drones and potentially, whatever else is connected to the Internet as an Internet of things. This has been a really big moment and I think I want to take some time to kind of unpack with you some of the complexities and kind of what's going on under the hood because 4G to 5G is a huge step up in the announcement and capabilities, and it's not just another device. There's really unique intellectual property involved, there's more power, there's a market leadership in the ecosystem, and really is a new way for service providers to achieve profitability, and get those products that are trying to connect, that need more power, more bandwidth, more capabilities. Can you take a minute just to talk about the key announcements impacting Mobile World Congress from Intel's perspective this week in your area? >> Lynn: Yeah, so we had a group of announcements that came out. Everything from solutions labs where operators are invited in to work with Nokia and Intel starting out to start working through what does it mean to try and manage a network that includes unlicensed and licensed spectrum and all these different usage models, very different model for them, to Ericsson, an initiative with GE and Honeywell and Intel, that is in Innovator's Initiative, where companies are invited to come in in the ecosystem. An early start working through what does it mean to have this kind of network capability? If you think what happened, 2G, 3G, to 4G, you start looking at the iPhone, been around for 10 years, and you've seen how the uses have changed, and how application developers have come up with completely new ways of doing things, like, who would have thought about crowdsourcing traffic patterns for driving directions? We all wanted it years ago, but it was just recently that we were able to have that on a smartphone. They're trying to unleash that with pretty unique companies. I mean, GE and Honeywell, UC Berkeley, you wouldn't necessarily think of them as being first on innovating new usage models for a wireless network, but with something like 5G, with all of these diverse use cases, you end up with a completely different ecosystem, really wanting to come in early and take advantage of the potential that's there. >> Lynn, talk about this end-to-end store because one of the things that got hidden in all the news, and certainly SiliconANGLE covered it, as well as, there was a great article in Fortune about it, but kind of talk about more of the 5G versus Qualcomm, that was kind of the big story that, the battle of the chips, if you will, and the big 5G angle there, but there's more to it and one thing that caught my attention was this end-to-end architecture, and it wasn't just Intel. You guys are a big part of that as an ingredient, but it's not just Intel, and what does that mean, end-to-end, 'cause I can see the wireless pieces and overlaying connecting devices, but where's the end-to-end fit in? Can you give some color on that? >> Lynn: Absolutely. You know what's really fascinating is you've got Intel and we've been in the cloud and heard of the genesis of what would become the consumer and the enterprise cloud from the very start, and so what we've been doing in working in that end-to-end arena is taking things like virtualization, which has allowed these service providers and enterprises to slice up compute resources and instead of having something that's completely locked and dedicated on one workload, they can create slices of different applications that all sit on the same hardware and share it, and so if you look, years ago, many of the service providers, cloud and enterprise, they were looking at utilization rights as maybe 15% of the compute power of a server, and now, a lot of them are aiming for 75 to 85% utilization, and that's just a crazy amount of (mumbles) so bringing that to this market that in traditional, we had single purpose boxes, there's various detections for one thing, but that creates a business challenge if you need to do more than one thing, so really what we're showing, for example, at Mobile World Congress, it's something that we call FlexRAN, and it's an example of how to run a radio area network on a standard server on the technology, and it does implement that network slicing. Its's very similar to the virtualization and the compute slicing, but taking advantage of it to use different bandwidths and different rates for different scenarios, whether IoT or smartphones, or even connected cars. >> So I got to ask you about, the big question I get is, first of all, thanks for that, but the big question I get is, this isn't turning into an app show, we're Mobile World Congress, and apps are everything from cars to just phone apps to network apps, et cetera, and the question that everyone's asking is, we need more bandwidth, and certainly, 5G addresses that, but the service providers are saying, "Do we really need all that power? And "When is it coming?" "What's the timing of all this?" So, specific question to you is, Lynn, is what is Intel doing to accelerate the network transformation for the service providers to get 5G ready, 'cause that seems to be the main theme as the orientation of where the progress bar is relative to is it ready for primetime, is it here and now, is it out in the future, is this kind of a pre-announcement, so there's kind of some confusion. Clarify that up. Where's the progress bar and how is Intel accelerating network transformation for folks in the service provider vis-a-vis 5G-ready? >> Lynn: So there's a couple things. So let me start with the accelerating piece because it also relates to the end-to-end piece. When you look at the way that networks have been constructed all the way, end-to-end, it has traditionally been a very, very limited set of solution providers, and they tend to survive pretty granular, pretty high-granular functions, so the appliance, the full appliance, software, hardware, everything, and I would look at some of the smartphones up until you