>>Hello, and welcome back to the cubes coverage of splunk.com here in the virtual studios in Silicon valley broadcasting around the world's a virtual event. Um, John four-year host of the queue. We've got a great guest, Zach brown, chief executive officer of McLaren racing, really looking forward to this interview, Zach, welcome to the queue. Well, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. So we have a huge fan base in the tech community. A lot of geeks love the neurons. They love the tech behind the sport. Uh, and Netflix is driving to survive. Series has absolutely catapulted the popularity of F1 in the tech community. So congratulations on all the success in that program and on, and then on the >>Thank you very much, it's been a, it's been a good run. We've won our first race in a while, but we still have a ways to go to get in that, uh, world championship that, uh, >>So for the techies out there and the folks in our audience that aren't familiar with, the specifics of the racing team and the dynamics, take a minute to explain what you guys do. >>Uh, so McLaren racing, uh, which has a variety of, uh, racing teams, uh, a formula one team in indie car team and extremely team and an e-sports team. Uh, we're the second most successful form of the one team in the history of sport. Now 183 wins 182, uh, when I joined 20 world championships and, uh, we're, we're close to a thousand people to, to run a couple of racing cars and, uh, currently third in the championship, uh, with Lando Norris and, uh, Daniel, Ricardo. >>So talk about the, um, the, the dynamics of the spore. Obviously data is big part of it. Uh, we see the, a lot of the coverage. You can see anything can happen overnight. It's very quick. Um, technology has been being, uh, playing a big role in sport. What's your vision on how that's evolving? Are you happy with where things are, uh, and where do you see it going? >>Yeah, it does some interesting stats. So, um, the car that qualifies first at the beginning of the year, if you didn't touch, it would be last by the end of the year. So that's the pace of a development of a, of a formula one car. We change a, uh, and develop a new part on the car every 14 minutes, 365 days, days a year. Um, and technology plays a huge role. Uh, it's, it's probably the most technical, um, evolved sport in the world. Uh, both safety data, uh, the innovation it's it's awesome. And what a lot of people don't know is a lot of what we develop in a formula. One car ends up in other parts of the world, whether it was a ventilators that we helped develop for the UK government, uh, to working with our, uh, various partners or safety and innovation in the automotive industry. >>You know, I love it. I always loved the IOT internet of things, story around cars, because sensors or instrumentation is a big part of it. Um, and it all comes together. So it's pretty, it's not simple. No, give it feel, give it a taste a little bit about what's it. How complicated is it, how you guys pay attention to the details? What's important. Take us through some of the, some of the inside the ropes around the IOT of the sensors and all the data. >>Yeah. So we have over 300 sensors on our race car. We collect the one and a half terabytes of data. Every race weekend, we have a thousand people, um, and the strong majority of those are working around data and technology, as opposed to physically touching the car out of those thousand people, you probably only have about 60 or 70. They're actually touch the race card at a race weekend. We've been doing connected cars for about 25 years. So that's kind of a new thing here to, to most people, but we've been communicating back and forth with our race car for, for decades all around the world. And what a lot of people don't realize is it all starts in our mission control back in our factory in Woking, England. So wherever we are around the world, the racing team actually starts in England. >>So I want to ask you about the personalities on the team. How big is the staff? What's the makeup of the personnel has to get the drivers. They're critical. They're a very dynamic personalities. We'll come to the side question on that later, but what's the staff look like on when you guys put this together. So you get, you get race day and you got back office support. >>What's the team look like? Yeah. So you've got about a thousand people that, that make up the collective team. You'll have about a hundred in marketing. Uh, you'll have about a hundred in finance, HR, and then you kind of get to the, the racing team. If you'd like 800 people, you have about a hundred people traveling to each race, uh, about 50 people back at the factory, working with data and communications that are grand Prix weekend. And then everybody else is designing manufacturing, production laminating. So we run 24, 7 shifts, uh, three shifts, uh, in certain parts. Uh, we develop, uh, 85% of the car changes of what's allowed to be changed start of the year to the, the end of the year. So the development is, is unbelievable. >>I know you're here in the U S for the U S grand Prix in Austin. Um, coming up, I'm just curious how cars get transported. >>Uh, w when we're traveling around the world, uh, they, they travel on 7 47 and are flown around the world. And then when we're in Europe, we have about 18 trucks that were communing around when we're kind of in the European part of the circuit is usually in the middle of the year. But when we're going to Australia or Singapore, Bahrain, those are, those are on planes form of the one actually does that. They give us an allocation of, of space, and then we have to write a check if we need more space than where >>Yeah. We're allowed. Yeah. And that brings up the security question, because honestly, there's a lot of fans, a lot of people are into it. Also, this potentially security risks. Have you guys thought about that obviously like physical moving the supply chain around from event event, but also technology risk. Um, how do you guys think about security? >>Yeah, it's, it's critically important. We've had, uh, fortunately we've not had any breach of our technology. We have had a breach in the late nineties of our radio communications and, uh, it was in Australia, Mika Hakkinen and a fan, uh, who I think was probably having some fun and were able to break into our radio channel and actually asked Mika to pit. He pitted team wasn't ready. And fortunately, we will run in one, two, but we actually had to reverse the drivers. So security is >>Critically important, probably Katie Scrivener, and they all look, I just hack the radio, was talking to the driver. That is a funny story, but it could be serious. I mean, now you have all kinds of >>The stuff going on and, and, you know, there's a lot of money at stake, you know, so, you know, we're fortunate in this particular instance, it didn't hurt us cause we were running one, two, so we could reverse the drivers and the right guide one. Um, but you know, that could decide, uh, a world championship and you have, you know, tens of millions of dollars online, but even besides the economics, we want to win races. >>You know, what's funny is that you guys have a lot of serious on the line stakes with these races, but you're known for having a lot of fun, the team team dynamic. I have to ask you, when you finish on the podium one and two, there's a Shui with the drivers. How'd that go down. It was pretty, pretty a big spectacle online and >>Yeah, it was, it was good, fun. That's something, obviously Daniel Ricardo is kind of developed as his thing when he, uh, when he wins. And, uh, when we were, uh, before we went on the podium, he said to me, you're going to do the shoe. Yes, of course. In the car show you got to do, we have to like a bunch of 12 year old kids, uh, on the podium, but that's where we're just big kids going, motor racing and >>The end of the day. Well, I gotta say you guys come across really strong as a team, and I love the fun and, you know, competitive side. So congratulations on that, I think is good on the competitive side, take me through the advantage, driving the advantage with data, because that's really the theme here at.com, which is Splunk, which they're a big partner, as well as your other sponsors. Data's big, you know, and it's striving an advantage. Where do you see that coming from? Take us through where you guys see the advantages. Yes. >>So, you know, everything we do is, is precision and, you know, every second, every 10th counts and, um, you know, you can get all this data in, but what do you do with this data? And the humans can, uh, real, uh, react as quickly as is, you know, people like Splunk who can help us, uh, not only collect data, but help us understand data. And, um, you know, typically there's one pit stop, which can be the difference between winning and losing. Um, you have all these different scenarios playing out with weather with tire wear competition. And so, you know, we live by data. We didn't, uh, when, in, in Russia, when we, uh, could have, and it was because we got a bit emotionally caught up in the excitement of trying to win the race instead of staying disciplined and focused on, on data. And so it's a very data-driven sport when I'm on the pit wall, there's a thing called racer instinct, which is my 30 years in the sport. And, uh, your experience and your kind of your gut to make decisions. And every time our team makes a decision that I'm sitting there going, I'm not sure that was the right decision. They're staring at data. I'm not, I'm trusting my 30 years of experience. They'd beat me nine out of 10. >>Yeah. I mean, you know, this is a huge topic too, in the industry, explainable AI is one of the hottest trends in computer science where there's so much algorithms involved. The gut instinct is now coming back. What algorithms are available, knowing when to deploy what algorithms or what data to pay attention to is a huge new gut factor. Yep. Can you explain how the young drivers and the experience folks in the industry are dealing with this new instinct full data-driven? >>Yeah. That's, you know, that's what we have 50 people back at the factory doing, and they're looking at all sorts of information coming in, and then they're taking that information and they're feeding it to our head of strategy. Who's then feeding it to our racing director. Who's getting all these data points in from tire to performance, to reliability, and then the human data from both drivers coming through their engineers. And then he gets all that information in. He has to process it immediately and make decisions, but it's, it's a data-driven sport. >>I saw Lando walking around, got a selfie with them. It's great. Everyone's loving it on Twitter. My family, like get an autograph, the future of the sport. He's a young young driver. So that instincts coming in the future sport comes up all the time. The tires are a big discussion point, but also you've got a lot of presets going on, a lot of data, a lot of going on and you see the future where there's remote, you know, kind of video game you're in the pit wall and you can make decisions and deploy on behalf of the drivers. Is that something that >>Well, that technology is there and we used to do that, but now it's been outlawed because there's a real push to make sure the drivers are driving the car. So that technology is here. It has been deployed in the past. We could do it, but we're trying to find as a sport, the balance between, you know, letting the driver do it. So he, or she might make a mistake and a little bit of excitement to it. So, um, we now there are certain protocols on what we communicate. Um, we can't, um, everything has to be driver fed into the car. So we can now you'll hear all sorts of codes that we're talking through, which there are, um, about 300 different adjustments the driver can make on the steering wheel, which is unbelievable. And so that's us seeing information, getting data in coming to conclusions that we're giving him or her information that we think will help make the car >>A lot of new dimensions for drivers to think about when they're being successful with the gut, that the track data everything's kind of coming together. >>Yeah. It's amazing. Um, when you listen to these drivers on the radio, you forget that they're going 200 plus miles an hour. Cause they sound quite relaxed in this very, you know, open and easy communication of here's what I'm feeling with. Again, we're talking all these codes and then we all, because we can hear each other, there's a lot of trickery that goes on. So for a driver to be going to turn a miles an hour, taking this information and then know what code we're talking, are we kind of throwing a code out there to put the competition off is pretty amazing that they can take this all in. >>You know, I wish I was younger again, like we're old school and the younger generation, I was having a few conversations with a lot of the young audience. They wanted me to ask you, when are you guys going to metaverse the tracks? When can I get involved and participate and maybe even make the team, or how do I become more active, engaged with the McLaren racing team? >>And that technology is almost, we're actually, um, that's in development. So I, I think it won't be long before, you know, Sunday you can log on, uh, and, and race Lando around Monaco and be in the race. So that, that technology is around the corner. >>That's the shadow thing to developing. I see that. E-sports just quick. I know you've got to go on, but last minute we have here, e-sports, what's the future of e-sports with the team, >>But e-sports been great for the sport. You know, it's gone from, you know, when I was growing up, it was video games and now it's real simulation. And, uh, so we've held, I think we're going four years into it. Now we were the first team to really develop any sports platform and we've had competitors go on to help us with our simulation. So it's, it's real racially developed the race car before it goes on the racetrack it's in simulation. And that's where e-sports, >>And this is the new advantage. This is a new normal, this is where you guys see the data driving. The >>Definitely. And I think the other thing it is, you know, somewhat stick and ball sports, you can play in school. And motor racing has historically been partying, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now with e-sports you have a less expensive platform to let young men and women around the world, but a steering wheel in their hand and go motor racing. So I think it's also going to kind of bring that younger generation of fan and >>There's so much collective intelligence, potentially competitive advantage data. Again, data coming up final word to end the segment, Splunk, big partner on the data side, obviously helping you guys financially, as well as you do need some sponsorship support to make the team run. Um, what's the relationship with Splunk? Take a minute to talk about the plug. >>It's been a, it's been great, you know, they're, they're two big contributors. We need a lot of money to run the racing team. So they're a great partner in that respect, but more importantly, they're helping us with our whole data journey, making smarter, quicker decisions. So their contribution to being part of the race team. And, uh, we used our technology. Um, it has been great. And I think, um, you know, if I look at our technology partners, uh, we have many that all contribute to making a >>Yeah. I mean, it really is nice. It's data inaction, it's teamwork, it's competitive, it's fun. That's kind of a good, good, >>I think fun is the center of everything that we do. It's the center of everything spunk does. Cause I think if you have fun, people enjoy going to working a little bit harder. We're seven days a week. And uh, you know, a lot of teammates you've got to work well together. So I think if you're having fun, you enjoy what you're doing and it doesn't feel like work. >>Congratulations on climbing up in the rankings and everything on your team. Two great drivers. Thanks for coming on the cube. We appreciate it. Thank you. All right. We're here. The key. We like to have fun here and get all the action on the tech side. Honestly, F1 is technology enabled data, driving the advantage and driving to is a great Netflix series. Check it out. McLaren's featured heavily in there and got a great team. Zach brown Siegel. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. I'm sure for your host. Thank you for watching.

>>Edge computing is predict, projected to be a multi-trillion dollar business. You know, it's hard to really pinpoint the size of this market. Let alone fathom the potential of bringing software, compute, storage, AI, and automation to the edge and connecting all that to clouds and on-prem systems. But what, you know, what is the edge? Is it factories? Is it oil rigs, airplanes, windmills, shipping containers, buildings, homes, race cars. Well, yes and so much more. And what about the data for decades? We've talked about the data explosion. I mean, it's mind boggling, but guess what, we're gonna look back in 10 years and laugh. What we thought was a lot of data in 2020, perhaps the best way to think about edge is not as a place, but when is the most logical opportunity to process the data and maybe it's the first opportunity to do so where it can be decrypted and analyzed at very low latencies that that defines the edge. And so by locating compute as close as possible to the sources of data, to reduce latency and maximize your ability to get insights and return them to users quickly, maybe that's where the value lies. Hello everyone. And welcome to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and with me to noodle on these topics is Omar Assad, VP, and GM of primary storage and data management services at HPE. Hello, Omer. Welcome to the program. >>Hey Steve. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. >>Yeah. Great to see you again. So how do you see the edge in the broader market shaping up? >>Uh, David? I think that's a super important, important question. I think your ideas are quite aligned with how we think about it. Uh, I personally think, you know, as enterprises are accelerating their sort of digitization and asset collection and data collection, uh, they're typically, especially in a distributed enterprise, they're trying to get to their customers. They're trying to minimize the latency to their customers. So especially if you look across industries manufacturing, which is distributed factories all over the place, they are going through a lot of factory transformations where they're digitizing their factories. That means a lot more data is being now being generated within their factories. A lot of robot automation is going on that requires a lot of compute power to go out to those particular factories, which is going to generate their data out there. We've got insurance companies, banks that are creating and interviewing and gathering more customers out at the edge for that. >>They need a lot more distributed processing out at the edge. What this is requiring is what we've seen is across analysts. A common consensus is that more than 50% of an enterprise is data, especially if they operate globally around the world is going to be generated out at the edge. What does that mean? More data is new data is generated at the edge, but needs to be stored. It needs to be processed data. What is not required needs to be thrown away or classified as not important. And then it needs to be moved for Dr. Purposes either to a central data center or just to another site. So overall in order to give the best possible experience for manufacturing, retail, uh, you know, especially in distributed enterprises, people are generating more and more data centric assets out at the edge. And that's what we see in the industry. >>Yeah. We're definitely aligned on that. There's some great points. And so now, okay. You think about all this diversity, what's the right architecture for these deploying multi-site deployments, robo edge. How do you look at that? >>Oh, excellent question. So now it's sort of, you know, obviously you want every customer that we talk to wants SimpliVity, uh, in, in, and, and, and, and no pun intended because SimpliVity is reasoned with a simplistic edge centric architecture, right? So because let's, let's take a few examples. You've got large global retailers, uh, they have hundreds of global retail stores around the world that is generating data that is producing data. Then you've got insurance companies, then you've got banks. So when you look at a distributed enterprise, how do you deploy in a very simple and easy to deploy manner, easy to lifecycle, easy to mobilize and easy to lifecycle equipment out at the edge. What are some of the challenges that these customers deal with these customers? You don't want to send a lot of ID staff out there because that adds costs. You don't want to have islands of data and islands of storage and promote sites, because that adds a lot of States outside of the data center that needs to be protected. >>And then last but not the least, how do you push lifecycle based applications, new applications out at the edge in a very simple to deploy better. And how do you protect all this data at the edge? So the right architecture in my opinion, needs to be extremely simple to deploy. So storage, compute and networking, uh, out towards the edge in a hyperconverged environment. So that's, we agree upon that. It's a very simple to deploy model, but then comes, how do you deploy applications on top of that? How do you manage these applications on top of that? How do you back up these applications back towards the data center, all of this keeping in mind that it has to be as zero touch as possible. We at HBS believe that it needs to be extremely simple. Just give me two cables, a network cable, a power cable, tied it up, connected to the network, push it state from the data center and back up at state from the ed back into the data center. Extremely simple. >>It's gotta be simple because you've got so many challenges. You've got physics that you have to deal your latency to deal with. You got RPO and RTO. What happens if something goes wrong, you've gotta be able to recover quickly. So, so that's great. Thank you for that. Now you guys have hard news. W what is new from HPE in this space >>From a, from a, from a, from a deployment perspective, you know, HPE SimpliVity is just gaining like it's exploding, like crazy, especially as distributed enterprises adopt it as it's standardized edge architecture, right? It's an HCI box has got stories, computer networking, all in one. But now what we have done is not only you can deploy applications all from your standard V-Center interface, from a data center, what have you have now added is the ability to backup to the cloud, right? From the edge. You can also back up all the way back to your core data center. All of the backup policies are fully automated and implemented in the, in the distributed file system. That is the heart and soul of, of the SimpliVity installation. In addition to that, the customers now do not have to buy any third-party software into backup is fully integrated in the architecture and it's van efficient. >>In addition to that, now you can backup straight to the client. You can backup to a central, uh, high-end backup repository, which is in your data center. And last but not least, we have a lot of customers that are pushing the limit in their application transformation. So not only do we previously were, were one-on-one them leaving VMware deployments out at the edge sites. Now revolver also added both stateful and stateless container orchestration, as well as data protection capabilities for containerized applications out at the edge. So we have a lot, we have a lot of customers that are now deploying containers, rapid manufacturing containers to process data out at remote sites. And that allows us to not only protect those stateful applications, but back them up, back into the central data center. >>I saw in that chart, it was a light on no egress fees. That's a pain point for a lot of CEOs that I talked to. They grit their teeth at those entities. So, so you can't comment on that or >>Excellent, excellent question. I'm so glad you brought that up and sort of at that point, uh, uh, pick that up. So, uh, along with SimpliVity, you know, we have the whole green Lake as a service offering as well. Right? So what that means, Dave, is that we can literally provide our customers edge as a service. And when you compliment that with, with Aruba wired wireless infrastructure, that goes at the edge, the hyperconverged infrastructure, as part of SimpliVity, that goes at the edge, you know, one of the things that was missing with cloud backups is the every time you backup to the cloud, which is a great thing, by the way, anytime you restore from the cloud, there is that breastfeed, right? So as a result of that, as part of the GreenLake offering, we have cloud backup service natively now offered as part of HPE, which is included in your HPE SimpliVity edge as a service offering. So now not only can you backup into the cloud from your edge sites, but you can also restore back without any egress fees from HBS data protection service. Either you can restore it back onto your data center, you can restore it back towards the edge site and because the infrastructure is so easy to deploy centrally lifecycle manage, it's very mobile. So if you want to deploy and recover to a different site, you could also do that. >>Nice. Hey, uh, can you, Omar, can you double click a little bit on some of the use cases that customers are choosing SimpliVity for, particularly at the edge, and maybe talk about why they're choosing HPE? >>What are the major use cases that we see? Dave is obviously, uh, easy to deploy and easy to manage in a standardized form factor, right? A lot of these customers, like for example, we have large retailer across the us with hundreds of stores across us. Right now you cannot send service staff to each of these stores. These data centers are their data center is essentially just a closet for these guys, right? So now how do you have a standardized deployment? So standardized deployment from the data center, which you can literally push out and you can connect a network cable and a power cable, and you're up and running, and then automated backup elimination of backup and state and BR from the edge sites and into the data center. So that's one of the big use cases to rapidly deploy new stores, bring them up in a standardized configuration, both from a hardware and a software perspective, and the ability to backup and recover that instantly. >>That's one large use case. The second use case that we see actually refers to a comment that you made in your opener. Dave was where a lot of these customers are generating a lot of the data at the edge. This is robotics automation that is going to up in manufacturing sites. These is racing teams that are out at the edge of doing post-processing of their cars data. Uh, at the same time, there is disaster recovery use cases where you have, uh, you know, campsites and local, uh, you know, uh, agencies that go out there for humanity's benefit. And they move from one site to the other. It's a very, very mobile architecture that they need. So those, those are just a few cases where we were deployed. There was a lot of data collection, and there's a lot of mobility involved in these environments. So you need to be quick to set up quick, to up quick, to recover, and essentially you're up to your next, next move. >>You seem pretty pumped up about this, uh, this new innovation and why not. >>It is, it is, uh, you know, especially because, you know, it is, it has been taught through with edge in mind and edge has to be mobile. It has to be simple. And especially as, you know, we have lived through this pandemic, which, which I hope we see the tail end of it in at least 2021, or at least 2022. They, you know, one of the most common use cases that we saw, and this was an accidental discovery. A lot of the retail sites could not go out to service their stores because, you know, mobility is limited in these, in these strange times that we live in. So from a central center, you're able to deploy applications, you're able to recover applications. And, and a lot of our customers said, Hey, I don't have enough space in my data center to back up. Do you have another option? So then we rolled out this update release to SimpliVity verse from the edge site. You can now directly back up to our backup service, which is offered on a consumption basis to the customers, and they can recover that anywhere they want. >>Fantastic Omer, thanks so much for coming on the program today. >>It's a pleasure, Dave. Thank you. >>All right. Awesome to see you. Now, let's hear from red bull racing and HPE customer, that's actually using SimpliVity at the edge. Countdown really begins when the checkered flag drops on a Sunday. It's always about this race to manufacture >>The next designs to make it more adapt to the next circuit to run those. Of course, if we can't manufacture the next component in time, all that will be wasted. >>Okay. We're back with Matt kudu, who is the CIO of red bull racing? Matt, it's good to see you again. >>Great to say, >>Hey, we're going to dig into a real-world example of using data at the edge and in near real time to gain insights that really lead to competitive advantage. But, but first Matt, tell us a little bit about red bull racing and your role there. >>Sure. So I'm the CIO at red bull racing and that red bull race. And we're based in Milton Keynes in the UK. And the main job job for us is to design a race car, to manufacture the race car, and then to race it around the world. So as CIO, we need to develop the ITT group needs to develop the applications is the design, manufacturing racing. We also need to supply all the underlying infrastructure and also manage security. So it's really interesting environment. That's all about speed. So this season we have 23 races and we need to tear the car apart and rebuild it to a unique configuration for every individual race. And we're also designing and making components targeted for races. So 20 a movable deadlines, um, this big evolving prototype to manage with our car. Um, but we're also improving all of our tools and methods and software that we use to design and make and race the car. >>So we have a big can do attitude of the company around continuous improvement. And the expectations are that we continuously make the car faster. That we're, that we're winning races, that we improve our methods in the factory and our tools. And, um, so for, I take it's really unique and that we can be part of that journey and provide a better service. It's also a big challenge to provide that service and to give the business the agility, agility, and needs. So my job is, is really to make sure we have the right staff, the right partners, the right technical platforms. So we can live up to expectations >>That tear down and rebuild for 23 races. Is that because each track has its own unique signature that you have to tune to, or are there other factors involved there? >>Yeah, exactly. Every track has a different shape. Some have lots of strengths. Some have lots of curves and lots are in between. Um, the track surface is very different and the impact that has some tires, um, the temperature and the climate is very different. Some are hilly, some, a big curves that affect the dynamics of the power. So all that in order to win, you need to micromanage everything and optimize it for any given race track. >>Talk about some of the key drivers in your business and some of the key apps that give you a competitive advantage to help you win races. >>Yeah. So in our business, everything is all about speed. So the car obviously needs to be fast, but also all of our business operations needed to be fast. We need to be able to design a car and it's all done in the virtual world, but the, the virtual simulations and designs need to correlate to what happens in the real world. So all of that requires a lot of expertise to develop the simulation is the algorithms and have all the underlying infrastructure that runs it quickly and reliably. Um, in manufacturing, um, we have cost caps and financial controls by regulation. We need to be super efficient and control material and resources. So ERP and MES systems are running and helping us do that. And at the race track itself in speed, we have hundreds of decisions to make on a Friday and Saturday as we're fine tuning the final configuration of the car. And here again, we rely on simulations and analytics to help do that. And then during the race, we have split seconds, literally seconds to alter our race strategy if an event happens. So if there's an accident, um, and the safety car comes out, or the weather changes, we revise our tactics and we're running Monte Carlo for example. And he is an experienced engineers with simulations to make a data-driven decision and hopefully a better one and faster than our competitors, all of that needs it. Um, so work at a very high level. >>It's interesting. I mean, as a lay person, historically we know when I think about technology and car racing, of course, I think about the mechanical aspects of a self-propelled vehicle, the electronics and the light, but not necessarily the data, but the data's always been there. Hasn't it? I mean, maybe in the form of like tribal knowledge, if somebody who knows the track and where the Hills are and experience and gut feel, but today you're digitizing it and you're, you're processing it and close to real time. >>It's amazing. I think exactly right. Yeah. The car's instrumented with sensors, we post-process at Virgin, um, video, um, image analysis, and we're looking at our car, our competitor's car. So there's a huge amount of, um, very complicated models that we're using to optimize our performance and to continuously improve our car. Yeah. The data and the applications that can leverage it are really key. Um, and that's a critical success factor for us. >>So let's talk about your data center at the track, if you will. I mean, if I can call it that paint a picture for us, what does that look like? >>So we have to send, um, a lot of equipment to the track at the edge. Um, and even though we have really a great wide area network linked back to the factory and there's cloud resources, a lot of the trucks are very old. You don't have hardened infrastructure, don't have ducks that protect cabling, for example, and you could lose connectivity to remote locations. So the applications we need to operate the car and to make really critical decisions, all that needs to be at the edge where the car operates. So historically we had three racks of equipment, like a safe infrastructure, um, and it was really hard to manage, um, to make changes. It was too flexible. Um, there were multiple panes of glass, um, and, um, and it was too slow. It didn't run her applications quickly. Um, it was also too heavy and took up too much space when you're cramped into a garage with lots of environmental constraints. >>So we, um, we'd, we'd introduced hyperconvergence into the factory and seen a lot of great benefits. And when we came time to refresh our infrastructure at the track, we stepped back and said, there's a lot smarter way of operating. We can get rid of all the slow and flexible, expensive legacy and introduce hyperconvergence. And we saw really excellent benefits for doing that. Um, we saw a three X speed up for a lot of our applications. So I'm here where we're post-processing data, and we have to make decisions about race strategy. Time is of the essence in a three X reduction in processing time really matters. Um, we also, um, were able to go from three racks of equipment down to two racks of equipment and the storage efficiency of the HPE SimpliVity platform with 20 to one ratios allowed us to eliminate a rack. And that actually saved a hundred thousand dollars a year in freight costs by shipping less equipment, um, things like backup, um, mistakes happen. >>Sometimes the user makes a mistake. So for example, a race engineer could load the wrong data map into one of our simulations. And we could restore that VDI through SimpliVity backup at 90 seconds. And this makes sure it enables engineers to focus on the car to make better decisions without having downtime. And we sent them to, I take guys to every race they're managing 60 users, a really diverse environment, juggling a lot of balls and having a simple management platform like HPE SimpliVity gives us, allows them to be very effective and to work quickly. So all of those benefits were a huge step forward relative to the legacy infrastructure that we used to run at the edge. >>Yeah. So you had the nice Petri dish and the factory. So it sounds like your, your goals, obviously your number one KPI is speed to help shave seconds time, but also costs just the simplicity of setting up the infrastructure. >>Yeah. It's speed. Speed, speed. So we want applications absolutely fly, you know, get to actionable results quicker, um, get answers from our simulations quicker. The other area that speed's really critical is, um, our applications are also evolving prototypes, and we're always, the models are getting bigger. The simulations are getting bigger and they need more and more resource and being able to spin up resource and provision things without being a bottleneck is a big challenge in SimpliVity. It gives us the means of doing that. >>So did you consider any other options or was it because you had the factory knowledge? It was HCI was, you know, very clearly the option. What did you look at? >>Yeah, so, um, we have over five years of experience in the factory and we eliminated all of our legacy, um, um, infrastructure five years ago. And the benefits I've described, um, at the track, we saw that in the factory, um, at the track we have a three-year operational life cycle for our equipment. When into 2017 was the last year we had legacy as we were building for 2018. It was obvious that hyper-converged was the right technology to introduce. And we'd had years of experience in the factory already. And the benefits that we see with hyper-converged actually mattered even more at the edge because our operations are so much more pressurized time has even more of the essence. And so speeding everything up at the really pointy end of our business was really critical. It was an obvious choice. >>Why, why SimpliVity? What why'd you choose HPE SimpliVity? >>Yeah. So when we first heard about hyperconverged way back in the, in the factory, um, we had, um, a legacy infrastructure, overly complicated, too slow, too inflexible, too expensive. And we stepped back and said, there has to be a smarter way of operating. We went out and challenged our technology partners. We learned about hyperconvergence within enough, the hype, um, was real or not. So we underwent some PLCs and benchmarking and, and the, the PLCs were really impressive. And, and all these, you know, speed and agility benefits, we saw an HP for our use cases was the clear winner in the benchmarks. So based on that, we made an initial investment in the factory. Uh, we moved about 150 VMs in the 150 VDI into it. Um, and then as, as we've seen all the benefits we've successfully invested, and we now have, um, an estate to the factory of about 800 VMs and about 400 VDI. So it's been a great platform and it's allowed us to really push boundaries and, and give the business, um, the service that expects. >>So w was that with the time in which you were able to go from data to insight to recommendation or, or edict, uh, was that compressed, you kind of indicated that, but >>So we, we all telemetry from the car and we post-process it, and that reprocessing time really it's very time consuming. And, um, you know, we went from nine, eight minutes for some of the simulations down to just two minutes. So we saw big, big reductions in time and all, ultimately that meant an engineer could understand what the car was during a practice session, recommend a tweak to the configuration or setup of it, and just get more actionable insight quicker. And it ultimately helps get a better car quicker. >>Such a great example. How are you guys feeling about the season, Matt? What's the team's sentiment? >>Yeah, I think we're optimistic. Um, we w we, um, uh, we have a new driver >>Lineup. Uh, we have, um, max for stopping his carries on with the team and Sergio joins the team. So we're really excited about this year and, uh, we want to go and win races. Great, Matt, good luck this season and going forward and thanks so much for coming back in the cube. Really appreciate it. And it's my pleasure. Great talking to you again. Okay. Now we're going to bring back Omer for quick summary. So keep it real >>Without having solutions from HB, we can't drive those five senses, CFD aerodynamics that would undermine the simulations being software defined. We can bring new apps into play. If we can bring new them's storage, networking, all of that can be highly advises is a hugely beneficial partnership for us. We're able to be at the cutting edge of technology in a highly stressed environment. That is no bigger challenge than the formula. >>Okay. We're back with Omar. Hey, what did you think about that interview with Matt? >>Great. Uh, I have to tell you I'm a big formula one fan, and they are one of my favorite customers. Uh, so, you know, obviously, uh, one of the biggest use cases as you saw for red bull racing is Trackside deployments. There are now 22 races in a season. These guys are jumping from one city to the next, they've got to pack up, move to the next city, set up, set up the infrastructure very, very quickly and average formula. One car is running the thousand plus sensors on that is generating a ton of data on track side that needs to be collected very quickly. It needs to be processed very quickly, and then sometimes believe it or not, snapshots of this data needs to be sent to the red bull back factory back at the data center. What does this all need? It needs reliability. >>It needs compute power in a very short form factor. And it needs agility quick to set up quick, to go quick, to recover. And then in post processing, they need to have CPU density so they can pack more VMs out at the edge to be able to do that processing now. And we accomplished that for, for the red bull racing guys in basically two are you have two SimpliVity nodes that are running track side and moving with them from one, one race to the next race, to the next race. And every time those SimpliVity nodes connect up to the data center collector to a satellite, they're backing up back to their data center. They're sending snapshots of data back to the data center, essentially making their job a whole lot easier, where they can focus on racing and not on troubleshooting virtual machines, >>Red bull racing and HPE SimpliVity. Great example. It's agile, it's it's cost efficient, and it shows a real impact. Thank you very much. I really appreciate those summary comments. Thank you, Dave. Really appreciate it. All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Volante. >>You.

