>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Club next nineteen Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back. Everyone live here in San Francisco, California is the cubes coverage of Google Cloud Next twenty nineteen star Third day of three days of wall to wall coverage. John for a maiko stupid demon devil on things out around the floor. Getting stories, getting scoops. Of course, we're here with Sadeer has Bay. Who's the director of product management? Google Cloud. So great to see you again. Go on Back on last year, I'LL see Big Query was a big product that we love. We thought the fifty many times about database with geek out on the databases. But it's not just about the databases. We talked about this yesterday, all morning on our kickoff. There is going to be database explosion everywhere. Okay, it's not. There's no one database anymore. It's a lot of databases, so that means data in whatever database format document relational, Unstructured. What you want to call it is gonna be coming into analytical tools. Yes, this's really important. It's also complex. Yeah, these be made easier. You guys have made their seers announcements Let's get to the hard news. What's the big news from your group around Big Queria Mail Auto ml Some of the news share >> the news. Perfect, I think not. Just databases are growing, but also applications. There's an explosion off different applications. Every organization is using hundreds of them, right from sales force to work today. So many of them, and so having a centralized place where you can bring all the data together, analyze it and make decisions. It's critical. So in that realm to break the data silos, we have announced a few important things that they went. One is clouded effusion, making it easy for customers to bring in data from different sources on Prum Ices in Cloud so that you can go out and as you bring the data and transform and visually just go out and move the data into Big query for for analysis, the whole idea is the board and have Dragon drop called free environment for customers to easily bring daytime. So we have, like, you know, a lot of customers, just bringing in all the data from their compromise. The system's oracle, my sequel whatever and then moving that into into big Query as they analyze. So that's one big thing. Super excited about it. A lot of attraction, lot of good feedback from our customers that they went. The second thing is Big Query, which is our Cloud Skill Data warehouse. We have customers from few terabytes to hundreds of terabytes with it. Way also have an inline experience for customers, like a data analyst who want to analyze data, Let's say from sales force work, they are from some other tools like that if you want to do that. Three. I have made hundred less connectors to all these different sense applications available to our partners. Like five Grand Super Metrics in Macquarie five four Barrel Box out of the box for two five clicks, >> you'LL be able to cloud but not above, but I guess that's afraid. But it's important. Connectors. Integration points are critical table stakes. Now you guys are making that a table stakes, not an ad on service the paid. You >> just basically go in and do five clicks. You can get the data, and you can use one of the partners connectors for making all the decisions. And also that's there. and we also announced Migration Service to migrate from candidate that shift those things. So just making it easy to get data into recipe so that you can unlock the value of the data is the first thing >> this has become the big story here. From the Cube standpoint on DH student, I've been talking about day all week. Data migration has been a pain in the butt, and it's critical linchpin that some say it could be the tell sign of how well Google Cloud will do in the Enterprise because it's not an easy solution. It's not just, oh, just move stuff over And the prizes have unique requirements. There's all kinds of governance, all kinds of weird deal things going on. So how are you guys making it easy? I guess that's the question. How you gonna make migrating in good for the enterprise? >> I think the one thing I'll tell you just before I had a customer tell me one pain. You have the best highways, but you're on grams to the highway. Is that a challenge? Can you pick that on? I'm like here are afraid. Analogy. Yeah, it's great. And so last year or so we have been focused on making the migration really easy for customers. We know a lot of customers want to move to cloud. And as they moved to cloud, we want to make sure that it's easy drag, drop, click and go for migration. So we're making that >> holding the on ramps basically get to get the data in the big challenge. What's the big learnings? What's the big accomplishment? >> I think the biggest thing has Bean in past. People have to write a lot ofthe court to go ahead and do these kind of activities. Now it is becoming Click and go, make it really cold free environment for customers. Make it highly reliable. And so that's one area. But that's just the first part of the process, right? What customers want is not just to get data into cloud into the query. They want to go out and get a lot of value out off it. And within that context, what we have done is way made some announcements and, uh, in the in that area. One big thing is the B I engine, because he'd be a engine. It's basically an acceleration on top of the query you get, like subsequently, agency response times for interactive dash boarding, interactive now reporting. So that's their butt in with that. What we're also announced is connected sheets, so connected sheets is basically going to give you spreadsheet experience on top ofthe big credit data sets. You can analyze two hundred ten billion rose off data and macquarie directly with drag drop weakened upriver tables again. Do visualizations customers love spreadsheets in general? >> Yeah, City area. I'm glad you brought it out. We run a lot of our business on sheep's way of so many of the pieces there and write if those the highways, we're using our data. You know what's the first step out of the starts? What are some of the big use cases that you see with that? >> So I think Andy, she is a good example of so air. Isha has a lot of their users operational users. You needed to have access to data on DH, so they basically first challenge was they really have ah subsequently agency so that they can actually do interact with access to the data and also be an engine is helping with that. They used their story on top. Off half now Big Quit it, Gordon. Make it accessible. Be engine will vote with all the other partner tooling too. But on the other side, they also needed to have spread sheet like really complex analysis of the business that they can improve operation. Last year we announced they have saved almost five to ten percent on operational costs, and in the airline, that's pretty massive. So basically they were able to go out and use our connective sheets experience. They have bean early Alfa customer to go out and use it to go in and analyse the business, optimize it and also so that's what customers are able to do with connected sheets. Take massive amounts of data off the business and analyze it and make better. How >> do we use that? So, for a cost, pretend way want to be a customer? We have so many tweets and data points from our media. I think fifty million people are in our kind of Twitter network that we've thought indexed over the years I tried to download on the C S V. It's horrible. So we use sheets, but also this They've had limitations on the han that client. So do we just go to Big Query? How would we work >> that you can use data fusion with you? Clicks move later into Big Query wants you now have it in big query in sheets. You will have an option from data connectors Macquarie. And once you go there, if you're in extended al far, you should get infection. Alfa. And then when you click on that, it will allow you to pick any table in bickering. And once you link the sheets to be query table, it's literally the spreadsheet is a >> run in >> front and got through the whole big query. So when you're doing a favour tables when you're saying Hey, aggregate, by this and all, it actually is internally calling big credit to do those activities. So you remove the barrier off doing something in the in the presentation layer and move that to the engine that actually can do the lot skill. >> Is this shipping? Now you mention it. Extended beta. What's the product? >> It's an extended out far for connected sheets. Okay, so it's like we're working with few customers early on board and >> make sure guys doing lighthouse accounts classic classic Early. >> If customers are already G sweet customer, we would love to get get >> more criteria on the connected sheets of Alfa sending bait after Now What's what's the criteria? >> I think nothing. If customers are ready to go ahead and give us feedback, that's what we care of. Okay, so you want to start with, like, twenty twenty five customers and then expanded over this year and expand it, >> maybe making available to people watching. Let us let us know what the hell what do they go? >> Throw it to me and then I can go with that. Folks, >> sit here. One of the other announcements saw this week I'm curious. How it connects into your pieces is a lot of the open source databases and Google offering those service maybe even expand as because we know, as John said in the open there, the proliferation of databases is only gonna increase. >> I think open source way announced lot of partnerships on the databases. Customers need different types of operational databases on. This is a great, great opportunity for us to partner with some of our partners and providing that, and it's not just data basis. We also announced announced Partnership with Confident. I've been working with the confident team for last one place here, working on the relationship, making sure our customers haven't. I believe customers should always have choice. And we have our native service with Cloud pops up. A lot of customers liked after they're familiar with CAFTA. So with our relationship with Khan fluent and what we announced now, customers will get native experience with CAFTA on Jessie P. I'm looking forward to that, making sure our customers are happy and especially in the streaming analytic space where you can get real time streams of data you want to be, Oh, directly analytics on top of it. That is a really high value add for us, So that's great. And so so that's the That's what I'm looking forward to his customers being able to go out and use all of these open source databases as well as messaging systems to go ahead and and do newer scenarios for with us. >> Okay, so you got big Big query. ML was announced in G. A big query also has auto support Auto ml tables. What does that mean? What's going what's going on today? >> So we announced aquarium L at Kew Blast next invader. So we're going Ta be that because PML is basically a sequel interface to creating machine learning models at scale. So if you have all your data and query, you can write two lines ofthe sequel and go ahead and create a model tow with, Let's say, clustering. We announced plastering. Now we announced Matrix factory ization. One great example I will give you is booking dot com booking dot com, one of the largest travel portals in the in the world. They have a challenge where all the hotel rooms have different kinds off criteria which says they have a TV. I have a ll the different things available and their problem was data quality. There was a lot of challenges with the quality of data they were getting. They were able to use clustering algorithm in sequel in Macquarie so that they could say, Hey, what are the anomalies in this data? Sets and identify their hotel rooms. That would say I'm a satellite TV, but no TV available. So those claims direct Lansing stuff. They were easily able to do with a data analyst sequel experience so that's that. >> That's a great example of automation. Yeah, humans would have to come in, clean the data that manually and or write scripts, >> so that's there. But on the other side, we also have, Ah, amazing technology in Auto Emma. So we had our primal table are normal vision off thermal available for customers to use on different technologies. But we realized a lot of problems in enterprise. Customers are structured data problems, So I have attained equerry. I want to be able to go in and use the same technology like neural networks. It will create models on top of that data. So with auto Emel tables, what we're enabling is customers can literally go in auto Emel Table Portal say, Here is a big query table. I want to be able to go out and create a model on. Here is the column that I want to predict from. Based on that data, and just three click a button will create an automated the best model possible. You'LL get really high accuracy with it, and then you will be able to go out and do predictions through an FBI or U can do bulk predictions out and started back into Aquarian also. So that's the whole thing when making machine learning accessible to everyone in the organization. That's our goal on with that, with a better product to exactly it should be in built into the product. >> So we know you've got a lot of great tech. But you also talk to a lot of customers. Wonder if you might have any good, you know, one example toe to really highlight. Thie updates that you >> think booking dot com is a good example. Our scent. Twentieth Century Fox last year shared their experience off how they could do segmentation of customers and target customers based on their past movies, that they're watched and now they could go out and protect. We have customers like News UK. They're doing subscription prediction like which customers are more likely to subscribe to their newspapers. Which ones are trying may turn out s o those He examples off how machine learning is helping customers like basically to go out and target better customers and make better decisions. >> So, do you talk about the ecosystem? Because one of things we were riffing on yesterday and I was giving a monologue, Dave, about we had a little argument, but I was saying that the old way was a lot of people are seeing an opportunity to make more margin as a system integrated or global less I, for instance. So if you're in the ecosystem dealing with Google, there's a margin opportunity because you guys lower the cost and increase the capability on the analytic side. Mention streaming analytics. So there's a business model moneymaking opportunity for partners that have to be kind of figured out. >> I was the >> equation there. Can you share that? Because there's actually an opportunity, because if you don't spend a lot of time analyzing the content from the data, talk aboutthe >> money means that there's a huge opportunity that, like global system integrators, to come in and help our customers. I think the big challenges more than the margin, there is lot of value in data that customers can get out off. There's a lot of interesting insights, not a good decision making they can do, and a lot of customers do need help in ramping up and making sure they can get value out of that. And it's a great opportunity for our global Asai partners and I've been meeting a lot of them at the show to come in and help organizations accelerate the whole process off, getting insights from from their data, making better decisions, do no more machine learning, leverage all of that. And I think there is a huge opportunity for them to come in. Help accelerate. What's the >> play about what some other low hanging fruit opportunities I'LL see that on ramping or the data ingestion is one >> one loving fruit? Yes, I think no hanging is just moving migration. Earlier, he said. Break the data silos. Get the data into DCP. There's a huge opportunity for customers to be like, you know, get a lot of value. By that migration is a huge opportunity. A lot of customers want to move to cloud, then they don't want to invest more and more and infrastructure on them so that they can begin level Is the benefits off loud? And I think helping customers my great migrations is going to be a huge Obviously, we actually announced the migration program also like a weak back also way. We will give training credits to our customers. We will fund some of the initial input, initial investment and migration activities without a side partners and all, so that that should help there. So I think that's one area. And the second area, I would say, is once the data is in the platform getting value out ofit with aquarium in auto ml, how do you help us? It must be done. I think that would be a huge opportunity. >> So you feel good too, dear. But, you know, build an ecosystem. Yeah. You feel good about that? >> Yeah, way feel very strongly about our technology partners, which are like folks like looker like tableau like, uh, talent confluence, tri factor for data prep All of those that partner ecosystem is there great and also the side partner ecosystem but for delivery so that we can provide great service to our customers >> will be given good logos on that slide. I got to say, Try facts and all the other ones were pretty good etcetera. Okay, so what's the top story for you in the show here, besides your crew out on the date aside for your area was a top story. And then generally, in your opinion, what's the most important story here in Google Cloud next. >> I think two things in general. The biggest news, I think, is open source partnership that we have announced. I'm looking forward to that. It's a great thing. It's a good thing both for the organizations as well as us on DH. Then generally, you'LL see lot off examples of enterprise customers betting on us from HSBC ends at bank that was there with mean in the session. They talked about how they're getting value out ofthe outof our data platform in general, it's amazing to see a lot more enterprises adopting and coming here telling their stories, sharing it with force. >> Okay, thanks so much for joining us. Look, you appreciate it. Good to see you again. Congratulations. Perfect fusion ingesting on ramps into the into the superhighway of Big Query Big engine. They're they're large scale data. Whereas I'm Jeffers dipping them in. We'LL stay with you for more coverage after this short break

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018, brought to your by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. (techy music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE live here in Las Vegas for Amazon Web Services, AWS re:Invent 2018, I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, the cohost of theCUBE on this set. There's two sets, and we're getting all the great interviews from the smartest people here in the ecosystem. AWS re:Invent is the industry conference that makes it all happen in the cloud. We're excited to have Lynn Lucas here, CMO of Cohesity, back on theCUBE, CUBE alumni, also the architect of the greatest party of all time. The Cohesity parties, you guys had a great party last night. I tweeted some live footage of it. Got a little bit of backlash on Twitter, but it's okay, you know. >> We don't want that. >> A lot of FOMO. >> Hopefully also the architect of some great marketing here. We're here to get the word out about Cohesity and our news with Amazon, so glad to have you here. Thanks for having me on the set again. >> You guys really hit the formula for parties at events because normally they can be kind of boring. You bring artists in, you have a great venue. You glam it up with green, the color of Cohesity. How's that working out for you guys, what's been the feedback? I was going to say people last night were jamming, great crowd. Tell us what's going on, what's the success look like, what's the vibe? >> Yeah, well it certainly is about appreciating our partners and customers that are here, but really it's all about getting the word out about Cohesity, and you know, I think you know the numbers here were somewhere between 50 and 60,000 people here, crazy, at re:Invent, and we want people to know what Cohesity can do for them in terms of their use of Amazon and making that investment even better and smarter for them, for what we call secondary data, so that was the purpose of the party, thank our customers and partners and get the word out about what we can do. >> As they say in the old marketing cliche, if you've got the sizzle you've got to have the steak. >> Absolutely. >> So, tell me, you've got some great sizzle, great marketing, congratulations, doing a great job. Love working with you and love going to your events. What is the action on the products, like where's the meat on the bone? >> Sure thing, so we had a really important announcement here yesterday extending our partnership with Amazon. We had an extension to some already great, killer features that we have. Three things, so three things you got to know. One, integration without agents to do backup of your cloud native, AWS applications, full failover and fail back to the Amazon cloud and back again for DR, and we also are now offering integration with Snowball, so a lot of customers looking at how they can get more of their data into Amazon, and now we facilitate that and of course give you the indexing that allows that to become searchable and usable for the longer term. >> I want to ask you a question. I saw a presentation this morning at Teresa Carlson's public sector breakfast, packed house, again. She's really doing an amazing job, so shout out to her and her team, but the presentation was from the deputy of the FBI counter terrorism, she talked about all the bad things that have happened and how they tried to catch up and find the bad guys, or gals, and the problem they have is that they have a data crisis, and she said that: "The FBI has a data crisis," and they can't put the puzzle together fast enough because although the data's there, they can't get it out of the databases and there are all these different fragmented systems. This is a problem, how are you guys helping clients fix this fragmentation problem? Is that an area you're solving? What's your vision, or Cohesity's vision, around this notion of how does cloudification solve this speeding up of value around data that's kind of spread out everywhere? >> Yeah, so you hit the nail on the head. We call this mass data fragmentation, and that's the problem that she's talking about. In fact, we just completed a global study of secondary data, and nine out of ten, not surprisingly, of IT organizations around the globe think that this is going to cost them somewhere between 50% and 100% more than what they're currently spending to manage their data, because it's in silos, it's in silos on-premise, but it's also then started to silo inside the cloud, and how Cohesity helps is creating a unified platform, what we call the Data Platform, and spanning the on-premise and the cloud, the multicloud environment, and providing some really unique capabilities to help organizations take that fragmentation and now remove it, bust those silos, put it in one place, give you global search, indexing, and then compression, because we all know how many copies... Excuse me, deduplication, save storage, but then also the removal of copies, because we all know how many copies there are out there. >> So, Cohesity's brand message is you guys keep pounding the frequency, get the brand message out there, is what, what's the brand promise for Cohesity? >> Great question, the brand promise is we are going to end your mass data fragmentation problems and give you web scale simplicity, right? So, why are so many organizations here, right? They love what they see with AWS and that web scale and that hyper scale simplicity, but many companies, right, still have a lot of on-premise systems, and so they're struggling with it. Well, our founder, Mohit Aron, was one of the original developers of the Google file system, knows a little bit about building distributed file systems, and so he's brought that into an affordable platform for the enterprise to give you that scalability across your on-premise, your public cloud, private cloud