could put new applications on it, as appliances, it did voice, and so, we have this service provider begging us for many years, "Give us an ecosystem that looks like server and PC. "I want a building block ecosystem. "I want to be able to take advantage of fast and free wires "in software and hardware. "I need people to come innovate, "like they go innovate on Amazon," and so building an ecosystem, so Intel Network Builders is something that was started about three years ago, and we had, oh, half dozen to maybe 12 different vendors who were part of it, mostly software vendors. Since then, we have 250-plus number and they range from service providers like GT and Telefonica all the way to the hardware vendors like Cisco and Ericsson, and then the software vendors that you would expect. So that's one thing that we've been really working, for a few years now, on giving these operators building block approaches, supporting them in open source. We had a big announcement from AT&T, talking about how they're putting about seven millions lines of code into the Linux Foundation, and its code has been deployed in their network already, so pretty big departure from normal practice, and then today, we had an announcement that came out, where not only did AT&T and Bell Canada and Orange in that community. Now we've got China Mobile, China Telecom, and a project called Open-O, also joining forces. If you were to map out the topics for these operators, we've got almost all of the top ten. They are joining this project to completely change the way that they run their networks, and that translates into the kind of innovation, the kind of applications that consumers love, that they're already getting out of the cloud, now they can begin to get that piece of innovation and creativity in the network as well. So the building block approach seems to be your strategy for the ecosystem. What's the challenge to keep that rolling and cohesive? How are you guys going to foster that growth on the ecosystem? You guys going to be doing a lot of joint marketing, funding, projects, and (chuckles) how are you going to foster that continuing growth? >> Lynn: Well there's a couple, it's such an opportunity-rich environment right now. Even things that you would assume would be normal and kind of standard practice, like standardized benchmarking, because you want apples-to-apples performance comparison. Well that's something that this industry really hasn't had. We've done very conceptualized testing, so we're working with the operators in a project called OPNSG to make sure that the operators have a uniform way, even if it's synthetic benchmark, but they at least understand this synthetic benchmark has this kind of performance, so they start really being able to translate and have the vendors do comparisons on paper, and they can actually do better comparisons without having to do six months of testing, so that's a really big deal. The other thing that I do want to also say about 5G is we're in a pre-standards world right now. ITU and 3GPP will have standards dropped in 2018 and 2020 is when it will be final, but every time that you're looking at a new wireless standard, there's a lot of pretrials that are happening, and that's because you want to test before you state everything has to work a specific way, so there was a trial just announced in December, with Erisson, AT&T in Austin, Texas in the Intel offices, and so if you happen to be in that office, you're starting to be able to experiment with what you could possibly get out of 5G. You'll see more of that with the Olympics in 2018 and 2020, where you've got, Japan and Korea have said we're going to have 5G at those Olympics. >> So I got to ask you some of the questions that we are going to have some guests on here in theCUBE in the Palo Alto coverage around NFV, network function virtualization, plays right into the software-defined networking virtualization world, so why is NFV and SDN so vital to the network transformation? Why now and what's happening in those two areas, and what's the enabler? >> Lynn: The enabler really started about 10 years ago, the real inspiration for it, when we were all in a world of packet processing engines and network processors, and we had some people in our research labs that realized that a lot of the efficiency in doing packet processing quickly came from parallelism, and we knew there were about two or three years to wait, but that was when multi-core came out, and so this thing called data plane development kit was born. We've referred to it as DPDK. It's now an industry organization, not an Intel invention anymore. The industry's starting to foster it. Now is really when the operators realized, "I can run a network on a general purpose processor." (coughs) Excuse me, so they can use cores for running operating systems and applications, of course, they always do that for compute cores, but they can also use the compute cores for passing packets back and forth. The line rates that we're getting are astonishing. 160 gigabits per second, which at the time, we were getting six million packets per second. Very unimpressive 10 years ago, but now, for many of those applications, we're at line rate, so that allows you to then separate the hardware and the software, which is where virtualization comes in, and when you do that, you aren't actually embedding software and hardware together in creating an appliance that, if you needed to do a software update, you might as well update the hardware, too, 'cause there's absolutely no new software load that can happen unless you're in an environment with virtualization or something like containers. So that's why NFV, network function virtualization is important. Gives the operator the ability to use general purpose processors for more than one thing, and have the ability to have future proofing of workloads where a new application or a new use becomes really popular, you don't have to issue new hardware, they just