(upbeat music) >> Edge computing is projected to be a multi-trillion dollar business. It's hard to really pinpoint the size of this market let alone fathom the potential of bringing software, compute, storage, AI and automation to the edge and connecting all that to clouds and on-prem systems. But what is the edge? Is it factories? Is it oil rigs, airplanes, windmills, shipping containers, buildings, homes, race cars. Well, yes and so much more. And what about the data? For decades we've talked about the data explosion. I mean, it's a mind-boggling but guess what we're going to look back in 10 years and laugh what we thought was a lot of data in 2020. Perhaps the best way to think about Edge is not as a place but when is the most logical opportunity to process the data and maybe it's the first opportunity to do so where it can be decrypted and analyzed at very low latencies. That defines the edge. And so by locating compute as close as possible to the sources of data to reduce latency and maximize your ability to get insights and return them to users quickly, maybe that's where the value lies. Hello everyone and welcome to this CUBE conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and with me to noodle on these topics is Omer Asad, VP and GM of Primary Storage and Data Management Services at HPE. Hello Omer, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. >> Yeah. Great to see you again. So how do you see the edge in the broader market shaping up? >> Dave, I think that's a super important question. I think your ideas are quite aligned with how we think about it. I personally think enterprises are accelerating their sort of digitization and asset collection and data collection, they're typically especially in a distributed enterprise, they're trying to get to their customers. They're trying to minimize the latency to their customers. So especially if you look across industries manufacturing which has distributed factories all over the place they are going through a lot of factory transformations where they're digitizing their factories. That means a lot more data is now being generated within their factories. A lot of robot automation is going on, that requires a lot of compute power to go out to those particular factories which is going to generate their data out there. We've got insurance companies, banks, that are creating and interviewing and gathering more customers out at the edge for that. They need a lot more distributed processing out at the edge. What this is requiring is what we've seen is across analysts. A common consensus is this that more than 50% of an enterprises data especially if they operate globally around the world is going to be generated out at the edge. What does that mean? New data is generated at the edge what needs to be stored. It needs to be processed data. Data which is not required needs to be thrown away or classified as not important. And then it needs to be moved for DR purposes either to a central data center or just to another site. So overall in order to give the best possible experience for manufacturing, retail, especially in distributed enterprises, people are generating more and more data centric assets out at the edge. And that's what we see in the industry. >> Yeah. We're definitely aligned on that. There's some great points and so now, okay. You think about all this diversity what's the right architecture for these multi-site deployments, ROBO, edge? How do you look at that? >> Oh, excellent question, Dave. Every customer that we talked to wants SimpliVity and no pun intended because SimpliVity is reasoned with a simplistic edge centric architecture, right? Let's take a few examples. You've got large global retailers, they have hundreds of global retail stores around the world that is generating data that is producing data. Then you've got insurance companies, then you've got banks. So when you look at a distributed enterprise how do you deploy in a very simple and easy to deploy manner, easy to lifecycle, easy to mobilize and easy to lifecycle equipment out at the edge. What are some of the challenges that these customers deal with? These customers, you don't want to send a lot of IT staff out there because that adds cost. You don't want to have islands of data and islands of storage and promote sites because that adds a lot of states outside of the data center that needs to be protected. And then last but not the least how do you push lifecycle based applications, new applications out at the edge in a very simple to deploy manner. And how do you protect all this data at the edge? So the right architecture in my opinion needs to be extremely simple to deploy so storage compute and networking out towards the edge in a hyper converged environment. So that's we agree upon that. It's a very simple to deploy model but then comes how do you deploy applications on top of that? How do you manage these applications on top of that? How do you back up these applications back towards the data center, all of this keeping in mind that it has to be as zero touch as possible. We at HPE believe that it needs to be extremely simple, just give me two cables, a network cable, a power cable, fire it up, connect it to the network, push it state from the data center and back up it state from the edge back into the data center, extremely simple. >> It's got to be simple 'cause you've got so many challenges. You've got physics that you have to deal, you have latency to deal with. You got RPO and RTO. What happens if something goes wrong you've got to be able to recover quickly. So that's great. Thank you for that. Now you guys have heard news. What is new from HPE in this space? >> Excellent question, great. So from a deployment perspective, HPE SimpliVity is just gaining like it's exploding like crazy especially as distributed enterprises adopted as it's standardized edge architecture, right? It's an HCI box has got storage computer networking all in one. But now what we have done is not only you can deploy applications all from your standard V-Center interface from a data center, what have you have now added is the ability to backup to the cloud right from the edge. You can also back up all the way back to your core data center. All of the backup policies are fully automated and implemented in the distributed file system that is the heart and soul of the SimpliVity installation. In addition to that, the customers now do not have to buy any third-party software. Backup is fully integrated in the architecture and it's then efficient. In addition to that now you can backup straight to the client. You can back up to a central high-end backup repository which is in your data center. And last but not least, we have a lot of customers that are pushing the limit in their application transformation. So not only, we previously were one-on-one leaving VMware deployments out at the edge site now evolved also added both stateful and stateless container orchestration as well as data protection capabilities for containerized applications out at the edge. So we have a lot of customers that are now deploying containers, rapid manufacture containers to process data out at remote sites. And that allows us to not only protect those stateful applications but back them up back into the central data center. >> I saw in that chart, it was a line no egress fees. That's a pain point for a lot of CIOs that I talked to. They grit their teeth at those cities. So you can't comment on that or? >> Excellent question. I'm so glad you brought that up and sort of at the point that pick that up. So along with SimpliVity, we have the whole Green Lake as a service offering as well, right? So what that means Dave is, that we can literally provide our customers edge as a service. And when you compliment that with with Aruba Wired Wireless Infrastructure that goes at the edge, the hyperconverged infrastructure as part of SimpliVity that goes at the edge. One of the things that was missing with cloud backups is that every time you back up to the cloud, which is a great thing by the way, anytime you restore from the cloud there is that egress fee, right? So as a result of that, as part of the GreenLake offering we have cloud backup service natively now offered as part of HPE, which is included in your HPE SimpliVity edge as a service offering. So now not only can you backup into the cloud from your edge sites, but you can also restore back without any egress fees from HPE's data protection service. Either you can restore it back onto your data center, you can restore it back towards the edge site and because the infrastructure is so easy to deploy centrally lifecycle manage, it's very mobile. So if you want to deploy and recover to a different site, you could also do that. >> Nice. Hey, can you, Omer, can you double click a little bit on some of the use cases that customers are choosing SimpliVity for particularly at the edge and maybe talk about why they're choosing HPE? >> Excellent question. So one of the major use cases that we see Dave is obviously easy to deploy and easy to manage in a standardized form factor, right? A lot of these customers, like for example, we have large retailer across the US with hundreds of stores across US, right? Now you cannot send service staff to each of these stores. Their data center is essentially just a closet for these guys, right? So now how do you have a standardized deployment? So standardized deployment from the data center which you can literally push out and you can connect a network cable and a power cable and you're up and running and then automated backup, elimination of backup and state and DR from the edge sites and into the data center. So that's one of the big use cases to rapidly deploy new stores, bring them up in a standardized configuration both from a hardware and a software perspective and the ability to backup and recover that instantly. That's one large use case. The second use case that we see actually refers to a comment that you made in your opener, Dave, was when a lot of these customers are generating a lot of the data at the edge. This is robotics automation that is going up in manufacturing sites. These is racing teams that are out at the edge of doing post-processing of their cars data. At the same time there is disaster recovery use cases where you have campsites and local agencies that go out there for humanity's benefit. And they move from one site to the other. It's a very, very mobile architecture that they need. So those are just a few cases where we were deployed. There was a lot of data collection and there was a lot of mobility involved in these environments, so you need to be quick to set up, quick to backup, quick to recover. And essentially you're up to your next move. >> You seem pretty pumped up about this new innovation and why not. >> It is, especially because it has been taught through with edge in mind and edge has to be mobile. It has to be simple. And especially as we have lived through this pandemic which I hope we see the tail end of it in at least 2021 or at least 2022. One of the most common use cases that we saw and this was an accidental discovery. A lot of the retail sites could not go out to service their stores because mobility is limited in these strange times that we live in. So from a central recenter you're able to deploy applications. You're able to recover applications. And a lot of our customers said, hey I don't have enough space in my data center to back up. Do you have another option? So then we rolled out this update release to SimpliVity verse from the edge site. You can now directly back up to our backup service which is offered on a consumption basis to the customers and they can recover that anywhere they want. >> Fantastic Omer, thanks so much for coming on the program today. >> It's a pleasure, Dave. Thank you. >> All right. Awesome to see you, now, let's hear from Red Bull Racing an HPE customer that's actually using SimpliVity at the edge. (engine revving) >> Narrator: Formula one is a constant race against time Chasing in tens of seconds. (upbeat music) >> Okay. We're back with Matt Cadieux who is the CIO Red Bull Racing. Matt, it's good to see you again. >> Great to see you Dave. >> Hey, we're going to dig in to a real world example of using data at the edge in near real time to gain insights that really lead to competitive advantage. But first Matt tell us a little bit about Red Bull Racing and your role there. >> Sure. So I'm the CIO at Red Bull Racing and at Red Bull Racing we're based in Milton Keynes in the UK. And the main job for us is to design a race car, to manufacture the race car and then to race it around the world. So as CIO, we need to develop, the IT group needs to develop the applications use the design, manufacturing racing. We also need to supply all the underlying infrastructure and also manage security. So it's really interesting environment that's all about speed. So this season we have 23 races and we need to tear the car apart and rebuild it to a unique configuration for every individual race. And we're also designing and making components targeted for races. So 23 and movable deadlines this big evolving prototype to manage with our car but we're also improving all of our tools and methods and software that we use to design make and race the car. So we have a big can-do attitude of the company around continuous improvement. And the expectations are that we continue to say, make the car faster. That we're winning races, that we improve our methods in the factory and our tools. And so for IT it's really unique and that we can be part of that journey and provide a better service. It's also a big challenge to provide that service and to give the business the agility of needs. So my job is really to make sure we have the right staff, the right partners, the right technical platforms. So we can live up to expectations. >> And Matt that tear down and rebuild for 23 races, is that because each track has its own unique signature that you have to tune to or are there other factors involved? >> Yeah, exactly. Every track has a different shape. Some have lots of straight, some have lots of curves and lots are in between. The track surface is very different and the impact that has on tires, the temperature and the climate is very different. Some are hilly, some have big curbs that affect the dynamics of the car. So all that in order to win you need to micromanage everything and optimize it for any given race track. >> COVID has of course been brutal for sports. What's the status of your season? >> So this season we knew that COVID was here and we're doing 23 races knowing we have COVID to manage. And as a premium sporting team with Pharma Bubbles we've put health and safety and social distancing into our environment. And we're able to able to operate by doing things in a safe manner. We have some special exceptions in the UK. So for example, when people returned from overseas that they did not have to quarantine for two weeks, but they get tested multiple times a week. And we know they're safe. So we're racing, we're dealing with all the hassle that COVID gives us. And we are really hoping for a return to normality sooner instead of later where we can get fans back at the track and really go racing and have the spectacle where everyone enjoys it. >> Yeah. That's awesome. So important for the fans but also all the employees around that ecosystem. Talk about some of the key drivers in your business and some of the key apps that give you competitive advantage to help you win races. >> Yeah. So in our business, everything is all about speed. So the car obviously needs to be fast but also all of our business operations need to be fast. We need to be able to design a car and it's all done in the virtual world, but the virtual simulations and designs needed to correlate to what happens in the real world. So all of that requires a lot of expertise to develop the simulations, the algorithms and have all the underlying infrastructure that runs it quickly and reliably. In manufacturing we have cost caps and financial controls by regulation. We need to be super efficient and control material and resources. So ERP and MES systems are running and helping us do that. And at the race track itself. And in speed, we have hundreds of decisions to make on a Friday and Saturday as we're fine tuning the final configuration of the car. And here again, we rely on simulations and analytics to help do that. And then during the race we have split seconds literally seconds to alter our race strategy if an event happens. So if there's an accident and the safety car comes out or the weather changes, we revise our tactics and we're running Monte-Carlo for example. And use an experienced engineers with simulations to make a data-driven decision and hopefully a better one and faster than our competitors. All of that needs IT to work at a very high level. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, as a lay person, historically when I think about technology in car racing, of course I think about the mechanical aspects of a self-propelled vehicle, the electronics and the light but not necessarily the data but the data's always been there. Hasn't it? I mean, maybe in the form of like tribal knowledge if you are somebody who knows the track and where the hills are and experience and gut feel but today you're digitizing it and you're processing it and close to real time. Its amazing. >> I think exactly right. Yeah. The car's instrumented with sensors, we post process and we are doing video image analysis and we're looking at our car, competitor's car. So there's a huge amount of very complicated models that we're using to optimize our performance and to continuously improve our car. Yeah. The data and the applications that leverage it are really key and that's a critical success factor for us. >> So let's talk about your data center at the track, if you will. I mean, if I can call it that. Paint a picture for us what does that look like? >> So we have to send a lot of equipment to the track at the edge. And even though we have really a great wide area network link back to the factory and there's cloud resources a lot of the tracks are very old. You don't have hardened infrastructure, don't have ducks that protect cabling, for example and you can lose connectivity to remote locations. So the applications we need to operate the car and to make really critical decisions all that needs to be at the edge where the car operates. So historically we had three racks of equipment like I said infrastructure and it was really hard to manage, to make changes, it was too flexible. There were multiple panes of glass and it was too slow. It didn't run our applications quickly. It was also too heavy and took up too much space when you're cramped into a garage with lots of environmental constraints. So we'd introduced hyper convergence into the factory and seen a lot of great benefits. And when we came time to refresh our infrastructure at the track, we stepped back and said, there's a lot smarter way of operating. We can get rid of all the slow and flexible expensive legacy and introduce hyper convergence. And we saw really excellent benefits for doing that. We saw up three X speed up for a lot of our applications. So I'm here where we're post-processing data. And we have to make decisions about race strategy. Time is of the essence. The three X reduction in processing time really matters. We also were able to go from three racks of equipment down to two racks of equipment and the storage efficiency of the HPE SimpliVity platform with 20 to one ratios allowed us to eliminate a rack. And that actually saved a $100,000 a year in freight costs by shipping less equipment. Things like backup mistakes happen. Sometimes the user makes a mistake. So for example a race engineer could load the wrong data map into one of our simulations. And we could restore that DDI through SimpliVity backup at 90 seconds. And this enables engineers to focus on the car to make better decisions without having downtime. And we sent two IT guys to every race, they're managing 60 users a really diverse environment, juggling a lot of balls and having a simple management platform like HPE SimpliVity gives us, allows them to be very effective and to work quickly. So all of those benefits were a huge step forward relative to the legacy infrastructure that we used to run at the edge. >> Yeah. So you had the nice Petri dish in the factory so it sounds like your goals are obviously number one KPIs speed to help shave seconds, awesome time, but also cost just the simplicity of setting up the infrastructure is-- >> That's exactly right. It's speed, speed, speed. So we want applications absolutely fly, get to actionable results quicker, get answers from our simulations quicker. The other area that speed's really critical is our applications are also evolving prototypes and we're always, the models are getting bigger. The simulations are getting bigger and they need more and more resource and being able to spin up resource and provision things without being a bottleneck is a big challenge in SimpliVity. It gives us the means of doing that. >> So did you consider any other options or was it because you had the factory knowledge? It was HCI was very clearly the option. What did you look at? >> Yeah, so we have over five years of experience in the factory and we eliminated all of our legacy infrastructure five years ago. And the benefits I've described at the track we saw that in the factory. At the track we have a three-year operational life cycle for our equipment. When in 2017 was the last year we had legacy as we were building for 2018, it was obvious that hyper-converged was the right technology to introduce. And we'd had years of experience in the factory already. And the benefits that we see with hyper-converged actually mattered even more at the edge because our operations are so much more pressurized. Time is even more of the essence. And so speeding everything up at the really pointy end of our business was really critical. It was an obvious choice. >> Why SimpliVity, why'd you choose HPE SimpliVity? >> Yeah. So when we first heard about hyper-converged way back in the factory, we had a legacy infrastructure overly complicated, too slow, too inflexible, too expensive. And we stepped back and said there has to be a smarter way of operating. We went out and challenged our technology partners, we learned about hyperconvergence, would enough the hype was real or not. So we underwent some PLCs and benchmarking and the PLCs were really impressive. And all these speed and agility benefits we saw and HPE for our use cases was the clear winner in the benchmarks. So based on that we made an initial investment in the factory. We moved about 150 VMs and 150 VDIs into it. And then as we've seen all the benefits we've successfully invested and we now have an estate in the factory of about 800 VMs and about 400 VDIs. So it's been a great platform and it's allowed us to really push boundaries and give the business the service it expects. >> Awesome fun stories, just coming back to the metrics for a minute. So you're running Monte Carlo simulations in real time and sort of near real-time. And so essentially that's if I understand it, that's what ifs and it's the probability of the outcome. And then somebody got to make, then the human's got to say, okay, do this, right? Was the time in which you were able to go from data to insight to recommendation or edict was that compressed and you kind of indicated that. >> Yeah, that was accelerated. And so in that use case, what we're trying to do is predict the future and you're saying, well and before any event happens, you're doing what ifs and if it were to happen, what would you probabilistic do? So that simulation, we've been running for awhile but it gets better and better as we get more knowledge. And so that we were able to accelerate that with SimpliVity but there's other use cases too. So we also have telemetry from the car and we post-process it. And that reprocessing time really, is it's very time consuming. And we went from nine, eight minutes for some of the simulations down to just two minutes. So we saw big, big reductions in time. And ultimately that meant an engineer could understand what the car was doing in a practice session, recommend a tweak to the configuration or setup of it and just get more actionable insight quicker. And it ultimately helps get a better car quicker. >> Such a great example. How are you guys feeling about the season, Matt? What's the team's sentiment? >> I think we're optimistic. Thinking our simulations that we have a great car we have a new driver lineup. We have the Max Verstapenn who carries on with the team and Sergio Cross joins the team. So we're really excited about this year and we want to go and win races. And I think with COVID people are just itching also to get back to a little degree of normality and going racing again even though there's no fans, it gets us into a degree of normality. >> That's great, Matt, good luck this season and going forward and thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> It's my pleasure. Great talking to you again. >> Okay. Now we're going to bring back Omer for quick summary. So keep it right there. >> Narrator: That's where the data comes face to face with the real world. >> Narrator: Working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a hugely beneficial partnership for us. We're able to be at the cutting edge of technology in a highly technical, highly stressed environment. There is no bigger challenge than Formula One. (upbeat music) >> Being in the car and driving in on the limit that is the best thing out there. >> Narrator: It's that innovation and creativity to ultimately achieves winning of this. >> Okay. We're back with Omer. Hey, what did you think about that interview with Matt? >> Great. I have to tell you, I'm a big formula One fan and they are one of my favorite customers. So obviously one of the biggest use cases as you saw for Red Bull Racing is track side deployments. There are now 22 races in a season. These guys are jumping from one city to the next they got to pack up, move to the next city, set up the infrastructure very very quickly. An average Formula One car is running the thousand plus sensors on, that is generating a ton of data on track side that needs to be collected very quickly. It needs to be processed very quickly and then sometimes believe it or not snapshots of this data needs to be sent to the Red Bull back factory back at the data center. What does this all need? It needs reliability. It needs compute power in a very short form factor. And it needs agility quick to set up, quick to go, quick to recover. And then in post processing they need to have CPU density so they can pack more VMs out at the edge to be able to do that processing. And we accomplished that for the Red Bull Racing guys in basically two of you have two SimpliVity nodes that are running track side and moving with them from one race to the next race to the next race. And every time those SimpliVity nodes connect up to the data center, collect up to a satellite they're backing up back to their data center. They're sending snapshots of data back to the data center essentially making their job a whole lot easier where they can focus on racing and not on troubleshooting virtual machines. >> Red bull Racing and HPE SimpliVity. Great example. It's agile, it's it's cost efficient and it shows a real impact. Thank you very much Omer. I really appreciate those summary comments. >> Thank you, Dave. Really appreciate it. >> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(mellow music) >> Okay, we're back with Matt Cadieux who is the CIO Red Bull Racing. Matt, it's good to see you again. >> Yeah, great to see you, Dave. >> Hey, we're going to dig into a real world example of using data at the edge and in near real-time to gain insights that really lead to competitive advantage. But first Matt, tell us a little bit about Red Bull Racing and your role there. >> Sure, so I'm the CIO at Red Bull Racing. And at Red Bull Racing we're based in Milton Keynes in the UK. And the main job for us is to design a race car, to manufacture the race car, and then to race it around the world. So as CIO, we need to develop, the IT team needs to develop the applications used for the design, manufacturing, and racing. We also need to supply all the underlying infrastructure, and also manage security. So it's a really interesting environment that's all about speed. So this season we have 23 races, and we need to tear the car apart, and rebuild it to a unique configuration for every individual race. And we're also designing and making components targeted for races. So 23 immovable deadlines, this big evolving prototype to manage with our car. But we're also improving all of our tools and methods and software that we use to design and make and race the car. So we have a big can-do attitude in the company, around continuous improvement. And the expectations are that we continue to make the car faster, that we're winning races, that we improve our methods in the factory and our tools. And so for IT it's really unique and that we can be part of that journey and provide a better service. It's also a big challenge to provide that service and to give the business the agility it needs. So my job is really to make sure we have the right staff, the right partners, the right technical platforms, so we can live up to expectations. >> And Matt that tear down and rebuild for 23 races. Is that because each track has its own unique signature that you have to tune to or are there other factors involved there? >> Yeah, exactly. Every track has a different shape. Some have lots of straight, some have lots of curves and lots are in between. The track's surface is very different and the impact that has on tires, the temperature and the climate is very different. Some are hilly, some are big curves that affect the dynamics of the car. So all that in order to win, you need to micromanage everything and optimize it for any given race track. >> And, you know, COVID has, of course, been brutal for sports. What's the status of your season? >> So this season we knew that COVID was here and we're doing 23 races knowing we have COVID to manage. And as a premium sporting team we've formed bubbles, we've put health and safety and social distancing into our environment. And we're able to operate by doing things in a safe manner. We have some special exhibitions in the UK. So for example, when people return from overseas that they do not have to quarantine for two weeks but they get tested multiple times a week and we know they're safe. So we're racing, we're dealing with all the hassle that COVID gives us. And we are really hoping for a return to normality sooner instead of later where we can get fans back at the track and really go racing and have the spectacle where everyone enjoys it. >> Yeah, that's awesome. So important for the fans but also all the employees around that ecosystem. Talk about some of the key drivers in your business and some of the key apps that give you competitive advantage to help you win races. >> Yeah, so in our business everything is all about speed. So the car obviously needs to be fast but also all of our business operations need to be fast. We need to be able to design our car and it's all done in the virtual world but the virtual simulations and designs need to correlate to what happens in the real world. So all of that requires a lot of expertise to develop the simulations, the algorithms, and have all the underlying infrastructure that runs it quickly and reliably. In manufacturing, we have cost caps and financial controls by regulation. We need to be super efficient and control material and resources. So ERP and MES systems are running, helping us do that. And at the race track itself in speed, we have hundreds of decisions to make on a Friday and Saturday as we're fine tuning the final configuration of the car. And here again, we rely on simulations and analytics to help do that. And then during the race, we have split seconds, literally seconds to alter our race strategy if an event happens. So if there's an accident and the safety car comes out or the weather changes, we revise our tactics. And we're running Monte Carlo for example. And using experienced engineers with simulations to make a data-driven decision and hopefully a better one and faster than our competitors. All of that needs IT to work at a very high level. >> You know it's interesting, I mean, as a lay person, historically when I think about technology and car racing, of course, I think about the mechanical aspects of a self-propelled vehicle, the electronics and the like, but not necessarily the data. But the data's always been there, hasn't it? I mean, maybe in the form of like tribal knowledge, if it's somebody who knows the track and where the hills are and experience and gut feel. But today you're digitizing it and you're processing it in close to real-time. It's amazing. >> Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, the car is instrumented with sensors, we post-process, we're doing video, image analysis and we're looking at our car, our competitor's car. So there's a huge amount of very complicated models that we're using to optimize our performance and to continuously improve our car. Yeah, the data and the applications that leverage it are really key. And that's a critical success factor for us. >> So let's talk about your data center at the track, if you will, I mean, if I can call it that. Paint a picture for us. >> Sure. What does that look like? >> So we have to send a lot of equipment to the track, at the edge. And even though we have really a great lateral network link back to the factory and there's cloud resources, a lot of the tracks are very old. You don't have hardened infrastructure, you don't have docks that protect cabling, for example, and you can lose connectivity to remote locations. So the applications we need to operate the car and to make really critical decisions, all that needs to be at the edge where the car operates. So historically we had three racks of equipment, legacy infrastructure and it was really hard to manage, to make changes, it was too inflexible. There were multiple panes of glass, and it was too slow. It didn't run our applications quickly. It was also too heavy and took up too much space when you're cramped into a garage with lots of environmental constraints. So we'd introduced hyper-convergence into the factory and seen a lot of great benefits. And when we came time to refresh our infrastructure at the track, we stepped back and said there's a lot smarter way of operating. We can get rid of all this slow and inflexible expensive legacy and introduce hyper-convergence. And we saw really excellent benefits for doing that. We saw a three X speed up for a lot of our applications. So here where we're post-processing data, and we have to make decisions about race strategy, time is of the essence and a three X reduction in processing time really matters. We also were able to go from three racks of equipment down to two racks of equipment and the storage efficiency of the HPE SimpliVity platform with 20 to one ratios allowed us to eliminate a rack. And that actually saved a $100,000 a year in freight costs by shipping less equipment. Things like backup, mistakes happen. Sometimes a user makes a mistake. So for example a race engineer could load the wrong data map into one of our simulations. And we could restore that DDI through SimpliVity backup in 90 seconds. And this makes sure, enables engineers to focus on the car, to make better decisions without having downtime. And we send two IT guys to every race. They're managing 60 users, a really diverse environment, juggling a lot of balls and having a simple management platform like HP SimpliVity gives us, allows them to be very effective and to work quickly. So all of those benefits were a huge step forward relative to the legacy infrastructure that we used to run at the edge. >> Yes, so you had the nice Petri dish in the factory, so it sounds like your goals obviously, number one KPI is speed to help shave seconds off the time, but also cost. >> That's right. Just the simplicity of setting up the infrastructure is key. >> Yeah, that's exactly right. >> It's speed, speed, speed. So we want applications that absolutely fly, you know gets actionable results quicker, get answers from our simulations quicker. The other area that speed's really critical is our applications are also evolving prototypes and we're always, the models are getting bigger, the simulations are getting bigger, and they need more and more resource. And being able to spin up resource and provision things without being a bottleneck is a big challenge. And SimpliVity gives us the means of doing that. >> So did you consider any other options or was it because you had the factory knowledge, HCI was, you know, very clearly the option? What did you look at? >> Yeah, so we have over five years of experience in the factory and we eliminated all of our legacy infrastructure five years ago. And the benefits I've described at the track we saw that in the factory. At the track, we have a three-year operational life cycle for our equipment. 