edge sites. >> And I think that is critical across multiple environments, especially as people are trying to develop across those multiple environments, there really needs to be that consistency for them. Some of the things that I've picked up that I hear about you guys, it's really about user experience. It seems like you care a lot about that. You've got one graphical, you know, interface that you actually use, and it makes, I think, data less scary to folks. I would say the ecosystem, I don't know... You know, I looked at your architecture and I don't know who's not in those boxes, but you make it very clear, you know, in particular, and I think also saving people money, you know, that's going to be critical because everyone is scaling out and they're spending more and more and more, and what they're spending more on is, you know, this vast amount of data that they can't control anymore, and it's, you know, just kind of churning. >> Yeah. >> And we just had this great guy on here and he was talking about, you know, the movie that he did, and he's the one-stop shop, like, IT guy at this company, and he's the... He thinks, he's like, "They saved my life," was what he told us-- >> Yeah. >> About you guys, so-- >> So, I think you hit the nail on the head, it's all about simplicity. I mean, again, in our new study, and I don't think this is going to surprise anyone, but bringing it up to date for 2018, you still have, on average, five to six systems just for backup, up to 15 if you count all secondary, which is files and objects, analytics, test dev, and think about IT trying to manage all of that complexity from a user interface, a procurement, a training enablement. So, we give them that one-stop dashboard simplicity-- >> Yeah. >> And then on top of that build a foundation for the test dev organization, analytics organization to now do more with the data, because it's not enough to just bring, bust those silos and bring the data into one place. We need to do something with that data, right? >> Absolutely, and you know, you guys were talking, before we came on camera, about storytelling, and you know, I look at the story of the cloud. I want to get your perspective on this, and Lauren, feel free to chime in because I think you've got a good input on this. If you look at what the cloud is doing to changing the game, this narrative is changing. Andy Jassy calls it the old guard, other people call it legacy systems. We've all been in a tech industry. We've kind of seen where it's been and where it's going now. More visibility now in where it's going, AI and more automation, all this greatness. The narrative's changing, who's ready, who's prepared, what is the story of the modern cloud era? What is that narrative and how should companies be talking to themselves? What's their self-talk, how do they... What's your thoughts on the story of the modern era? What's actually happening in your mind? >> Well, I think, you know, the narrative is around if you are not cloud-forward, I don't like to call it cloud native because I think that really doesn't speak to so many organizations, so it's about being cloud-forward, and having that mindset, right, that you are going to be thinking about what are the advantages of the AWS cloud for me and my business. How can I use that to gain efficiencies, and that is something that I think really does separate the old guard from the new guard. You know, if I think about Cohesity in that vein, compared to some of the legacy solutions out there, that is what Mohit Aron built in. We're cloud native from the beginning with an S3 interface, but with those interfaces back into the enterprise world so that we can help customers bring that forward, data portability and app portability. >> That's Amazon's mission, they're just forward, forward, forward progress. They're not even looking in the rear view. Although, Andy does look at Oracle, but we have to Oracle, Lauren, what's your take on the storytelling, because I'd love to get your perspective on this, too. I hate to go on a little tangent here, but I think it ties to the Cohesity brand promise. You got developers changing, you got IT experts being devops kind of, you know, culture change there, and you've got the role of opensource communities. This is a new mosh pit of action. What's your-- >> Yeah, I think it's a mosh pit of action, but it's more of a mosh pit of opportunity-- >> Yeah, absolutely. (chuckling) >> If you really want to look at it. You know, you have developers, so you know, in 2003 I was at BEA building developer communities around web servers, and then I actually went, you know, in 2008 I was at Microsoft building the web platform, which was the precursor to Azure, and you know, then skip ahead, you know, 10 years, and this is where we are and this is what we're looking at, and I think that what we've gotten to along that, you know, kind of timeline, is it has to be easy for users. Development has to be easy, it doesn't matter where in the stack people are working, it has to be accessible, people have to be able to learn it or up skill to it very, very quickly, and it's really a new, you know, shape and form that's kind of coming to the table, and as people look to study computer science and things along those lines it will be important, but it will become less important as more companies start to look at the Salesforce model where you literally can become a developer in a week, and things along those lines. >> Right. >> That's what I think the cloud is really bringing to the table. >> It's the new software methodology. Clearly Amazon announcing this cool ground station, satellite as a service, spin up, fly your own drones, whatever you want to do. You don't have to provision a satellite anymore, just turn it on. It's going to empower the edge, because the edge is where conductivity stops. So, if you've got conductivity everywhere, that now means that all data will be coming in even probably more exponentially. This is kind of in your wheelhouse. As you look forward, as you go cloud-forward and IoT edge forward more data's coming. Are you ready for that, what's the vision for you guys, how do you handle all that? >> Well, you know, I think the story about more data, with respect, is old. We all know that, right, you know. What people haven't been able to solve is as it's coming in, how are you going to keep track of it, and is it even feasible to try to put it all in one place, and I think the answer's not really, right? I mean, think about IoT-- >> Yeah. >> And all these edge sites-- >> Yeah. >> And the promise of what's going on, so this vision, which I love, is of a spanning system that gives you that operating model of one platform, but not trying to do the impossible of continually trying to put data all in physically one place, coupled with, I so agree with you, this API-first economy. If you aren't building systems that way, you know, then it really isn't built for the future because who can imagine all of the things that we do with our smartphones, and we like to think of what the Cohesity Data Platform is is the analogy to the smartphone, right? We used to carry the flip phone, the GPS, the music player, the flashlight, that device changed the world, and then we changed it again by using APIs to build new apps on it. Cohesity Data Platform is that same vision. We're going to create that unified operating environment, and then through APIs let companies build on it. >> So, it's a data platform is not so much a category of backup and recovery. It's a benefit, a lot of value there, get a magic quadrant, maybe, written up someday, but you're a data platform. >> Yeah, well I go back to that analogy of the smartphone, right? You know, so we solve, and want to solve and be the world's best at solving some of the toughest problems, and data protection is one of them. Like, I'll speak to one of our other AWS customers that's here, which is Dolby, and Dolby had a massive challenge with their on-premise data center moving their workloads to AWS since 2016, had a fire in their data center and started realizing, "Hey, there's a lot of benefits "to doing more backup in the cloud, "but also doing more archive to the cloud," both from a protection point of a view, as well as a cost saving point of view, and that is, you know, the kind of thing where we're going to solve each of those use cases. Your phone is still great as a phone, but it's also great to order your Uber here, and maybe get you a meal. >> And there's data in there, too, okay. >> Yeah. >> Question, final question for you is competition, a lot of heat in the kitchen with competition. You don't shy away from it, I love that about you. You guys are loud and proud at Cohesity, love that brand. >> Super green. >> Yeah, super green, green light, go, green is money, too. How are you different from competition, why are you winning, what's the advantage? >> Well, let me go back to, I think, a phrase, old guard, new guard. So, I think there's an old guard, and we would clearly separate ourselves from the old legacy solutions that are not hyperconverged and are not web scale, and are not web-first or cloud-forward. There's another group that are looking at, and even some of the old players now, trying to move into the new world, but I think what differentiates Cohesity is three things: A true spanning file system, web scale, that is not focused on just being a better backup. So, you just touched on backup, it's an important workload, but our vision is to consolidate all secondary workloads, so that's backup, yes, but it's also files and objects. It's also then making that data productive for test dev and analytics, and doing that across, again, the edge, the cloud, and on-premise, and that's what makes us different. >> Final, final question, because I always do this because one pops into my head when you're talking, Andy Jassy's going to talk a lot about this tomorrow, because I got a little preview on Monday last week, net new workloads, latency, all these new things. Got some of the announcements trickling out. He's seeing, and a lot of people are, we included agree with him, when you have the kind of compute that's available and the kind of data platforms and the horizontal scalability to cloud, these new net workload will be enabled. AIs been enabled by great compute. AIs been around for decades-- >> Mm-hm. >> And it's got a renaissance with compute. What new net work, net new workloads do you envision Cohesity bumping into or pioneering in the future? >> Well, actually we're going to look to the developer community, honestly, right. I think we have a strong ethos and belief that, you know, we're not the smartest people in the room, so to speak, so let's bring that out to the developers and let them in their companies or in the third parties, the great community that's here, figure out what is the next thing that we can do. When we don't have these fragmented silos of data and we can actually see in its entirety what is available to us, what might be possible? I think it could change the world. >> Developer community's a very key part of it, I would agree. Again, there's hardcore new developers emerging, IT expert developers, opensource community contributors all coming together, all here on theCUBE covering, that's our audience, that's you guys out there. Bringing the best action here at re:Invent. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, here with Lynn Lucas with Cohesity. We'll be back with more live coverage here from the two sets, double barrel shotgun of theCUBE, we call it theCUBE canons. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (techy music)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman. >> For several years now, the analysts at WikiBound have been talking about taking the cloud, the public cloud, operating model, and bringing it to your data, wherever that data lives. Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Welcome to HCI: A Foundation For IT Transformation. We're here with Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, at Dell EMC. Chad, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, glad to be here, good to spend time with you guys. >> So, we talk a lot about, you know, VxRail, speaking of foundations. Give us a quick update. What is it, and what's new with VxRail? >> Okay, well big news in VxRail land, right, we just completed our transition under the 14th generation of Dell Power Edge servers, so this gives us a substantially more powerful platform, a substantially more predictable performance, and a lot more configuration options that make it fit a lot of different workloads that our customers have, so it really makes it prime time for HCI. >> So, where is the power and performance come from? Is that predominantly, kind of, new compute? >> That's a big piece of it. Some of that is software as well, right? vSAN underlies VxRail as a software defined storage layer, and we've seen pretty amazing increases in performance, just from software, from our 13G, to our 14G transition, but when we look at that performance now, on 14G servers, with the Intel Skylake chipset, we're seeing 2x performance over the last generation, and we're seeing latencies that are very, very low. And that has to do with, more and faster memory channels, more threads, overall faster processors, so really off the hook, in terms of the performance that we're seeing. >> Chad, when we look at HCI, it's really about the software layer, often, it gets overlooked, you know, what actually has to happen between the software and that underlying hardware? Are there optimizations, does it matter if I'm using the software, you know, what's optimized for that next generation Intel chip? >> Yeah, it's all about the software, or so our software vendor would say, but we know that when you're treating something as a system, you need that hardware and that software to work together, in perfect unison, as a system, and, you know, we've done a lot in this generation, working with the PowerEdge team to make sure that we have the right hardware, hooks, and design points that are focused on HCI. That goes from things like the devices that we use to boot up, and where we would execute the hypervisor kernel, to network connectivity, and really importantly, to the inband channels that we use to update all of the little pieces of firmware that operate the hardware inside the system, right? You need to be able to treat those as a system, update, lifecycle manage those, all in context of one another, so having direct and deep, meaningful access into that hardware is critically important when you're operating a system like this. >> When we've looked at, kind of, our cloud strategy, in general, it's about the data. We talk about data, it's things like predictability and latency, it's about, kind of, the power of the underlying thing, maybe, give us a little bit more specifics, as to what you're getting in this generation. >> So, the big difference here, above and beyond the performance, which is about 2x what we saw from the last generation, if we look at the same hardware, the same software, running on the two different pieces of hardware, about 100% better. But that's really just part of the story. It's the predictability of latency that's critically important. If you're going to migrate Tier 1 workloads under this infrastructure, you need to ensure that other workloads are not going to disturb that performance. So when we look at this, we look at how the IOs per second increases, and we look at the overall latency. How long does that latency line stay flat, right? So when we look at this generation, we see over 2x the IOPS, but the horizontal line where we look at the response time in latency, it stays flat nine times longer in this generation than in the last. So if you've got that sub-millisecond response time, even at very high IOPS, you can put a lot of different workloads on that same infrastructure, and still get predictable performance. >> I think, the other thing that people don't understand, is that, oh, HCI, it's just like, it's that little LEGO block you build, but it's not just one LEGO block, what have you seen from customers, what's kind of, the portfolio, what are the decisions that they have to make, to kind of, pick the right configuration? >> Sure, so yeah, when you're a kid and you get your first LEGO set, you get a lot of pretty generalized blocks, they're all, you know, square and some are rectangle, but not a lot of variability. When you get up into the big leagues of the LEGO Star Wars set, right, you've got a lot of specialized parts, and you can do really advanced, really cool things. That's really where we're at with HCI right now. If you want to really tune the infrastructure for the workloads that you have, you need a lot of variability in the processors you choose, the amount of memory, the speed of memory, and even the storage. It could be hybrid, some people still choose hybrid HDDs, but even within flash, people will choose SAS or SATA drives depending on the performance and cost benefits that they want to realize. So being able to scale up and down the processors, the memory, different types of storage, is critically important, so you can fit it into those different workloads. Also, a lot more people use this for VDI, and for high end imaging. So the ability to pack these things full of graphical processing units, and still be able to power and cool the things, is critically important. We have a lot of applications in those verticals where there's video processing and these are required. So, we don't just have one model of VxRail, we've got a number of different VxRail models, all of which can scale up, and then of course, HCI can intrinsically scale out. So that lets you really fine-tune it and get to that expert level, in terms of your LEGO building blocks. >> So Chad, a minute ago, you mentioned workloads. So as you're bringing this sort of 14th generation server technology to VxRail, how has it affected workloads, what are you seeing is the sweet spot for workloads? >> So if I were to think back a year, the question that every customer would ask, is how do I know which workload is right for HCI? And a lot of times they even lack the vocabulary and taxonomy to say, okay, that fits, that doesn't fit. What's happened in the meantime though, are the software's gotten so much better, the hardware's gotten so much faster and more predictable, that the question is, well, what workloads are not right for HCI yet? And there are very few that aren't. So, we've seen people generally start off with one workload, right? Maybe it's VDI, maybe it's a database, and then they start to move other, as they get comfortable with it, they move other workloads over to it. Obviously, we've got a big install block, or install base of VxBlock, and Vblock. We see a lot of those customers start to migrate workloads from there onto a layer of HCI. And more and more, those are becoming Tier One workloads. Crate & Barrel is a great example, a great customer of ours. They're moving their point of sale systems onto VxRail. Now for a retailer, your point of sale system, that's about as mission critical as you can possibly get, so they and others now have the confidence to start to move these things over. The only outliers that we see are some of these very big data applications that are hugely write intensive, and we actually usually end up selling a layer of hyper-converge with our Isilon arrays, to store that data, and then put a layer of hyper-converge compute around it, because in some ways, hyper-converged is just a better way to server, if you know what I mean. >> Wondering if you can talk about the business impact, what a customer's seeing, how are they quantifying the value of these systems, share some stories, or color there. >> Sure, it's all about operational expense savings, right? How much more efficiently am I going to be able to operate this infrastructure? It's not so much about capital acquisition costs. So when you look at the typical operational expense savings, and that comes from us doing all the lifecycle management of the hardware, of the software, of the cluster as a system, you see those costs go down. Really good example, is First Credit of British Columbia. Another one of our good customers. Now, they've deployed this, they've seen 30% OPEX savings and they've seen 50% power and space savings. You get a smaller package because you don't have separate storage array, separate servers, but, you also have really, one function that needs to operate your environment and that's the virtual administrator. He or she is the one that really operates everything, you don't have separate storage, separate compute, separate virtualization teams that have to look after the infrastructure. So, that first run is very easy, very fast to deploy, but it's day two through 700 and day 900 where you see that recurring operational expense saving where it really pays off for customers, all the updates and updates and life cycle management. >> Yeah, so Chad you talk about the success and all the customers. What about the customers that haven't looked at kind of the HCI space yet? What are they missing? You know, what do you say to those customers that maybe, you know, aren't sure if the waters right to jump in yet? >> So there's really three ways that you're going to encounter a customer who's going to consider HCI. You're either going to refresh a server, you know, your servers are up for maintenance and you're going to take a look at HCI as the next step in your evolution of your compute strategy. Or you're going to refresh your storage, and you're going to look at hyperconvergence as the next step in the evolution of your storage strategy. Or you've got that one workload that's probably net new and it's going to be, sort of, an isolated case and they need an infrastructure and they need to stand if up fast. That third case is really the one that drove the initial adoption of HCI, I can't tell you how many of our customers started with VDI. I mean, it's so cliched now to talk about VDI as killer app for HCI, but that's how so many people started. Because it's, you know, a very bound, isolated infrastructure and from there they get comfortable with it and they start to bring other workloads onto it. So, if you're thinking about refreshing your servers and if you're thinking about refreshing storage, it's time to kick the tires onto HCI. If you've got a workload that you need to stand up quickly and you don't know how big it's going to be, you know, one, two, three years down the road. It's another opportunity to look at HCI. Because you can start with a very small infrastructure, but you can grow it to a very very large one. >> What if we could talk a little bit about digital transformation, I mean, everybody's talking about digital transformation, and to us, digital transformation is all about how you leverage data and the edges exploding. We've envisioned sort of a three tier data model. You've got the edge, you've got maybe an aggregation point and you bring it back to the cloud. And that cloud can be a public cloud or it can be on-prem. So you've got to have some kind of cloud infrastructure to manage all this data. So where does this fit in the context of transformations and why does hardware matter? >> Yep, well let's go from the end and work back to the beginning. Hardware matters because of form factor, for one. As you start to push compute out to the edge, right, you want form factors that are small, don't consume a lot of power but, you know, still have a lot of processing power and can manipulate that data. Right, the whole internet of things phenomenon that is, creating all this data out at the edge, you know, presents us with a conundrum right? The data itself is not that valuable, the insights that we get from the data are immensely valuable. Bringing all that data back to the core to do something with is not cost effective. So, it's how do we turn the data at the edge into information and then how do we funnel that valuable information back to the core and leave the unvaluable data out where it is. hyper-converge fits really well there because you can have, you know, devices of very small form factors that are very quick to deploy, very easy to manage remotely. At the aggregation point you can have, simply, larger versions of the same thing or more of the same thing. And then finally at the core you can have very large clusters of hyperconverged appliances, like VxRail, to do your processing. Now the key is from an operational perspective you've still got a single pane of glass that manages everything. Right, it's still the same set of tools, it's still the same hardware and software lifecycle management process that happens out at the edge, at the aggregation point and at the core. So again, it comes back to the operational expense of making decisions closer to the data and then managing everything with a consistent set of tools. >> So I wondered if we could also talk about the competition and when Stu and I think about competition in this sphere we look at, first of all this all sort of software defined, everything can moved into software defined. So we see two vectors, one is head to head competition with other software defined suppliers, and the second big competitor is, hey, I'm just going to roll on my own. >> Chad Dunn: Right >> So let's start with the former, why Delium C vs vendor A, B, C or D? >> Sure, sure it really gets down to what your goal is as a customer and we obviously have multiple options within our own portfolio and those perfectly, you know, find solutions for a lot of people. But, you know, number one if you're a VMware user and you want to optimize around the VMware user experience, then VxRail is the way to go. Because we do co-engineer this with Vmware, it's not just a regular partnership, we have engineers and marketing people and product managers at Vmware that functionally role up to our team and so we do behave as one engineering and one product management organization to really optimize the user experience for VMware. Secondly, architecturally from a VCM perspective, this is a service that's baked into the kernal of vSphere. So, in terms of performance and the overhead that it creates on CPU, memory, et cetera. This is the best game in town. We can do more IO more predictably with flatter latency than really any other solution that's on the market in the HCI space. Every other one takes a virtual storage appliance approach where they have something running on top of the hypervisor. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> The very long and circuitous data path, we'll performance test against solutions like that all day long, every day, that doesn't worry us at all. So, if you're a vSphere customer, VMware customer it's the most obvious choice and from a performance perspective you're not giving up anything right? We don't want users to have to sacrifice the storage functionality, the performance, the compute functionality. Just because it's hyper-converge and you scale out doesn't mean you can compromise on any to those axis. >> Okay, what about the guys who like to change their own oil in the car and the spark plugs and tune it up and they want to roll on their own. >> (laughs) It's been a long time since I've been able to work on my own car. So I encounter these kind of customers all the time. It's the build your own crowd and it's what they've been doing for a long time. And it's great, alright, I build my own computers at home and I have my own ESX server that I put together. I can't afford a VxRail. (laughing) There's no employee discount. So I'll tell you a story that will hopefully make sense, my first job when I got into this business, I went to Boston College, my first job and work study was to keep a spreadsheet that had all the MAC addresses and all the IP addresses for every host on the BC network and keep those in sync. >> You're really good at that I bet. >> I was excellent at that. That is not a skill set that is in demand right now. Or really even at that time. But when you think about what it means to take a software defined storage product like VMware vSAN and take an x86 server and put those together. Yes, you're getting to the same destination of running vSphere on a host with software defined storage. You're missing the systemness, right? We go to a lot of trouble to make sure we're managing all of things things in the context of the cluster level. All of the little pieces of firmware, and they're roughly 12 or so pieces of firmware that we have to take care of. From the BIOS to the drive controller firmware, the drives, the boss card, which is our boot media, the iDRAC firmware, the backplane, power supplies. In legacy EMC we spent 30 years building arrays. We had all those same challenges with all the different pieces of firmware and software that all had to function as a system, we did that. And we guaranteed that it would live up to 5/9ths of availability for the customer. That's exactly what we do when we deliver VxRail's hyperconverge. If you want to choose to build those things yourself that's fine if you have the skills and that's how you want to operate your business. The 5/9ths is now on you though. Right, because you're the one responsible for bringing all those parts together. So, yeah it's certainly a valid path for others but, the market is shifting and we see more often than not, people are moving towards a buy approach rather than build. >> You bring up a great point. I remember back in the early days before we even called it HCI, you think about vSAN, oh well is the storage admin going to buy it? Is the virtualization admin going to take that over? What's excited me about this wave is the oh, heres the cool stuff that companies are doing now that they're not spending their time keeping spreadsheets of MAC addresses. >> Chad Dunn: Yeah, yeah exactly. >> What is the kind of, you know, owner of this, look like in your environment? And any cool stories you're hearing from customers transforming their organization. >> By and large the operator is your virtual admin. The person who is at home in vCenter and vROps, you know, maybe even vRA if they're going full infrastructure as a service. That's really the user of this, and the dynamic you mention is similar to what we had with Vblock, right. Customers who went Vblock, who said, I'm going to change my operating model to a virtual administrator versus compute, storage, network. You know, customers who didn't change the operating model were not happy Vblock customers. Ones that did change the model did. And, I'll tell ya a real off script anecdote, recently I was traveling in Europe, and I started playing a game with the sales guy we were traveling with. Because in Europe, very often, they have more of an affinity to putting their logos on the sides of buildings in a lot of European cities. So, as we would go to these different cities and we went from Stockholm all the way down to Rome, to Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You know, we're just spotting VxRail customers, right, whose going to spot the most. And the one really interesting one is we checked into a hotel, you know, late night in Switzerland. Next morning we meet for breakfast and he goes, "Did you spot the rail customer?" I said "Who was it?" We went into the bathroom and they have these, you know, squeeze bottles that have the soap in the shower and it's a cosmetics company and they're located in Germany. And they do, obviously, a ton of business all over Europe, and they had outsourced a lot of their IT because, you know, their core competency is not IT, it's cosmetics. And they now have one guy that looks after all of IT for this company rather than outsource it to two different companies to manage all this and he runs it all on VxRail. So, transformative yes, to that company very transformative. But, at a very small scale, but that pattern sort of repeats itself the higher that you scale. >> Alright we're out of time but where can people go to get more information on this and other products your HTI strategy. >> If I were them I'd go to dellemc.com/hci. >> Excellent, Chad, thanks very much, Stu appreciate you co-hosting with me and check out videos on thecube.net, this and other videos will be up there. Thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman we'll see you next time! (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering AWS reInvent 2017, presented by AWS, intel, and our ecosystem of partners >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Cube here, live in Las Vegas for Amazon web services, AWS annual conference reInvent 2017 and I'm John Furrier here, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of the Cube. We are here for our fifth year in a row as Amazon Web Services continues to go on a thundering pace of product announcements and massive growth and we're here with two live sets, we're growing so much, there's so much action, there's two cubes, double barrel shotgun of innovation and data we're sharing with you, go to SiliconAngle.com, check out all the stories, all the news and we're hear kicking it of with an analysis, getting ready for tomorrow, the big day, today's officially the partner day, Sunday night they had Midnight Madness, the first ever event for Amazon, where they used the March Madness, kind of copied Cube Madness if you follow the Cube and they do a little preview, I'm here with Justin Moore and Keith Townsend, two great analysts in the community, guys and co-host this week at the cube. First of all thanks for co-hosting the Cube this week and thanks for coming by >> It's a pleasure >> Nice being here with my 50,000 closest friends (laughs) >> It's so good to have you guys here, one, the hosting but more importantly more Cloud thinking men but we've been watching this evolution, both when the Amazon start, I know you both have been involved in the game, in the Cloud watching it and participating but watching just like the tipping point, you're starting to see that moment where, people are calling this the Vmware 2008 moment, Where it's like oh my God its kind of gone mainstream but its still got a community, can they keep that alive? Meanwhile everybody is just getting blown away by Amazon, no matter what is being said, they're clearly the leader in Cloud, Microsoft pedaling as fast as they can, cobbling together their legacy Cloud, to try to keep up. Google, a new guard company looking really good with developers but not international, not a lot of things there yet but certainly looking great and then you got everybody else. >> Keith: Is there anybody else, really? >> As Dave Alonzo would say, what horses are on the track? >> Yeah there's lots of smaller players who are calling themselves Cloud, they're much more like, manage service providers and collocation kind of things, its not really Cloud they way you would think of it from the AWS kind of perspective. >> I've been talking to a lot of Fortune 500's lately and all of their internal customers, when they describe what they want, they're describing AWS, Azure and Google compute and everything else is just not even part of the discussion >> Yeah it needs to look like AWS, that's like the bench mark so this is what it is >> Total gold standard, the bell weather, let's talk about Amazon because I was writing a post on Forbes, I posted about kind of, trying to tell the story in a way that was kind of understood by the mainstream, still not really truly understood but they're changing the game, they're just kind of minding their knitting, they're just all steam ahead, you know, why look in the rear view mirror when your top dog? Why do that but the game is changing, they're constantly introducing new stuff, serverless is the hot trend that we've been tracking, you're seeing it here, you're seeing real developer centric, customer centric announcements. Even during the analysts meeting I heard rumblings, we can't even keep up with all the news, it's so massive so just thundering pace of announcements. Where's the innovation? What's Amazon doing now? What do they gotta do to distance themselves from the field? >> It's interesting, I reckon the competitors to Amazon are actually distancing themselves from AWS, they're trying to find their own way of doing things because you cannot AWS AWS >> Keith: Rackspace learned that a couple years ago right? >> Yeah, trying to compete head on, you're gonna lose so then we see Google is pushing really really hard, machine oiling and they are in top systems, a lot of people are using them for that big data and genomics research, Microsoft is all about office 365 and their traditional enterprise applications that all of their customers today, they know and love >> Yeah so Microsoft is doing what Microsoft does, which is taking care of their enterprise customers and I think this is where AWS needs to innovate in and its not maybe a technical innovation more than a operating and sales approach to how they treat enterprise customers. Enterprise customers still I think, are struggling to this date on how to interact with AWS and AWS is still trying to figure out how do they sale and help manage enterprise accounts. >> So let's separate IT because obviously two factors are merging, the CXO which is traditional IT, which we're all familiar with and a new kind of developer model is emerging and I won't say it's developer speeds and fees, developer programs, where developers are shaping the agenda. It used to be CXO's have the cash, they drive everything. Now you got this developer mojo and I can see early signs of a cult here, where all the innovation that's come in the field, is from customers saying screw it, I don't need the big dog telling me, the old guard, the old CIO up there, I'm just gonna go do it, get out of my way, three feet in the Cloud dust, get a prototype up and running. So you guys see that dynamic, with this cultural shift, what's your thoughts? >> Cloud is a state of mind... (laughs) It's a way of operating the business, its not so much about the infrastructure, its not so much about the services that live on top of it, it's how you use them and that way of doing things that the developers like, is that they get to pick and choose their favorite tools from what they think is the best solution and a lot of the time that's been AWS and then they blend them together and they just stitch this system together based on the favorite tools that they have and that just lives in a completely different level of abstraction than what we've seen before. >> And the speed too, I mean that's just changing the game too, right? >> Well you can do that a lot faster than waiting, raise a PO, wait for three months for someone to rack ans stack a whole bunch of gear, wait for everything to clear through purchasing and then you get access to the enterprise, anointed correct thing, so we saw it the same with sales floors, where people would... sales guys would just go with a credit card and just say, yes I'll have some of that, thanks >> It's much more than a credit card, VMware worked their re-Cloud air service a couple years, said, I can take your credit card, build a data center, my son a developer, in college, I gave him that solution, he looked at it, he was like what's a load balancer, why do I need to configure a firewall, I just want to build a application man, I just want to build, I just want to code, and AWS has figured that out, how to get developers back to what they love to do, which is solving problems via code and you see it, even before the start of this show, there's a lot of hoodies and shorts at this conference, compared to the culture that we see at a lot of other and past shows. >> I find it inspirational, so couple key points, so I asked Andy Jassy, an exclusive one on one with him last Monday and I asked him, you know, he was talking and he made a comment to me and I'll tell you the story here, he says, you know, we have a conversation inside Amazon, this is Andy talking about if we were gonna start Amazon all over again, cause he tells the story about the scar tissue and all the pain they went through with S3. He says if we're going to do it all over again, we would use Lambda, and the serverless trend is interesting because now that speaks to your son's objective, I don't need routers, I don't need load balances, I don't need gear... >> What do you mean how many CPUs I need? I don't know >> What's a patch? >> You tell me, alright, yeah >> Load Linux? What's Linux? So, okay if that's the norm, the driver has to be a new programming methodology, not agile, we're talking about compose ability and a level where no one says, oh I need Oracle for that or I need Mongodb for that, there's just data bases. So a whole new things happening where this choice that used to be the religious war between vendor A or B... serverless could change the game on this >> We're just gonna end up with a new religious war I think, it's gonna be, instead of Vim versus Emacs, it's gonna be should I use Amazon Lambda or should I use Google Cloud functions, it's gonna be one of those, which programming language is the best. >> Okay old guard, new guard, it's a term that Jassy uses, I like it because I'm old, so maybe I'm old guard trying to be new guard, old guard means legacy, he's really talking about Oracle, IBM, probably say Microsoft, so move over and put them in that bucket, so new guard players, clearly Amazon, saying they're new guard, but Google's new guard in Cloud, they're not really trying to do anything legacy, they have legacy infrastructure but they're approaching a... a market from a new guard perspective. What's you guys take on old guard, new guard and do you agree with that statement and what do the old guards have to do to be cool with the new school? >> So the Cube has been at almost every major conference, this year, take an example, what some of the old guard is trying to do, NetApp is trying to get into the Cloud conversation. Google has none of that legacy concern of needing to sell boxes, you look at a solution like Kubernetes, Kubernetes has come on and taken over the container orchestration conversation because Google doesn't need to make money off of Kubernetes, they don't need it to sell more boxes, there's a bit of freedom... >> They may have moved some work loads off Amazon, don't you think? >> It's a great way to move work loads out of Amazon, AWS has joined the CNCF because they no longer have a choice in the matter, Kubernetes has won the containers war so because of that, these new school competitors can compete in ways that a HPE, Dell EMC, etc., simply can't. >> Josh I gotta ask you this, I agree with what he's saying, I'll take it one step further, the old guards trying to slow the game down, move the goal post as an expression, they gotta try to slow this freight train down because otherwise it could be less than it does and they have leverage, they've got customers, they have market power, even Oracle I would say is in that category so they gotta kind of slow the game down but is the scale and the unprecedented amount of announcements, the differentiator as more services come on, their thesis here at Amazon, as I release more services faster, more available capability thus more, total address full markets available. Do you buy those two things, slowing down and services being the advantage? >> That's interesting I think it's more of a scatter gun approach in a way, it's like you know, fail fast. So if we throw enough services out there, throw enough stuff at the wall, we'll just find the ones that work and concentrate on those, as someone who tries to keep up with what Amazon is doing and this happens with developers as well. When you release 800 new services in a year, name them all, as a human that's really really difficult to manage. So I think in some ways it's a little bit... >> I've got four kids I can't even name, I get them all confused >> It's a little bit like Microsoft Word, it's got 800 billion different features but for any given customer they're gonna use maybe 10% of them and yet all of them are there because different customers use a different 10%. I think that's a little bit what Amazon is going for, kind of ubiquitous market coverage, as much market as it can possibly get, it's a lot like it's retail strategy, we want to be in everything, where some of the competitors are being a little bit more focused about saying well rather than just being a generic service that covers everything, we're gonna focus on particular areas that we think have enough value in that for it to be worth that time. >> Okay I wanna ask you guys a question about value creation, entrepreneurial, the startups, companies that are trying to go, you kind of see, certainly in Silicon Valley, where I live, startups are getting pummeled, if they were born before 2012, they're really going.6.. they try to go big but they're mostly going home. Barracuda Networks just announced this week that they're gonna go private, private equity's squabbling up all these companies that have pretty good sizeable funding, 100 million dollar invests from Andressen Horowitz, Graylog, Sequoia, big names, folding tent and being acquired which is code words for we can't got public and even big public companies that don't have a Cloud player, kind of retooling. So the question is, are we at a point now where scale and speed of the game is causing some havoc in the market place. >> Well look no further than what's going on in Europe now, the Cube is at HPE reInvent. HPE's discover in Europe and HPE is a completely different company than it was three years ago as a direct result of what Amazon has done in the Cloud space and gobbling up all of these smaller accounts and new opportunity. You mentioned it earlier, HPE is still HPE, HPE is gonna get that interview or session with the CIO, Meg makes the call, someones going to pick up the line. >> Now Antonio >> Yeah, now Antonio But AWS has been changing that story, impacting and taking the air out. HPE chose a interesting approach, get smaller, become more agile, Dell chose the opposite route of getting bigger to compete, we'll see which one plays out, in the meantime 18 billion dollar run rate and no sign of slowing down. >> 18 billion dollar run rate with 40% growth on that bassline is pretty significant, I think they might even be doing better than that next quarter but that speaks to the traction, it's not just startups, those numbers aren't just startups. Airbnb is a big company now but they started out small. We use Amazon, a lot of people use Amazon, they're winning big enterprise deals, why? What do you guys think, what's the reason why? >> You know what... Go a little bit intuitive here, look at VMware on AWS, I've been kind of critical of that solution but it is a easy win, if VMware made the exact same announcement on IBM, the year before at VM world... the Fortune 500's I talk to don't consider that Cloud, the exact same solution and AWS is Cloud, that's the Cloud check box. AWS, they do a much better job at controlling their brand Kleenex but they are the Kleenex, they are the Xerox of Cloud, you don't have Cloud unless you have AWS from a enterprise perspective, that's what Azure, Google Compute, and all the other Cloud providers have to compete against >> First of all those guys are incomplete in their Cloud and that's just on a feature by feature basis, I do agree it's kind of like Outlook or Word, I like Outlook because it's more bloated than Word and less useful but my point is, that's the name of the game, getting functional value creation. So final question for you guys is, as we look at reInvent this week obviously I looked at the industry day yesterday and the board, a lot of Alexa repeats. So you can see what sessions are repeating so that's a indicator of popularity so Alexa's got traction, serverless with Lambda. What do you guys see as the big, so far, early show buzz? >> I'm hearing a lot about containers, containers and like you say, things like Lambda and Alexa, anything that has AI machine learning in it, that's very hot at the moment whether or not it's just hype and the bubble on that will pop in a few years, I personally think that that is mostly hype and hot air but it'll settle down and there'll be some real value in there. That's where I'm seeing the noise. >> So over at the RA, they have the container kind of show, it's a show within a show and I'm hearing similarities with containers but not just containers, to your point, serverless, it was a term that we struggled with a couple years ago, now it's generally accepted, you know what, I can just write code and that code can be executed without regard to infrastructure operations. That has proved to be insanely popular right now. >> Okay final question, I'll start it, we're gonna end this on this last segment, I know I wanna get one more in, that's the buzz. I wanna ask you guys, what tea leaves are you reading, what signals are you looking for? Because remember Amazon is very scripted up right now, you can see them on message, I'm trying to poke holes, and which tea leaves, smelling it, putting my ear, ear to the ground, think about that question, my view is, I'm looking at, is this developer trend a cultural shift and to what extent is that developer traction in terms of mind share and love of the brand, Kleenex, the Cloud, the real Cloud, and how much will that tip the CXO conversation. Where's that power shift? So me, I'm trying to read what the tea leaves are saying, if this developer tipping point happens at this scale, developers could really be in the drivers seat. Not just oh developers are in charge, I'm talking about really making the decisions on all big deployments, that's my tea leaf read. What are you looking at? >> So I'm talking to a lot of vendors, their number one reason for being at AWS, when I say vendors, vendors that we see at traditional infrastructure shows, they're here to talk to new audiences, to that developer audience that you mentioned and what I want to know from them, more than just interest, do these developers have money? One of those challenges that all of these Cloudy type companies have faced is that the developers fall in love with them, Docker is a great example, developers fell in love with Docker, millions of downloads. However that doesn't translate to POs and purchases, do these guys actually have the buying power to see through that initial contact all the way to the sale of the solution. >> Influence the buying decisions and IT, thoughts? >> You made the same comment I think earlier about 2008 VM world, it has a very similar vibe to me here, I'm seeing that this is now the crossover between where it was developers, where it was all hoodies and tracksuits and pink hair, I'm seeing a lot of suits, seeing a lot of money floating around this conference, so I'm starting to think that this is the point where AWS is starting its transition from being the new guard to the old guard, they would love to be IBM, IBM made a lot of money. >> Turning into an old guard is very good financially >> It makes you a lot of money. So I'm looking to see where on that transition are we and how long can AWS maintain that momentum of being a new guard company. >> If they can hold the line on new guard they win everything as long as they could in my opinion. Alright, I'm John Furrier here with Justin Moore and Keith Townsend kicking off the first day of three days of wall to wall coverage here at AWS reInvent, stay tuned for more analysis opinion, commentary, of course go to SiliconANGLE.com for all the exclusive interviews with Andy Jassy and all the top executives of Amazon. We'll be back with more after this short break. (slow futuristic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here at VMworld 2017 day three wrap-up. We're going to wrap up the whole show. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, Keith Townsend. Cube, set, two sets of coverage. Guys, great job, we have Justin Warren as well, John Troyer, Lisa Martin. Great team, guys, amazing. Three days, a lot of content, wall-to-wall coverage. Double barrel shotgun of Cube content. Amazing. What's left in the tank? Let's get this done. Dave, your thoughts as VMworld comes down to a close. >> Well, so I missed VMworld last year as you know, 'cause I was doing another show. Pat was giving me a lot of grief for that. But if I go back two years ago, two years ago VMware was shrinking. Its license revenue was in decline. Its cloud strategy was in continued disarray. Customers were kind of, you know, losing a lot of faith. >> John: Ecosystem was in turmoil. >> And the world thought that Amazon was going to completely destroy this company. Fast forward two years later, license growth, you know, 12-13%, the company's growing. It's nearly eight billion dollars, three billion dollars of operating cash, big stock buybacks, clarity on the cloud and, I think, and I'd love for Keith's opinion on this, a recognition of the customers that "I can't just throw everything in the cloud." Okay, that's one thing, but what I can do is try to bring the cloud model to my data, and AW, I mean Amazon, sorry, VMware is going to be a partner in doing that. And I think those have all been tailwinds along with some product cycles and some >> John: And Dell Technologies buying out from the federation which was taking on water. Let's not forget. Let's not forget about the federation EMC owned VMware and that was bought by Dell. >> People talk about the Dell discount. I'm not seeing the Dell discount right now. >> What is a Dell discount? What does that mean? >> The Dell discount is because Dell owns VMware, just like when EMC owned VMware, it somehow shackles them and depresses the value. Michael obviously doesn't agree. >> So product focus as well has been not diminished at all. The products are front and center. They still got the sessions. Guys, on the product side, what's your view? >> Strong product offering. I really love the message they want. A lot of the response from the community was like, "Pat is feeling energized." He has this shadow of what is going to happen post-acquisition. Is there going to be a Dell discount? You know what? VMware, you know, famously, five years ago, Pat was onstage. He said he's going to double down on virtualization. He jettisoned Pivotal, and we were all wondering, "What is he doing?" Proved over the long run he was right. Last year, this year, he's doubled down, not on just virtualization, but on this concept of SDDC. And it's finally starting to pay off. We're seeing consistently this concept of VCF. VMware cloud foundation on premises, off prem, and even in AWS, ironically. You know, three or four years ago, we were like, well, is OpenStack going to eat VMware's lunch? VMware has turned the tables and become that OpenStack layer, that consistent cloud layer, at least for that legacy type of way to do IT. Taking your internal data center processes and moving them to the cloud consistently across their vCAN network in the AWS. >> So if I get this right, you're basically saying that VMware essentially went from a position where they're twisting in the wind at all levels, turmoil in every department, every, house is on fire, to pulling one major bold bet, grab it out of the hat, kicking ass, taking names, Pat Gelsinger and team made good calls. >> You know what, I'm not a fan of calling what VMware's SDDC thing a private cloud. I don't think it's true private cloud. It is valuable to the infrastructure, but it's not private cloud, but customers love the message. Take what I'm doing now, check an easy box, move it into AWS or vCAN and it's resonating. >> Well certainly, Stu just gave you the eye dagger, 'cause Stu, the true private cloud report from Wikibon, which has been going viral at the show, been the talk of the show, everyone has been talking about it, Wikibon's true private cloud report. People love that, too, because the message is simple, take care of business at home, called the on prem. Yeah, change the operating model, that's going to take some time. >> So, my thought on this is, for years, we were talking about the stack wars. Lately, we've been talking about the cloud wars, and for the last few years, when I talked to the partner ecosystem, they were shrinking their booths. They were looking for alternatives. Remember Cisco? Aw geez, flaying anything but VMware. Let's see if we can do this. You know, IBM who was a big VMware partner. Well, they got rid of X86. Where are they going to part with VMware? On and on, HPE going closer with Microsoft. Even Dell, pre-acquisition, how much deeper they going to go with Microsoft? Now, you know, John, we've been talking on theCUBE for a while. You know, there's Microsoft. Their stack, their partnerships, their application, where they're putting it. Amazon, huge elephant in the room, when they made the deal it was like, oh well, you know, Pat's on his way out the door, and he's kind of, you know, pulling one over on Dell before he leaves. Now, I think we understand a little bit better where this fits in that portfolio of the Dell family. Open source, still something we beat on Pat and EMC before that. They're not really open source. They've got a proprietary software alternative that their partners seem excited about. They've really fumbled around with their cloud strategy for a year. They've got one that seems to be going well. We'll see, 4,500 service provider partners, the Amazon thing. We will still see where revenue comes. >> Stu, that's a good point. Pat Gelsinger was kicking ass as a CEO now, but his channels on his job many times, so props to Pat. He made some good calls, stayed on course, held the line on the direction, did not cave at all, him and his team, they did it. There's been some turnover as we know in VMware. I'll see the results. I'll clear the scoreboard. They're winning. Question I'll put to you guys right now. Impact of Andy Jassy from AWS here on day one. How much of an impact was that? He made some statements. And the question I want to ask you, in addition to the impact, is he said, "This is not an optical deal." Most companies make optical illusional deals, make it look like they're all in, and they don't really deliver. So one, impact of Jassy being here and two, who was he talking about? >> Dave: Well >> Where's the Barney deal? >> Well, so okay, first thing is I saw, I've always seen that AWS deal from Andy Jassy's perspective as TAM expansion. Big part of a CEO's job is, I've got to expand my TAM, especially when you see the growth of AWS, and it's slowing down a little bit, even though it's still impressive. He's got to expand his TAM. Well, how does AWS do that? Look to 500,000 VMware customers. So that's number one. Barney deal? There are a lot of Barney deals out there. I mean, most... >> What are you referring to, 'cause Google came on the stage the next day. I was getting tweets saying "Azure?" Stu, guys, who's the deal? Who was Andy Jassy talking about when he was looking at the VMware customers saying, essentially, this is not, implying others are? >> I'm not sure that he was necessarily throwing shade at anyone specifically. What there was is there was 18 months from when this deal went through, a lot of work. This was a lot of engineering work. Talk to the cloud foundation team, talk to the VSAN team. The amount of work to actually integrate, because we know Amazon actually has an extensive engineering team. They hyper-optimize what they're doing, so this is not some white box that I just slapped VMware on and said the BIOS, you know, it works and everything where I still am a little concerned if I'm, you know, a VMware employee as customers, I talked to some customers that really excited about this, the Lighthouse customers. They say it's going to get my team that loves their vCenter. They love everything, it's going to help them move faster. Then, you're talking to, "Oh there's these services they're going to be able to use." I'm like well, how much are they going to realize oh hey, this is great, and the VMware sales reps are just going to get eaten by the lion while the customer goes off. >> And so the impact's big then, you're saying, but you won't answer the question of who he's referring to. You don't think he's referring to anyone. Keith, what do you think? >> Let's look at, I like the comment about how difficult the integration was. Last year when I read, it said something like, wait, hold on what, the AWS, who is notorious about controlling their message, what I thought was funny is that Andy didn't use the term private cloud, he didn't use the term VMware cloud, he, VMware infrastructure and AWS, which is a massive engineering effort. So from that, I question whether or not they could execute upon that, but Andy Jassy being onstage on Monday showed the commitment that we're going to make these other services work, the total addressable market of 500,000 additional customers. You don't do this for bare metal servers. >> John: VMware has 500,000 customers? >> Yeah. That's the total addressable market, but that's not where AWS is going to grow by halting physical servers, by selling more Lambda, selling more CDN, selling more PAS, is the key, and where VMware and AWS relationship his weak is in that true integration between the two hybrid IT environments. So when you say, "Where's the barney deals?" the barney deals are, I think it's across the industry. Unless you're getting fully in bed and committed to make that level of investment >> No but engineering resources, this comes back down to what, the new kind of engagement between biz dev deals look like. You need to have that kind of level. >> I have no problem pointing to the Nutanix Google deal, anything that people are doing with Azure, no one's partnered at this level. >> Okay, Azure is a good one too, because I've heard from startups that have been enticed by the dollars, 'cause Microsoft's been sprinkling some cash on, who have left to go back to AWS, because of technical reasons, reverse proxies, basically software clued just to basically make stuff work. >> Well, so, where do we, how much do we know about the IBM VMware relationship? Because I mean IBM's >> Pat brought it up today. >> Soft layer hosting, right? They've got a lot more experience with VMware, IBM has said, I think they're shipping, they've been shipping for quite some time. So there's an example of engineering that had already largely been done, that's actually delivering value for customers. Pat probably brought it up because it's a great distribution channel for him. And I think Keith's right on. AWS doesn't speak in terms of VMs. They talk in terms of cloud services, like Lambda, database services, middleware, PAS layers, that's really where they're going to hook people in this community into their platform. >> Okay, so here's a question to end the segment as we wrap up the show, because this is kind of where it's all going. To me, my big epiphany was the following. Andy Jassy, statesman, Harvard MBA, now CEO of AWS, ticking names, ticking this, huge accomplishments, he's done great in his career, he's only getting better. And then Sam Ramji, great developer chops, knows software ecosystems, not Andy Jassy in terms of the title, but in terms of status, still a solid guy. Two contrasting positions, running the biggest cloud today, to Google brainpower, okay? So you're looking at that and you're saying, "Hmm, where is this going to go?" So the question on the table is, what does it take for someone to be successful in today's IT environment? Does IT need to be smarter in business or does need to be more smarter in IT, or both, and does Google have enough IQ in IT to actually make the products fast enough or are they at risk? >> Well I'll take the customer point of view, and you know, we always talk about people, process, technology. The technology is maturing, and it's maturing pretty quickly, but maybe still not quite to the point where the true private cloud vision is where we need it to be, but what's going to slow that down is the people and process side is going to take a lot longer. Stu, you made a comment yesterday, VMware's moving at the pace of the CIO. >> It's Keith's line, he's been using all week. >> Okay, great line and Robin Matlock heard that today, course marketing CMO said, "And the CIO needs to move faster." (men laugh) Well guess what? They can't. I thought that was just a perfect testament >> But that is exactly the dilemma isn't it? >> It really is, and this stuff is hard. And cloud doesn't necessarily make it any easier, (laughs) if anything, it makes it more complex, 'cause it's a completely new business model. >> But remember the old term, forklift upgrade? Okay, you don't have forklift upgrades anymore, you have rip and replace, whatever word you want to use. >> Stu: Now we have lift and shift. >> Lift and shift, rip and replace, lift and shift. Is Google, and this is my challenge to Sam, I didn't have time to ask him this question, I'll certainly do one on one next time I see him. Is Google smart enough with IQ in IT, certainly we know they're smart enough, but do they have enough IQ in IT to really make the transformation, or are they betting on a rip and replace version of a cloud? >> So John, no doubt Google's smart, and they built amazing things that, the ripple that Google has through the industry is phenomenal. They spin off whole industries based on what they're doing. Google played a very different game than Amazon is, you know, when you talk to customers and how they're first getting onto Google, you know, data's really important, analytics of course. Couple of years ago Google was saying, "Oh, we're just going to be that data analytics cloud," now of course they're trying to be a big player. Amazon, the company, remember, Amazon isn't just AWS. Andy Jassy fits into Jeff Bazer's great plans. You know, I'd love to hear, when we go to reinvent, what's happening in Whole Foods that's impacted by AWS. They are everywhere, they are, you know, Walmart did. >> How about TAM expansion, my wife's checking Amazon even more. >> But this is really interesting right, because Walmart's now using its muscle to say, "Hey, you going to do business "with AWS" >> Absolutely >> "And Whole Foods? "You're not doing business with us." So the point being that digital business is allowing companies to traverse industries and now you're seeing it in really interesting competitive lashbacks. >> So Capital One was onstage, I say something that over the past couple of years been controversial, no one believes me, but I believe this is what needs to happen. Capital One claimed that it's a technology company, they're not a bank. Well I want to bank with a bank, that' a whole 'nother conversation. But technology is just a tool to get your job done, and just like we had bookkeepers that knew Excel and then eventually Excel just became a part of your toolkit. AI, I talked to Chuck Hollis of Oracle about this on the podcast the other day. AI is just going to be a business toolkit that a business user uses. To the question, business users will become smarter at using technology. The cloud providers that enables the business user to have the least amount of friction to use that technology, to solve business challenges will win. The question is, is that Google or Andy Jassy, who has done it with Amazon, or some other cloud provider that's eating their own dog food. >> Okay guys, let's wrap this up. Let's go around the table, one word, two words, how do you wrap up VMware's position vis a vis as they go forward? >> VMware's on fire, I think the data center's on fire, the ecosystem is reforming around the cloud. And there's a lot of momentum right now, I mean I'm wondering, okay, what's going to happen to derail this, but right now the fundamentals look very good. >> Relevant, John. >> Yeah. >> Cool and relevant again. It's right, you know, cool, we can all argue, you know, look, I like what I heard with Amazon, it was better than I was expecting coming in. You know, getting in there, they talked about serverless, they talked about edge computing, something I actually had a couple really good conversations ticking to, partners doing IoT, and customers looking at that. If they can be relevant, not just in the data center, but in the cloud, and even at the edge, VMware's going to have a good life going forward. >> Yeah, and I'll wrap it up, you stole my word relevant, so I'll say, I'll a little bit further than relevant, VMware is still the leader in enterprise infrastructure software. They're not letting that lead go. >> But just on that, the last thing, they're an infrastructure software company. I think they showed how they can be more than that in the future. >> And my take is, smart strategy playing out, now people are starting to realize the long game that Pat's been playing. It's showing up in the financial results, and there's clarity, and you can see the game playing out, you're starting to see there where they're going to position, so good job, guys, that's a wrap. Want to thank our sponsors. Without sponsors theCUBE would not be able to come for the three days of wall-to-wall coverage provided to the community. We get great support from the folks on Twitter, we get support from the folks who watch the videos, want to thank you for watching, and also the sponsors, VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Dell EMC, IBM, OVH, CenturyLink, Datrium, Densify, Druva, Hitachi, INFINIDAT, Kamarino, NetApp, Nutanix, Red Hat, Rackspace, Rubrik, Skytap, Veeam and Zadara Storage. Thanks to all the 20 sponsors that we can go out and bring our best stuff here. Really appreciate your support. Thanks for watching theCUBE. This is a wrap from VMworld, thanks guys, thanks everybody here, and that's a wrap for VMworld 2017, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone live, here in Las Vegas from VMworld 2017, I'm John Furrier of the Cube, live coverage of VMworld 2017 with my cohost Dave Vellante, next guest Dom Delfino, senior vice president of sales and systems engineering, Cube alum, great to see you, welcome back. >> Thanks guys, good to be here again. >> RAC are covering VMworld, the ecosystem has been a little tide goes out, tide comes in, real clarity this year, cloud, you want it on private cloud, public to private cloud or Amazon. >> Dom: Right. >> Any questions? >> Dom: Exactly. Clear. >> This is the vision coming to fruition. This is what you're seeing this year at VMworld. I think in particular when you talk to the customers, they're now in a state of cloud reality. There was sort of this big rush, I'm going to try to move as much to the public cloud as possible and then in terms of the scale they got there, they start to have then challenges on that side, they realize, I need to have a dual strategy. I need to have a private, a public, a hybrid strategy. I think you see all the announcements that we've made today, with DFC on AWS going live now, with more coming around the world in different zones as we progress throughout the rest of the year and into next year, as well as all the service offerings we just announced, Wave Run is a service, VRNI is a service, NSX is a service, app defense, which is our latest security strategy as well. Customers really see how it comes together now and they want to go down that journey with VMware. >> It's important too to clarify, I call the high level messaging, so it's got clarity, but also VMware and ecosystems has a lot under the hood and it can get very technical, so you got to balance the speeds and feeds to feed the red meat to all the practitioners and then the high level. I got to ask you the question because people that are sitting out there on this cloud reality that you mentioned, they don't have a lot of people sometimes. Someone's got to implement this stuff, automation's coming, okay I get that, but getting to the cloud is not easy. I still got to run my shop, what is that operational reality right now because cloud reality, okay I get it, but now I got to turn my on premise into a true private cloud with a new operating model, new practices, how are the VMware customers dealing with that? >> I think that's part of moving away from the legacy as fast as you can or at least where you have to keep it, you've got to sort of isolate it and put it in a corner because it's the legacy that's holding most of us back, right? Because I got to understand how to run the legacy, keep the lights on, that takes 20, 30, 40, 50% of my time, depending on the customer, depending on their infrastructure at the same time I've got to retool my skills, I've got to retool my tool kits that I use, my run books, my operational