need to spin up the new virtual machine and be able to put function in it. >> So that, I got-- >> Lynn: If you went back and, we were talking about 5G and all of this new way of managing the network, now management in orchestration, it's really important but SDN is also really critical, both for cloud and for comm, because it gives you one map of the connections on the network, so you know what is connected where, and it gives you the ability to remotely change how the servers or how the hardware is connected together. If you were going to ask the CIO, "What's your biggest problem today?" they would tell you that it's almost impossible for them to be able to spin up a fully functional, new application that meets all the security protocols because they don't have a network map of everything that's connected to everything. They don't really have an easy way to be able to issue a command and then have all of the reconfigurations happen. A lot of the information's embedded in router tables. >> Yeah. >> Lynn: So it makes it very, very hard to take advantage of a really complicated network connection map, and be agile. That's where SDN comes in. It just kind of like a command control center, whereas NFV gives them the ability to have agility and spin up new functions very quickly. >> Yeah, and certainly that's where the good security part of the action is. Lynn, I want to get your final thoughts on the final question is this Mobile World Congress, it really encapsulates years and years in the industry of kind of a tipping point, and this is kind of my observation, and I want to get your thoughts on this and reaction to it, is the telcos and the service providers are finally at a moment where there's been so much pressure on the business model. We heard this, you can go on back many, many years ago, "Oh, over the top, " and you're starting to see more and more pressure. This seems to be the year that people have a focus on seeing a straight and narrow set of solutions, building blocks and a ecosystem that poised to go to the next level, where there can be a business model that actually can scale, whether it's scaling the edge, or having the core of the network work well, and up and down the stack. Can you talk about the key challenges that these service providers have to do to address that key profitability equation that being a sustainable entity rather than being the pipes? >> Lynn: Well it comes down to being able to respond to the needs of the user. I will refer to a couple demos that we have in the data center section of our booth, and one of them is so impressive to China Telecom that have put together on complete commercial off-the-shelf hardware that a cloud vendor might use. A demo that shows 4K video running from a virtualized, fixed wireline connection, so one of the cable kind of usage. Now 4K video goes over a virtualized environment from a cable-like environment, to what we call virtual INF, and that's the way that you get different messages passed between different kinds of systems. So INF is wireless, so they've got 4K video from cable out to a wireless capability, running in a virtualized environment at performance in hardware that can be used in the cloud, it could be used in communication service providers 'cause it's general purpose. That kind of capability gives a company like China Telecom the flexibility they need, so with 5G, it's the usage model for 5G that's most important. Turns out to be fixed wireless, because it's so expensive for them to deploy in fiber, well, they have the ability to do it and they can spin it up, maybe not in real time, but certainly, it's not going to take a three-month rollout. >> Yes, and-- >> Lynn: So hopefully, that gives you one example. >> Well that's great enablement 'cause in a lot of execution, well, I thought it gave me one more idea for a question, so since I have my final, final question for you is, what are you most excited about 'cause you sounded super excited with that demo. What other exciting things are happening in the Intel demo area from Intel that's exciting for you, that you could share with the folks listening and watching? >> Lynn: So, I used to never be a believer in augmented reality. (John chuckling) I thought, who's going to walk around with goggles, it's just silly, (coughs) it seemed to me like a toy and maybe I shouldn't admit that on a radio show but I became a believer, and I started to really understand how powerful it could be when Pokemon Go took over all the world in over the summer, to this, an immersive experience, and it's sort of reality, but you're interacting with a brand, or in the booth, we have a really cool virtual reality demo and it was with Nokia next and it's showing 5G network transformation. The thing about virtual reality, we have to really have low latency for it to feel real, quote-unquote, and so, it harnesses the power that we can see just emerging with 5G, and then we get this really great immersive experience, so that, I think, is one that innovate how popular brands like Disney or Disney World or Disneyland, that immersive experience, so I think we're just starting to scratch the surface on the opportunities there. >> Lynn, thanks so much for spending the time. Know you got to go and run. Thanks so much for the commentary. We are low latency here inside theCUBE, bringing you all the action. It's a good title for a show, low latency. Really fast, bringing all the action. Lynn, thanks so much for sharing the color and congratulations on your success at Mobile World Congress and looking forward to getting more post-show, post-mortem after the event's over. Thanks for taking the time. We'll be back with more coverage of Mobile World Congress for a special CUBE live in studio in Palo Alto, covering all the action in Barcelona on Monday and Tuesday, 27th and 28th. I'm John Furrier. Wrap it with more after this short break, thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music) (bright electronic music)