2017 was the last year we had legacy. As we were building for 2018, it was obvious that hyper-converged was the right technology to introduce. And we'd had years of experience in the factory already. And the benefits that we see with hyper-converged actually mattered even more at the edge because our operations are so much more pressurized. Time is even more of the essence. And so speeding everything up at the really pointy end of our business was really critical. It was an obvious choice. >> So why SimpliVity? Why do you choose HPE SimpliVity? >> Yeah, so when we first heard about hyper-converged, way back in the factory. We had a legacy infrastructure, overly complicated, too slow, too inflexible, too expensive. And we stepped back and said there has to be a smarter way of operating. We went out and challenged our technology partners. We learned about hyper-convergence. We didn't know if the hype was real or not. So we underwent some PLCs and benchmarking and the PLCs were really impressive. And all these, you know, speed and agility benefits we saw and HPE for our use cases was the clear winner in the benchmarks. So based on that we made an initial investment in the factory. We moved about 150 VMs and 150 VDIs into it. And then as we've seen all the benefits we've successfully invested, and we now have an estate in the factory of about 800 VMs and about 400 VDIs. So it's been a great platform and it's allowed us to really push boundaries and give the business the service it expects. >> Well that's a fun story. So just coming back to the metrics for a minute. So you're running Monte Carlo simulations in real-time and sort of near real-time. >> Yeah. And so essentially that's, if I understand it, that's what-ifs and it's the probability of the outcome. And then somebody's got to make, >> Exactly. then a human's got to say, okay, do this, right. And so was that, >> Yeah. with the time in which you were able to go from data to insight to recommendation or edict was that compressed? You kind of indicated that, but. >> Yeah, that was accelerated. And so in that use case, what we're trying to do is predict the future and you're saying well, and before any event happens, you're doing what-ifs. Then if it were to happen, what would you probabilistically do? So, you know, so that simulation we've been running for a while but it gets better and better as we get more knowledge. And so that we were able to accelerate that with SimpliVity. But there's other use cases too. So we offload telemetry from the car and we post-process it. And that reprocessing time really is very time consuming. And, you know, we went from nine, eight minutes for some of the simulations down to just two minutes. So we saw big, big reductions in time. And ultimately that meant an engineer could understand what the car was doing in a practice session, recommend a tweak to the configuration or setup of it, and just get more actionable insight quicker. And it ultimately helps get a better car quicker. >> Such a great example. How are you guys feeling about the season, Matt? What's the team's, the sentiment? >> Yeah, I think we're optimistic. We with thinking our simulations that we have a great car. We have a new driver lineup. We have Max Verstappen who carries on with the team and Sergio Perez joins the team. So we're really excited about this year and we want to go and win races. And I think with COVID people are just itching also to get back to a little degree of normality, and, you know, and going racing again, even though there's no fans, it gets us into a degree of normality. >> That's great, Matt, good luck this season and going forward and thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> It's my pleasure. Great talking to you again. >> Okay, now we're going to bring back Omar for a quick summary. So keep it right there. (mellow music)

>> Announcer: From Miami Beach, Florida it's theCUBE, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE coverage here at the Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019 in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Not a bad venue for an event. It's their first inaugural event around cyber protection. Our next guest is a great guest. He's going to go into great detail. Very fun job. Stressful job. Graeme Hackland, CIO of ROKiT Williams Racing Formula One team. Thanks for joining me. >> Thanks Joe. >> Great job you have. I mean, it's high pressure, high stakes, data's involved. You can nerd out on all the tech and it's a part of the business these days. Take a minute to explain the Williams Racing Team history and what are you guys up to these days. >> So Williams, this is Sir Frank Williams' 41st year with this team. 50 years in total he's been in Formula One. Won 16 world championships. Not recently, we want to do that again for him and that's the mission, right? Get up every day wanting to get back to the front of the grid and help Williams to win. I joined them in 2014. I've been 23 years in total in Formula One. I love the industry, the fast pace, everything you describe. There's a bit of stress obviously but I just love the industry and I joined Williams in 2014 to help with the digital transformation and it's been brilliant and now we're not using the transformation word anymore. We're on a digital journey. We've already put a lot of that infrastructure in place, moved to the cloud, and it's just been, it's been brilliant and we've had some success on the track. More recently it's been tough but we'll get back there. >> You know, I just had a conversation with Dan Havens who's the Chief Growth Officer, he's done all of the sports deals. We were talking about, you know, baseball and the other football, European football, and also Formula One. The competitive advantage edge is there in the data. AI is here, machine learning feeds AI, so now do you set up the infrastructure, you get operationalized properly. This is a big job. It's not just loading software. You got to really think about the wholistic system at work. >> That's the great thing, right? We've go to do the infrastructure right. So you've got to get the basics right. But then if we can do a better job with AI, with machine learning, with the analytic tools that are out there than the other teams are doing. We can beat them. We don't have the same funding levels that they do but we got really smart people, and people is our biggest asset. And then the second biggest is data and making sure that the right engineer has the right data at the right time so that they can do their job, so that we can set the fastest pit stop time or that we can challenge the cars in front of us. It is really important, so we put a lot of time and effort into data analytics, but especially video. Video has become huge for us and obviously then, the data size grows massively. But data and being able to analyze your competitors, analyze your own car, your two drivers against each other. There's a huge amount of data that we are dealing with. >> Without giving any secrets away Graeme, talk about some of the data dynamics that you have going on. What is some of the workflows? What are some of the things you're optimize... You said video. Where are you guys looking at? What are some of the key, cool things that you're seeing as an edge opportunity for you? >> So, Formula One team has this life cycle of a Formula One car where you start in aerodynamics, either in a wind tunnel with a physical model or you do virtual wind tunnel with computational fluid dynamics. There's CFD, so that computation power is really important. Then you go into design, CAD design, that really turns it into something that you can make so then we're into manufacturing. Then we got a race engineer, and all the tools that they use to get the optimum out of the car that they're given on a race weekend. And then you feed that back in so that every race were adding performance to the car, and all through the season. We'll add one and a half to two seconds per lap of performance onto that car every season. And so that's a really important loop that you need to be constantly doing. And if you don't, you know, we've had some issues in this year, if you don't get that completely right, you will lose time to your competitors. >> Give me an example where it didn't work out, where you've gone back to the drawing board. >> So, I think there's been, and it's been well publicized, Clay Williams has talked about it. There's been a bit of a gap between the results we were getting in the wind tunnel and the reality that was happening on the track. And so we've had to bring that back and make sure that there was a correlation between the tunnel and the track. And our engineering group will be working really hard on that, so that kind of thing can happen. >> Talk about the engineering backgrounds that are going on behind the scenes. A lot of people look at Formula One's, only the hardcore nerd that are nerding out and geeking out on the sport know that the depth but, what's going on in the engineering front because there's a lot of investment you guys are making on engineering. >> Yeah, and so, Formula One fans love the data. I think they really love to see the data and work with it and, fortunately, the people who run Formula One are opening more of that data to the fans. If you left it to the teams, we wouldn't share it with the fans because then our competitors see it and we see it as a competitor's advantage. But if something's shared for everyone then that's fair. So, I think the fans love to see the data and see what we're doing. What we're trying to look at now is automation. Humans making decisions has been okay up until probably the last couple of years where some errors have been made in strategy, in real-time where you've got a few seconds to make a decision. Are you going to pit? Virtual safety car has just been called. You've got three seconds to make a decision. Sometimes the humans are making the wrong decision. So we see automation, AI, as really having a role in that real-time decision making. But we think AI can help us in our factory. The things that we're making, something happens at the track, and now we have to change that design. We think introducing automation and AI into that process will really help us as well. >> Yeah, sports market, sports teams, and sports franchises, to me, optimize digital transformation or digital journey because the fans want it. >> Graeme: Yeah. >> There's competitive advantage in running the team. There's the player's decision making whether it's baseball or a driver. >> Graeme: Yup. >> And then there's the fans. So, I got to ask ya on, what are you guys thinking about the fan experience because now you got some data opening up, you got visualization, potentially apps that show you that cars in 3D space and some virtual reality potential. >> Yup. >> The old experience was, ooh, there's a car, goes by again, hey we're (giggles) comes by again. So, bringing, extending the digital fan-based experience, what do you guys, what's your view there? >> Oh, there's a huge amount of work happening in Formula One and it's great to see the people who are running Formula One talking about a digital transformation, not just the teams, right. And it was all about the fan experience. We want the fan to feel like they're a part of it. So Williams did a couple of experiments with virtual reality, so that you could either be one of the pit crews, so you could be the person holding the gun, feel the car coming in, and changing the tire. >> That's awesome. >> Or you could have the driver's view. So the cameras that are on the car are above the driver's head so you don't get an accurate view. So we brought that down into the helmet and now you're getting the view of what it's like to be the driver. >> Wow. >> So, there's been a lot of focus on that fan experience and making sure that you're not at a disadvantage sitting in this, you know, at the track, compared to someone who's at home with two televisions or multiple devices that they're tracking the data on. And the GPS data of where the cars are and hearing some of the commentary of why they're making the decisions they are and when the driver's challenge their engineers, I love that bit. So the engineers got all that data, tells the driver we're going to do this strategy and the driver challenges it because they're in the car feeling how the car feels. >> I think you guys have a great opportunity as an industry because, you look at Esports and the gaming culture, the confluence of that experience based product coming to Formula One. >> Graeme: Yup. >> It's just the perfect fit. >> Well, it's gone, the Esports Formula One has gone huge. We run a team as well. Most of the Formula One teams now have an Esports team. And actually, the people who are driving in the Esports teams, their skills are transferrable. I remember one of the competitions a couple of years ago was to win a drive in the simulator. You became a development driver for one of the Formula One teams. And that shows that those skills are transferrable, so it's great. >> Yeah, that's beautiful stuff. All right, I want to get back to the Acronis cyber.. >> Yup. >> Global Cyber Summit 2019. You're here talking to folks, also sharing knowledge, you guys were hit with ransomware. >> Graeme: Yup. >> Not once, but twice. >> Graeme: Yup. >> I think you had just joined, I think at that time before.. >> It was during 2014 when I first joined and we would, I know, we had put as much investment as we could into our cyber security and to our protection. But we had gaps and I think, so the first ransomware that we got hit by was inside our network and it encrypted 50,000 files before we discovered it. Now we were lucky. We were able to recover all the data from back-up, but we knew that, because it had happened in the middle of the day, someone had looked at some websites during their lunch break and within a couple of hours we had discovered it, contained it, corrected it, restored the data. But the second time we got hit, it was an individual on their computer off network, and we lost data. And that's the thing I hate the most. That data is so precious to us. Losing it was really upsetting. And so we went out into the market, how can we make sure that our data is being backed up? But more than that, how can we make sure that backed up data is protected? And there's a number of reasons we want to protect it. We want to protect it from things like ransomware, but also, the thing that people often don't thing about with their data is, how do we make sure that it's not tampered with at any point? So, when we're at the track, and the car's running around the track, we're pushing data locally, inside the network. We're pushing it to the cloud to do computation and we're sending it back to the UK so that engineers at base can work with it. >> Yeah. >> What it someone was in those stream of data tampering with it? >> Yeah. >> And we then had fake data? And as we go to more machine learning and automation, if those decisions are being made on bad data, that's going to be a real problem. So, we wanted to make sure that our data couldn't be tampered with, so we can adopt new technology. So that was really important. But, Williams also have an advanced engineering company, so beyond Formula One, we apply that knowledge and know how, to all sorts of other industries. From healthcare to retail to automotive. We've been helping Unilever with some really interesting projects to make ice cream better and more efficiently and to help with soap powder. We got to make sure that that customer data is never tampered with. If we're going to put technology into road cars, that's a very different challenge to Formula One. >> John: Yeah. >> We got to make sure that, that whole, the IP chain, how we develop that technology can be proven and isn't tampered with. >> It's interesting, supply chain concepts data protection merging together. Data protection used to be thought after.. Oh, we've got a design. Well let's brush up, we'll get back it, bolt it on. Not anymore. >> Now having to build it into the solutions up front. As we're preparing technology for customers, we're having to make sure that we're thinking about the data challenge. So if it's in a car, so we did battery technology, we won the supply for the first ever gas to electric model, right. As that car is driving around, there's going to be data that's important around the health of the battery. >> John: Yeah. >> And information that is going to be needed by the driver, but also for later for when they're doing the servicing on the car. We got to make sure that that data is protected properly. >> You guys are pushing the envelope on instrumentation, sensors, data, real-time telemetry? >> To be honest, Formula One has always been like that. We put our first data logger in 1979 on a Formula One car. Honestly, it's been an IOT device since then. (laughs) It's not a new thing for F Ones. I think we are really experienced. Our electronics group are real experienced in how to protect that data as it comes off the car and we've applied that knowledge to road cars as well. >> Well you, what's great about you guys and the whole industry is that, that innovation for the sport is now translating as a benefit for society. >> Exactly. >> And I think that is really kind of a, I think, an example of where innovation can come from. Places you least expect it. The people doing hard work pays off. >> It always worried me that Formula One, we spend all the money we spend, right, hundred million pounds, three hundred million pounds per year. And at the end of the year, the product that we created gets retired and we create a whole new product. It always worried me that that technology wasn't reused. Williams are reusing it. You know, we take the carbon fiber that we use to protect a driver in a Formula One car. We've now applied that to babies in hospitals when they get moved around. We built a carbon fiber unit that moves them around. Aerodynamics design, we've applied to fridges to make them more efficient. If you've got an open fridge, the cold air doesn't come out into the aisle of the supermarket. We push it back into the fridges. I love that. Reuse, taking loose end leaf batteries and putting them into a unit that you bought on the side of a house and it helps to power the house over night. >> You know, it's interesting Graeme, you mentioned digital transformation versus digital journey, you guys are operationalize it as it's used. >> Graeme: Exactly. >> Difference, there's nuance but transformation. You have yet transformed. >> Graeme: Yup. >> You guys up transformed so you're on a journey. I got to ask you, what is some learnings in your operationalize digital? I mean, obviously you got your sport, but now it's translating out to other areas. What's the big learnings that you take away from, as a professional and as an individual in the industry, from all this? >> I think, initially, we were quite conservative and we only went with big players that we were convinced were going to be around in three to five years. I think, there's a lot more established cloud providers now but early on we only went with the big guys because we wanted to make sure we could get our data out. If they disappeared, we weren't going to lose our data. I think what the partnership with Acronis and other partnerships we've done has helped us to be more aggressive in terms of our approach towards CAD vendors. We can now take risks with a smaller player. We've got a really niche product but it's something that could give us a competitive advantage for half a season, three, four races sometimes. We'd go for it. Whereas, I think we were a bit conservative at first. I think all CIOs have to think about what's their appetite for risk. We did a really good process of mapping that out, discussing it all the way to board level. What exactly are we prepared to risk? There's some things, you know, car data, we're just not prepared to risk that. >> Yeah. >> But there are some things that we can afford to take risks with. And I've talked to CIOs at finance institutes, they're starting to take risks now. There's core data that they won't be able to, either by regulation or just doesn't make sense. But there's a lot you can commoditize and put out into the cloud. >> And if you have a cyber protection foundation, you can take those risks. >> Graeme: Exactly. >> You don't want to be looking over your shoulder worrying. >> Because you own the data. And sometimes when you go with a cloud provider, it feels almost like they own the data. But when you've got a partnership like the one we have with Acronis, we know that we own the data. We're backing that data away from the cloud vendor so we can always get it back. >> Graeme, thanks so much for the insight. Love this conversation. I think it's really innovative, cutting edge, and great fun to talk about. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, cheers. >> CUBE coverage here at Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau Hotel for Acronis Global Cyber Security 2019 Summit, I'm John Ferrier, stay with us for more CUBE day two coverage after this short break. (fun music)

>> Announcer: From Denver, Colorado it's theCUBE. Covering Super Computing 17, brought to you by Intel. Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Super Computing 2017 in Denver, Colorado talking about big big iron, we're talking about space and new frontiers, black holes, mapping the brain. That's all fine and dandy, but we're going to have a little bit more fun this next segment. We're excited to have our next guest Bernie Spang. He's a VP Software Defined Infrastructure for IBM. And his buddy and guest Wayne Glanfield HPC Manager for Red Bull Racing. And for those of you that don't know, that's not the pickup trucks, it's not the guy jumping out of space, this is the Formula One racing team. The fastest, most advanced race cars in the world. So gentlemen, first off welcome. Thank you. Thank you Jeff. So what is a race car company doing here for a super computing conference? Obviously we're very interested in high performance computing so traditionally we've used a wind tunnel to do our external aerodynamics. HPC allows us to do many many more iterations, design iterations of the car. So we can actually kind of get more iterations of the designs out there and make the car go faster very quicker. So that's great, you're not limited to how many times you can get it in the wind tunnel. The time you have in the wind tunnel. I'm sure there's all types of restrictions, cost and otherwise. There's lots of restrictions and both the wind tunnel and in HPC usage. So with HPC we're limited to 25 teraflops, which isn't many teraflops. 25 teraflops. >> Wayne: That's all. And Bernie, how did IBM get involved in Formula One racing? Well I mean our spectrum computing offerings are about virtualizing clusters to optimize efficiency, and the performance of the workloads. So our Spectrum LSF offering is used by manufacturers, designers to get ultimate efficiency out of the infrastructure. So with the Formula One restrictions on the teraflops you want to get as much work through that system as efficiently as you can. And that's where Spectrum computing comes in. That's great. And so again, back to the simulations. So not only can you just do simulations 'cause you got the capacity, but then you can customize it as you said I think before we turned on the cameras for specific tracks, specific race conditions. All types of variables that you couldn't do very easily in a traditional wind tunnel. Yes obviously it takes a lot longer to actually kind of develop, create, and rapid prototype the models and get them in the wind tunnel, and actually test them. And it's obviously much more expensive. So by having a HPC facility we can actually kind of do the design simulations in a virtual environment. So what's been kind of the ahah from that? Is it just simply more better faster data? Is there some other kind of transformational thing that you observed as a team when you started doing this type of simulation versus just physical simulation in a wind tunnel? We started using HPC and computational fluid dynamics about 12 years ago in anger. Traditionally it started out as a complementary tool to the wind tunnel. But now with the advances in HPC technology and software from IBM, it's actually beginning to overtake the wind tunnel. So it's actually kind of driving the way we design the car these days. That's great. So Bernie, working with super high end performance, right, where everything is really optimized to get that car to go a little bit faster, just a little bit faster. Right. Pretty exciting space to work in, you know, there's a lot of other great applications, aerospace, genomics, this and that. But this is kind of a fun thing you can actually put your hands on. Oh it's definitely fun, it's definitely fun being with the Red Bull Racing team, and with our clients when we brief them there. But we have commercial clients in automotive design, aeronautics, semiconductor manufacturing, where getting every bit of efficiency and performance out of their infrastructure is also important. Maybe they're not limited by rules, but they're limited by money, you know and the ability to investment. And their ability to get more out of the environment gives them a competitive advantage as well. And really what's interesting about racing, and a lot of sports is you get to witness the competition. We don't get to witness the competition between big companies day to day. You're not kind of watching it in those little micro instances. So the good thing is you get to learn a lot from such a focused, relatively small team as Red Bull Racing that you can apply to other things. So what are some of the learnings as you've got work with them that you've taken back? Well certainly they push the performance of the environment, and they push us, which is a great thing for us, and for our other clients who benefit. But one of the things I think that really stands out is the culture there of the entire team no matter what their role and function. From the driver on down to everybody else are focused on winning races and winning championships. And that team view of getting every bit of performance out of everything everybody does all the time really opened our thinking to being broader than just the scheduling of the IT infrastructure, it's also about making the design team more productive and taking steps out of the process, and anything we can do there. Inclusive of the storage management, and the data management over time. So it's not just the compute environment it's also the virtualized storage environment. Right, and just massive amounts of storage. You said not only are you running and generating, I'm just going to use boatloads 'cause I'm not sure which version of the flops you're going to use. But also you got historical data, and you have result data, and you have models that need to be tweaked, and continually upgraded so that you do better the following race. Exactly, I mean we're generating petabytes of data a year and I think one of the issues which is probably different from most industries is our workflows are incredibly complex. So we have up to 200 discrete job steps for each workflow to actually kind of produce a simulation. This is where the kind of IBM Spectrum product range actually helps us do that efficiently. If you imagine an aerospace engineer, or aerodynamics engineer trying to manually manage 200 individual job steps, it just wouldn't happen very efficiently. So this is where Spectrum scale actually kind of helps us do that. So you mentioned it briefly Bernie, but just a little bit more specifically. What are some of the other industries that you guys are showcasing that are leveraging the power of Spectrum to basically win their races. Yeah so and we talked about the infrastructure and manufacturing, but they're industrial clients. But also in financial services. So think in terms of risk analytics and financial models being an important area. Also healthcare life sciences. So molecular biology, finding new drugs. When you talk about the competition and who wins right. Genomics research and advances there. Again, you need a system and an infrastructure that can chew through vast amounts of data. Both the performance and the compute, as well as the longterm management with cost efficiency of huge volumes of data. And then you need that virtualized cluster so that you can run multiple workloads many times with an infrastructure that's running in 80%, 90% efficiency. You can't afford to have silos of clusters. Right we're seeing clients that have problems where they don't have this cluster virtualization software, have cluster creep, just like in the early days we had server sprawl, right? With a different app on a different server, and we needed to virtualize the servers. Well now we're seeing cluster creep. Right the Hadoop clusters and Spark clusters, and machine learning and deep learning clusters. As well as the traditional HPC workload. So what Spectrum computing does is virtualizes that shared cluster environment so that you can run all these different kind of workloads and drive up the efficiency of the environment. 'Cause efficiency is really the key right. You got to have efficiency that's what, that's really where cloud got its start, you know, kind of eating into the traditional space, right. There's a lot of inefficient stuff out there so you got to use your resources efficiently it's way too competitive. Correct well we're also seeing inefficiencies in the use of cloud, right. >> Jeff: Absolutely. So one of the features that we've added to the Spectrum computing recently is automated dynamic cloud bursting. So we have clients who say that they've got their scientists or their design engineers spinning up clusters in the cloud to run workloads, and then leaving the servers running, and they're paying the bill. So we built in automation where we push the workload and the data over the cloud, start the servers, run the workload. When the workload's done, spin down the servers and bring the data back to the user. And it's very cost effective that way. It's pretty fun everyone talks often about the spin up, but they forget to talk about the spin down. Well that's where the cost savings is, exactly. Alright so final words, Wayne, you know as you look forward, it's super a lot of technology in Formula One racing. You know kind of what's next, where do you guys go next in terms of trying to get another edge in Formula One racing for Red Bull specifically. I mean I'm hoping they reduce the restrictions on HPC so it can actually start using CFD and the software IBM provides in a serious manner. So it can actually start pushing the technologies way beyond where they are at the moment. It's really interesting that they, that as a restriction right, you think of like plates and size of the engine, and these types of things as the rule restrictions. But they're actually restricting based on data size, your use of high performance computing. They're trying to save money basically, but. It's crazy. So whether it's a rule or you know you're share holders, everybody's trying to save money. Alright so Bernie what are you looking at, sort of 2017 is coming to an end, it's hard for me to say that as you look forward to 2018 what are some of your priorities for 2018. Well the really important thing and we're hearing it at this conference, I'm talking with the analysts and with the clients. The next generation of HPC in analytics is what we're calling machine learning, deep learning, cognitive AI, whatever you want to call it. That's just the new generation of this workload. And our Spectrum conductor offering and our new deep learning impact capability to automate the training of deep learning models, so that you can more quickly get to an accurate model like in hours or minutes, not days or weeks. That's going to a huge break through. And based on our early client experience this year, I think 2018 is going to be a breakout year for putting that to work in commercial enterprise use cases. Alright well I look forward to the briefing a year from now at Super Computing 2018. Absolutely. Alright Bernie, Wayne, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day, appreciate it. You're welcome, thank you. Alright he's Bernie, he's Wayne, I'm Jeff Frick we're talking Formula One Red Bull Racing here at Super Computing 2017. Thanks for watching.