processes, but now they at least have a direction to build to. All the customer meetings we're having here today it's about software defined. How do I build this abstraction layer? Okay we've been doing this with VMware for years on the compute side, many of them have ventured down the journey with us on the NSX side, we see 10,000 customers roughly on the VSAN side as well and that's about putting together, putting the automation tool set around it and really building that same experience that they can get in the public cloud, which it's fast and it's easy on their on prem data centers as well. Sometimes there's many reasons to retain on the private side, data sovreignty, intellectual property, all of those things as well. I think that's where the customers are in the journey right now and it's now they feel comfortable with the direction and they're going to adopt quickly. >> I like this idea of cloud realities. We've been talking on the Cube today about configuring the cloud to the realities of your organization's data. You're talking about governance, security, data locality, etc. so it really comes back to a data challenge. You can't just take all your data and shove it up into the cloud. What are you seeing from customers in that regard? >> I think there's a regulatory component to that as well, particularly if you go overseas, to Europe and Asia, there's a lot more challenges around that as well. I think what you're seeing is that customers recognize the fact that not everything is going to go into the public cloud at this point, so they're really prioritizing, burstable work loads, temporary work loads, definitely a prime opportunity to put in the public cloud. New application development, definitely a primary opportunity to put in the cloud. If I'm in the health care business and I have to retain health care records for x number of years and I'm responsible for HIPPA compliance around them, maybe not something that I'm just going to shove up into the cloud today. It's use case specific depending on and application specific, depending on the vertical industry, the customer resides in and depending on where they are in their journey to the cloud as well. >> You've got a lot of momentum in your business right now. Basically you're on fire. We talked about the cloud realities, that's part of it. The AWS announcement last year, even though it was a year ahead of time, gave a lot of clarity to people. How much of the momentum is due to those factors? Again, the cloud reality, the fact that people are now more comfortable with your cloud strategy and saying okay, I'm willing to make maybe a multi-year commitment with VMware. Is that a factor? >> It is a factor, it is a factor and I think the two remaining components, accelerating and capturing momentum in the market of our SCDC strategy being VCN and NSX has also helped that reality come to fruition for customers as well. It is software defined, we've been talking about software defined data center for a long time, like everybody else in the industry, we talk about things sometimes a lot sooner than they come to fruition, but now that they put together VC ware with NSX with VSAN, and they say hey, I can actually build a private cloud that's fast and easy, which is the reason a lot of my IT people or my application developers were going around me, because the public cloud was faster and easier. Wasn't necessarily cheaper, but it was definitely faster and easier, now customers who've been on that journey with us for the last year realize they can offer the same thing on prem as well and take advantage of both. Does that make sense? >> Yeah. What's the biggest walk away for you right now, looking at VMware, if you had to talk to customers that are not here and looking at the online coverage, certainly Twitter you'll bump into a lot of Cube coverage and lot of pictures, lot of architectural slides. What's the big walk away so far, day one? >> I think tremendous innovation is the big walk away. In many different categories coming forward, you'll hear another big announcement tomorrow coming up in terms of what we'll be doing in conjunction with one of our sister companies in the application development world. But also about taking security to the next level with app defense, so microsegmentation has become fairly ubiquitously known within the industry now, how do I take that into the guest, into the operating system, into the application layer? How do I secure those things as well? You see a lot of customers getting hit with ransomware attacks this year, those are big reality checkers for you if you're the one sitting behind the keyboard that's got to defend your environment against that and rebuild it and I think they really see VMware continue to push the envelope to develop very innovative solutions to these approaches that are very cost effective and that are also very high performance. >> Personal question, as you're out in the field talking to customers, you've been in the industry for a while, you've seen the waves. What's the biggest thing that you notice, observe out there right now? What's happening? Share some color with the landscape in the marketplace. >> I think there's some good recognition from customers around the type of operational transformation that they're going to have to go through in this journey. It's not about the network independent from storage independent from security independent from computer anymore. Infrastructure is one entity, that's the way the application owners and the application developers view it and want to consume it, that's the way that infrastructure teams are going to have to deliver it. I think there's a lot of recognition of that. I think there's recognition that the security problem is bigger and badder and worse than ever and it's not going away any time soon and there's sort of no magic box. If there was, you'd pay a lot of money for it to make your problems go away, but it's really something that has to be ubiquitous. Infosect policy has to be aligned with infrastructure security implementation. I could have the greatest policy in the world, if I can't actually implement it, I'm not going to get the benefit to that security there. I think those are some of the things as well. I think sort of the container world is going through a little bit of the post high upcycle, what's the reality check of that environment as well right now, we saw this with open flow and SDN five and six years ago. >> John: Saw it on big data with Hadoub. It's so expensive to run, why even do it? At some point, it can be total cost ownership and ease of use, old school topics. >> We're well into production ready phase of software defined networking. We're well into the production ready phase of software defined storage and hyperconverge infrastructure we need to take containers into that next phase as well. >> Bottom line, what does cloud ready mean to an enterprise these days? >> Cloud ready means that application, that work load is portable and I can deliver the same level of availability, service and agility, whether it's in the public cloud or whether it's in my private data center. Or I move it back and forth between both. We're certainly excited about the momentum we see with our customers, I think you can see and hear the buzz around VMware going on this year and I think it's the best it's been in a few years. >> You run the SE team as well right? >> Dom: Yes I do. >> How does that work? SE's are like the Navy SEALS John always talks about on the beach, they, >> I like to call them the conscience of the sales force. >> There you go, right. Customer trusts them, but at the same time, they understand the customer requirements at a very deep level. How are they organized? How do they fit into the partner ecosystem, maybe you could explain that a little bit. >> Yeah I think traditionally we've organized our SE's, aligned them with product categories, so I've got networking and security SE's, I've got cloud management, automation, orchestration SE's and software defined storage SE's, but I think that sort of is the base line and then you start to build their skill sets toward solution, towards a solution. What types of solution? Is it containers on open stack? Is it VMware's STDC stack? Is it around particular vertical solutions? If you're an SE on my health care team, you're probably very focused on electronic health records and EPIC and Medtronic and different applications like that. How do you solve those customers' problems at the higher level and be able to drill down at the same time with the domain experts from those customers when they want to understand how OSPF works and NSX or they want to understand how lund creation works in VSAN. It's sort of an evolution in terms of building skills. You've got to start at the deepest levels and then you got to build to how those products and those technologies integrate together to provide the customer with a solution. >> So as you move toward this multi cloud word, throwing another buzz word, but is this cloud architect like SE role emerging? >> We'll call them a solution architect. That solution may be a cloud solution, it may be a vertical solution targeted at a specific customer base and make sure that we do what's appropriate to serve our customers. >> John: What's the coolest thing you've worked on this year? >> I've got to think that app defense is the coolest thing that we've got out this year. I think that we've solved a lot of problems with microsegmentation from a network security perspective. I think now going up into the guest and into the application layer and providing an analogous functionality there is going to be really a very very prevalent way of preventing breaches, malware, malware propagation, ransomware in the future as well. I'm a little bit of a security geek, it's attractive to me. I really see that as just an ongoing, it's not even a battle anymore, it's a war now for our customers. We want to help them win that war. >> John: Ransomware has been so brutal. >> Ransomware's been brutal and I mean, see customers almost going out of business. >> Well it's become a board-level topic overnight. It is a serious board-level topic, not just lip service. You're seeing that right? >> You will see in some circumstances boards actually pulling the chief information security officer out of IT and having them report directly to the board. >> Well it makes a lot of sense. >> John: The pressure is unbelievable. >> The pressure is unbelievable right? >> In a lot of regards you would think that the CSO certainly should not report to the CIO, it's kind of like the fox watching the hen house dynamic. Maybe that's not the best analogy, but there should be an inherent tension there number one, but number two is what's the right regime? Why is it IT's problem? It shouldn't be. >> Yeah I think it goes back to information security policy versus actual implementation and the gap that's existed between those two for years for many reasons, networking being a flagrant issue in that context, where I could say oh, this application, this user needs to talk to this application, this application needs to this set of data. How do we implement that? That's not the easiest thing with the tool set that customers who run legacy networks have had historically. I think now that we have some of those things, you'll see the scenario I just described where a few organizations are pulling the CSO out of IT and reporting to the board or some, we've seen board level mandates for segmentation initiatives within the technology area as well so I think this is going to be an ongoing battle that we face moving forward. >> This is the biggest problem I would say at the Cube all day long because part of the value proposition of cloud and dev ops and apps is having data in real time. To be liberal with the data, you run the risk of opening it up so you can't do it the old way. >> Part of the cloud adoption and the new wave of applications about moving these businesses forward, the security is one of those things that will move you backwards from where you are today. I think it's important that we be able to tackle all these battles on all different fronts at the same time. >> If I may, I know we got to go, but there's another dynamic as well which is the recognition that we are going to get penetrated and yet I think it was the third leg of Pat's slide today was response. Boards are saying it's not if, it's when. How do we respond? That's a critical part of the implementation. >> I think it's, we talk about IOT. Think about the number of new entry points you create into your infrastructure, every device you connect to the network itself. Keeping them out is a huge challenge. The question is what can you do as the owner/operator once they are inside? How do you limit, how do you restrict the level of risk that you have and exposure you have to your data, to your applications to your customer information, so on and so forth and I think that's what we've brought to the table in a substantial way with microsegmentation with NSX and I think you'll see that continue to really raise the game with app defense as well. >> Dom Delfino, great to have you, great color, great commentary, you're like a pro. He's just like a anchor with us, SportsCenter >> If Pat fires me am I in? No? >> John: You're in. >> All right. >> Pat fire him so we can hire him. >> John: Don't fire me, Pat, I like my job. >> Dom, thanks so much, good coverage, always great. >> Dave: Thank you, pleasure. >> Bringing a great attitude to the Cube, great energy. More come, day one as we continue down, wind down day one and three days of wall to wall coverage with the Cube VMworld two sets, double barrel shotgun of content here at the Cube, we'll be back with more after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's The Cube, covering Inforum 2017, brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of Inforum 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Corey Tollefson. He is the senior vice president and general manager for retail here at Infor. Thanks so much for returning to The Cube. >> Happy to be here. >> Good to see you again. >> Looking forward to this, again. >> So you were, this was launched about 18 months ago, so give our viewers a status update, where are we? >> Well, it's been an amazing ride, so just 12 months ago, I think we talked about the initial prognosis of the business unit. Yeah, we just ended our fiscal year, we did about 77% year over year growth, we expanded into new markets like New Zealand and in Europe, we just opened up a brand new office in London, and we're thrilled with the market reception of our solutions. >> So talk a little bit about the solutions that you're coming up with, I mean, retail, or actually, let's back up. Let's talk a little bit about the state of retail right now and what the retailers themselves are feeling, and also, the customer experience. >> Yeah, I mean, anybody that shops understands that retail is in a complete disorder. I'd say chaos and disorder right now. >> Let's do some shopping! >> (laughs) >> Yeah, exactly, well, that's a great point. So when you think of retail, think of post World War II, where basically, the premise for retailing was an anchored mall with knowledgeable shoppers, or knowledgeable workers, associates that knew about their product, they were very product-centric. It was all about taking the car and the family and going to a destination and making it about your day. The reality is, the e-commerce world has changed the business model so much that retail is centered around these iPhones, and the smartphone, that it's 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and that the power of the information has now shifted from the store associates, to the actual consumer, so consumers and customers can walk into a retailer and have more knowledge, not only about the products that you're selling, but even your inventory levels, you know. Looking online, being able to buy on, search online and come into the store and purchase something, so. >> Yeah, so, I mean, there was always an asymmetry, pre-Internet, the brands had all the power, they had all the information, and then it's, as you say, it's totally flipped. In many ways, digital transformation is about trying to create that balance of power again, back in the hands of the brand, right? >> Yeah, I mean, it's funny how, if you look at it over the last 20 years, at first it was the brand and the manufacturers had all of the influence, and then, the whole concept of category management and allowances and things like that in the '90s, the retailers started to have the influence. Now the reality is, it's not even the retailers or the brands anymore, it's the customer. The customer and the consumer have all the influence in the world, which is making so much chaos and disorder around what's retail and the lines have blurred between what's a brand manufacturer and what's a retailer. >> So everyone's got their sort of, I've got to compete with Amazon strategy. What are you seeing that's, that's actually working? >> Well, what's happening in the industry, you know, you may have heard that Amazon put an offer in on Whole foods and ... >> I have heard that, yeah. >> You may have heard about that, so, what it does is it's basically validating our strategy two and a half years ago, when we had the idea of putting together this retail team and what we've done since then, around, you know, modern, beautiful applications that are fueled by science and analytics, that have a beautiful user experience, all those types of technologies are codified over the last two years, and best practices that we've created by using our relationships with Crate & Barrel and Whole Foods and DSW and Nordstrom, as opposed to stuff where that was written in the 1990s. So that's what we believe has been helping our, our progress so far. >> So you've worked with Macy's and Nordstrom and Williams-Sonoma, DSW. What do you think customers want? I mean, you're talking about beautiful applications, a user experience that is satisfying and easy. >> Well, it's funny that when we talk about things like this, I mean, I just mentioned beautiful user experience because customers want to enjoy the shopping experience. You know, Duncan mentioned it earlier on the main stage around next-generation applications are almost headless. You know, the next UI is AI. >> (laughs) >> Right, it's the, it's the UI that doesn't exist, and that's where our applications are going as well. Now it's about holding onto that data, that analytics, that science, and presenting that in a format that's an offer to our customer's customer. >> Speaking of AI, you're really the first cloud suite that is going to be able to take full advantage of Coleman, the new product to launch today. Tell our viewers a little bit more about how you anticipate using Coleman. >> Well, I could get into the whole, "Coleman, tell us to look up a promo, "Coleman, tell us about this price change," there's all those different types of technologies. We're exposing all the data, so anything can be accessible by Coleman around our analytics platform. And one thing that does differentiate us is, we don't view our systems as silos, so, our execution engine for core item merchandising and our omni-channel merchandising system, and our advance analytics and forecasting and planning and replenishment system, are built on one common stack, so that it's common whether it's analytics or execution, they're converged together, so it allows us to be able to take advantage of technologies like Coleman. >> So there was an article in the journal the other day talking about how Apple was actually behind in ... You'd use the example of Siri, anybody who's used Siri knows that it, maybe not quite as where we'd like it to be, and Google and Amazon have the data, and maybe that helps them sort of lead. What is your corpus of data, obviously GT Nexus is part of that, what, but you've got to have the data source, it's all about the data, what's your data corpus? >> I'll give you a real world use case, so two years ago, when we announced the Whole Foods project, one of the design principles that we definitely went forward with, was the whole concept of no, no hierarchies, unlimited attributing, unlimited information around item, because we want to take all that information and all that attributes associated with the item, and we want to load it up into our machine learning solution. >> So, very flat. >> Very flat. We want to load that up into our advanced machine learning in our data platform in the cloud, and we can make as many science recommendations against all that information that's aggregated. So, ah. That's one of our ways in which we differentiate as well. >> Okay, and then, the other thing is, when I look at your, and we saw Soma was presenting to the analysts yesterday and putting up some architecture slides and, there was a lot of AWS in there. It appears that you're heavily leveraging that Amazon, sort of innovation flywheel. How does that affect your business? >> Well, it's a sticky wicket, right? I mean, what we've learned from working with Amazon as well as AWS is they're distinct organizations and we spent a lot of time with AWS because they spend so much money, it's been a nuclear arms race over the last decade to see who could spend the most money to build the best infrastructure and plumbing, and there is a wall that segments the two from each other, but that doesn't preclude us from working with other clouds. There's other clouds that we can use from our customer. I mean, some of our customers have requirements around leveraging Microsoft or Google, and we're happy to work with those clouds, too. >> I want to talk a little bit about international expansion. You mentioned a new office in London and also a new one in New Zealand. London seems like an obvious destination, New Zealand, not as much. Can you just explain to our viewers a little bit about why those two places? >> Well, I think the first part of that is, it's English-speaking. >> Okay, fair enough, yes. >> It's a little bit easier with less translation requirements related to those markets, but what we really like about London, is it feels like they're catching our momentum that we had two years ago in North America, and the reception we've had in London has been insane. And I wish I could be in a position to announce all the recent wins that we've had in Europe, but there's going to be more to come as well, in announcements. >> Okay, so, what are you hearing here? A little over a year in, what are the customers here telling you? What they like, what they don't like, what they want. >> Well, I think what a lot of customers are asking for is, they want to see acceleration a road map. They believe in concepts like Coleman that we had mentioned this morning, they want to take advantage of that as quickly as possible. And for us, we can provide a prescriptive journey, and it doesn't need to be a big bang where you have to deploy this huge, monolithic system. I would love nothing more than to have all of your system, all of our customers and prospects take advantage of all of our systems, but the reality is, there's some legacy systems they don't want to touch, that's okay, that's fine, we can make SAP smarter by having the best analytics platform in the retail on the planet, we believe, you know. We can take advantage of that horizontal ERP that you're running by taking advantage of some of the burst functionality, where we can come in and start taking information out of different, disparate silos. So there's not just one way of digesting an experience with Infor. >> So a lot of the ways in which companies are competing with Amazon is obviously with data, utilizing data in new ways, personalizing the experience as you mentioned, Europe, Europe, you know, last year dropped a bomb called GDPR, and the whole privacy piece and it goes and, the penalties go into effect May of '18. How are you rethinking, privacy and data protection, in this new era? >> You know, the irony on this question is, two years ago, if you would have asked the same question, the onus would be on us to provide accessibility and provide proof that it's better to go with a cloud provider? The dialog has shifted to the point where, you know, we talked about it earlier today, we've got hundreds of people that are working in cloud ops, as opposed to our retailers that might have a handful that use it, so it's almost like the onus and the risk is on our retailers of not trusting a cloud provider, for that service. >> It's true, I mean, Amazon absorbs a lot of that risk for GDPR. So, then, how do the retailers think about data protection? I mean, they don't just wash their hands and say, "Okay, Amazon will take care of it." Are the discuss, are they more sort of, data protection brokers or strategists or? >> Well, I think it comes back to, there was some interesting behavior back in the mid-90s between a couple retailers and Amazon and, that's where a lot of the trepidation came from, of working with them, I keep harping back to, there is a pretty distinct line between AWS and Amazon, and what we find is, they don't even talk to each other. So if they're listening right now, they, that's probably, that's not a knock on them, that's actually congratulations that they are completely separate units, that we don't feel like there's any issues related to privacy or, the biggest concern isn't privacy, it's around having access to information around that SKU and that item and that price point. They don't want Amazon to be able to see that price point and suddenly offer up a promo based upon inside information. >> Okay, you know, sure, I buy that. I, you know, I think Amazon is pretty reputable in terms of that, that brick wall between the two companies, but specifically, I'm talking about personal information, and how that's protected, or just generally, security, well, I guess security again, the onus is on the cloud provider, but, are you, is that a board level discussion? Is that more of a wonk level discussion in IT or just? >> Over the last two years it's evolved to the point where it's not even a discussion point anymore. >> Because of the cloud. >> Because of the cloud, the cloud adoption as well as the standards that AWS has put in place, it's almost like they've created the industry standard for, to which others now compete with. >> Great. >> So. >> When you're thinking about the future of retail, is there a piece of advice that you could give to retailers? They're listening now, they're watching The Cube. Retailers who are fearful of a digital transformation, resistant to one, or know that they have to transform in this way but just can't quite seem to get over the hump. >> Well, every day I meet with a retailer, and it's the same sentiment. They understand and appreciate that if they don't adopt, they're dead. And it's really, it's really a grave situation, and the reality is, I think we're going to usher in a golden age of retailing, because, what's left behind is the old adage of, let's just expand and create more store space and more shelf space, and we'll just see our margins go higher and our revenues go higher. Those days are done, so they need to make the most they can out of the space that they have, and the reality is, any single store, it's almost like a node on the network, and I wanted to tell this story. So last night, I was boarding a plane and I realized my shoes were not packed. It's because I didn't have them, I left them in London last week, and the reality is, I'm not the best shopper when it comes to making these decisions. So I called my personal shopper at Nordstrom. She had all the information on me. She played it against her BI report on, these are the types of trends, style, color, class, and she came back and said, "Corey, "I'm going to purchase these for you." And I said, "Great, I'll pick them up "at your Nordstrom location in Manhattan." And she said, "Oops, it doesn't open until the spring." And I thought I was completely out of luck, and the reality is, she said "don't worry about it, "there's a distribution center not that far behind, "we'll ship it directly to your hotel." And guess what, lo and behold, this morning, my shoes were there. That's the type of modern retailing that all the non-Amazon, non-Walmart.com retailers can do to be successful. >> But it's not headless. I mean, there was a human being involved, yeah. >> There was a human being there, but we're working on next generation apps, specifically with Nordstrom too, to help them create that experience so we can eliminate the heroics and make that embedded into a new modern platform. >> I love it, I love it, I'm excited. >> Okay, but wait, wait, wait. Why couldn't Amazon replicate that with its AI and, you know, geniuses and alpha geeks? >> It's the human interaction. I don't want to just necessarily interact with a bot, on Amazon.com. I called my personal shopper live, and said, "This is what the situation is, can you solve it for me?" So then she took that back, she ran it through the calculations and came back and said, "Here's what you need and I'll ship it to you." >> Well, the other thing that I think about is the physical store. Some, like every time I buy sneakers on Amazon, they never fit, so, okay, so I want to go into DSW. I love DSW. >> (laughs) >> We do, too. >> It's, like, my favorite shoe store in the world, and of course my girls love it too, so. But so, there are many situations where you really actually want that physical, look and feel and touch. >> And think about what you just said, so with DSW, most of their customers are avid shoe shoppers and they love shoes. The differentiation between DSW and Amazon is that, I believe the numbers are pretty much 70% of North America's population is within 5 to 10 miles of a DSW. Think of that as competitive advantage, being able to buy online, pick it up in the store after work, there's no delay in shipping, that's really why Amazon's trying to get into the retail space with-- >> And by the same, unless Whole Foods starts-- >> There could be a drone! >> selling shoes ... (laughs) >> Or there could be a drone, that would deliver it to me in a couple hours. Anyway, but this is next year's Inforum. This is, these are all the themes. >> That's going to be amazing, to sit down with you and talk about this year after year. >> I know, we, at the golden age, it's soon to be upon us. Corey Tollefson, always a pleasure to sit down with you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much, appreciate it. >> Thanks for coming on. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have our wrap just after this. (peppy techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's The Cube, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by, Infor. >> Welcome back to Inforum 2017. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're joined by Marc Scibelli, he is the chief creative officer here at Infor. Thanks so much for returning to The Cube. >> Thanks for having me again, it's good to see you guys. >> So last year, the big announcement was H and L Digital, Hook and loop digital. Bring us up to speed, give us a status update of where you are now. >> Well we're a year later, I think what's really important is that we've established our application development framework, which allows us to rapidly deploy our prototypes, rapidly deploy the projects we're working on for a lot of customers. We've had a lot of wins over the last year. We're working closely with Brooklyn Sports, both the basketball team and the stadium and entertainment center. We're working with Travis Perkins, we're working with American Express. So we've got a lot of great client wins in our belt. We've learned a lot over the last year, but most importantly we've been able to actually fine tune our application development framework to bring that stuff to market very quickly for our customers, which has been a very big deal for us. >> So you mentioned a couple of client wins, Brooklyn Sports, let's unpack that a little bit, tell me a little about, tell our viewers specifically what's gone on. >> Yeah so, Brooklyn Nets basketball team here in the U.S., player performance a little bit down, so we're working with the performance coaches, we're working with the telemetric data that's coming out from the players. Things as it pertains to the arc of the ball throw, or the scale to models of how they perform or how much sleep they're getting. We're tying into a lot of IOT devices that the players use. We're bringing all that data into one place for the performance coaches and then allowing them to make better decisions on the field, on the court, in real time. So you'll see actually, behind you guys is our half court. We've actually set up a half court to show some of that data that we're bringing in about player performance. We actually run an NBA player assessment and show your player readiness, I hit like an eight percent readiness (Dave and Rebecca laugh) >> Rebecca: There's still time. >> Yeah five, eight I didn't think I was going to get very far in the NBA. >> High single digits. >> High, yeah, high, real high. So we're working a lot around player performance, certainly. And also with Brooklyn Sports Entertainment around the Barclay Center here in Brooklyn, how they can start to brand that experience. Nobody really has an affinity for an arena, you go and see Beyoncé or you go to watch the Nets. You don't really think about going to the Barclays Center, so how do you start as soon as they walk in the door, engaging with the customer using technology to drive all this value all the way through. How do you find the shortest beverage and bar line. How do you find the cleanest bathroom. How do you find, to get beverage and drinks and food delivered to your seat. That's all going to be technology that's going to drive that. A lot of our clients we've installed the digital backbone underpinning of that with our cloud suite. And now it's our job to commit a certain, creating these apps that differentiate them in the market place, help Barclays compete against other next-gen stadiums. >> So the Nets example it's similar to Moneyball but different, so he's talking the arc of the ball and so the remediation of some of those, the optimization of some of those, is just different training patterns or different exercises or drills that they could do. Whereas Moneyball it's like this unseen value, unbased percentage for example, are there analogs to Moneyball? Like I was listening to an interview with an owner the other day and the interviewer was beating him up about one player and he said well if you look at the deeper analytics, I'm like oh, deeper analytics what does that mean? So are there deeper analytics? >> Absolutely, you know we've left a lot of the basketball to the basketball professionals. When we started this thing the GM said to us, "Should we really get this started with" "you guys? What do you know about basketball?" We looked around and it was like an Englishman next to me and myself and we're like we don't know a lot about basketball but we hope that, that's what you're bringing to the table. We know a lot about how to bring the data science together, we can bring the AI in, we can bring all that together for your performance coaches and work with them Just like we didn't know a lot about farming and agriculture but we can work with feed companies to help them optimize for their customers. So it's not about what we knew about basketball but up to your point, those performance coaches are definitely finding those little nuggets of data to help those teams perform better. I couldn't tell you more off the top of my head cause that's how little I know about basketball. My eight percent performance rating will show you that, but they are looking inside that data and able to find that. And the trick is bringing it to them in real-time, bringing it so that they don't have to go into deep excel documents. That's what they were doing before. It was all stored in excel and they had to go through it and maybe somebody make a pivot table or something. >> Rebecca: Or watching play tapes. >> Or watching play, absolutely, of course. And by being able to assess all of that data too as well and bring that into the feed and be able to actually assess that and report it back into the larger system we're providing. It gives them a lot more visibility so they can find those little nuggets that they know as basketball professionals. >> And Burst is part of this solution? >> Not currently, no, but certainly we will be needing the Burst into that play, yeah. >> So Thomas Perkins is another example -- >> Marc: Travis Perkins. >> Travis Perkins, I'm sorry, that you mentioned. What kind of things are you doing there to make make that company able to really use data more wisely? >> So Travis Perkins, one of the largest building manufacturing supply company in the U.K. over 2000 distribution locations across England, very strong in its footprint. It's a really strong brand in terms of, sort of the Home Depot of the U.K. They put in M3 last year, it was a big announcement and it was a very large initiative for them and that's the digital backbone we talk about. So now it's our job we're coming in now we're automating a lot of their systems for their distribution centers so they get a better customer experience. So when I go into a Travis Perkins distribution center, I can get what I need much quicker so that's kind of the baseline thing that we come in and do. We look at ways to optimize for example if I could fah-bin with my truck and actually just pull my truck fah-bin, you know it's me, my order is ready. I don't need to get out of the truck, they pack my truck and I just drive out the other side. How do we create engagements for visibility models for the distribution managers to be able to see what's selling, what's not selling. Who's performing, who's not performing. Those are the things that we do as the baseline of the experience and then additionally to that, we look at new business models with them. So we're actually helping them think about new ways that they can create subscription models or ecosystem models. So, for example working on, they're working on the tool locker rental, setting up a,basically locker or rental facility, then using software to be able to access that locker and then you sort of create a subscription model to that. I'm able to just pull up, punch in a code, that's my tool locker, I get my tools right out of it and I can drive right off. And then doing it in places geographically that make a lot of sense for them. So that's kind of the best time, I think we get these signature experiences and optimize on top of the backbone, but then we create these whole new business transformation models of these companies, that's really exciting, really helpful. >> So retail's an interesting example everybody's got an amazon war-room trying figure out how to compete, where they can add value. What have you seen specifically in the retail business? >> I just moderated a panel with the CIO of DSW and the COO of Crate and Barrel on either side of me and it was exciting to see their, they feel a disruption but they're certainly eager to take it over. So, on the Crate and Barrel side we're seeing them be, really beat up by the Wayfairs of the world, three billion dollar valuation. They can get the market much quicker, they're running products in a much different way. Where Crate and Barrel has a much longer lead timer, the CPQ model. They've got to configure pricing, quoting, get it out. Takes 12 weeks to get a couch. How do you get, on the supply chain side, how do you get that shorter. So they're working with Infor to get that supply chain shorter. So they can compete on a shorter lead times but we're coming in to help them do is also look at how can you start to create experiences while you're waiting for that couch to be produced. Or while your shopping online what are things that you can do to know how long it'll take to get that item. And now that we just take all that digital backbone of that supply chain and create new experiences for it. On the DSW side we've been working really closely with them on point of sale as well as deep customer experience, apps for them with their employees. They really see their employees as the key tool to driving loyalty to their stores. So, we've been working on brand new apps in the mobile space that'll help their employees be able to serve their customers a lot better, have a much more tied loyalty program to their job performance with the customer's loyalty. So, a lot of great things there that we're working hard on. But certainly it's a massive behemoth of competing against amazon as a retailer. >> So what's your advice then for a company that is, and you're talking about companies that are already being very thoughtful and planful about this transformation, and understanding first of all that they need to transform, that they need to change or else they'll be left behind. So what's your advice for companies that are just starting on it? >> I think we kind of look at this as a holistic approach, we cannot take a little nibble bite-size out of the problem. So when it comes to digital looking at the entire ecosystem, looking at the operations, looking at the customers, looking at the employee. Saying what are we doing on our core backbone of the operations to make that run efficiently, to automate that. Let's do that, let's get that out of the way of all those people, let's make that run as quickly, as streamline as possible. Our cloud suite certainly help companies do that. And then, let's look at how we can start to transform the way they do their, they function inside their business by creating these functionally integrated models between all three. Between the operations, the customer and the employee. And let's create new experiences that live on top of that of that backbone that drive new value and until you do that, until you leverage your brand, like Crate and Barrel can leverage their brand if they just shorten that supply chain and start to optimize how they deliver. DSW can leverage their brand as a shoe warehouse if they provide a larger assortment and a better experience in-store, they can compete against amazon. So, to do that, we need them to, I would recommend companies, think of the approach holistically and not as a small little bites of just let's create this app and this one app is going to solve our problems. It's not, you got this much larger holistic approach you need to take. >> What percent of the Infor portfolio has Hook and Loop touched, affected? >> So, Hook and Loop core, certainly the GA products have touched everything. You'll see tomorrow on-stage Nunzio Esposito, our new head of Hook and Loop core. Who's running the business that when I first met you, I was running. They're doing very well and they've touched, I would say percentage-wise, 80% of the product if not more. Certainly their products are driving our business, like EAM, ACM financials, they have re-invented. And you'll see it tomorrow, they have done some incredible work. They just, they'll be releasing tomorrow, it's pretty exciting, a new UX for an entire cloud suite, so that pretty incredible. How Colman will be integrated into our cloud, it's a big deal so how do you create UX for that. And then certainly of course, how much UX and UY do you take away because you introduced Colman. You could take a lot of UX and UY away, a lot of functionality gets stripped away. So it's changed the methodologies we've used in the Hook and Loop core team but Ninzio has done a great job challenging himself to do that. >> Rebecca you were saying when you read the press releases around Infor they use terms like beautiful and so it's very apple-esque. Where do you get your inspiration? >> I think it's the consumer great products we talked about years ago when I first met you. The idea that how I function, like daily life at home, should echo how I function at work. Certainly now we're getting inspiration for how companies that are born digitally are creating these models that drive them. How we can help other companies do that as well. so, we're inspired by everything that touches us. To be honest , I still use my TEVO, I might be the only person left, (Dave and Rebecca laughing) That's not true they're doing very well >> I like the little sound effects of TEVO, I know what you mean. >> I can't say I'm the only person, but I'm probably the only person that'll admit it. That I love my TEVO. But these are things that I've watched them, not just change their UX like we did with Infor five years ago, but now they've changed their business model, they've changed what they've become as a hub and as a digital solution. How they used media channels to drive their business, I think that's incredible and it's a similar journey we're going on. So, there's a lot to be inspired by. >> Why should the consumer guys have all the fun? >> Marc: Yeah exactly. >> So how do you keep your team, you're the chief creative officer, so how do you, you talked about what inspires you and what inspires the company as a whole but how do you, keep a culture of creativity and innovation going? How do you keep the momentum? >> We've been really fortunate to have a really great support system by the executive team, Charles Phillips, Duncan Angove, certainly have been incredible about needing a team like Hook and Loop. When I met David it was 15 people maybe a little more, and now it's a 120 that run that core team. We launched H and L Digital last year, we were like nine people and now we're over 40. That investment, those dollars they put back into these kind of endeavors are really indicative of that . And I think that it comes through to the creatives and the people that we bring in that this is the kind of investments that Infor is interested in. We have a beautiful working environment inside New York City inside our headquarters. We have a beautiful new garage we just opened up, an innovation lab, we get to play with the greatest toys. I think we're actually very, very fortunate, to be inside a company like Infor and get to work with the people, we get to work with as designers, and as creatives. And that was an up hill slope to keep people motivated to do that as creatives and we call them left brain creators. I think we're there now, we turn away a lot of people to come work for us now. So it's pretty exciting. >> New York, London, Dubai, right? >> That's exactly right thank you, yeah. We are, we opened London just recently, we're opening Dubai next and we have two teams in New York. It's pretty exciting. >> Rebecca: Great. >> Love to see the Dubai. >> Yeah, Dubai is being built up right now, we have an office there already. >> could be the next destination, >> Cube Dubai. >> We should do a cube Dubai, that'd be great, they would love it there. >> Alright. >> I love it. Well Marc-- >> Put that on the list. >> Marc, thanks so much for joining us it's always a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante we will have more from Inforum after this.