(calm music) >> Good morning from Miami. Lisa Martin here, live with The Cube, on the floor of IFS Unleashed. We are thrilled to be back with them after not seeing them for three years, of course, of obvious problems. But I'm very happy to be welcoming back one of our Cube alumni and the CEO of IFS, Darren Roos. Darren, it's great to have you back on The Cube. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> I was telling you before we started, it must have felt amazing, exhilarating this morning, walking out on stage, seeing that sea of people, of live bodies, and actually getting to engage with your customers and your ecosystem in person again. >> Yeah, it's great. You know, I think we've all dealt with all of the challenges that Covid have brought and I think just going back to something that feels very normal and, you know, getting to interact with people again at this scale is really unique and a great feeling to be back, back in the throes of normality. >> Exactly. In the throes of normality. Well, so much has changed since The Cube last caught up with you. I think it was 2019 in Boston. Talk to me about some of the specific things that you've learned during the pandemic that IFS has done 'cause there's a lot of momentum which we're going to uncover on the show today. >> Yeah. Look, I think when we met last in 2019, the focus then was really on building out our Field Service Management offering. We'd always been a contender in the ERP space and with some asset management capability, but the focus was really on establishing ourselves as a leader in the field service management space. And today we are the undisputed leader in field service managements, both from an analyst and customer recognition perspective and what we've also done is we've really focused on building out that asset management capability and, you know, today, again, we're the number one player in asset management. And when you think about how you bring those two things together and the way that asset and service-centric entities have to orchestrate their organizations to create what we call amazing moments of service for their customers, then you need a technology platform that can provide all of that and we do that, really best-of-breed capability across field service management, asset management and components of ERP, but on a single platform. So customers don't have to deal with the integration complexity that they would in a more heterogeneous environment. >> Which is critical for getting time-to-market, product-to-market services, new revenue streams, et cetera. But you're also the top three ERP vendor. One of the top three. >> Yeah, we're one of the top three ERP vendors. You're growing north of 20%, way more than the big guys. How are you doing it and and where do you win? >> Yeah, you know, I think, for so long, customers have had to choose, as I said, between this best-of-breed and best-of-suite and making compromises either on functionality or on integration and I think that, you know, we are very focused from an industry perspective. As I said, just now, we only focus on capabilities and in service and asset-centric industries, think utilities, aerospace and defense, et cetera and in that space, you know, we have a very compelling proposition, as you said. We can help customers go live faster. We can de-risk those implementations 'cause we have more depth of functionality that's suited specifically to their needs and that makes it compelling and that means that, in a world where we're competing against vendors who are very much horizontally-focused and that best-of-suite offering that they have means that the functionality's compromised or in a best-of-suite, best-of-breed world, that the integration is compromised. That's why we're winning and that's why we're outgrowing the competition and, you know, I think we, we just stay focused. We stay in our niche, we stay focused on our customers and creating value and, you know, that's our reason for being. >> So north of 10,000 customers so far. Has IFS always been vertically-focused or is that something that's come on in the last few years, maybe since you were tenured. >> Yeah, in the last five years we've really homed in on those assets and service-centric verticals and it's important, because when you think about what we do from a development perspective, you know, as we build the technology and we think about those emerging use cases around, you know, asset investment planning or asset performance management or asset monitoring or all of the things that our customers are thinking about, IOT, AI, augmented reality, all of which we're showcasing at the conference, you know, you want to do that with a very specific use case in mind because I've talked a little bit about field service management and asset management but none of our customers consume technology in that way. You know, if they're in oil and gas, then they're thinking about shutdown and turnaround and they're thinking about plant maintenance, they're thinking about specific use cases that are industry focused and that's how we build the technology. So, you know, I think that's the differentiator for us and, you know, there's a bunch of customers here and, you know, you'll see all of the, you know, the solar arrays and the wind farms and all the different things where we're demoing the capability that we have that is very industry focused. >> The industry focus is so, like you said, very differentiating, but also it's not just, "We're going where customers are." It's, "We're listening "and we're actually speaking the language "that our customers speak." That's differentiating from the many, many hundreds of tech leaders that I talk to, just so you know. >> A hundred percent. Well, look, I think the thing is, is that what we recognize, is that for us to be able to really create value for them in the specific vertical that they're in, it can't be that we stick a marketing label on it. And that industry flavor has to be ubiquitous from, you know, when we meet them and we're able to understand the problems that they're facing through to the way that we build the technology to address the problems, all the way through to the partners that we're working with who are then going to deliver that solution. They need to understand the industry and I think that, you know, it's a not a particularly level playing field because so many of our competition don't operate that way. They have a horizontal application, they have horizontal partners, and then a lot of the rest is marketing blurb. But, you know, I think the customers that we have here today are great, global, international brands. You know, we told some of the stories from the stage this morning, with companies like Southwest and the MRO solution that we delivered for them and we're immensely proud of that. And, you know, our focus is on just telling more of those stories and creating more of those stories and being able to point towards tangible value that our technology's created in record time. You know, that's the focus. >> Right. It's all about the business outcomes. We've got sitting across from our set here is the Aston Martin F1 car. Darren and I were talking before, we're both big F1 fans. I love hearing the smart factory from an F1 team's perspective, or hearing about aerospace and defense customers because you get to understand the commonalities of these businesses and how similar they are to other industries. They have some of the same huge challenges but getting a race car built between now and February of 23 for the next race season, the amount of manufacturing that has to go on, smart manufacturing, and knowing that IFS is really underpinning that, is fantastic. >> Well, it's more complex than that even, because they're not building a new car by February, you know, they're rebuilding the car every week and, you know, it's that kind of attention to detail and the speed and sense of urgency that is a great opportunity for us to showcase the technology and that's why we love the relationship with Aston Martin Racing, but, you know, being able to then leverage the learnings from that environment, which is super high paced and the cycle times are so much quicker, into, you know, industries which maybe don't move as fast, but are, you know, perhaps more mission critical, you know, like an airline or, you know, something equivalent to that. >> Well, if we think about the industries that that you're focused on, so many of them were the hardest hit during the last couple of years, where they're really arterial industries and IFS has really been focused on helping these folks transform digitally. Talk to me about IFS as really a catalyst of those companies' digital transformations. >> You know, interestingly, we, didn't see a ton of impact during Covid to our business but that's because, as you say, that they were hit but hits almost in a positive way because they were the ones that kept things going. You know, think about our customers like telcos or utilities or, you know, unfortunately our aerospace and defense customers, commercial aviation aside, but we have a bunch of defense organizations that are customers and, you know, they've had to keep going and what we've really focused on and it continues to be our focus, is how do we help those businesses to be more efficient? And this is increasing, especially with what's happening in the world today, is increasingly important to them. How do they drive operational efficiency? And I talked a lot about the power of IFS's capability on a single platform and how do we bring the orchestration of the different parts of their business, whether that's their customers, their assets and their people. How do you orchestrate those things in order to create operational efficiency and in IFS language, create those moments of service? And that's what we do, and because we are focused on creating those moments of service and we're helping those customers to be more efficient, you're helping them to drive loyalty and, you know, repeat business and increase value in their customers, you know, that's, we just became and become, more important to them. You know, it's not a system that they can turn off and go, you know, "We'll do without this for a while." You know, we're really underpinning that value creation for them. >> You're integral. You're mission-critical, really. Let's double click on the moments of service. I love that from a tagline perspective. It's also the title of your new book. Congratulations on the book by the way. Define that for the audience. I think they can get a sense of that but what is, and it's really IFS enabling its customers to deliver moments of service. Talk to me about that. >> You know, it's funny. As we were discussing it, it tends to get used as the moments of service that we provide for our customers but that's really not what it's about. Every industry, every business, when you talk to the CEOs of those businesses, they're thinking about how do they impact their customers. What are the things that they need to do? And every business, when you talk about this concept of a moment of service, every business has multiple moments of service and everything that we do is about helping those customers, irrespective of whether they are a utility and the service they're providing is a broadband service, or, sorry, a telco providing a broadband service, or a utility providing electricity. That customer flicks the switch and the power is there, or they, you know, they dial their phone and the phone call is there. That's one of the moments of service that they provide. It could be, you know, the engineer going in and activating that service and being able to let the customer know that they're arriving at a certain time and then that broadband being activated so that the customer can actually, you know, plan around their day. But those moments of service are what we enable and it does, it takes a tremendous amount for an organization to come together. We all, as a consumer, had an experience where, you know, we've had an expectation and we've been disappointed and that moment of service wasn't provided and almost in every single case it comes down to a fragmented selection of systems that weren't integrated, that weren't inter-operating. You know, the wrong technician shows up, he doesn't have the right equipment, he didn't know that your house, you know, didn't have a certain capability or piece of equipment in it and that's where it starts to fall down and that's the customer disappointment and that leaves the sour taste in their mouths. So everything that we've done, whether it's our customer satisfaction monitoring tool, Customable, or whether it's the asset management capability, the field service management, managing those techs, so that you get the right technician with the right parts, when they said they were going to be there. All of those things are really focused on those moments of service, and you know, as you said, what resonates with people is that everybody, as a consumer, you know, interacts with companies where they've been disappointed by a poor moment of service and they've had great moments of service. So it does resonate with everyone. >> It does, and I actually think moments of service, probably, in a hopefully post-pandemic world, are probably even more important, because I think one of the things, and you talked about this, we've all had these disappointing experiences in the last couple of years, that were magnified to some factor of X and I think patience has been in short supply. Probably not going to rubber band back. So being able to, through your technology, enable customers to deliver those moments of service that are critical to reducing churn, increasing revenue, turning revenue into recurring, is really a differentiator for your customers. It's an advantage for them. >> Well I think that, you know, the consumers, in general, are becoming more demanding. That's a trend that isn't going to change. Covid certainly accelerated that. That's one element and we think about kind of big macro trends that are impacting, you know, businesses today. The other thing is this big move towards servitization and we think about companies like Rolls Royce, who are a customer of ours, who, you know, they used to manufacture and sell engines that went on aeroplanes and other engines. And today they don't. They rent those by the hour. And at the point that you flip that dynamic from being, you know, making a product and selling it, to, you know, providing it as a service, the world changes completely because all of a sudden you have to think about, you know, "How well are we making these assets? "How are we going to monitor those assets? "How are we going to continue to service those assets?" And obviously longevity and quality becomes so much more important and your customer experience becomes so much more important because if they're not putting a big capital out there and they're just renting it from you, if you don't provide, you know, quality of service, then they'll simply go somewhere else, and our technology underpins those motions. So you've got these big trends of customer expectation going up and of course the servitization trend. >> Right. And we've actually got Rolls Royce's Nick Ward for Rolls Royce coming on the program later today, so we'll talk about the big pivot they've made and how IFS has really been transformative in that. Talk a little bit about, in our last few minutes, about supply chain. Obviously we know it's been quite a mess the last couple of years. I saw some research over the summer from IFS that said 66% of organizations are keeping more stock on hand, more organizations are increasing supplier numbers. How is IFS helping in that sense? >> Yeah, so I think it's all about visibility and I think if we can give customers visibility into their supply chains and their stock levels, their inventory, and of course, you know, what's required from a customer perspective, and again, it's this orchestration of different pieces, which in a heterogeneous non best-to-breed and suite world, means that customers maybe have to try and figure out how they're going to manage all those things across the different systems. In IFS it's all in one system. We give them visibility and control that they wouldn't ordinarily have and I think that's a huge point today when you know everybody's under pressure. You know, how much money you've got tied up in inventory. You know, what your supply chain cash levels look like is a huge challenge for businesses with increasing debt costs coming up now. So, you know, I think that being able to manage that more efficiently, having better visibility, being able to plan more effectively, so that you're, you know, if you're building up your stock supplies, it's because you need those stock and you know what order's coming and that's where, you know, having integrated capabilities is so important and that's what we provide. >> Visibility and control are absolutely critical. I know that energy is one of your vertical specialties. Talk to me a little bit about how you're helping customers in Ukraine from an energy perspective. Is IFS there helping organizations to navigate those headwinds? >> Yeah, so we're not in Ukraine. It's not a market that we operate in, but I think that what is, you know, ubiquitous now in the world, is energy crisis, given what's happening in Ukraine and I think that, as an industry, we see the utilities industry investing heavily in two areas. One is that continuity of service and being able to make sure that, again, it has predictability around what the requirements are and how they provide quality of supply and continuous supply, but the other thing is of course is, you've got this whole move towards sustainable energy and that's an area in which we are increasingly involved and again, like I said, you see a bunch of sustainable energy demos going on around here in being able to help companies make the transition as well as manage that new infrastructure and we've got a bunch of innovation around that coming in the next six months or so. >> Well, you're coming off a fantastic first half. We saw the results over the summer, ARR up 33%. I can only imagine the trajectory in second half. >> It is strong. >> Continuing to go up. >> We'll release our Q3 results soon and, in fact, all the numbers are improved on our half-year numbers, so really happy with that development. But it's, you know, it is a testament to our customers. It's a testament to the way in which they work with us to make sure that we can build differentiated capability and, you know, we continue to try and work with them and reciprocate that loyalty and, you know, that's our story. >> Synergy. Love it. Darren, thank you so much for coming on The Cube, sharing with us the great momentum that IFS has been having during your tenure, also during the pandemic, the great customer stories that really articulate your value. We appreciate your time and we look forward to unpacking more on the program today. >> Thank you Lisa. >> My pleasure. For Darren Roos, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube live from Miami on the show floor of IFS Unleashed. Don't go away. My next guest joins me in just a minute. (calm music)

(soft music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's covers of Splunk's dot com virtual event, their annual summit. I'm John Ferry, host of the cube. We've been covering dot conf since twenty twelve. Usually a physical event in person. This year it's virtual. I'm here with Claire Hockin, the CMO of Splunk. She's been here three and a half years. Your first year as CMO, and you got to go virtual from physical. Welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >> Thank you very much, John. Great. >> I got to ask you, I mean, this has been the most impressive virtual venue, you've taken over the hotel here in Silicon valley. You're entire teams here. It feels like there's a dynamic of like the teamwork. You can kind of feel the vibe. It's almost like a little VIP Splunk event, but you're broadcasting it to the world. Tell us what's happening. >> Yeah, it's been, I think for everyone a year where we really hope to be back to having a hybrid event, so having a big virtual component, but running dot conf as we had before from Las Vegas, which wasn't possible. So what we thought in the last six weeks is that we would actually bring the Splunk studio to a physical location. So we've been live all of this week from California, where we're sitting today and really thought through bringing the best of that programming to our, you know, our amazing audience of twenty six thousand people. So we were sitting here in a studio, we have a whole live stage and we've activated the best of dot conf to bring as many Splunkers as we can. And as many external guests to make it feel as real and as vibrant as possible. So. >> I have to say I'm very impressed. Since twenty twelve we've been watching the culture evolve. Splunk has always been that next big thing. And then the next big thing again, it seems to be the theme as data becomes so bigger and more important even than ever. There's a new Splunk emerging, another kind of next big thing. And this kind of says the patterns like do something big, that's new, operationalize it and do something new again. This is a theme, big part of this culture here. Can you share more about how you see this evolving? >> Sure. And I think that's what makes Splunk such a great place to be. And I think it attracts people who like to continually challenge reinvent. And I think we've spent a lot of time this year building out our portfolio, going through this cloud transformation. It just gives you a whole new landscape of how you unlock that power of data and how customers use it. So we've had a lot of fun, always building on top of that building, you know, our partnerships, what customers do and really having fun with it. I think one of the best things about Splunk is we do have this incredibly fun and playful brand and as data just becomes something that is more and more powerful, it's really relatable. And we have fun with activating that and storytelling. So, yeah. >> And you have a new manager, Teresa Carlson came in from Amazon web services. You have a lot more messaging kind of building on previous messaging. How are you handling and looking at the aperture of, that's growing from a messaging standpoint, you have a partner verse, which has rebranded of your solution of your ecosystem, kind of a lot of action going on in your world. What's the update? >> Yeah. It keeps us busy. And I think at one end, you know, the number of people that are using Splunk inside any customer base is just growing. So you have different kinds of users. And this year we're really working hard on how to partner and position Splunk with developers, but at the top end of that, the value of data and the idea of having a data foundation is something that's incredibly compelling for CTOs. So working really hard about looking at Splunk and data from that perspective, as well as the individual uses across areas like security and observability. So. >> You know, one of the things I wanted to ask you is, I was thinking about this when I was driving in this morning, Splunk has a lot of customers and you keep your customers and you've have a lot of customers that organically came into the Splunk through the product leadership and just great product. And then as security became more important, Splunk kind of takes that territory now. Now mainstream enterprise with the platform are leaning into Splunk solutions, and now you've got an ecosystem. So it's just becoming bigger and bigger just seems that the scale of the Splunk is growing radically bigger than it was, Is that happening? And what's your take on that? >> I think that's definitely a thing, John. So I think that the power of the ecosystem is amazing. We have customers, partners, as you've seen and everything just joins up. So we're seeing more and more dot joining through data. And we're just seeing this incredible velocity in terms of what's possible and how we can co-build with our partners and do more and more with our customers. So Splunk moves incredibly quickly. And I think if anything, we're just, gaining velocity, which is fun and also really challenging. >> Cloud-scale. And certainly during the pandemic, you guys had a tailwind on the business side, talk about the journey that you've had with Splunk as in your career and also for the customers. How are they reacting and what can they expect as Splunk continues to evolve? >> I think we're working really hard to make sure that Splunk is easier to use. Everything gets every more integrated. And I think our goal and our vision is you just capture your data and you can apply it to any use case using Splunk. And to make it sort of easier see that data in action. And one of the things I love from today was the dashboard studio. They're just these beautiful visualizations that really are inspiring around how data is working in your organization. And for me, I've been a Splunker for three and a half years. And I just think there is just so much to do, and there's so much of our story ahead of us and so much potential. So just really enjoying working with customers on the next data frontier, really. >> You have the Jedi Knight from Star Wars speaking, you had the F1 car racing. Lando was here, kind of the young Jedi, the old Jedi. The generations are coming together. You're seeing that old IT world, which relied on Splunk. And now you have this new developer real-time shifting left with security DevOps now going mainstream, you kind of have the confluences of these cultures coming together. It's not really clashing. It's kind of jelling. How are you handling that? How do you see that? What's Splunk kind of doing? Because I can see the themes, am I right? >> No, no. One of the stories from this morning that really struck me is we have Cal Poly and we worked with Cal Poly on their security and they actually have their students using Splunk and they run their whole security environment. And at the very top end, you have Walmart, the Fortune one, just using Splunk at a massive, incredible scale. And I think that's the power of data. I mean, data is something that everyone should and can be able to use. And that's what we're really seeing is unlocking the ability to bring, you know, bring all of your data in service of what you're trying to do, which is fun. And it just keeps growing. >> We had Zach Brown, the CEO of F1 McLaren Racing Team, here on the queue earlier. And it was interesting cause I was like driving the advantage with data, you know, kind of cliche, but they're using data very specifically, highly competitive. It almost kind of feels like a cloud kind of scale model because we've got thousands of people working on the team. They're on the track, they're competing, they're using data, they got to be agile and they got to be fast real time. Kind of sounds like the current enterprise's these days. >> Absolutely. And I think what's interesting about McLaren that the thing I love is either they have hundreds of terabytes of data moving at just at incredible speed through Splunk Enterprise, but it all goes back to their mission control in the UK. And there are 32 people that look at all that data. And I think it's got a half second delay and they make all the decisions for the car on the track. And that I think is a great lesson to any enterprises you have to, you know, you have to bring all that data together and you have to look at it and take decisions centrally for the benefit of your whole team. And I think McLaren is a really good example of when you do that it pays dividends and the team has had a really, really great season. >> Well, I want to say congratulations for pulling off a great virtual event. I know you had your physical event was on track and literally canceled the last minute because of the pandemic with the Delta virus. But it was amazing, made for digital TV kind of event. >> Absolutely, >> This is the future of media. >> Absolutely. And it is a lot of fun. And I think I'm really proud. We have done all of this with our in-house team, the brand, the experiences that you see, which is really fantastic. And it's given us a lot of ideas for sort of, you know, digital media and how we story tell, and really connect to our twenty thousand customers or two hundred and thirty thousand community members and keep everyone connected through digital. So this has been a lot of fun and a really nice moment for us this week. >> You know it's interesting, I was saying to the team here on one of our breaks, is that when you have this kind of agility with media to tell your own story directly, you're almost telling more stories there before. And there's a lot to tell you have a lot of successful customers, the new partners. What's the coolest story that you've seen. What would you share that you think is your favorite? If you could pick one or a few of them, what are your top stories that you see happening? >> So I've talked about Cal Poly, which I love because it's students and you know, the scale of Walmart, but there are so many stories. And I think the ones that I love most are the data heroes. We talk about the data here is a lot of Splunk and the people that are able to harness that data and to take action on that data and make something amazing happen. And we just see that time and time again, across all kinds of organizations where data heroes are surfacing, those insights. Those red flags, if you like and helping organizations stay on step ahead. And Conf is really a celebration of that. I think that's why we do this every year. And we really celebrate those data heroes. So across the program, probably too many to mention, but in every industry and at every scale, people are, you know, making things happen with data and that's an incredibly exciting place to be. >> Well you have a lot of great customers to, to use as references. But I got to ask you that as you go forward this year in marketing, what are your plans to take on this new dynamic? You've got hybrid events, you've got the community is always popular and thriving with Splunk at large-scale enterprises, global system integrators, doing business deals with you guys, as you guys are continuing to grow and grow and grow, what's the strategy? How do you keep the Splunk coolness going? Cause that's, you know, you guys are growing so fast. That's your job, is to keep things on track. What's your strategy? >> I think I look at that and just, we put the customer at the heart of that. And we think, you know, who are the personas, who are the people that use Splunk? What's their experience? What are they trying to do? What are those challenges? And we design those moments to help them move forward faster. And so that I think is just a really good north star. It is really unifying and our partners and customers, and every Splunker gets really behind that. So stay focused on that. >> Thanks for coming on the Cube, really appreciate it. Congratulations for great event. And thanks for having the Cube. We love coming in and sharing our media partnership with you. Thank you for coming. >> Thank you so much. And next year is your tenth year John. So we look forward to celebrating that as well. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Okay it's the Cube coverage here live in the Splunk studios. We are a virtual event, but it's turning out to be a hybrid event. It's like a VIP event, a lot of great stories. Check them out online. They'll be recycling through so much digital content. This is truly a great digital event. Jeffery, hot of the Cube. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Well, hello everybody, John Walls here on theCUBE and continuing our coverage. So splunk.com for 21, you know, we talk about big data these days, you realize the importance of speed, right? We all get that, but certainly Formula One Racing understands speed and big data, a really neat marriage there. And with us to talk about that is James Hodge, who was the global vice president and chief strategy officer international at Splunk. James, good to see it today. Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. Thank you for having me and yeah, the speed of McLaren. Like I'm, I'm all for it today. >> Absolutely. And I find it interesting too, that, that you were telling me before we started the interview that you've been in Splunk going on nine years now. And you remember being at splunk.com, you know, back in the past other years and watching theCUBE and here you are! you made it. >> I know, I think it's incredible. I love watching you guys every single year and kind of the talk that guests. And then more importantly, like it reminds me of conf for every time we see theCUBE, no matter where you are, it reminds me of like this magical week there's dot com for us. >> Well, excellent. I'm glad that we could be a part of it at once again and glad you're a part of it here on theCUBE. Let's talk about McLaren now and the partnership, obviously on the racing side and the e-sports side, which is certainly growing in popularity and in demand. So just first off characterize for our audience, that relationship between Splunk and McLaren. >> Well, so we started the relationship almost two years ago. And for us it was McLaren as a brand. If you think about where they were, they recently, I think it's September a Monza. They got a victory P1 and P2. It was over 3200 days since their last victory. So that's a long time to wait. I think of that. There's 3000 days of continual business transformation, trying to get them back up to the grid. And what we found was that ethos, the drive to digital the, the way they're completely changing things, bringing in kind of fluid dynamics, getting people behind the common purpose that really seem to fit the Splunk culture, what we're trying to do and putting data at the heart of things. So kind of Formula One and McLaren, it felt a really natural place to be. And we haven't really looked back since we started at that partnership. It's been a really exciting last kind of 18 months, two years. >> Well, talk a little bit about, about the application here a little bit in terms of data cars, the, the Formula One cars, the F1 cars, they've got hundreds of sensors on them. They're getting, you know, hundreds of thousands or a hundred thousand data points almost instantly, right? I mean, there's this constant processing. So what are those inputs basically? And then how has McLaren putting them to use, and then ultimately, how is Splunk delivering on that from McLaren? >> So I learned quite a lot, you know, I'm, I'm, I been a childhood Formula One fan, and I've learned so much more about F1 over the last kind of couple of years. So it actually starts with the car going out on the track, but anyone that works in the IT function, the car can not go out on track and less monitoring from the car actually is being received by the garage. It's seen as mission critical safety critical. So IT, when you see a car out and you see the race engineer, but that thumbs up the mechanical, the thumbs up IT, get their vote and get to put the thumbs up before the car goes out on track there around about 300 sensors on the car in practice. And there were two sites that run about 120 on race day that gets streamed on a two by two megabits per second, back to the FIA, the regulating body, and then gets streams to the, the garage where they have a 32 unit rack near two of them that have all of their it equipment take that data. They then stream it over the internet over the cloud, back to the technology center in working where 32 race engineers sit in calm conditions to be able to go and start to make decisions on when the car should pit what their strategy should be like to then relate that back to the track side. So you think about that data journey alone, that is way more complicated and what you see on TV, you know, the, the race energy on the pit wall and the driver going around at 300 kilometers an hour. When we look at what Splunk is doing is making sure that is resilient. You know, is the data coming off the car? Is it actually starting to hit the garage when it hits that rack into the garage, other than streaming that back with the right latency back to the working technology center, they're making sure that all of the support decision-making tools there are available, and that's just what we do for them on race weekend. And I'll give you one kind of the more facts about the car. So you start the beginning of the season, they launched the car. The 80% of that car will be different by the end of the season. And so they're in a continual state of development, like constantly developing to do that. So they're moving much more to things like computational fluid dynamics applications before the move to wind tunnel that relies on digital infrastructure to be able to go and accelerate that journey and be able to go make those assumptions. That's a Splunk is becoming the kind of underpinning of to making sure those mission critical applications and systems are online. And that's kind of just scratching the surface of kind of the journey with McLaren. >> Yeah. So, so what would be an example then maybe on race day, what's a stake race day of an input that comes in and then mission control, which I find fascinating, right? You've got 32 different individuals processing this input and then feeding their, their insights back. Right. And so adjustments are being made on the fly very much all data-driven what would be an example of, of an actual application of some information that came in that was quickly, you know, recorded, noted, and then acted upon that then resulted in an improved performance? >> Well, the most important one is pit stop strategy. It can be very difficult to overtake on track. So starting to look at when other teams go into the pit lane and when they come out of the, the pit lane is incredibly important because it gives you a choice. Do you stay also in your current set of tires and hope to kind of get through that team and kind of overtake them, or do you start to go into the pits and get your fresh sets of tires to try and take a different strategy? There are three people in mission control that have full authority to go and make a Pit lane call. And I think like the thing that really resonated for me from learning about McLaren, the technology is amazing, but it's the organizational constructs on how they turn data into an action is really important. People with the right knowledge and access to the data, have the authority to make a call. It's not the team principle, it's not the person on the pit wall is the person with the most amount of knowledge is authorized and kind of, it's an open kind of forum to go and make those decisions. If you see something wrong, you are just as likely to be able to put your hand up and say, something's wrong here. This is my, my decision than anyone else. And so when we think about all these organizations that are trying to transform the business, we can learn a lot from Formula One on how we delegate authority and just think of like technology and data as the beginning of that journey. It's the people in process that F1 is so well. >> We're talking a lot about racing, but of course, McLaren is also getting involved in e-sports. And so people like you like me, we can have that simulated experience to gaming. And I know that Splunk has, is migrating with McLaren in that regard. Right. You know, you're partnering up. So maybe if you could share a little bit more about that, about how you're teaming up with McLaren on the e-sports side, which I'm sure anybody watching this realizes there's a, quite a big market opportunity there right now. >> It's a huge market opportunity is we got McLaren racing has, you know, Formula One, IndyCar and now extreme E and then they have the other branch, which is e-sports so gaming. And one of the things that, you know, you look at gaming, you know, we were talking earlier about Ted Lasso and, you know, the go to the amazing game of football or soccer, depending on kind of what side of the Atlantic you're on. I can go and play something like FIFA, you know, the football game. I can be amazing at that. I have in reality, you know, in real life I have two left feet. I am never going to be good at football however, what we find with e-sports is it makes gaming and racing accessible. I can go and drive the same circuits as Lando Norris and Daniel Ricardo, and I can improve. And I can learn like use data to start to discover different ways. And it's an incredibly expanding exploding industry. And what McLaren have done is they've said, actually, we're going to make a professional racing team, an e-sports team called the McLaren Shadow team. They have this huge competition called the Logitech KeyShot challenge. And when we looked at that, we sort of lost the similarities in what we're trying to achieve. We are quite often starting to merge the physical world and the digital world with our customers. And this was an amazing opportunity to start to do that with the McLaren team. >> So you're creating this really dynamic racing experience, right? That, that, that gives people like me, or like our viewers, the opportunity to get even a better feel for, for the decision-making and the responsiveness of the cars and all that. So again, data, where does that come into play there? Now, What, what kind of inputs are you getting from me as a driver then as an amateur driver? And, and how has that then I guess, how does it express in the game or expressed in, in terms of what's ahead of me to come in a game? >> So actually there are more data points that come out of the F1 2021 Codemasters game than there are in Formula One car, you get a constant stream. So the, the game will actually stream out real telemetry. So I can actually tell your tire pressures from all of your tires. I can see the lateral G-Force longitudinal. G-Force more importantly for probably amateur drivers like you and I, we can see is the tire on asphalt, or is it maybe on graphs? We can actually look at your exact position on track, how much accelerator, you know, steering lock. So we can see everything about that. And that gets pumped out in real time, up to 60 Hertz. So a phenomenal amount of information, what we, when we started the relationship with McLaren, Formula One super excited or about to go racing. And then at Melbourne, there's that iconic moment where one of the McLaren team tested positive and they withdrew from the race. And what we found was, you know, COVID was starting and the Formula One season was put on hold. The FIA created this season and called i can't remember the exact name of it, but basically a replica e-sports gaming F1 series. We're using the game. Some of the real drivers like Lando, heavy gamer was playing in the game and they'd run that the same as race weekends. They brought celebrity drivers in there. And I think my most surreal zoom call I ever was on was with Lando Norris and Pierre Patrick Aubameyang, who was who's the arsenal football captain, who was the guest driver in the series to drive around Monaco and Randy, the head of race strategy as McLaren, trying to coach him on how to go drive the car, what we ended up with data telemetry coming from Splunk. And so Randy could look out here when he pressing the accelerator and the brake pedal. And what was really interesting was Lando was watching how he was entering corners on the video feed and intuitively kind of coming to the same conclusions as Randy. So kind of, you could see that race to intuition versus the real stats, and it was just incredible experience. And it really shows you, you know, racing, you've got that blurring of the physical and the virtual that it's going to be bigger and bigger and bigger. >> So to hear it here, as I understand what you were just saying now, the e-sports racing team actually has more data to adjust its performance and to modify its behaviors, then the real racing team does. Yep. >> Yeah, it completely does. So what we want to be able to do is turn that into action. So how do you do the right car setup? How do you go and do the right practice laps actually have really good practice driver selection. And I think we're just starting to scratch the surface of what really could be done. And the amazing part about this is now think of it more like a digital twin, what we learn on e-sports we can actually say we've learned something really interesting here, and then maybe a low, you know, if we get something wrong, it may be doesn't matter quite as much as maybe getting an analytics wrong on race weekend. >> Right. >> So we can actually start to look and improve through digital and then start to move that support. That's over to kind of race weekend analytics and supporting the team. >> If I could, you know, maybe pun intended here, shift gears a little bit before we run out of time. I mean, you're, you're involved on the business side, you know, you've got, you know, you're in the middle east Africa, right? You've got, you know, quite an international portfolio on your plate. Now let's talk about just some of the data trends there for our viewers here in the U S who maybe aren't as familiar with what's going on overseas, just in terms of, especially post COVID, you know, what, what concerns there are, or, or what direction you're trying to get your clients to, to be taking in terms of getting back to work in terms of, you know, looking at their workforce opportunities and strengths and all those kinds of things. >> I think we've seen a massive shift. I think we've seen that people it's not good enough just to be storing data its how do you go and utilize that data to go and drive your business forwards I think a couple of key terms we're going to see more and more over the next few years is operational resilience and business agility. And I'd make the assertion that operational resilience is the foundation for the business agility. And we can dive into that in a second, but what we're seeing take the Netherlands. For example, we run a survey last year and we found that 87% of the respondents had created new functions to do with data machine learning and AI, as all they're trying to do is go and get more timely data to front line staff to go. And next that the transformation, because what we've really seen through COVID is everything is possible to be digitized and we can experiment and get to market faster. And I think we've just seen in European markets, definitely in Asia Pacific is that the kind of brand loyalty is potentially waning, but what's the kind of loyalty is just to an experience, you know, take a ride hailing app. You know, I get to an airport, I try one ride hailing app. It tells me it's going to be 20 minutes before a taxi arrives. I'm going to go straight to the next app to go and stare. They can do it faster. I want the experience. I don't necessarily want the brand. And we're find that the digital experience by putting data, the forefront of that is really accelerating and actually really encouraging, you know, France, Germany are actually ahead of UK. Let's look, listen, their attitudes and adoption to data. And for our American audience and America, America is more likely, I think it's 72% more likely to have a chief innovation officer than the rest of the world. I think I'm about 64% in EMEA. So America, you are still slightly ahead of us in terms of kind of bringing some of that innovation that. >> I imagine that gap is going to be shrinking though I would think. >> It is massively shrinking. >> So before we, we, we, we are just a little tight on time, but I want to hear about operational resilience and, and just your, your thought that definition, you know, define that for me a little bit, you know, put a little more meat on that bone, if you would, and talk about why, you know, what that is in, in your thinking today and then why that is so important. >> So I think inputting in, in racing, you know, operational resilience is being able to send some response to what is happening around you with people processing technology, to be able to baseline what your processes are and the services you're providing, and be able to understand when something is not performing as it should be, what we're seeing. Things like European Union, in financial services, or at the digital operational resilience act is starting to mandate that businesses have to be operational in resilient service, monitoring fraud, cyber security, and customer experience. And what we see is really operational resilience is the amount of change that can be absorbed before opportunities become risk. So having a stable foundation of operational resilience allows me to become a more agile business because I know my foundation and people can then move and adjust quickly because I have the awareness of my environment and I have the ability to appropriately react to my environment because I've thought about becoming a resilient business with my digital infrastructure is a theme. I think we're going to see in supply chain coming very soon and across all other industries, as we realize digital is our business. Nowadays. >> What's an exciting world. Isn't it, James? That you're, that you're working in right now. >> Oh, I, I love it. You know, you said, you know, eight and an eight and a half years, nine years at Splunk, I'm still smiling. You know, it is like being at the forefront of this diesel wave and being able to help people make action from that. It's an incredible place to be. I, is liberating and yeah, I can't even begin to imagine what's, you know, the opportunities are over the next few years as the world continually evolves. >> Well, every day is a school day, right? >> It is my favorite phrase >> I knew that. >> And it is, James Hodge. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Glad to have you on finally, after being on the other side of the camera, it's great to have you on this side. So thanks for making that transition for us. >> Thank you, John. You bet James Hodge joining us here on the cube coverage of splunk.com 21, talking about McLaren racing team speed and Splunk.

>>Thank you for joining us for accelerate next event. I hope you're enjoying it so far. I know you've heard about the industry challenges the I. T. Trends HP strategy from leaders in the industry and so today what we wanna do is focus on going deep on workload solutions. So in the most important workload solutions, the ones we always get asked about and so today we want to share with you some best practices, some examples of how we've helped other customers and how we can help you. All right with that. I'd like to start our panel now and introduce chris idler, who's the vice president and general manager of the element. Chris has extensive solution expertise, he's led HP solution engineering programs in the past. Welcome chris and Mark Nickerson, who is the Director of product management and his team is responsible for solution offerings, making sure we have the right solutions for our customers. Welcome guys, thanks for joining me. >>Thanks for having us christa. >>Yeah, so I'd like to start off with one of the big ones, the ones that we get asked about all the time, what we've been all been experienced in the last year, remote work, remote education and all the challenges that go along with that. So let's talk a little bit about the challenges that customers have had in transitioning to this remote work and remote education environments. >>Uh So I I really think that there's a couple of things that have stood out for me when we're talking with customers about V. D. I. Um first obviously there was a an unexpected and unprecedented level of interest in that area about a year ago and we all know the reasons why, but what it really uncovered was how little planning had gone into this space around a couple of key dynamics. One is scale. Um it's one thing to say, I'm going to enable V. D. I. For a part of my work force in a pre pandemic environment where the office was still the central hub of activity for work. It's a completely different scale. When you think about okay I'm going to have 50, 60, 80, maybe 100 of my workforce now distributed around the globe. Um Whether that's in an educational environment where now you're trying to accommodate staff and students in virtual learning, Whether that's in the area of things like Formula one racing, where we had the desire to still have events going on. But the need for a lot more social distancing. Not as many people able to be trackside but still needing to have that real time experience. This really manifested in a lot of ways and scale was something that I think a lot of customers hadn't put as much thought into. Initially the other area is around planning for experience a lot of times the V. D. I. Experience was planned out with very specific workloads are very specific applications in mind. And when you take it to a more broad based environment, if we're going to support multiple functions, multiple lines of business, there hasn't been as much planning or investigation that's gone into the application side. And so thinking about how graphically intense some applications are. Uh one customer that comes to mind would be Tyler I. S. D. Who did a fairly large rollout pre pandemic and as part of their big modernization effort, what they uncovered was even just changes in standard Windows applications Had become so much more graphically intense with Windows 10 with the latest updates with programs like Adobe that they were really needing to have an accelerated experience for a much larger percentage of their install base than they had counted on. So, um, in addition to planning for scale, you also need to have that visibility into what are the actual applications that are going to be used by these remote users? How graphically intense those might be. What's the logging experience going to be as well as the operating experience. And so really planning through that experience side as well as the scale and the number of users is kind of really two of the biggest, most important things that I've seen. >>You know, Mark, I'll just jump in real quick. I think you covered that pretty comprehensively there and it was well done. The a couple of observations I've made, one is just that um, V. D. I suddenly become like mission critical for sales. It's the front line, you know, for schools, it's the classroom, you know, that this isn't Uh cost cutting measure or uh optimization in IT. measure anymore. This is about running the business in a way it's a digital transformation. One aspect of about 1000 aspects of what does it mean to completely change how your business does. And I think what that translates to is that there's no margin for error, right? You know, you really need to to deploy this in a way that that performs, that understands what you're trying to use it for. That gives that end user the experience that they expect on their screen or on their handheld device or wherever they might be, whether it's a racetrack classroom or on the other end of a conference call or a boardroom. Right? So what we do in the engineering side of things when it comes to V. D. I. R. Really understand what's a tech worker, What's a knowledge worker? What's the power worker? What's a gP really going to look like? What time of day look like, You know, who's using it in the morning, Who is using it in the evening? When do you power up? When do you power down? Does the system behave? Does it just have the, it works function and what our clients can can get from H. P. E. Is um you know, a worldwide set of experiences that we can apply to, making sure that the solution delivers on its promises. So we're seeing the same thing you are christa, We see it all the time on beady eye and on the way businesses are changing the way they do business. >>Yeah. It's funny because when I talked to customers, you know, one of the things I heard that was a good tip is to roll it out to small groups first so you can really get a good sense of what the experiences before you roll it out to a lot of other people and then the expertise. Um It's not like every other workload that people have done before. So if you're new at it make sure you're getting the right advice expertise so that you're doing it the right way. Okay. One of the other things we've been talking a lot about today is digital transformation and moving to the edge. So now I'd like to shift gears and talk a little bit about how we've helped customers make that shift and this time I'll start with chris. >>All right Hey thanks. Okay so you know it's funny when it comes to edge because um the edge is different for every customer and every client and every single client that I've ever spoken to of. H. P. S. Has an edge somewhere. You know whether just like we were talking about the classroom might be the edge. But I think the industry when we're talking about edges talking about you know the internet of things if you remember that term from not too not too long ago you know and and the fact that everything is getting connected and how do we turn that into um into telemetry? And I think Mark is going to be able to talk through a a couple of examples of clients that we have in things like racing and automotive. But what we're learning about Edge is it's not just how do you make the Edge work? It's how do you integrate the edge into what you're already doing? And nobody's just the edge. Right. And so if it's if it's um ai ml dl there that's one way you want to use the edge. If it's a customer experience point of service, it's another, you know, there's yet another way to use the edge. So, it turns out that having a broad set of expertise like HP does, um, to be able to understand the different workloads that you're trying to tie together, including the ones that are running at the, at the edge. Often it involves really making sure you understand the data pipeline. What information is at the edge? How does it flow to the data center? How does it flow? And then which data center, which private cloud? Which public cloud are you using? Um, I think those are the areas where we, we really sort of shine is that we we understand the interconnectedness of these things. And so, for example, Red Bull, and I know you're going to talk about that in a minute mark, um the racing company, you know, for them the edges, the racetrack and, and you know, milliseconds or partial seconds winning and losing races, but then there's also an edge of um workers that are doing the design for the cars and how do they get quick access? So, um, we have a broad variety of infrastructure form factors and compute form factors to help with the edge. And this is another real advantage we have is that we we know how to put the right piece of equipment with the right software. And we also have great containerized software with our admiral container platform. So we're really becoming um, a perfect platform for hosting edge centric workloads and applications and data processing. Uh, it's uh um all the way down to things like a Superdome flex in the background. If you have some really, really, really big data that needs to be processed and of course our workhorse reliance that can be configured to support almost every combination of workload you have. So I know you started with edge christa but and and we're and we nail the edge with those different form factors, but let's make sure, you know, if you're listening to this, this show right now, um make sure you you don't isolate the edge and make sure they integrated with um with the rest of your operation, Mark, you know, what did I miss? >>Yeah, to that point chris I mean and this kind of actually ties the two things together that we've been talking about here at the Edge has become more critical as we have seen more work moving to the edge as where we do work, changes and evolves. And the edge has also become that much more closer because it has to be that much more connected. Um, to your point talking about where that edge exists, that edge can be a lot of different places. Um, but the one commonality really is that the edge is an area where work still needs to get accomplished. It can't just be a collection point and then everything gets shipped back to a data center back to some other area for the work. It's where the work actually needs to get done. Whether that's edge work in a used case like V. D. I. Or whether that's edge work. In the case of doing real time analytics, you mentioned red bull racing, I'll bring that up. I mean, you talk about uh, an area where time is of the essence, everything about that sport comes down to time. You're talking about wins and losses that are measured as you said in milliseconds. And that applies not just to how performance is happening on the track, but how you're able to adapt and modify the needs of the car, adapt to the evolving conditions on the track itself. And so when you talk about putting together a solution for an edge like that, you're right. It can't just be, here's a product that's going to allow us to collect data, ship it back someplace else and and wait for it to be processed in a couple of days, you have to have the ability to analyze that in real time. When we pull together a solution involving our compute products are storage products or networking products. When we're able to deliver that full package solution at the edge, what you see results like a 50 decrease in processing time to make real time analytic decisions about configurations for the car and adapting to real time test and track conditions. >>Yeah, really great point there. Um, and I really love the example of edge and racing because I mean that is where it all every millisecond counts. Um, and so important to process that at the edge. Now, switching gears just a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about um some examples of how we've helped customers when it comes to business agility and optimizing the workload for maximum outcome for business agility. Let's talk about some things that we've done to help customers with that >>mark, give it a >>shot. >>Uh, So when we, when we think about business agility, what you're really talking about is the ability to implement on the fly to be able to scale up and scale down the ability to adapt to real time changing situations. And I think the last year has been, has been an excellent example of exactly how so many businesses have been forced to do that. Um I think one of the areas that I think we've probably seen the most ability to help with customers in that agility area is around the space of private and hybrid clouds. Um if you take a look at the need that customers have to be able to migrate workloads and migrate data between public cloud environments, app development environments that may be hosted on site or maybe in the cloud, the ability to move out of development and into production and having the agility to then scale those application rollouts up, having the ability to have some of that. Um some of that private cloud flexibility in addition to a public cloud environment is something that is becoming increasingly crucial for a lot of our customers. >>All right, well, we could keep going on and on, but I'll stop it there. Uh, thank you so much Chris and Mark. This has been a great discussion. Thanks for sharing how we help other customers and some tips and advice for approaching these workloads. I thank you all for joining us and remind you to look at the on demand sessions. If you want to double click a little bit more into what we've been covering all day today, you can learn a lot more in those sessions. And I thank you for your time. Thanks for tuning in today.