>> Voiceover: Live from San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's The Cube covering DataWorks Summit 2017. Brought to you by: Hortonworks. >> Hey, welcome back to The Cube. We are live on day one of the DataWorks Summit in the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Peter Burris. Not only is this day one of the DataWorks Summit, this is the day after the Golden State Warriors won the NBA Championship. Please welcome our next guess, the CTO of Dell AMC, Bill Shmarzo. And Cube alumni, clearly sporting the pride. >> Did they win? I don't even remember. I just was-- >> Are we breaking news? (laughter) Bill, it's great to have you back on The Cube. >> The Division III All-American from-- >> Cole College. >> 1947? >> Oh, yeah, yeah, about then. They still had the peach baskets. You make a basket, you have to climb up this ladder and pull it out. >> They're going rogue on me. >> It really slowed the game down a lot. (laughter) >> All right so-- And before we started they were analyzing the game, it was actually really interesting. But, kick things off, Bill, as the volume and the variety and the velocity of data are changing, organizations know there's a tremendous amount of transformational value in this data. How is Dell AMC helping enterprises extract and maximize that as the economic value of data's changing? >> So, the thing that we find is most relevant is most of our customers don't give a hoot about the three V's of big data. Especially on the business side. We like to jokingly say they care of the four M's of big data, make me more money. So, when you think about digital transformation and how it might take an organization from where they are today to sort of imbed digital capabilities around data and analytics, it's really about, "How do I make more money?" What processes can I eliminate or reduce? How do I improve my ability to market and reach customers? How do I, ya know-- All the things that are designed to drive value from a value perspective. Let's go back to, ya know, Tom Peters kind of thinking, right? I guess Michael Porter, right? His value creation processes. So, we find that when we have a conversation around the business and what the business is trying to accomplish that provides the framework around which to have this digital transformation conversation. >> So, well, Bill, it's interesting. The volume, velocity, variety; three V's, really say something about the value of the infrastructure. So, you have to have infrastructure in place where you can get more volume, it can move faster, and you can handle more variety. But, fundamentally, it is still a statement about the underlying value of the infrastructure and the tooling associated with the data. >> True, but one of the things that changes is not all data is of equal value. >> Peter: Absolutely. >> Right? So, what data, what technologies-- Do I need to have Spark? Well, I don't know, what are you trying to do, right? Do I need to have Kafka or Ioda, right? Do I need to have these things? Well, if I don't know what I'm trying to do, then I don't have a way to value the data and I don't have a way to figure out and prioritize my investment and infrastructure. >> But, that's what I want to come to. So, increasingly, what business executives, at least the ones who we're talking to all the time, are make me more money. >> Right. >> But, it really is, what is the value of my data? And, how do I start pricing data and how do I start thinking about investing so that today's data can be valuable tomorrow? Or the data that's not going to be valuable tomorrow, I can find some other way to not spend money on it, etc. >> Right. >> That's different from the variety, velocity, volume statement which is all about the infrastructure-- >> Amen. >> --and what an IT guy might be worried about. So, I've done a lot of work on data value, you've done a lot of work in data value. We've coincided a couple times. Let's pick that notion up of, ya know, digital transformation is all about what you do with your data. So, what are you seeing in your clients as they start thinking this through? >> Well, I think one of the first times it was sort of an "aha" moment to me was when I had a conversation with you about Adam Smith. The difference between value in exchange versus value in use. A lot of people when they think about monetization, how do I monetize my data, are thinking about value in exchange. What is my data worth to somebody else? Well, most people's data isn't worth anything to anybody else. And the way that you can really drive value is not data in exchange or value in exchange, but it's value in use. How am I using that data to make better decisions regarding customer acquisition and customer retention and predictive maintenance and quality of care and all the other oodles of decisions organizations are making? The evaluation of that data comes from putting it into use to make better decisions. If I know then what decision I'm trying to make, now I have a process not only in deciding what data's most valuable but, you said earlier, what data is not important but may have liability issues with it, right? Do I keep a data set around that might be valuable but if it falls into the wrong hands through cyber security sort of things, do I actually open myself up to all kinds of liabilities? And so, organizations are rushing from this EVD conversation, not only from a data evaluation perspective but also from a risk perspective. Cause you've got to balance those two aspects. >> But, this is not a pure-- This is not really doing an accounting in a traditional accounting sense. We're not doing double entry book keeping with data. What we're really talking about is understand how your business used its data. Number one today, understand how you think you want your business to be able to use data to become a more digital corporation and understand how you go from point "a" to point "b". >> Correct, yes. And, in fact, the underlying premise behind driving economic value of data, you know people say data is the new oil. Well, that's a BS statement because it really misses the point. The point is, imagine if you had a barrel of oil; a single barrel of oil that can be used across an infinite number of vehicles and it never depleted. That's what data is, right? >> Explain that. You're right but explain it. >> So, what it means is that data-- You can use data across an endless number of use cases. If you go out and get-- >> Peter: At the same time. >> At the same time. You pay for it once, you put it in the data lake once, and then I can use it for customer acquisition and retention and upsell and cross-sell and fraud and all these other use cases, right? So, it never wears out. It never depletes. So, I can use it. And what organizations struggle with, if you look at data from an accounting perspective, accounting tends to value assets based on what you paid for it. >> Peter: And how you can apply them uniquely to a particular activity. A machine can be applied to this activity and it's either that activity or that activity. A building can be applied to that activity or that activity. A person's time to that activity or that activity. >> It has a transactional limitation. >> Peter: Exactly, it's an oar. >> Yeah, so what happens now is instead of looking at it from an accounting perspective, let's look at it from an economics and a data science perspective. That is, what can I do with the data? What can I do as far as using the data to predict what's likely to happen? To prescribe actions and to uncover new monetization opportunities. So, the entire approach of looking at it from an accounting perspective, we just completed that research at the University of San Francisco. Where we looked at, how do you determine economic value of data? And we realized that using an accounting approach grossly undervalued the data's worth. So, instead of using an accounting, we started with an economics perspective. The multiplier effect, marginal perpetuity to consume, all that kind of stuff that we all forgot about once we got out of college really applies here because now I can use that same data over and over again. And if I apply data science to it to really try to predict, prescribe, and monetize; all of a sudden economic value of your data just explodes. >> Precisely because of your connecting a source of data, which has a particular utilization, to another source of data that has a particular utilization and you can combine them, create new utilizations that might in and of itself be even more valuable than either of the original cases. >> They genetically mutate. >> That's exactly right. So, think about-- I think it's right. So, congratulations, we agree. Thank you very much. >> Which is rare. >> So, now let's talk about this notion of as we move forward with data value, how does an organization have to start translating some of these new ways of thinking about the value of data into investments in data so that you have the data where you want it, when you want it, and in the form that you need it. >> That's the heart of why you do this, right? If I know what the value of my data is, then I can make decisions regarding what data am I going to try to protect, enhance? What data am I going to get rid of and put on cold storage, for example? And so we came up with a methodology for how we tie the value of data back to use cases. Everything we do is use case based so if you're trying to increase same-store sales at a Chipotle, one of my favorite places; if you're trying to increase it by 7.1 percent, that's worth about 191 million dollars. And the use cases that support that like increasing local even marketing or increasing new product introduction effectiveness, increasing customer cross-sale or upsell. If you start breaking those use cases down, you can start tying financial value to those use cases. And if I know what data sets, what three, five, seven data sets are required to help solve that problem, I now have a basis against which I can start attaching value to data. And as I look across at a number of use cases, now the valued data starts to increment. It grows exponentially; not exponentially but it does increment, right? And it gets more and more-- >> It's non-linear, it's super linear. >> Yeah, and what's also interesting-- >> Increasing returns. >> From an ROI perspective, what you're going to find that as you go down these use cases, the financial value of that use case may not be really high. But, when the denominator of your ROI calculation starts approaching zero because I'm reusing data at zero cost, I can reuse data at zero cost. When the denominator starts going to zero ya know what happens to your ROI? In infinity, it explodes. >> Last question, Bill. You mentioned The University of San Francisco and you've been there a while teaching business students how to embrace analytics. One of the things that was talked about this morning in the keynote was Hortonworks dedication to the open-source community from the beginning. And they kind of talked about there, with kids in college these days, they have access to this open-source software that's free. I'd just love to get, kind of the last word, your take on what are you seeing in university life today where these business students are understanding more about analytics? Do you see them as kind of, helping to build the next generation of data scientists since that's really kind of the next leg of the digital transformation? >> So, the premise we have in our class is we probably can't turn business people into data scientists. In fact, we don't think that's valuable. What we want to do is teach them how to think like a data scientist. What happens, if we can get the business stakeholders to understand what's possible with data and analytics and then you couple them with a data scientist that knows how to do it, we see exponential impact. We just did a client project around customer attrition. The industry benchmark in customer attrition is it was published, I won't name the company, but they had a 24 percent identification rate. We had a 59 percent. We two X'd the number. Not because our data scientists are smarter or our tools are smarter but because our approach was to leverage and teach the business people how to think like a data scientist and they were able to identify variables and metrics they want to test. And when our data scientists tested them they said, "Oh my gosh, that's a very highly predicted variable." >> And trust what they said. >> And trust what they said, right. So, how do you build trust? On the data science side, you fail. You test, you fail, you test, you fail, you're never going to understand 100 percent accuracy. But have you failed enough times that you feel comfortable and confident that the model is good enough? >> Well, what a great spirit of innovation that you're helping to bring there. Your keynote, we should mention, is tomorrow. >> That's right. >> So, you can, if you're watching the livestream or you're in person, you can see Bill's keynote. Bill Shmarzo, CTO of Dell AMC, thank you for joining Peter and I. Great to have you on the show. A show where you can talk about the Warriors and Chipotle in one show. I've never seen it done, this is groundbreaking. Fantastic. >> Psycho donuts too. >> And psycho donuts and now I'm hungry. (laughter) Thank you for watching this segment. Again, we are live on day one of the DataWorks Summit in San Francisco for Bill Shmarzo and Peter Burris, my co-host. I am Lisa Martin. Stick around, we will be right back. (music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell, EMC. >> John: Okay, welcome back, everyone, this is theCUBE live in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017, our 8th year covering EMC World. Now, the first year covering Dell EMC World, I'm John Furrier, my co-host this week, Paul Gillin, on the blue set, two CUBES, two shot guns, double barrel shot gun of content. Our next guest, who's been on theCUBE every single year we've been in existence, since 2010, the Chief Marketing Officer of Dell Technologies and Dell EMC, Jeremy Burton, formerly the CMO of EMC and again, 2010 was your first year with EMC, now. >> That's right. >> Look, I mean, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, yeah the makeup takes a bit longer, I got to cover up more wrinkles, but you know. >> You're running the show, you're on stage, your son is doing some gigs up there. Where are you now mentally, I mean, 2010, when we started our journey with theCUBE was the first at EMC World in Boston, you just joined the company. Now, here, look where you're at. I mean, do you have the pinch me moments? How the hell did this happen? Look how big we are. What's, how do you feel? >> Yeah, it's great. I mean, I almost have this belief in tech, you can never plan more than a couple years. I mean, so I kind of laugh a little bit at the five year strategy or whatever. And I'm think even personally, if you're looking out maybe more than a couple years in your career as to what you want to do, its... it can all change. It's like the start of a race. You can have all the best plans in the world, but you don't know what's going to happen when you get around the first corner, right? So, yeah, I knew last year, when Michael asked me to take on the CMO role, that the marketing team could make a difference. I'm a big believer about story and making sure that people understand what we're trying to do. It was, for me at least, it was a challenge, and a real interesting role to take on. >> Certainly a big challenge, you got the merger going on, obviously bigger role, bigger company, more portfolio product. You also have a product background you usually were doing a lot of the product stuff. What's been the impact from a customer standpoint as you've been rolling out the brand of Dell Technologies which I know is a holistic brand. But you now have a lot of brands to deal with in your portfolio. >> Yeah, well the good news is we're bigger, we have more budget, we can do a bigger brand campaign and the real goal here is; most people, when they think of Dell, they think of a PC. When they think of EMC they think of a storage array. Dell Technologies, if you look at the breadth of the company now, it really is incredible what we can do in an organization. So the brand campaign is really about redefining the company. What is Dell Technologies stand for? Well, it's about transforming your business, Transforming IT, your workforce and security. If we can get across over the next couple of years, the impact that we can have on an organization that's really where the win is. Underneath that obviously, we want to say, hey look, if you're on a digital project, Pivotal's going to be lead. It if's a software-defined data center, it's VMWear. So first and foremost, it's getting the big story of Dell Technologies, and redefining how people perceive the company. >> Well, Jeremy, so what's the message? We've been trying to read the tea leaves here, about what's the theme coming out of the show. What is the single most important message you want customers to take away? >> Number one, first and foremost, it's about, look, if every company is going to become a digital company, if you want to become a digital company, trust Dell Technologies for your journey. >> Everybody's saying that, though. I mean, that's HP's pitch now, too. So why did you adopt digital transformation as a theme, when it has become such a buzzword in the industry? Are you trying to find a nuance there? >> No, because the thing is, is that's where the world is going. And we could make up something that's ours, but the problem with that, I've never been one for saying, oh, we're just going to make up a new category. The category, people are going to become digital companies without a doubt, and I think our differentiation, and this is in the ad campaign, and you see it around the show, here, it's about making it real. At some point, you got to realize that transformation. if you're going to go build a cloud native app with HP, good luck, they don't have any software. >> I think you said on theCUBE last year, or the year before, I forget which year it was. These eight years are blurring in, and... theCUBE's on it's eight year. I think you quote said, "never fight fashion," was a phrase you always say, so I do believe that digital transformation's a little bit boring, but it's a reality. >> Well and for us, I feel like our differentiation, whether it be EMC or Dell, is we're a very practical company. And if we can't make it real, nobody can. Which is why the ad campaign only focused on customers. It was, hey if you want to look at GE, if you're going to look at Colombia Sports Wear, Chitale Dairy, we got about ten different customers, cause I think, to your point, right, it is noisy. How do you make it believable? You have a real customer saying, "I bet on Dell Technologies and they transformed my business." >> So we were talking on the intro about the transformation I know there's a lot of herding cats with the new merged companies, and you got to get every thing they want on stage, limited time on stage, not a lot of customers on stage, so I got to ask you, look it, the business transformation is Isilon Onefs, so digital transformation really means the businesses. How do you evolve from speeds and feeds culture, to real business transformation? Cause that's kind of what I hear you saying. >> That is, if you look internally at how the company's got to transform, it's exactly that. We created around the time we brought the companies together a small group sales team called Dell Technologies Select and these are folks that actually don't... carry any one brand. They carry Dell Technologies, and they're working with fifty of our biggest most transformative customers. So obviously the goal here is over time, you want that fifty to be two hundred, to be a thousand. Really, you're going to grow the DNA within that group, because the difficulty is that, some companies are doing digital transformation, some people are not even doing IT transformation, some companies are still trying to figure out the last big issue that they had. The market doesn't, it's not an on-off switch, you've got early adopters, you've got 'luggards, and everything in between, so Dell Technologies Select, was really geared towards engaging with transformative customers in a different way, across the entire portfolio, instead of; a storage, a service, a virtualization. >> Can you dig a little deeper on the sales model? Because you had the merge of two great sales organizations, one enterprise focused, is account focused, another is channel focused, >> SMB >> And direct SMB. How are you getting them to work together, or trying to merge those cultures, or are you trying to use each for what it does best? >> It's a great question, cause I think this is where many companies fall down when they merge or acquire even, right? So think of the Dell Technologies Select at the very top of the pyramid, they're the biggest, most transformative projects we're engaged on, and have a set of folks who work across the portfolio. Beneath that, we have an enterprise sales team. That, is predominantly made up from the EMC sales team, prior to the merger; relationship selling, big accounts, you know there's three thousand accounts there. Bill Scannell runs that sales team. Beneath that, you've got the commercial sales team, and Marius Haas, who was from Dell. Marius runs that. And so we're trying to preserve the higher end relationship selling that Bill Scannell and his team did. And the transactional sales team that Dell had, and then even beneath that in Jeff Clarke's organization, you've got consumer and small business. So what we've tried to do is, not complicated things. Leave each area to do what they were good at. And then to the key point we made earlier, build this very broad digital capability. Kind of new DNA; start small and grow big. >> You know, EMC has always had good partner relations, they were storage and you had some swim lanes, some stuff to partner program, and all the different stuff you were involved in. The branding was phenomenal when you took over on that. But now my observation on this show, just from watching it over the years, is a whole lift in alliance and marketing partners. Intel Dan Bryan on stage, obviously Dell and Intel make a lot of sense together. That history is there. But the alliances in Microsoft, Cisco, now a whole new set of industry alliances now, at the disposal. Has that changed your thinking a bit? And how do you look at that? Because now that's not just like a merging, that's like pre-existing and exploding. >> No, you always need partners, right? I think both Dell and EMC never believed they do it all themselves, right? And I think here we are, together, we're a much bigger company, but we still need partners. I mean Intel, we're Intel's biggest customer, right? So that makes up more relevant to them, but whereas in the past, maybe we were always thought as on the EMC side as enemy of Microsoft because of the VMWare. Now, Microsoft's an alliance partner. And it's nice that folks like Satya, he's taken over the company, and he's made it very clear that he wants to build an ecosystem, or rebuild and ecosystem. The big companies like Intel and Microsoft, I mean Cisco, we still do two billion dollars of Vblock, right? And as much as I think... we do kind of jousting between vendors at times, ultimately the customer decides who partners, and who competes. We often partner because the customer wants us to partner. >> One of the things I always like about interviewing you, Jeremy, you have your toe in the water of the future. I heard you mention VR, virtual reality, and all kinds of reality on stage; AR, VR. AI is certainly the hottest thing in the world. Deep learning and machine learning... is getting integrated into some of the products. But as a brand marketer, how are you looking at these new trends? Cause they are great opportunities, you have a great show on stage, you had great entertainment, informative, colorful, but now, soon, as a marketer, you have to start integrating some of these awesome tools, into the marketing mix. >> It's incredible right now, because... one of the things I love about the coming together of Dell EMC, and maybe this is not intuitively obvious, but a lot of the client products, a lot of the VR and gaming business that Dell has built over the years, I mean all the guys who come here, are either gamers or have got kids who are gamers. And so getting access to the Alienware team, they've got relationships with the Minecraft team, working with the folks that work on the AR and VR headsets. To me it should make events like this much more engaging. I'm a big believer that over time, these events have got to become- >> And by the way, all those new startups, are going to be running Dell servers, potentially, so a lot of this stuff is going on, your hands in it. >> Yeah, we got to make this experiential for folks. And a lot of the client technology has got that, it grabs you, right? I'm looking forward to exploring- I mean particularly augmented reality. To me, that's a technology, which is going to be massive in future. I think the way we want to present the company, is not as consumer and business, or client and data center, I think we've got to show folks the end to end. If you're doing a service request as a field service worker, and you've got your augmented reality headset on, you're going to get data for the service request from