momentum is gathering [Music] business is evolving more and more quickly moving through one transformation to the next because change never stops it only accelerates this is a world that demands a new kind of compute deployed from edge to core to cloud compute that can outpace the rapidly changing needs of businesses large and small unlocking new insights turning data into outcomes empowering new experiences compute that can scale up or scale down with minimum investment and effort guided by years of expertise protected by 360-degree security served up as a service to let it control own and manage massive workloads that weren't there yesterday and might not be there tomorrow this is the compute power that will drive progress giving your business what you need to be ready for what's next this is the compute power of hpe delivering your foundation for digital transformation welcome to accelerating next thank you so much for joining us today we have a great program we're going to talk tech with experts we'll be diving into the changing economics of our industry and how to think about the next phase of your digital transformation now very importantly we're also going to talk about how to optimize workloads from edge to exascale with full security and automation all coming to you as a service and with me to kick things off is neil mcdonald who's the gm of compute at hpe neil always a pleasure great to have you on it's great to see you dave now of course when we spoke a year ago you know we had hoped by this time we'd be face to face but you know here we are again you know this pandemic it's obviously affected businesses and people in in so many ways that we could never have imagined but in the reality is in reality tech companies have literally saved the day let's start off how is hpe contributing to helping your customers navigate through things that are so rapidly shifting in the marketplace well dave it's nice to be speaking to you again and i look forward to being able to do this in person some point the pandemic has really accelerated the need for transformation in businesses of all sizes more than three-quarters of cios report that the crisis has forced them to accelerate their strategic agendas organizations that were already transforming or having to transform faster and organizations that weren't on that journey yet are having to rapidly develop and execute a plan to adapt to this new reality our customers are on this journey and they need a partner for not just the compute technology but also the expertise and economics that they need for that digital transformation and for us this is all about unmatched optimization for workloads from the edge to the enterprise to exascale with 360 degree security and the intelligent automation all available in that as a service experience well you know as you well know it's a challenge to manage through any transformation let alone having to set up remote workers overnight securing them resetting budget priorities what are some of the barriers that you see customers are working hard to overcome simply per the organizations that we talk with are challenged in three areas they need the financial capacity to actually execute a transformation they need the access to the resource and the expertise needed to successfully deliver on a transformation and they have to find the way to match their investments with the revenues for the new services that they're putting in place to service their customers in this environment you know we have a data partner called etr enterprise technology research and the spending data that we see from them is it's quite dramatic i mean last year we saw a contraction of roughly five percent of in terms of i.t spending budgets etc and this year we're seeing a pretty significant rebound maybe a six to seven percent growth range is the prediction the challenge we see is organizations have to they've got to iterate on that i call it the forced march to digital transformation and yet they also have to balance their investments for example at the corporate headquarters which have kind of been neglected is there any help in sight for the customers that are trying to reduce their spend and also take advantage of their investment capacity i think you're right many businesses are understandably reluctant to loosen the purse strings right now given all of the uncertainty and often a digital transformation is viewed as a massive upfront investment that will pay off in the long term and that can be a real challenge in an environment like this but it doesn't need to be we work through hpe financial services to help our customers create the investment capacity to accelerate the transformation often by leveraging assets they already have and helping them monetize them in order to free up the capacity to accelerate what's next for their infrastructure and for their business so can we drill into that i wonder if we could add some specifics i mean how do you ensure a successful outcome what are you really paying attention to as those sort of markers for success well when you think about the journey that an organization is going through it's tough to be able to run the business and transform at the same time and one of the constraints is having the people with enough bandwidth and enough expertise to be able to do both so we're addressing that in two ways for our customers one is by helping them confidently deploy new solutions which we have engineered leveraging decades of expertise and experience in engineering to deliver those workload optimized portfolios that take the risk and the complexity out of assembling some of these solutions and give them a pre-packaged validated supported solution intact that simplifies that work for them but in other cases we can enhance our customers bandwidth by bringing them hpe point next experts with all of the capabilities we have to help them plan deliver and support these i.t projects and transformations organizations can get on a faster track of modernization getting greater insight and control as they do it we're a trusted partner to get the most for a business that's on this journey in making these critical compute investments to underpin the transformations and whether that's planning to optimizing to safe retirement at the end of life we can bring that expertise to bayer to help amplify what our customers already have in-house and help them accelerate and succeed in executing these transformations thank you for that neil so let's talk about some of the other changes that customers are seeing and the cloud has obviously forced customers and their suppliers to really rethink how technology is packaged how it's consumed how it's priced i mean there's no doubt in that to take green lake it's obviously a leading example of a pay as pay-as-you-scale infrastructure model and it could be applied on-prem or hybrid can you maybe give us a sense as to where you are today with green lake well it's really exciting you know from our first pay-as-you-go offering back in 2006 15 years ago to the introduction of green lake hpe has really been paving the way on consumption-based services through innovation and partnership to help meet the exact needs of our customers hpe green lake provides an experience that's the best of both worlds a simple pay-per-use technology model with the risk management of data that's under our customers direct control and it lets customers shift to everything as a service in order to free up capital and avoid that upfront expense that we talked about they can do this anywhere at any scale or any size and really hpe green lake is the cloud that comes to you like that so we've touched a little bit on how customers can maybe overcome some of the barriers to transformation what about the nature of transformations themselves i mean historically there was a lot of lip service paid to digital and and there's a lot of complacency frankly but you know that covered wrecking ball meme that so well describes that if you're not a digital business essentially you're going to be out of business so neil as things have evolved how is hpe addressed the new requirements well the new requirements are really about what customers are trying to achieve and four very common themes that we see are enabling the productivity of a remote workforce that was never really part of the plan for many organizations being able to develop and deliver new apps and services in order to service customers in a different way or drive new revenue streams being able to get insights from data so that in these tough times they can optimize their business more thoroughly and then finally think about the efficiency of an agile hybrid private cloud infrastructure especially one that now has to integrate the edge and we're really thrilled to be helping our customers accelerate all of these and more with hpe compute i want to double click on that remote workforce productivity i mean again the surveys that we see 46 percent of the cios say that productivity improved with the whole work from home remote work trend and on average those improvements were in the four percent range which is absolutely enormous i mean when you think about that how does hpe specifically you know help here what do you guys do well every organization in the world has had to adapt to a different style of working and with more remote workers than they had before and for many organizations that's going to become the new normal even post pandemic many it shops are not well equipped for the infrastructure to provide that experience because if all your workers are remote the resiliency of that infrastructure the latencies of that infrastructure the reliability of are all incredibly important so we provide comprehensive solutions expertise and as a service options that support that remote work through virtual desktop infrastructure or vdi so that our customers can support that new normal of virtual engagements online everything across industries wherever they are and that's just one example of many of the workload optimized solutions that we're providing for our customers is about taking out the guesswork and the uncertainty in delivering on these changes that they have to deploy as part of their transformation and we can deliver that range of workload optimized solutions across all of these different use cases because of our broad range of innovation in compute platforms that span from the ruggedized edge to the data center all the way up to exascale and hpc i mean that's key if you're trying to affect the digital transformation and you don't have to fine-tune you know be basically build your own optimized solutions if i can buy that rather than having to build it and rely on your r d you know that's key what else is hpe doing you know to deliver things new apps new services you know your microservices containers the whole developer trend what's going on there well that's really key because organizations are all seeking to evolve their mix of business and bring new services and new capabilities new ways to reach their customers new way to reach their employees new ways to interact in their ecosystem all digitally and that means app development and many organizations of course are embracing container technology to do that today so with the hpe container platform our customers can realize that agility and efficiency that comes with containerization and use it to provide insights to their data more and more that data of course is being machine generated or generated at the edge or the near edge and it can be a real challenge to manage that data holistically and not have silos and islands an hpe esmerald data fabric speeds the agility and access to data with a unified platform that can span across the data centers multiple clouds and even the edge and that enables data analytics that can create insights powering a data-driven production-oriented cloud-enabled analytics and ai available anytime anywhere in any scale and it's really exciting to see the kind of impact that that can have in helping businesses optimize their operations in these challenging times you got to go where the data is and the data is distributed it's decentralized so i i i like the esmerel of vision and execution there so that all sounds good but with digital transformation you get you're going to see more compute in in hybrid's deployments you mentioned edge so the surface area it's like the universe it's it's ever-expanding you mentioned you know remote work and work from home before so i'm curious where are you investing your resources from a cyber security perspective what can we count on from hpe there well you can count on continued leadership from hpe as the world's most secure industry standard server portfolio we provide an enhanced and holistic 360 degree view to security that begins in the manufacturing supply chain and concludes with a safeguarded end-of-life decommissioning and of course we've long set the bar for security with our work on silicon root of trust and we're extending that to the application tier but in addition to the security customers that are building this modern hybrid are private cloud including the integration of the edge need other elements too they need an intelligent software-defined control plane so that they can automate their compute fleets from all the way at the edge to the core and while scale and automation enable efficiency all private cloud infrastructures are competing with web scale economics and that's why we're democratizing web scale technologies like pinsando to bring web scale economics and web scale architecture to the private cloud our partners are so important in helping us serve our customers needs yeah i mean hp has really upped its ecosystem game since the the middle of last decade when when you guys reorganized it you became like even more partner friendly so maybe give us a preview of what's coming next in that regard from today's event well dave we're really excited to have hp's ceo antonio neri speaking with pat gelsinger from intel and later lisa sue from amd and later i'll have the chance to catch up with john chambers the founder and ceo of jc2 ventures to discuss the state of the market today yeah i'm jealous you guys had some good interviews coming up neil thanks so much for joining us today on the virtual cube you've really shared a lot of great insight how hpe is partnering with customers it's it's always great to catch up with you hopefully we can do so face to face you know sooner rather than later well i look forward to that and uh you know no doubt our world has changed and we're here to help our customers and partners with the technology the expertise and the economics they need for these digital transformations and we're going to bring them unmatched workload optimization from the edge to exascale with that 360 degree security with the intelligent automation and we're going to deliver it all as an as a service experience we're really excited to be helping our customers accelerate what's next for their businesses and it's been really great talking with you today about that dave thanks for having me you're very welcome it's been super neal and i actually you know i had the opportunity to speak with some of your customers about their digital transformation and the role of that hpe plays there so let's dive right in we're here on the cube covering hpe accelerating next and with me is rule siestermans who is the head of it at the netherlands cancer institute also known as nki welcome rule thank you very much great to be here hey what can you tell us about the netherlands cancer institute maybe you could talk about your core principles and and also if you could weave in your specific areas of expertise yeah maybe first introduction to the netherlands institute um we are one of the top 10 comprehensive cancers in the world and what we do is we combine a hospital for treating patients with cancer and a recent institute under one roof so discoveries we do we find within the research we can easily bring them back to the clinic and vis-a-versa so we have about 750 researchers and about 3 000 other employees doctors nurses and and my role is to uh to facilitate them at their best with it got it so i mean everybody talks about digital digital transformation to us it all comes down to data so i'm curious how you collect and take advantage of medical data specifically to support nki's goals maybe some of the challenges that your organization faces with the amount of data the speed of data coming in just you know the the complexities of data how do you handle that yeah it's uh it's it's it's challenge and uh yeah what we we have we have a really a large amount of data so we produce uh terabytes a day and we we have stored now more than one petabyte on data at this moment and yeah it's uh the challenge is to to reuse the data optimal for research and to share it with other institutions so that needs to have a flexible infrastructure for that so a fast really fast network uh big data storage environment but the real challenge is not not so much the i.t bus is more the quality of the data so we have a lot of medical systems all producing those data and how do we combine them and and yeah get the data fair so findable accessible interoperable and reusable uh for research uh purposes so i think that's the main challenge the quality of the data yeah very common themes that we hear from from other customers i wonder if you could paint a picture of your environment and maybe you can share where hpe solutions fit in what what value they bring to your organization's mission yeah i think it brings a lot of flexibility so what we did with hpe is that we we developed a software-defined data center and then a virtual workplace for our researchers and doctors and that's based on the hpe infrastructure and what we wanted to build is something that expect the needs of doctors and nurses but also the researchers and the two kind of different blood groups blood groups and with different needs so uh but we wanted to create one infrastructure because we wanted to make the connection between the hospital and the research that's that's more important so um hpe helped helped us not only with the the infrastructure itself but also designing the whole architecture of it and for example what we did is we we bought a lot of hardware and and and the hardware is really uh doing his his job between nine till five uh dennis everything is working within everyone is working within the institution but all the other time in evening and and nights hours and also the redundant environment we have for the for our healthcare uh that doesn't do nothing of much more or less uh in in those uh dark hours so what we created together with nvidia and hpe and vmware is that we we call it video by day compute by night so we reuse those those servers and those gpu capacity for computational research jobs within the research that's you mentioned flexibility for this genius and and so we're talking you said you know a lot of hard ways they're probably proliant i think synergy aruba networking is in there how are you using this environment actually the question really is when you think about nki's digital transformation i mean is this sort of the fundamental platform that you're using is it a maybe you could describe that yeah it's it's the fundamental platform to to to work on and and and what we see is that we have we have now everything in place for it but the real challenge is is the next steps we are in so we have a a software defined data center we are cloud ready so the next steps is to to make the connection to the cloud to to give more automation to our researchers so they don't have to wait a couple of weeks for it to do it but they can do it themselves with a couple of clicks so i think the basic is we are really flexible and we have a lot of opportunities for automation for example but the next step is uh to create that business value uh really for for our uh employees that's a great story and a very important mission really fascinating stuff thanks for sharing this with our audience today really appreciate your time thank you very much okay this is dave vellante with thecube stay right there for more great content you're watching accelerating next from hpe i'm really glad to have you with us today john i know you stepped out of vacation so thanks very much for joining us neil it's great to be joining you from hawaii and i love the partnership with hpe and the way you're reinventing an industry well you've always excelled john at catching market transitions and there are so many transitions and paradigm shifts happening in the market and tech specifically right now as you see companies rush to accelerate their transformation what do you see as the keys to success well i i think you're seeing actually an acceleration following the covet challenges that all of us faced and i wasn't sure that would happen it's probably at three times the paces before there was a discussion point about how quickly the companies need to go digital uh that's no longer a discussion point almost all companies are moving with tremendous feed on digital and it's the ability as the cloud moves to the edge with compute and security uh at the edge and how you deliver these services to where the majority of applications uh reside are going to determine i think the future of the next generation company leadership and it's the area that neil we're working together on in many many ways so i think it's about innovation it's about the cloud moving to the edge and an architectural play with silicon to speed up that innovation yes we certainly see our customers of all sizes trying to accelerate what's next and get that digital transformation moving even faster as a result of the environment that we're all living in and we're finding that workload focus is really key uh customers in all kinds of different scales are having to adapt and support the remote workforces with vdi and as you say john they're having to deal with the deployment of workloads at the edge with so much data getting generated at the edge and being acted upon at the edge the analytics and the infrastructure to manage that as these processes get digitized and automated is is so important for so many workflows we really believe that the choice of infrastructure partner that underpins those transformations really matters a partner that can help create the financial capacity that can help optimize your environments and enable our customers to focus on supporting their business are all super key to success and you mentioned that in the last year there's been a lot of rapid course correction for all of us a demand for velocity and the ability to deploy resources at scale is more and more needed maybe more than ever what are you hearing customers looking for as they're rolling out their digital transformation efforts well i think they're being realistic that they're going to have to move a lot faster than before and they're also realistic on core versus context they're they're their core capability is not the technology of themselves it's how to deploy it and they're we're looking for partners that can help bring them there together but that can also innovate and very often the leaders who might have been a leader in a prior generation may not be on this next move hence the opportunity for hpe and startups like vinsano to work together as the cloud moves the edge and perhaps really balance or even challenge some of the big big incumbents in this category as well as partners uniquely with our joint customers on how do we achieve their business goals tell me a little bit more about how you move from this being a technology positioning for hpe to literally helping your customers achieve their outcomes they want and and how are you changing hpe in that way well i think when you consider these transformations the infrastructure that you choose to underpin it is incredibly critical our customers need a software-defined management plan that enables them to automate so much of their infrastructure they need to be able to take faster action where the data is and to do all of this in a cloud-like experience where they can deliver their infrastructure as code anywhere from exascale through the enterprise data center to the edge and really critically they have to be able to do this securely which becomes an ever increasing challenge and doing it at the right economics relative to their alternatives and part of the right economics of course includes adopting the best practices from web scale architectures and bringing them to the heart of the enterprise and in our partnership with pensando we're working to enable these new ideas of web scale architecture and fleet management for the enterprise at scale you know what is fun is hpe has an unusual talent from the very beginning in silicon valley of working together with others and creating a win-win innovation approach if you watch what your team has been able to do and i want to say this for everybody listening you work with startups better than any other company i've seen in terms of how you do win win together and pinsando is just the example of that uh this startup which by the way is the ninth time i have done with this team a new generation of products and we're designing that together with hpe in terms of as the cloud moves to the edge how do we get the leverage out of that and produce the results for your customers on this to give the audience appeal for it you're talking with pensano alone in terms of the efficiency versus an amazon amazon web services of an order of magnitude i'm not talking 100 greater i'm talking 10x greater and things from throughput number of connections you do the jitter capability etc and it talks how two companies uniquely who believe in innovation and trust each other and have very similar cultures can work uniquely together on it how do you bring that to life with an hpe how do you get your company to really say let's harvest the advantages of your ecosystem in your advantages of startups well as you say more and more companies are faced with these challenges of hitting the right economics for the infrastructure and we see many enterprises of various sizes trying to come to terms with infrastructures that look a lot more like a service provider that require that software-defined management plane and the automation to deploy at scale and with the work we're doing with pinsando the benefits that we bring in terms of the observability and the telemetry and the encryption and the distributed network functions but also a security architecture that enables that efficiency on the individual nodes is just so key to building a competitive architecture moving forwards for an on-prem private cloud or internal service provider operation and we're really excited about the work we've done to bring that technology across our portfolio and bring that to our customers so that they can achieve those kind of economics and capabilities and go focus on their own transformations rather than building and running the infrastructure themselves artisanally and having to deal with integrating all of that great technology themselves makes tremendous sense you know neil you and i work on a board together et cetera i've watched your summarization skills and i always like to ask the question after you do a quick summary like this what are the three or four takeaways we would like for the audience to get out of our conversation well that's a great question thanks john we believe that customers need a trusted partner to work through these digital transformations that are facing them and confront the challenge of the time that the covet crisis has taken away as you said up front every organization is having to transform and transform more quickly and more digitally and working with a trusted partner with the expertise that only comes from decades of experience is a key enabler for that a partner with the ability to create the financial capacity to transform the workload expertise to get more from the infrastructure and optimize the environment so that you can focus on your own business a partner that can deliver the systems and the security and the automation that makes it easily deployable and manageable anywhere you need them at any scale whether the edge the enterprise data center or all the way up to exascale in high performance computing and can do that all as a service as we can at hpe through hpe green lake enabling our customers most critical workloads it's critical that all of that is underpinned by an ai powered digitally enabled service experience so that our customers can get on with their transformation and running their business instead of dealing with their infrastructure and really only hpe can provide this combination of capabilities and we're excited and committed to helping our customers accelerate what's next for their businesses neil it's fun i i love being your partner and your wingman our values and cultures are so similar thanks for letting me be a part of this discussion today thanks for being with us john it was great having you here oh it's friends for life okay now we're going to dig into the world of video which accounts for most of the data that we store and requires a lot of intense processing capabilities to stream here with me is jim brickmeyer who's the chief marketing and product officer at vlasics jim good to see you good to see you as well so tell us a little bit more about velocity what's your role in this tv streaming world and maybe maybe talk about your ideal customer sure sure so um we're leading provider of carrier great video solutions video streaming solutions and advertising uh technology to service providers around the globe so we primarily sell software-based solutions to uh cable telco wireless providers and broadcasters that are interested in launching their own um video streaming services to consumers yeah so this is this big time you know we're not talking about mom and pop you know a little video outfit but but maybe you can help us understand that and just the sheer scale of of the tv streaming that you're doing maybe relate it to you know the overall internet usage how much traffic are we talking about here yeah sure so uh yeah so our our customers tend to be some of the largest um network service providers around the globe uh and if you look at the uh the video traffic um with respect to the total amount of traffic that that goes through the internet video traffic accounts for about 90 of the total amount of data that uh that traverses the internet so video is uh is a pretty big component of um of how people when they look at internet technologies they look at video streaming technologies uh you know this is where we we focus our energy is in carrying that traffic as efficiently as possible and trying to make sure that from a consumer standpoint we're all consumers of video and uh make sure that the consumer experience is a high quality experience that you don't experience any glitches and that that ultimately if people are paying for that content that they're getting the value that they pay for their for their money uh in their entertainment experience i think people sometimes take it for granted it's like it's like we we all forget about dial up right those days are long gone but the early days of video was so jittery and restarting and and the thing too is that you know when you think about the pandemic and the boom in streaming that that hit you know we all sort of experienced that but the service levels were pretty good i mean how much how much did the pandemic affect traffic what kind of increases did you see and how did that that impact your business yeah sure so uh you know obviously while it was uh tragic to have a pandemic and have people locked down what we found was that when people returned to their homes what they did was they turned on their their television they watched on on their mobile devices and we saw a substantial increase in the amount of video streaming traffic um over service provider networks so what we saw was on the order of 30 to 50 percent increase in the amount of data that was traversing those networks so from a uh you know from an operator's standpoint a lot more traffic a lot more challenging to to go ahead and carry that traffic a lot of work also on our behalf and trying to help operators prepare because we could actually see geographically as the lockdowns happened [Music] certain areas locked down first and we saw that increase so we were able to help operators as as all the lockdowns happened around the world we could help them prepare for that increase in traffic i mean i was joking about dial-up performance again in the early days of the internet if your website got fifty percent more traffic you know suddenly you were you your site was coming down so so that says to me jim that architecturally you guys were prepared for that type of scale so maybe you could paint a picture tell us a little bit about the solutions you're using and how you differentiate yourself in your market to handle that type of scale sure yeah so we so we uh we really are focused on what we call carrier grade solutions which are designed for that massive amount of scale um so we really look at it you know at a very granular level when you look um at the software and and performance capabilities of the software what we're trying to do is get as many streams as possible out of each individual piece of hardware infrastructure so that we can um we can optimize first of all maximize the uh the efficiency of that device make sure that the costs are very low but one of the other challenges is as you get to millions and millions of streams and that's what we're delivering on a daily basis is millions and millions of video streams that you have to be able to scale those platforms out um in an effective in a cost effective way and to make sure that it's highly resilient as well so we don't we don't ever want a consumer to have a circumstance where a network glitch or a server issue or something along those lines causes some sort of uh glitch in their video and so there's a lot of work that we do in the software to make sure that it's a very very seamless uh stream and that we're always delivering at the very highest uh possible bit rate for consumers so that if you've got that giant 4k tv that we're able to present a very high resolution picture uh to those devices and what's the infrastructure look like underneath you you're using hpe solutions where do they fit in yeah that's right yeah so we uh we've had a long-standing partnership with hpe um and we work very closely with them to try to identify the specific types of hardware that are ideal for the the type of applications that we run so we run video streaming applications and video advertising applications targeted kinds of video advertising technologies and when you look at some of these applications they have different types of requirements in some cases it's uh throughput where we're taking a lot of data in and streaming a lot of data out in other cases it's storage where we have to have very high density high performance storage systems in other cases it's i gotta have really high capacity storage but the performance does not need to be quite as uh as high from an io perspective and so we work very closely with hpe on trying to find exactly the right box for the right application and then beyond that also talking with our customers to understand there are different maintenance considerations associated with different types of hardware so we tend to focus on as much as possible if we're going to place servers deep at the edge of the network we will make everything um maintenance free or as maintenance free as we can make it by putting very high performance solid state storage into those servers so that uh we we don't have to physically send people to those sites to uh to do any kind of maintenance so it's a it's a very cooperative relationship that we have with hpe to try to define those boxes great thank you for that so last question um maybe what the future looks like i love watching on my mobile device headphones in no distractions i'm getting better recommendations how do you see the future of tv streaming yeah so i i think the future of tv streaming is going to be a lot more personal right so uh this is what you're starting to see through all of the services that are out there is that most of the video service providers whether they're online providers or they're your traditional kinds of paid tv operators is that they're really focused on the consumer and trying to figure out what is of value to you personally in the past it used to be that services were one size fits all and um and so everybody watched the same program right at the same time and now that's uh that's we have this technology that allows us to deliver different types of content to people on different screens at different times and to advertise to those individuals and to cater to their individual preferences and so using that information that we have about how people watch and and what people's interests are we can create a much more engaging and compelling uh entertainment experience on all of those screens and um and ultimately provide more value to consumers awesome story jim thanks so much for keeping us helping us just keep entertained during the pandemic i really appreciate your time sure thanks all right keep it right there everybody you're watching hpes accelerating next first of all pat congratulations on your new role as intel ceo how are you approaching your new role and what are your top priorities over your first few months thanks antonio for having me it's great to be here with you all today to celebrate the launch of your gen 10 plus portfolio and the long history that our two companies share in deep collaboration to deliver amazing technology to our customers together you know what an exciting time it is to be in this industry technology has never been more important for humanity than it is today everything is becoming digital and driven by what i call the four key superpowers the cloud connectivity artificial intelligence and the intelligent edge they are super powers because each expands the impact of the others and together they are reshaping every aspect of our lives and work in this landscape of rapid digital disruption intel's technology and leadership products are more critical than ever and we are laser focused on bringing to bear the depth and breadth of software silicon and platforms packaging and process with at scale manufacturing to help you and our customers capitalize on these opportunities and fuel their next generation innovations i am incredibly excited about continuing the next chapter of a long partnership between our two companies the acceleration of the edge has been significant over the past year with this next wave of digital transformation we expect growth in the distributed edge and age build out what are you seeing on this front like you said antonio the growth of edge computing and build out is the next key transition in the market telecommunications service providers want to harness the potential of 5g to deliver new services across multiple locations in real time as we start building solutions that will be prevalent in a 5g digital environment we will need a scalable flexible and programmable network some use cases are the massive scale iot solutions more robust consumer devices and solutions ar vr remote health care autonomous robotics and manufacturing environments and ubiquitous smart city solutions intel and hp are partnering to meet this new wave head on for 5g build out and the rise of the distributed enterprise this build out will enable even more growth as businesses can explore how to deliver new experiences and unlock new insights from the new data creation beyond the four walls of traditional data centers and public cloud providers network operators need to significantly increase capacity and throughput without dramatically growing their capital footprint their ability to achieve this is built upon a virtualization foundation an area of intel expertise for example we've collaborated with verizon for many years and they are leading the industry and virtualizing their entire network from the core the edge a massive redesign effort this requires advancements in silicon and power management they expect intel to deliver the new capabilities in our roadmap so ecosystem partners can continue to provide innovative and efficient products with this optimization for hybrid we can jointly provide a strong foundation to take on the growth of data-centric workloads for data analytics and ai to build and deploy models faster to accelerate insights that will deliver additional transformation for organizations of all types the network transformation journey isn't easy we are continuing to unleash the capabilities of 5g and the power of the intelligent edge yeah the combination of the 5g built out and the massive new growth of data at the edge are the key drivers for the age of insight these new market drivers offer incredible new opportunities for our customers i am excited about recent launch of our new gen 10 plus portfolio with intel together we are laser focused on delivering joint innovation for customers that stretches from the edge to x scale how do you see new solutions that this helping our customers solve the toughest challenges today i talked earlier about the superpowers that are driving the rapid acceleration of digital transformation first the proliferation of the hybrid cloud is delivering new levels of efficiency and scale and the growth of the cloud is democratizing high-performance computing opening new frontiers of knowledge and discovery next we see ai and machine learning increasingly infused into every application from the edge to the network to the cloud to create dramatically better insights and the rapid adoption of 5g as i talked about already is fueling new use cases that demand lower latencies and higher bandwidth this in turn is pushing computing to the edge closer to where the data is created and consumed the confluence of these trends is leading to the biggest and fastest build out of computing in human history to keep pace with this rapid digital transformation we recognize that infrastructure has to be built with the flexibility to support a broad set of workloads and that's why over the last several years intel has built an unmatched portfolio to deliver every component of intelligent silicon our customers need to move store and process data from the cpus to fpgas from memory to ssds from ethernet to switch silicon to silicon photonics and software our 3rd gen intel xeon scalable processors and our data centric portfolio deliver new core performance and higher bandwidth providing our customers the capabilities they need to power these critical workloads and we love seeing all the unique ways customers like hpe leverage our technology and solution offerings to create opportunities and solve their most pressing challenges from cloud gaming to blood flow to brain scans to financial market security the opportunities are endless with flexible performance i am proud of the amazing innovation we are bringing to support our customers especially as they respond to new data-centric workloads like ai and analytics that are critical to digital transformation these new requirements create a need for compute that's warlord optimized for performance security ease of use and the economics of business now more than ever compute matters it is the foundation for this next wave of digital transformation by pairing our compute with our software and capabilities from hp green lake we can support our customers as they modernize their apps and data quickly they seamlessly and securely scale them anywhere at any size from edge to x scale but thank you for joining us for accelerating next today i know our audience appreciated hearing your perspective on the market and how we're partnering together to support their digital transformation journey i am incredibly excited about what lies ahead for hp and intel thank you thank you antonio great to be with you today we just compressed about a decade of online commerce progress into about 13 or 14 months so now we're going to look at how one retailer navigated through the pandemic and what the future of their business looks like and with me is alan jensen who's the chief information officer and senior vice president of the sawing group hello alan how are you fine thank you good to see you hey look you know when i look at the 100 year history plus of your company i mean it's marked by transformations and some of them are quite dramatic so you're denmark's largest retailer i wonder if you could share a little bit more about the company its history and and how it continues to improve the customer experience well at the same time keeping costs under control so vital in your business yeah yeah the company founded uh approximately 100 years ago with a department store in in oahu's in in denmark and i think in the 60s we founded the first supermarket in in denmark with the self-service and combined textile and food in in the same store and in beginning 70s we founded the first hyper market in in denmark and then the this calendar came from germany early in in 1980 and we started a discount chain and so we are actually building department store in hyber market info in in supermarket and in in the discount sector and today we are more than 1 500 stores in in three different countries in in denmark poland and germany and especially for the danish market we have a approximately 38 markets here and and is the the leader we have over the last 10 years developed further into online first in non-food and now uh in in food with home delivery with click and collect and we have done some magnetism acquisition in in the convenience with mailbox solutions to our customers and we have today also some restaurant burger chain and and we are running the starbuck in denmark so i can you can see a full plate of different opportunities for our customer in especially denmark it's an awesome story and of course the founder's name is still on the masthead what a great legacy now of course the pandemic is is it's forced many changes quite dramatic including the the behaviors of retail customers maybe you could talk a little bit about how your digital transformation at the sawing group prepared you for this shift in in consumption patterns and any other challenges that that you faced yeah i think uh luckily as for some of the you can say the core it solution in in 19 we just roll out using our computers via direct access so you can work from anywhere whether you are traveling from home and so on we introduced a new agile scrum delivery model and and we just finalized the rolling out teams in in in january february 20 and that was some very strong thing for suddenly moving all our employees from from office to to home and and more or less overnight we succeed uh continuing our work and and for it we have not missed any deadline or task for the business in in 2020 so i think that was pretty awesome to to see and for the business of course the pandemic changed a lot as the change in customer behavior more or less overnight with plus 50 80 on the online solution forced us to do some different priorities so we were looking at the food home delivery uh and and originally expected to start rolling out in in 2022 uh but took a fast decision in april last year to to launch immediately and and we have been developing that uh over the last eight months and has been live for the last three months now in the market so so you can say the pandemic really front loaded some of our strategic actions for for two to three years uh yeah that was very exciting what's that uh saying luck is the byproduct of great planning and preparation so let's talk about when you're in a company with some strong financial situation that you can move immediately with investment when you take such decision then then it's really thrilling yeah right awesome um two-part question talk about how you leverage data to support the solid groups mission and you know drive value for customers and maybe you could talk about some of the challenges you face with just the amount of data the speed of data et cetera yeah i said data is everything when you are in retail as a retailer's detail as you need to monitor your operation down to each store eats department and and if you can say we have challenge that that is that data is just growing rapidly as a year by year it's growing more and more because you are able to be more detailed you're able to capture more data and for a company like ours we need to be updated every morning as a our fully updated sales for all unit department single sku selling in in the stores is updated 3 o'clock in the night and send out to all top management and and our managers all over the company it's actually 8 000 reports going out before six o'clock every day in the morning we have introduced a loyalty program and and you are capturing a lot of data on on customer behavior what is their preferred offers what is their preferred time in the week for buying different things and all these data is now used to to personalize our offers to our cost of value customers so we can be exactly hitting the best time and and convert it to sales data is also now used for what we call intelligent price reductions as a so instead of just reducing prices with 50 if it's uh close to running out of date now the system automatically calculate whether a store has just enough to to finish with full price before end of day or actually have much too much and and need to maybe reduce by 80 before as being able to sell so so these automated [Music] solutions built on data is bringing efficiency into our operation wow you make it sound easy these are non-trivial items so congratulations on that i wonder if we could close hpe was kind enough to introduce us tell us a little bit about the infrastructure the solutions you're using how they differentiate you in the market and i'm interested in you know why hpe what distinguishes them why the choice there yeah as a when when you look out a lot is looking at moving data to the cloud but we we still believe that uh due to performance due to the availability uh more or less on demand we we still don't see the cloud uh strong enough for for for selling group uh capturing all our data we have been quite successfully having one data truth across the whole con company and and having one just one single bi solution and having that huge amount of data i think we have uh one of the 10 largest sub business warehouses in global and but on the other hand we also want to be agile and want to to scale when needed so getting close to a cloud solution we saw it be a green lake as a solution getting close to the cloud but still being on-prem and could deliver uh what we need to to have a fast performance on on data but still in a high quality and and still very secure for us to run great thank you for that and thank alan thanks so much for your for your time really appreciate your your insights and your congratulations on the progress and best of luck in the future thank you all right keep it right there we have tons more content coming you're watching accelerating next from hpe [Music] welcome lisa and thank you for being here with us today antonio it's wonderful to be here with you as always and congratulations on your launch very very exciting for you well thank you lisa and we love this partnership and especially our friendship which has been very special for me for the many many years that we have worked together but i wanted to have a conversation with you today and obviously digital transformation is a key topic so we know the next wave of digital transformation is here being driven by massive amounts of data an increasingly distributed world and a new set of data intensive workloads so how do you see world optimization playing a role in addressing these new requirements yeah no absolutely antonio and i think you know if you look at the depth of our partnership over the last you know four or five years it's really about bringing the best to our customers and you know the truth is we're in this compute mega cycle right now so it's amazing you know when i know when you talk to customers when we talk to customers they all need to do more and and frankly compute is becoming quite specialized so whether you're talking about large enterprises or you're talking about research institutions trying to get to the next phase of uh compute so that workload optimization that we're able to do with our processors your system design and then you know working closely with our software partners is really the next wave of this this compute cycle so thanks lisa you talk about mega cycle so i want to make sure we take a moment to celebrate the launch of our new generation 10 plus compute products with the latest announcement hp now has the broadest amd server portfolio in the industry spanning from the edge to exascale how important is this partnership and the portfolio for our customers well um antonio i'm so excited first of all congratulations on your 19 world records uh with uh milan and gen 10 plus it really is building on you know sort of our you know this is our third generation of partnership with epic and you know you are with me right at the very beginning actually uh if you recall you joined us in austin for our first launch of epic you know four years ago and i think what we've created now is just an incredible portfolio that really does go across um you know all of the uh you know the verticals that are required we've always talked about how do we customize and make things easier for our customers to use together and so i'm very excited about your portfolio very excited about our partnership and more importantly what we can do for our joint customers it's amazing to see 19 world records i think i'm really proud of the work our joint team do every generation raising the bar and that's where you know we we think we have a shared goal of ensuring that customers get the solution the services they need any way they want it and one way we are addressing that need is by offering what we call as a service delivered to hp green lake so let me ask a question what feedback are you hearing from your customers with respect to choice meaning consuming as a service these new solutions yeah now great point i think first of all you know hpe green lake is very very impressive so you know congratulations um to uh to really having that solution and i think we're hearing the same thing from customers and you know the truth is the compute infrastructure is getting more complex and everyone wants to be able to deploy sort of the right compute at the right price point um you know in in terms of also accelerating time to deployment with the right security with the right quality and i think these as a service offerings are going to become more and more important um as we go forward in the compute uh you know capabilities and you know green lake is a leadership product offering and we're very very you know pleased and and honored to be part of it yeah we feel uh lisa we are ahead of the competition and um you know you think about some of our competitors now coming with their own offerings but i think the ability to drive joint innovation is what really differentiate us and that's why we we value the partnership and what we have been doing together on giving the customers choice finally you know i know you and i are both incredibly excited about the joint work we're doing with the us department of energy the oak ridge national laboratory we think about large data sets and you know and the complexity of the analytics we're running but we both are going to deliver the world's first exascale system which is remarkable to me so what this milestone means to you and what type of impact do you think it will make yes antonio i think our work with oak ridge national labs and hpe is just really pushing the envelope on what can be done with computing and if you think about the science that we're going to be able to enable with the first exascale machine i would say there's a tremendous amount of innovation that has already gone in to the machine and we're so excited about delivering it together with hpe and you know we also think uh that the super computing technology that we're developing you know at this broad scale will end up being very very important for um you know enterprise compute as well and so it's really an opportunity to kind of take that bleeding edge and really deploy it over the next few years so super excited about it i think you know you and i have a lot to do over the uh the next few months here but it's an example of the great partnership and and how much we're able to do when we put our teams together um to really create that innovation i couldn't agree more i mean this is uh an incredible milestone for for us for our industry and honestly for the country in many ways and we have many many people working 24x7 to deliver against this mission and it's going to change the future of compute no question about it and then honestly put it to work where we need it the most to advance life science to find cures to improve the way people live and work but lisa thank you again for joining us today and thank you more most importantly for the incredible partnership and and the friendship i really enjoy working with you and your team and together i think we can change this industry once again so thanks for your time today thank you so much antonio and congratulations again to you and the entire hpe team for just a fantastic portfolio launch thank you okay well some pretty big hitters in those keynotes right actually i have to say those are some of my favorite cube alums and i'll add these are some of the execs that are stepping up to change not only our industry but also society and that's pretty cool and of course it's always good to hear from the practitioners the customer discussions have been great so far today now the accelerating next event continues as we move to a round table discussion with krista satrathwaite who's the vice president and gm of hpe core compute and krista is going to share more details on how hpe plans to help customers move ahead with adopting modern workloads as part of their digital transformations krista will be joined by hpe subject matter experts chris idler who's the vp and gm of the element and mark nickerson director of solutions product management as they share customer stories and advice on how to turn strategy into action and realize results within your business thank you for joining us for accelerate next event i hope you're enjoying it so far i know you've heard about the industry challenges the i.t trends hpe strategy from leaders in the industry and so today what we want to do is focus on going deep on workload solutions so in the most important workload solutions the ones we always get asked about and so today we want to share with you some best practices some examples of how we've helped other customers and how we can help you all right with that i'd like to start our panel now and introduce chris idler who's the vice president and general manager of the element chris has extensive uh solution expertise he's led hpe solution engineering programs in the past welcome chris and mark nickerson who is the director of product management and his team is responsible for solution offerings making sure we have the right solutions for our customers welcome guys thanks for joining me thanks for having us krista yeah so i'd like to start off with one of the big ones the ones that we get asked about all the time what we've been all been experienced in the last year remote work remote education and all the challenges that go along with that so let's talk a little bit about the challenges that customers have had in transitioning to this remote work and remote education environment uh so i i really think that there's a couple of things that have stood out for me when we're talking with customers about vdi first obviously there was a an unexpected and unprecedented level of interest in that area about a year ago and we all know the reasons why but what it really uncovered was how little planning had gone into this space around a couple of key dynamics one is scale it's one thing to say i'm going to enable vdi for a part of my workforce in a pre-pandemic environment where the office was still the the central hub of activity for work uh it's a completely different scale when you think about okay i'm going to have 50 60 80 maybe 100 of my workforce now distributed around the globe um whether that's in an educational environment where now you're trying to accommodate staff and students in virtual learning uh whether that's uh in the area of things like uh formula one racing where we had uh the desire to still have events going on but the need for a lot more social distancing not as many people able to be trackside but still needing to have that real-time experience this really manifested in a lot of ways and scale was something that i think a lot of customers hadn't put as much thought into initially the other area is around planning for experience a lot of times the vdi experience was planned out with very specific workloads or very specific applications in mind and when you take it to a more broad-based environment if we're going to support multiple functions multiple lines of business there hasn't been as much planning or investigation that's gone into the application side and so thinking about how graphically intense some applications are one customer that comes to mind would be tyler isd who did a fairly large roll out pre-pandemic and as part of their big modernization effort what they uncovered was even just changes in standard windows applications had become so much more graphically intense with windows 10 with the latest updates with programs like adobe that they were really needing to have an accelerated experience for a much larger percentage of their install base than than they had counted on so in addition to planning for scale you also need to have that visibility into what are the actual applications that are going to be used by these remote users how graphically intense those might be what's the login experience going to be as well as the operating experience and so really planning through that experience side as well as the scale and the number of users uh is is kind of really two of the biggest most important things that i've seen yeah mark i'll i'll just jump in real quick i think you you covered that pretty comprehensively there and and it was well done the couple of observations i've made one is just that um vdi suddenly become like mission critical for sales it's the front line you know for schools it's the classroom you know that this isn't a cost cutting measure or a optimization nit measure anymore this is about running the business in a way it's a digital transformation one aspect of about a thousand aspects of what does it mean to completely change how your business does and i think what that translates to is that there's no margin for error right you really need to deploy this in a way that that performs that understands what you're trying to use it for that gives that end user the experience that they expect on their screen or on their handheld device or wherever they might be whether it's a racetrack classroom or on the other end of a conference call or a boardroom right so what we do in in the engineering side of things when it comes to vdi or really understand what's a tech worker what's a knowledge worker what's a power worker what's a gp really going to look like what's time of day look like you know who's using it in the morning who's using it in the evening when do you power up when do you power down does the system behave does it just have the it works function and what our clients can can get from hpe is um you know a worldwide set of experiences that we can apply to making sure that the solution delivers on its promises so we're seeing the same thing you are krista you know we see it all the time on vdi and on the way businesses are changing the way they do business yeah and it's funny because when i talk to customers you know one of the things i heard that was a good tip is to roll it out to small groups first so you could really get a good sense of what the experience is before you roll it out to a lot of other people and then the expertise it's not like every other workload that people have done before so if you're new at it make sure you're getting the right advice expertise so that you're doing it the right way okay one of the other things we've been talking a lot about today is digital transformation and moving to the edge so now i'd like to shift gears and talk a little bit about how we've helped customers make that shift and this time i'll start with chris all right hey thanks okay so you know it's funny when it comes to edge because um the edge is different for for every customer in every client and every single client that i've ever spoken to of hp's has an edge somewhere you know whether just like we were talking about the classroom might be the edge but but i think the industry when we're talking about edge is talking about you know the internet of things if you remember that term from not to not too long ago you know and and the fact that everything's getting connected and how do we turn that into um into telemetry and and i think mark's going to be able to talk through a couple of examples of clients that we have in things like racing and automotive but what we're learning about edge is it's not just how do you make the edge work it's how do you integrate the edge into what you're already doing and nobody's just the edge right and and so if it's if it's um ai mldl there's that's one way you want to use the edge if it's a customer experience point of service it's another you know there's yet another way to use the edge so it turns out that having a broad set of expertise like hpe does to be able to understand the different workloads that you're trying to tie together including the ones that are running at the at the edge often it involves really making sure you understand the data pipeline you know what information is at the edge how does it flow to the data center how does it flow and then which data center uh which private cloud which public cloud are you using i think those are the areas where where we really sort of shine is that we we understand the interconnectedness of these things and so for example red bull and i know you're going to talk about that in a minute mark um uh the racing company you know for them the the edge is the racetrack and and you know milliseconds or partial seconds winning and losing races but then there's also an edge of um workers that are doing the design for for the cars and how do they get quick access so um we have a broad variety of infrastructure form factors and compute form factors to help with the edge and this is another real advantage we have is that we we know how to put the right piece of equipment with the right software we also have great containerized software with our esmeral container platform so we're really becoming um a perfect platform for hosting edge-centric workloads and applications and data processing yeah it's uh all the way down to things like our superdome flex in the background if you have some really really really big data that needs to be processed and of course our workhorse proliance that can be configured to support almost every um combination of workload you have so i know you started with edge krista but but and we're and we nail the edge with those different form factors but let's make sure you know if you're listening to this this show right now um make sure you you don't isolate the edge and make sure they integrate it with um with the rest of your operation mark you know what did i miss yeah to that point chris i mean and this kind of actually ties the two things together that we've been talking about here but the edge uh has become more critical as we have seen more work moving to the edge as where we do work changes and evolves and the edge has also become that much more closer because it has to be that much more connected um to your point uh talking about where that edge exists that edge can be a lot of different places but the one commonality really is that the edge is is an area where work still needs to get accomplished it can't just be a collection point and then everything gets shipped back to a data center or back to some some other area for the work it's where the work actually needs to get done whether that's edge work in a use case like vdi or whether that's edge work in the case of doing real-time analytics you mentioned red bull racing i'll i'll bring that up i mean you talk about uh an area where time is of the essence everything about that sport comes down to time you're talking about wins and losses that are measured as you said in milliseconds and that applies not just to how performance is happening on the track but how you're able to adapt and modify the needs of the car uh adapt to the evolving conditions on the track itself and so when you talk about putting together a solution for an edge like that you're right it can't just be here's a product that's going to allow us to collect data ship it back someplace else and and wait for it to be processed in a couple of days you have to have the ability to analyze that in real time when we pull together a solution involving our compute products our storage products our networking products when we're able to deliver that full package solution at the edge what you see are results like a 50 decrease in processing time to make real-time analytic decisions about configurations for the car and adapting to to real-time uh test and track conditions yeah really great point there um and i really love the example of edge and racing because i mean that is where it all every millisecond counts um and so important to process that at the edge now switching gears just a little bit let's talk a little bit about some examples of how we've helped customers when it comes to business agility and optimizing their workload for maximum outcome for business agility let's talk about some things that we've done to help customers with that mark yeah give it a shot so when we when we think about business agility what you're really talking about is the ability to to implement on the fly to be able to scale up to scale down the ability to adapt to real time changing situations and i think the last year has been has been an excellent example of exactly how so many businesses have been forced to do that i think one of the areas that that i think we've probably seen the most ability to help with customers in that agility area is around the space of private and hybrid clouds if you take a look at the need that customers have to to be able to migrate workloads and migrate data between public cloud environments app development environments that may be hosted on-site or maybe in the cloud the ability to move out of development and into production and having the agility to then scale those application rollouts up having the ability to have some of that some of that private cloud flexibility in addition to a public cloud environment is something that is becoming increasingly crucial for a lot of our customers all right well i we could keep going on and on but i'll stop it there uh thank you so much uh chris and mark this has been a great discussion thanks for sharing how we helped other customers and some tips and advice for approaching these workloads i thank you all for joining us and remind you to look at the on-demand sessions if you want to double click a little bit more into what we've been covering all day today you can learn a lot more in those sessions and i thank you for your time thanks for tuning in today many thanks to krista chris and mark we really appreciate you joining today to share how hpe is partnering to facilitate new workload adoption of course with your customers on their path to digital transformation now to round out our accelerating next event today we have a series of on-demand sessions available so you can explore more details around every step of that digital transformation from building a solid infrastructure strategy identifying the right compute and software to rounding out your solutions with management and financial support so please navigate to the agenda at the top of the page to take a look at what's available i just want to close by saying that despite the rush to digital during the pandemic most businesses they haven't completed their digital transformations far from it 2020 was more like a forced march than a planful strategy but now you have some time you've adjusted to this new abnormal and we hope the resources that you find at accelerating next will help you on your journey best of luck to you and be well [Music] [Applause] [Music] 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>>live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I. F s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I. F. S. >>Welcome back to Boston, everybody. You're watching The Cube. The leader in live tech coverage is Day one coverage of the I. F s World Conference. Darren Russo's here is the CEO of F S Darren. Thanks for coming back in the Cube. Great TV again. So last year was your first year. He was kind of laid out your vision at the World Conference. How's progress? >>Yeah, Look, it's going incredibly well. We were really focused on how we go from being a pretty fragment of global business to being, you know, an integrated business where we were able to operate. You know, its scale globally in a very homogenous way, where the customer experience was the same, irrespective where they engaged with us. And, you know, we've made a tremendous amount of progress with it, So you know, the business is growing really strongly. Net revenues up 22% year on year. I lost its revenues up 40% year on year are clouds up in the triple digits, so you know it's tough to be critical of how it's going so far. >>That's great, Great. You're growing faster than your peers. I think the stat was you gave us three Ex factory except in the industry would be awesome. Is that means that your primary benchmark do you want? You want to gain share? You want to go faster than the big whales, I presume. I >>think two things One is customer satisfaction, we believe, is the key indicator of long term success. S O. You know, we're the number one ranked European efforts. Salmon gotten appearance sites. That's that is and always will be my number. One metric. Can we be way the number one from a customer satisfaction perspective? And then I believe the revenue stats will follow and you know that's where we are. So certainly, if you look at our our core peers, the big G R P vendors, all of them are flat on. Dhe were growing 20 ships since >>one of the things you mentioned in your Cube interview last year was one of the things that you wanted to focus on was I'll call regional alignment. Paul and I used to work for I D. G. I worked for I. D. C. You were editor in chief of Computer World. We work for a company, had more offices overseas and IBM, and it was really hard to herd the cats. And that was one of the things that you cited. Have you been able to get people generally poor or at the same time? And how has that affected your business? Yeah. Look, I >>think the big challenge before I arrived was that there wasn't really a strategy of global strategy for the business. My face had a way of working and there was a strong culture, but there wasn't really a strategy. And obviously it's difficult to be critical of people when they not following the strategy when there isn't one s o. You know, Step one was really making sure that we had a strategy on DDE that was really about being focused on the five industries that we focused on, focused on three solutions on dhe focused on the six segments of customer, which is half a 1,000,000,000 to 5 billion. So now, globally, you know, irrespective the office that you go to, um anywhere in the world, they're focused on those five industries they focused on those three solutions and they're focused on their customer segments. So it helps me. P. M >>I said during our preview video video this morning that I've been around this industry as long as I f s has, until last year had never even heard of it. Is that just me being clueless? There's something there >>that we were just saying before we started that we're the definitely the biggest software business you've never heard of. Um, and and and that's common, I think, you know, we were There are a couple of factors. One is that the business was very European centric. Andi didn't really engaged in a tremendous amount of marketing and media prison. So, you know, those are elements that, you know, I think we're doing a better job off now, But we have a long way to go. The challenge that we have is that where we compete, we win when we get in and were able to tell our story, and we're able to show the value we win. We just don't get into as many deals as we need to. And that's the challenge we have. >>Yeah, there was a lot of talk this morning about the importance of those five pillars of those five industries. If you're going to become the next S A P, you're gonna have to branch out beyond that. What is your thinking about diversify >>becoming the next? They say he is definitely not my ambition, You know, I think way remain focused on customer satisfaction. And, you know, I think that there's a there's a difference. Whatever it is leading them, it's not customer satisfaction. You worked >>there for four years. >>I worked there for four years. I know. I think the big thing for me is is that we've got to stay focused on their customer voice. They focused on what delivers value for our customers beyond just the rhetoric and hyperbole. You know, I think when you when you listen to a lot of the complexity that our customers are facing today, any customers are facing. Companies are facing increasingly disruptive times, and the tech industry is making life more difficult for them. The more best of breed solutions get both. The more fragments that potential the landscape is, the more complex it becomes for customers if they have to try and figure out. How do we integrate these things and derive value from this highly fragmented landscape? So you know, we're trying to solve that problem. How do we make it easier for customers to challenge in their industry? And that's where this whole for the challenges has check comes from. How do we help him to be disruptive in their industry? Have competitive advantage? >>That seems to be a sort of a fundamentally different thing about your approach, though. Is this focus on those vertical industry's most e r P companies did not do that. Is that something that is core to your values? >>Look, I >>think what we recognize is that as you move to the cloud, you have to drive to standard. That's just the reality of going to the cloud on what's happening for the horizontal E. R B vendors. So the locks of ASAP and Oracle is that they have one e r P solution that fits every industry. So if it's good for health insurance and it's good for a bank, then it's difficult to really get your head around the fact that it could be good for a defense manufacturer, but the functional requirements is simply vastly different on that means that you have to customize them. If you have to customize that, they can go to the cloud. So what we believe is that you have to have this vertical specialization, the five industries that we serve us all. A lot of commonality in the process is that they use. And that's why that vertical strategy is so key to our success. So you won't see us going into financial service is, or health care or retail worth that core application. We may in time in many years to come branch out. That will be a different solutions. >>So your tailor, that app for that module for that industry, Yes, just go deep, deep functionality. You're known for that, but at the same time you're also messaging. You want your customers to be able to tailor this for their environment. So square that circle for me. >>So I think when we talk about a choice and and I think tailoring is the wrong word, we talk about choice. We're talking about choice of deployments on Prem or in the cloud choice of customer choice of partner, rather who they're going to deploy with on Dhe, then The solution is really an industry solution that comes with that functional death. And we don't we don't advocate their customers customized that all. We really don't want them to customize it. What we explain to them in some detail is that the real value comes from adopting the solution for two standard and staying on a vanilla application. Because that vanilla application, you're going to be able to withstand future upgrades, the total cost of ownership gets lower. The processes that are embedded in that application or best of breed at the box. That's what they're intended to do, and that works when you have a vertical application. When you have a horizontal application and you're trying to have a do things that it shouldn't naturally be doing, that becomes company. >>Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that essentially the message ASAP had when it went through? It's hyper growth in the late nineties. I mean, there was a Y two k thing there, too, but ah, lot of the message was around. Do it our way and and then you don't have to get stuck in a rut, >>So I think that when it came out with that generation of application. That certainly was what they had hoped would happen. But what happened in practice is that the system integrators came in and the whole business process reengineering explosion happened on Dhe. That's not how it how it manifested itself. So what you see is, you see, he's very large, monolithic ASAP applications that were customized over in some cases decades, not not. You know, if a customer is deploying for two standard, then they should be able to deploy in a period mission. In weeks, we spoke about our deployment with Racing Point. If one team and going live in 12 weeks, you know, we're a 700 million global business. We deployed a knife s in 24 weeks. You know, if a customer's deploying for two standard, it's measured in weeks. As soon as they start to talk about two years or three years or five years or seven years there, customizing the solution significantly. Yeah, I >>mean, it became just sort of a perpetual upgrade, maintenance and up for the time it had a business impact. But boy, you think a cloud today agility, you know, getting rid of waterfall approaches, Missus. Antithetical to today's Look >>what I don't point fingers here. I think that this just maturity come with experience. The line of business applications you'll see our EMS and your HR solutions have taught people that you can, if you think about this is look at sea. Are Emma's an example? You had Siebel before people would implement stable. They would customize Siebel that would take long implementations. They were highly bespoke applications and then sells. Force came along and just destroyed them, and they destroyed them. Because what people learned very quickly was that there was a really easy to consume, really easy to use application that functionally might be inferior. But the compromises that you'd make from a functionality perspective will weigh, outweighed by their time to value in ease of use. And and the learnings from CR mnh are in procurement. Those line of business applications have now being backed into in the e. R. P >>world. So in terms of capital allocation, you're owned by private equity, which is actually a public company. I'm interested in how you're allocating capital R and D, where you're where your emphasis is. You don't have to you have to do stock buy back, but, you know, describe the P relationship. >>So look, one of my learning's to see survive this is that not all private equity firms or equal they have different strategies are very fortunate to be with Ekiti, who are a growth investor. They're known as a growth investor on dhe, and they buy companies that are strong growth tech firms on dhe. They've been hugely supportive of us investing because they understand that the investment in technology is important. So, you know, just looking at some detail today we invest twice as much in R and D as we did three years ago, just to give you, you know, one data point. So there's a big focus on technology, and the thing is, is that we we have to invest in technology to drive those attributes that are discussed earlier. How do we How do we enable customers to adopt a solution? It's a standard so they can go alive quicker. How do we enable customers to be able to sit down in the front of the application like we do with the mobile phone and intuitively know how to use it? How do we reduce the total cost of ownership through automation. Those are capabilities that you know that they don't come for free. We have to invest in them. So big investments in technology. And >>I think the private equity guys, at least the modern ones, have realized Why should the V. C's have all the fun they realize? Hey, we can actually put some money in tow and the transforming we can have a bigger exit and actually make much better returns than sucking the company drive. Yeah, well, look, I think the other >>thing is is that you know, in public companies, you have the downside off. You know this this courtly metric Ondas quarterly cadence. Andi, you see very compromising decisions being made because you know, people can't afford to miss 1/4. There's no long term planning that's done on dhe. That's fundamentally not the case and the private equity world, you know, not unusual now for four p firms to hold companies for 5678 years on, and that allows you to take a very long term strategic view. If if if a shift from perpetual to subscription is the right thing to happen, they can do that without worrying that, you know, because of the definite earnings are revenue that you're going to get caned by the market next quarter. Andi. I think that that needs to, I think, better decision making for the long term. >>A lot of companies are struggling. >>If you have the right P for because you get bought by the firm of events, you want to go public. But the the you said something this morning that 50% of your customers each year or net knew, How are you pulling that off >>That 50% of our license revenue? Eso way we went about 300 odd new customers a year. Obviously, that's growing, as I said, you know, 40%. But you know, it's ah, I think, having done this for 25 years, there are companies that are or good at extracting revenue from their installed based. One of the analysts here has as a hashtag wallet Fracking is what do you think It's such a great So you know, they're good at Wallick fracking and and I think the customers that that our customers off those vendors know exactly who they are and you know I think that for us to that the fact that we're able to go out and win 50% of our license revenue from net new name customers, I think is a really strong indicator of the health of the business. It's much harder to do than just extracting revenue out of the install base. You know, we don't have a compliance practice. We've never charged a customer for you in direct access. You know, these are principles that we stand by, and it's easier to say that your customer centric on get 80% of your revenue, have your installed base because you're doing compliance rounds. But, you know, we put our money where our mouth is, and that's not that's not how we do it. >>Are these net new customers? Are they? Are they migrating from QuickBooks or they migrating from a Competitors >>know, because of the segment that we're in this half a 1,000,000,000 to 5 billion? I would say the majority of them are what I would call first generation the Rp solution. So you know you're talking about you know, the original generation of Microsoft's acquisitions, the divisions and the eggs actors and the Solomon's and so on on. And then, you know, it's a P R two and our three customers you're talking about customer sitting on, you know, the solutions that in for hoovered up the matrix B picks type customers, ace 400 customers. So they're you know, they're first generation your P solutions that simply don't have the flexibility to deal with the complexity and demands of modern business world. >>From 2009 about 2017 I f. S was pretty inquisitive and then just actually, I was gonna ask you >>when I started, you stopped >>it, right? But then, you know, today you announced an extra small acquisition, But how should we think about M and a >>look? The first year for me was really about trying to build a functional business. You know, we spoke about how fragmented this really hit to Jenna's business. Andi just occurred to me. You know, if we go out and we start to buy things, how do we integrate them into a business that's completely fragments? And you know, it had no identity or culture. So, you know, the last year has been focused on how do we build their common understanding of what it is that we're doing. We now have a very clear strategy. Five industries, three solutions, one segment. And you know, when you when you have that clarity of vision that it's really easy to guard and do him and I because you know what fits and what doesn't fit, you can understand exactly how you're gonna build value for customers on dhe. That's why the S t a deal is so good for us. Because we're now the undisputed leader in field service management, you know, 8000 our customers globally, which is way more than anybody else. Scott, Andi, you know, you should absolutely expect more from us. But it will be in the five industries, three technology segments and one customers. Isaac. >>Well, in the A p I enablement should obviously facility. >>Absolutely. I mean, I was just with a partner of ours now, and they have this amazing augmented reality solution. You know, it will be a combination of off going out there to build market, share a cz well, as finding you know, really innovative solutions that can help us advance the technology that we provide customers. >>You have a new slogan this year for the challengers, which seems to be aimed at companies that that imagine themselves as challenging the Giants, which is great. But if you're not a company that season sees themselves that way. Are the studies level home with I have s Look, >>I I think I was with a group of CEOs from one of the big analyst rooms, and they had the portfolio companies and their private equity firm and analysts that CEOs of the companies are having a conversation with him about digital transformation. And I I made a rather provocative statement which, you know, got unanimous agreement, which is that all of the CEOs there with either in an industry that was being disrupted and we're trying to figure out how they respond to that disruption or they would soon not every job and they all acknowledge that they absolutely fit into that category. In other words, all of them were being disrupted. All of them were facing a challenge. It was kind of like, you know, if it is happening to all of us at a more rapid pace than we have ever had before. So my view is, is that you know if if you're in the room and you're going, you know, if it's might not be for us because we're not a challenger. Yeah, The lights may not be on >>for Long s o double click on that. What role does I s play in terms of digital transformation? >>If I could just hold on there because the thing is, there are leaders in Mama, there challenges. And there are leaders. The leaders typically are gonna go with seif solution. They're gonna go with one of the legacy our peace. So I'm not suggesting that everybody necessarily is a challenger. There are leaders, you know, Nokia was a leader until they weren't because they were complacent. Andi, I think they you know, they didn't run on I office. So, you know, I think there are two segments. There are leaders and there are challenges, and we're there for the ones that are ready to disrupt. Sorry. >>Please clarify that. No. Good. So So get back to it. Sort of digital transformation and disruption. What do you see? Is the role of AARP generally, but specifically I f s. >>Look, I think we digital information. A lot of discussion about it on the stage this morning. I've just touched on it now. I think that it takes very different forms. What most industries are finding is that they're facing a lot of non traditional competition and they're having to innovate around their business models. They can't going to market in the same way as they did before. They're having to innovate because of this non traditional competition. Andi. Understanding your your customer's understanding, your your staff, understanding your supply chain understanding your financials are all critical parts of being able to respond to whatever their changes, and that's where the RP solution comes into it. I think there's an interesting challenge now, which is that as those applications have become more fragmented and you've got more based debris cloud applications Ah, lot of the value often E. R P was that you had this integrated set of applications that you had this one source of the truth andan. Fortunately for many customers today, they don't have that because they've got import all of these best of breed applications and they don't have one source of the truth that multiple invoices made it multiple versions of their customer in the databases. Andi we still stand for a single integrated the r p. So, you know, I think understanding those elements of your businesses key. I was with a customer of ours in Nebraska a short while ago, and they were talking about our existing office customer. They were talking about the steel import duties that were imposed through the trade war with China. And they were saying, Look, that they had been able to respond to that in a way that they had good visibility of the supply chain, who was improved, imposing the tariffs, how they were going to impact them when they were going to impact them. And because they had this integrated Siara AARP. They were able to pass those pricing changes onto their customers, and they survived this. What could have been a cataclysmic event for their business had they not had an integrated your pee? They not being able to have this visibility into the supply chain and the customer base. They may well have gone out of business just because of that one change >>to meet all day and all comes back to the data, putting their putting data at the core of their business. That integrated data pipeline is essentially what they get out of that last question. So thinking about the next 18 to 24 months, what are the milestones that observers should look for? One of the barometers that we should be watching. >>So look, in the next two years, it's it's really about us building incremental scale. We have, ah, four year plan, which I built when I came in. We're halfway through that plan. We've hit all of the metrics and exceeded most the metrics that we had on their plan. It's really continue to focus on the strategy. As I said, we focus on those five industries, continue to build market share, continue to focus on those three solution types and build market share and market dominance on those three solutions. Andi in that segment that I defined before, so no change from a strategy perspective. I think there's really value in the consistency that we bring on on their talk track and, you know, along the way we passed the $1,000,000,000 mark, which we will do, I think, in 2021 organically if we accelerate, some of the money will pass the 1,000,000,000 before, but you know business. The margins continue to expand. We focus on customer satisfaction and, you know, it's a It's a pretty straight, you know, traditional prey book that we have to execute on now. >>Well, congratulations. It's a great playbook, and you're growing very nicely. So love that. Look, we really an honor to the last couple of years. Learn a little bit about the company in your industry. So appreciate meeting you guys. Thank you. All right. And thank you for watching over right back with our next guest. Ready for this short break day Volonte with Paul Gill in. You're watching the Cube from I f s World Conference from Boston 2019 right back.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and this is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of IBM Think 2018, the inaugural event, IBM's consolidated a number of events here, I've been joking there's too many people to count, I think it's between 30 and 40,000 people. Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek is here, she's the president of >> Michelle: Good job. >> Global Marketing, Michelle B-B, for short >> Yes. >> Global Marketing, business solutions at IBM, and John Bobo, who's the managing director of Racing Ops at NASCAR. >> Yes. >> We're going to have, a fun conversation. >> I think it's going to be a fun one. >> Michelle B-B, start us off, why is weather such a hot topic, so important? >> Well, I think as you know we're both about to fly potentially into a snowstorm tonight, I mean weather is a daily habit. 90% of all U.S. adults consume weather on a weekly basis, and at the weather company, which is part of IBM, right, an IBM business, we're helping millions of consumers anticipate, prepare for, and plan, not just in the severe, but also in the every day, do I carry an umbrella, what do I do? We are powering Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, So if you're getting your weather from those applications, you're getting it from us. And on average we're reaching about 225 million consumers, but what's really interesting is while we've got this tremendous consumer business and we're helping those millions of consumers, we're also helping businesses out there, right? So, there isn't a business on the planet, and we'll talk a little bit about NASCAR, that isn't impacted by weather. I would argue that it is incredibly essential to business. There's something like a half a trillion dollars in economic impact from weather alone, every single year here in the U.S. And so most businesses don't yet have a weather strategy, so what's really important is that we help them understand how to take weather insights and turn it into a business advantage. >> Well let's talk about that, how does NASCAR take weather insights and turn it into a business advantage, what are you guys doing, John, with, with weather? >> Oh, it's very important to us, we're 38 weekends a year, we're probably one of the longest seasons in professional sports, we produce over 500 hours of live television just in our top-tier series a year, we're a sport, we're a business, we're an entertainment property, and we're entertaining hundreds of thousands of people live at an event, and then millions of people at home who are watching us over the internet or watching us on television through our broadcast partners. Unlike other racing properties, you know, open-wheeled racing, it's a lot of downforce, they can race in the rain. A 3,500 pound stock car cannot race in the rain, it's highly dangerous, so rain alone is going to have to postpone the event, delay the event, and that's a multi-million dollar decision. And so what we're doing with Weather Channel is we're getting real-time information, hyper-localized models designed around our event within four kilometers of every venue, remember, we're in a different venue every week across the country. Last week we're in the Los Angeles market, next week we're going to be in Martinsville, Virginia. It also provides us a level of consistency, as places we go, and knowing we can pick up the phone and get decision support from the weather desk, and they know us, and they care as much about us as we do, and what we need to do, it's been a big help and a big confidence builder. >> So NASCAR fans are some of the most fanatic fans, a fan of course is short for fanatic, they love the sport, they show up, what happens when, give us the before and after, before you kind of used all this weather data, what was it like before, what was the fan impact, and how is that different now? >> Going back when NASCAR first started getting on television, the solution was we would send people out in cars with payphone money, and they would watch for weather all directions, and then they would call it in, say, "the storm's about ten miles out." Then when it went to the bulky cell phones that were about as big as a bread box, we would give them to them and then they would be in the pullover lane and kind of follow the storm in and call Race Control to let us know. It has three big impacts. First is safety, of the fans and safety of our competitors through every event. The second impact is on the competition itself, whether the grip of the tires, the engine temperature, how the wind is going to affect the aerodynamics of the car, and the third is on the industry. We've got a tremendous industry that travels, and what we're going to have to do to move that industry around by a different day, so we couldn't be more grateful for where we're able to make smarter decisions. >> So how do you guys work together, maybe talk about that. >> Well, so, you know, I think, I think one of the things that John alluded to that's so important is that they do have the most accurate, precise data out there, right, so when we talk about accuracy, a single model, or the best model in the world isn't going to produce the best forecast, it's actually a blend of 162 models, and we take the output of that and we're providing a forecast for anywhere that you are, and it's specific to you and it's weighted differently based on where you are. And then we talk about that precision, which gets down to that four kilometer space that John alluded to that is so incredibly important, because one of the things that we know is that weather is in fact hyper-local, right, if you are within two kilometers of a weather-reporting station, your weather report is going to be 15% more accurate. Now think about that for a minute, analytics perspective, right, when you can get 15% more accuracy, >> Dave: Huge. >> You're going to have a much better output, and so that precision point is important, and then there's the scale. John talks about having 38 race weekends and sanctioning 1,200 races, but also we've got millions of consumers that are asking us for weather data on a daily basis, producing 25 billion forecasts for all of those folks, again, 2.2 billion locations around the world at that half a kilometer resolution. And so what this means is that we're able to give John and his Racing Operations Team the best, most accurate forecast on the planet, and not just the raw data, but the insight, so what we've built, in partnership with Flagship, one of our business partners, is the NASCAR Weather Track, and this is a race operations dashboard that is very specific to NASCAR and the elements that are most important to them. What they need to see right there, visible, and then when they have a question they can call right into a meteorologist who is on-hand 24/7 from the Wednesday leading up to a race all the way till that checkered flag goes down, providing them with any insight, right, so we always have that human intelligence, because while the forecast is great you always want somebody making that important decision that is in fact a multi-million dollar one. >> John, can you take us through the anatomy of how you get from data to insight, I mean you got to, it's amazing application here, you got the edge, you got the cloud, you got your operations center, when do you start, how do you get the data, who analyzes the data, how do you get to decision making? >> Yeah, we're data hogs in every aspect of the sport, whether it's our cars, our events, or even our own operations. We get through Flagship Solutions, and they do a fantastic job through a weather dashboard, the different solutions. We start getting reports on Monday for the week ahead. And so we're tracking it, and in fact it adds some drama to the event, especially as we're looking at the forecast for Martinsville this upcoming weekend. We work closely with our broadcast partners, our track partners, you know, we don't own the venues of where we go, we're the sports league, so we're working with broadcast, we're working with our track venues, and then we're also working with everyone in the industry and all our other official sponsors, and people that come to an event to have a great time. Sometimes we're making those decisions in the event itself, while the race is going on, as things may pop up, pop-up storms, things may change, but whether it's their advice on how to create our policy and be smarter about that, whether it's the real-time data that makes us smarter, or just being able to pick up a phone and discuss the various multi-variables that we see occurring in a situation, what we need to do live, to do, and it's important to us. >> So, has it changed the way, sometimes you might have to cancel an event, obviously, so has it changed the way in which you've made that decision and communicate to your, to your customers, your fans? >> Yeah, absolutely, it's made a lot of us smarter, going into a weekend. You know, weather is something everybody has an opinion about, and so we feel grateful that we can get our opinion from the best place in the country. And then what we do with that is we can either move an event up, we can delay an event, and it helps us make those smarter decisions, and we never like to cancel an event cause it's important to the competition, we may postpone it a day, run a race on a Monday or Tuesday, but you know a 10, 11:00 race on a Monday is not the best viewership for our broadcast partners. So, we're doing everything we can to get the race in that day. >> Yeah so it's got to be a pretty radical condition to cancel a race, but then. >> Yes, yeah. >> So what you'll do is you'll predict, you'll pull out the yellow flag, everybody slows down, and you'll be able to anticipate when you're going to have to do that, is that right, versus having people, you know. >> Right. >> Calling on the block phones? >> Or if we say, let's start the race two hours early, and that's good for the track, it's good for our broadcast partners, and we can get the race in before the bad weather occurs, we're going to do that. >> Okay, and then, so, where are you taking this thing, Michelle, I mean, what is John asking you for, how are you responding, maybe talk about the partnership a little bit. >> Well, you know, yes, so I, you know the good news is that we're a year into this partnership and I think it's been fantastic, and our goal is to continue to provide the best weather insights, and I think what we will be looking at are things like scenario plannings, so as we start to look longer-range, what are some of the things that we can do to better anticipate not just the here and now, but how do we plan for scenarios? We've been looking at severe weather playbooks too, so what is our plan for severe weather that we can share across the organization? And then, you know, I think too, it's understanding potentially how can we create a better fan experience, and how can we get some of this weather insight out to the fans themselves so that they can see what's going to happen with the weather and better prepare. It's, you know, NASCAR is such a tremendous partner for us because they're showcasing the power of these weather insights, but there isn't a business on the planet that isn't impacted, I mean, you know we're working with 140 airlines, we're working with utility companies that need to know how much power is going to be consumed on the grid tomorrow, they don't care as much about a temperature, they want to know how much power is going to be consumed, so when you think about the decisions that these companies have to make, yes the forecast is great and it's important, but it really is what are the insights that I can derive from all of that data that are going to make a big difference? >> Investors. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Airlines. >> Airlines, utility companies, retailers. >> Logistics. >> Logistics, you know, if you think about insurance companies, right, there's a billion dollars in damage every single year from hail. Property damage, and so when you think about these organizations where every single, we just did this great weather study, and I have to get you a copy of it, but the Institute of Business Value at IBM did a weather study and we surveyed a thousand C-level executives, every single one of them said that weather had an impact on at least one revenue metric, every single, 100%. And 93% of them said that if they had better weather insights it would have a positive impact on their business. So we know that weather's important, and what we've got to do is really figure out how we can help companies better harness it, but nobody's doing it better than these guys. >> I want to share a stat that we talked about off-camera. >> Sure. >> 'Cause we all travel, I was telling a story, my daughter got her flight canceled, very frustrating, but I like it because at least you now know you can plan at home, but you had a stat that it's actually improved the situation, can you share that? >> Right, yeah, so nobody likes to have their flights canceled, right, and we know that 70% of all airline delays are due to weather, but one of the things we talked about is, you know, is our flight going to go out? Well airlines are now operating with a greater degree of confidence, and so what they're doing is they trust the forecast more. So they're able to cancel flights sooner, and by doing so, and I know nobody really likes to have their flight canceled, but by doing so, when we know sooner, we're now able to return those airlines to normal operations even faster, and reduce cancellations in total by about 11%. That's huge. And so I think that when you look at the business impact that these weather insights can have across all of these industries, it's just tremendous. >> So if you're a business traveler, you're going to be better off in the long run. >> That's right, I promise. >> So John I have to ask you about the data science, when IBM bought the weather company a big part of the announcement was the number of data scientists that you guys brought to the table. There's an IOT aspect as well, which is very important. But from a data science standpoint, how much do you lean on IBM for the data science, do you bring your own data scientists to the table, how to they collaborate? >> No no, we lean totally on them, this is their expertise. Nobody's going to be better at it in the world than they are, but, you know, we know that at certain times past data may be more predictive, we know that at different times different data sets show different things and they show so much, we want to have cars race, we want to concentrate on officiating a race, putting on the bet entertainment we can for sports fans, it's a joy to look at their data and pick up the phone and not have to figure this out for myself. >> Yeah, great. Well John, Michelle, thanks so much for coming. >> Thank you. >> I'll give you the last word, Michelle, IBM Think, the weather, make a prediction, whatever you like. >> Well, I just have to say, for all of you who are heading home tonight, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, so good luck there. And if you haven't, this is the one thing I have to say, if you haven't had the opportunity to go to a NASCAR race, please do so, it is one of the most exciting experiences around. >> Oh, and I want to mention, I just downloaded this new app. Storm Radar. >> Oh yes, please do. >> Storm radar. So far, I mean I've only checked it out a little bit, but it looks great. Very high ratings, 13,600 people have rated it, it's a five rating, five stars, you should check it out. >> Michelle: I love that. >> Storm Radar. >> John: It is good isn't it. >> And just, just check it out on your app store. >> So, thanks you guys, >> Michelle: Love that. Thank you so much. >> Really appreciate it. And thank you for watching, we'll be right back right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE live from Think 2018. (light jingle)