a back office system, you're going to get your knowledge from an Isilon system but it's going to be rendered in real time in front of you, as you do your work. I think the customer wants to see the solution. >> We were talking with Peter Burris in the previous segment about... are we going back to the future? The old IBM, one throat to choke, IBM was in every market, they dominated almost every market. But they had the full range of products you could get from them, from one sales rep. Are we going back to that type of model now? >> Yes and no. If you want a good indication of the future, look at the past, right? And so, infrastructure clearly is consolidating, right? What we believe, as infrastructure consolidates, it can support fewer players. So, you got to be the big player. So, in infrastructure market, we have a consolidation play, and we're very open about that. We're going to be more efficient, more economic Even if that market's flat, we're going to take more- >> But it's still huge numbers, by the way. >> It's a huge number, and then look, there's the new cloud native world. We've got to play with Pivotal there. Look at the myriad of devices you're going to see in IRT. The IRT ecosystem is not a single, vertical integrated stack. You've got sprinklers, you've got things that attach to cows, you've got... sensors on cars. I think when on part of the tech industry starts to consolidate, and you get this, maybe fewer vendors, another area opens up, and you get this incredible ecosystem. I'd say, IoT, machine intelligence, cloud native apps, that's like the next frontier, and those ecosystems are thriving, as the prior ecosystem consolidates. >> Great, awesome comment there, I think you just encapsulated- well done, the consolidation, that's a huge number, by the way. That's massive. >> It's hundreds of billions of dollars. In fact, IDC would track it and say it's about three. >> A hyper conversion that's going on right now. I mean two years ago, that was a thriving ecosystem, now it's all consolidated- >> It's consolidating, because the macro category- >> It seems to happen faster. >> Yeah, you've got to, I think in infrastructure... It's interesting, we don't necessarily in our business need to be the first mover, like we weren't the first mover to hyperconverge. But we can't be asleep at the wheel, number one, and we have to bring our distribution scale to bear. Once something goes to mainstream, as we proved in our flash, and now we're proving in hyperconverge, we has zero revenue for VxRail a year ago, today it's the market leader. That's... we weren't first to market with the product, but we've got distribution scale. The reason why a lot of these small companies are struggling is because they spend all of their VC money, or their profits, it's all spent on building a distribution channel. And so that's where Wall Street doesn't value them anymore. >> Scales and new competitive advantage, we've said on theCUBE, we continue to say that, certainly Amazon web service has proven that. Scale is the new differentiator, it's the barred to entry, great point there. I got to ask you about a point we were discussing, with Peter Burris, and we were kind of riffing on this, kind of, meaning to joke at at some of the vendors out there. Everyone's claiming to be number one, at everything. It's like, we're number one at this! We're number one. Markel's number one, Dell's number one, HP's number one. So the question is, what is the scoreboard? So the answer in our little opening was; customers. That is the ultimate scoreboard. >> Yeah. >> How are you guys going to continue to push, because there's been some wins with the combination. That's ultimately going to be the scoreboard. Forget the market share from whatever research firm. How are you getting new customers, are you retaining them, are they valuing your products and services? Your thoughts. >> Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things there. And I think the history of Dell is pretty interesting, because the data shows that the best way for us to get into a new customer, believe it or not, is with a PC. And, it's our, probably lowest priced product, it's our, maybe the most frictionless sale. And the nice thing now is once we get in there with the PC, and maybe a low end server, there's a whole lot more value we can bring in behind it. Which is why a lot of our focus, is not just on product; it's distribution channel as well, because if that's working effectively, we can get that cross-sale going. We've already seen in the early days of the merger, customers who've got our storage, sometimes a great tactic is to go, ask the customer; "hey, can we have your server business?" And it's been amazing how many folks have come back and said, "okay," because we've got relationships. And so, adding for the next couple of years, that cross sale becomes absolutely critical for us. Because we get a new customer, but then we want to keep that customer. How do we keep them? We got to solve more of the problem. And that's called cross-sale. >> Jeremy, great to have you on theCUBE. I know you're super busy, I know you got Gwen Stefani's the entertainment tonight. Great attendance here at the show. Congratulations on the CMO role, of the huge organization that's Dell Technologies. Big brand challenge, a great opportunity for you personally. So my final question, as always on theCUBE, What are your priories for next year? When we come back, and look back... what are you trying to do this year? You've got a lot going on, give us the plan. >> I mean, I'll leave the Dell Technologies thing to Michael, he's probably talked about that already. But marketing specifically, look, 70% of the content on the internet is going to be video by 2020. So, as a marketer, we've got to get really great at producing really high quality video content. It's the way that marketing's going to be done. So the nice thing, the exciting thing for the marketing team is, hey, if you're great at doing PowerPoint or writing a white paper, you're going to be a media star in the future. But I'm a huge believer in the fact that we've got to get great at doing unique content, at scale, and that's how you cut through the noise and get people's attention, because the world is going to become more noisy, not less. So that's one of the big priorities, obviously there's a little bit of bedding in of this new marketing model, we only closed the deal back in September. We got to get the team- >> You got to big budget, that's for sure. >> Yeah but video, and storytelling, is huge. Up there, that's the biggest trend. >> And don't forget the gaming. You brought up the gaming. CGI is coming around the corner, we're going to have VR, AR... >> You're going to see a lot of that. >> Jeremy Burton, Chief Marketing Officer of Dell Technologies. Dell EMC, here on theCUBE. Here at the first Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris will be back with more live coverage, stay with us. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Cube special coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. This is the Cube Silicon Angle's flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is our eighth year of covering EMC World, but now called Dell EMC World. I'm John Furrier, your co-host on our set one and with my co-host Paul Gillin this week as well as Kieth Townshend and John Walls and Rebecca Knight on set two. Double barrel shotgun of content here at Dell EMC World with you. Thanks for joining us for three days of wall to wall coverage. Paul, so much to talk about here this week. Digital transformation, little bit boring theme, it's being played out in real time. But this is a historic moment because one, the Cube started at EMC World in 2010, eight years ago. But, this is the first official EMC World where it's Dell EMC World, kind of a mini event in Austin, but since Michael Dell took over, or I'm sorry, merger of equals, a combination. >> Paul: Combination, as they call it. >> (chuckling) Combination. This is the first instantiation of EMC World as Dell EMC World. Jeremy Burton's now the CMO of Dell Technologies which is the holding company for all the companies. It's the same EMC World flair, now the integrated content. Notable absent Cube alumni and executives from EMC. We'll talk about that in the EMC Mafia segment shortly, but (chuckling) your thoughts because now Michael Dell's puttin' the rubber to the road. Kind of nothing earth shattering in his keynote, but certainly private company, all guns blaring, smiling and dialing, he's got the swagger on stage. >> Well, Michael is nothing if not an optimist. He's always good at seeing a brighter future, and at his keynote this morning, as you said it was blissfully free of content, but it did talk a lot about digital transformation which is of course the buzzword of the year in the IT industry. Little surprised that Dell adopted the same buzzword that HP and Cisco and all these other big companies are adopting. What happened in the keynote is less interesting than how the mood changes here, and this is the coming out party for Dell EMC. Yeah, there was a conference last October, a month after the merger, but this is really, things have finally settled out, now six months later and it's a chance for customers and for the partners to get a sense of how well this is all working out. >> And one of the things I'm watching is how the story's unfolding 'cause now you're starting to see the big companies, certainly in the consolidation side of the business market of infrastructure and data center and enterprise IT, it's a consolidating mature market. It is transforming, there is a cloud story requirement, there are new software requirements, software defined data center, as well as new growth opportunities, so what I'm looking at is what is the story? What is Michael packaging and how does that compare to the competition? We're going to hear from HPE at HPE Discover coming up, the Cube will be covering that for the seventh consecutive year. We're seeing Amazon's story playing out in real time. Oracle's story, everyone's got their story. And it's certainly digital transformation but what's interesting is Michael's got the packaging. He's packaging it up, your thoughts. >> And Michael kind of dissed the cloud this morning, actually in his presentation. He said, you can't have a successful business, or your business is not going to grow as quickly if you're 100% cloud based. He was very much making a pitch for data center infrastructure. Really not surprising coming from Michael. One thing that will be a sub-theme here I think is how this merger is working out, and as we wrote on Silicon Angle this week, if you go back to the history of big mega mergers, particularly in the hardware industry, going back to Burroughs Sperry, DEC Compaq, HP Compaq, Wellfleet Synoptics and NCR AT&T. I mean, it goes on and on and on. Pretty much all disasters, and we really haven't seen a merger anywhere near this scale between two IT companies that has worked well. All indications are now that they're doing the right things, they even have some people on board with Dell EMC who went through some of those mergers. But it's going to be interesting to see how they break a pattern that has been decidedly negative. >> Great point, I loved your post by the way, and I would add that interesting observation, at least from my perspective is, as we sit down with these billionaires and interview them one-on-one on the Cube is, you look at Amazon, Andy Jasse and Jeff Bezos, Bezos in particular. Larry Ellison and Michael Dell, you have essentially captains of industry at the helm. Michael Dell is no spring chicken, but he's also not over the hill either, he's 51 years old. >> Paul: He's a kid relative to most leaders in this industry. >> You know, you hear Jeff Bezos talk and I was watching his talk in DC just this week, he's saying we're taking the long view. If you look at Amazon.com's CEO, Bezos, look at Michael Dell, look at what Ellison's doing, they're all playing the long game card. Now I don't know if that's a hedge against we don't have our story right, or give us more time to bake out our stuff, but I think what's different about Dell Technologies is, Michael's 33 years into the business, one trillion dollars later in sales and he's young, so I think that is a wild card. Ellison's still running the show, Bezos is still running the show, Dell's certainly running the show. I think the wild card on this is the fact that you got a strong founder, and a privately held company. >> And Ellison, it's questionable how long Ellison will be able to run the show, I mean he is over 70 at this point. Dell certainly will be around for a long time. You have to take a long term strategy. If you're not Amazon, you have to take a long term strategy 'cause what other choice do you have? You've lost in the short term, so it's not surprising to hear these guys going that way. I'll be interested to hear from Michael and from his team about the cloud and how they really design and differentiate its strategy. I think IBM has staked its position in cloud out pretty well. Even HPE has got a differentiated position. HPE of course has the configurable hardware, that's a point that Dell I think has to come back on, and the big question is software. John, as you pointed out the other day, VMware is worth more than HPE, by a substantial margin at this point. They've got this huge asset in VMware, not to mention Virtuestream and Pivotal and the other good software assets they acquired. What are they going to do with them? Are they just going to let 'em go free like Michael has done in the past, or are they going to try to mold these into some kind of coordinated whole? >> Well, great point one is on the HPE valuation thing market cap, VMware's actually worth more on market cap and public markets than HPE. Interesting, but not significant in my mind yet, but it does point to the fact that Michael Dell's rhetoric on stage today, he didn't take any shots at HP. Last year he took a big shot at HPE. It's been his rival from day one. I used to work at HP when he was just a mail order company selling white boxes and then he grew that business, obviously the rest is history, but no shot at HP because VMware has to work with HP. Right, (chuckling) so that's interesting. Two is, on the software side, Dell is a hardware company, let's face it. But they have more software now than they've ever had before so that is a good point, we're going to be getting into this date software defined data center to find out how much they actually have. A couple core themes that I see already popping out of the keynote, one, Pivotal. Pivotal and Cloud Foundry's instrumental in the keynotes. NSX was mentioned, Pat Gelsinger's going to be on tomorrow. NSX is VMware's secret play. If you look at what NSX is doing with the Amazon public cloud deal that they did recently this year, NSX could be the real lever in that intellectual property, that lock in, that kind of differentiation. The cloud is not a place, it's a way of doing IT is another message we heard all day today. To me, and your point about bashing cloud, I actually think that's a stake in the ground to kind of hold the line, because they have no cloud strategy. Now, their cloud strategy is kind of hand waiving right now with multi-cloud, which I buy, but multi-cloud is still a fantasy in my mind. Latencies are too low, there just isn't the kind of plumbing yet in place on the clouds for multi-cloud, but certainly hybrid-cloud I think will be multi-cloud roll, so those are the key things and then I'm going to ask Michael directly. You blew 60 billion dollars on this deal. Is there any cash left for M&A? >> Paul: Acquisitions, yeah. >> M&A right now is hot market, you can do some nice tuck ins, fill in the white spaces on the products. Get those software assets and really start cobbling together a growth strategy. There's no doubt in my mind, Paul, that they're going to win the mature, classic business school move of consolidated market. Own the consolidated market, and try to get a growth strategy. To me, that's going to be the big question. What is Dell Technologies and Dell EMC's growth strategy? >> And you would have to think it's either through M&A, perhaps an acquisition of HPE if the valuation continues to go down. Or it's in software It's a good point you made about VMware. Vmware also has a strategic alliance with IBM, so if you're Michael Dell, it's hard to give a compelling keynote speech these days because you can't really offend anybody. His companies now are in cahoots with all these other firms, and of course dissing the cloud is even dangerous because Cloud Foundry is such a critical part of the Pivotal strategy. I think it's an important point, you've got a company that is almost trying to reassemble the old IBM, the old IBM of the '80s which dominated every segment that was important Dell is almost doing that now, I mean the only piece they really don't have is networking. To make a big play, to become the mongo IT company in the world, can they raise the kind of funds for that? >> Yeah, and we're also going to talk about the cloud transition as well as what I'm calling the EMC mafia, folks that have been on the Cube and big executives at EMC. We'll get to that in a minute, but I just want to talk about that cloud play, because you're right, the growth strategy has to come from software. I just don't see the cloud growth yet for these guys, although Michael, in the hallway, conversations are growth in the cloud is doing really well for EMC, not sure. But on the growth strategy, Pivotal, Boo-Mee, Vmware, Virtuestream, and Software Converge Infrastructure are interesting plays, so I think that's where we have to look here. I still think there's a lot of holes in the product line. To me that's important. Now, trends so far, and what we're expecting to hear at the show is, some of my notes Paul, I'll share with you, and get your reaction on. All flash arrays are going to be big, continuing to grow that. Hyperconverge VX rail, we heard that on stage today, claiming to be number one. Power edge 14G. Again, back to speeds and feeds, (chuckling) you know. Storage. Storage is the bread and butter of EMC and now Dell EMC I still think is going to be a real critical beachhead that they going to continue to expand, storage is not going away. Obviously the ice lawn all flash is coming out, and then SSD's, data protection in the cloud. You're starting to see them going where their roots are. Cloud stuff is coming out of the data domain, kind of their core storage first, make sense strategy wise, while they buy their time to fill in the cloud. >> Well, it's a good point about storage. They have a comfortable lead in storage. According to the latest IDC figures, they're a good 15 points ahead of their next biggest competitor. They have a comfortable lead in the hyper converge infrastructure. Four different product lines in that area. These are beachheads that they have to shore up. They have to be sure that their market share doesn't erode in those areas. The question is where does the growth come from? You look at a company that's going through a very similar transition right now, Cisco, which has finally really bought in to software defined networking and is remaking its company around it. That company is having to change the whole culture in response to a technology trend. Now the same thing's going on in the data center. Everything's being remade as virtualized and Vmware is at the center of that, so Michael Dell has the asset to be able to lead that conversion, but are they psychologically going to get there? >> Great point. One, I would agree with you that the whole Cisco example proves the same channel that Dell EMC is. Can they move up the stack? In this case, they're hardware guys, can they add software. Cisco, they're transforming themselves to be more cloud native. The classic move's happening. Cisco have been trying to move up the stack for over a generation. They're plumbing guys, they're networking guys. These guys are hardware guys. Can they get the DNA to truly become software providers, not in the sense of selling software, just providing a software fabric that's going to be the key differentiators, because digital transformation is about IT transformation. That is certainly the reality, what we're seeing when you start to peel back the onions. And that to me is going to be the big discussion because as David Gooldun said on stage, apps provide the value. As the enterprises build more apps, you got to have a platform, you got to have a cohesive horizontal end to end software fabric, and the question is, do they have it? >> Well, they certainly have the foundation for it, I mean they have Pivotal, there's a whole developer community around Pivotal. Dell itself doesn't have a developer community, nor does EMC but they have elements of that to build upon. The interesting thing about the conversion to software, about software defined infrastructure, is that it requires thinking from an application perspective and that's not something hardware companies have ever been inclined to do. So, how does Michael Dell make that transition, has he made it himself, is there other leadership he's going to have to bring in who are going to make it for him? The whole leadership of the Dell EMC company right now is ex-Dell and EMC people, it's hardware guys. >> I'm going to put pressure on Dell, the question on software. But you wrote a two part series on SiliconAngle.com, worth checking out, getting a lot of viral buzz around open source and the value of open source, because if you look at say Cisco for instance, what they're doing with the cloud native strategy, they have actually pivoted and Chuck Robbins, the CEO has acknowledged, actually re-tweeted one of my tweets the other day, with as we were talking about this new program called DevNet Create. They're taking the developer program from Cisco and moving it into an open community model, which basically is the toe in the water for saying, we have to figure out open source. All the critical, big vendors that are transforming from called the old guard, as Amazon calls 'em, Amazon Web Services, Andy Jasse. Dell's an old guard guy, but still young, but they got to get to open source. What are you finding is the success parameters there because you got to play in the open source, be a contributing member. Again, back to the DNA of the culture, and two, there's real value there. >> Well, there's no question that open source has won when it comes to infrastructure. I mean, the biggest IT companies in the world which are Google and Facebook, are both built on open source platforms. Game over. This is where IT infrastructure is headed. Cisco, interesting case because they are an infrastructure company, and they are being eroded, their traditional market is being eroded by open source, they've chosen to embrace it through their developer community. Cisco is one company I would never bet against. They're such a great company. If anyone's going to make the transition, they will. Open source is still an infrastructure play. I don't see open source in the applications area being a major driver, but Dell is an infrastructure company, so you have to assume that everything they're doing in managing, in securing storage and servers is going to be under pressure from open source at some point. They have to embrace that as Cisco is doing. >> Paul, we had thought leader chat with some experts on our digital panel, software crowd chat, everyone knows crowdchat.net, check it out. And comment and conversation was taking place among the influential folks saying, what is a software company? You go back to the web, shrink wrapped, download software, to now fully SAS based and Saas now platform, what is a software company? So, the question was, is Facebook a software company? Or are they an app company? Which begs the question, you have to be a software company, but it's not the classic software company category, business model. You need software (chuckling) to run stuff, so you can be a hardware guy, like Michael Dell, and have Dell Technologies. You can be a network company like Cisco, but you've got to be a software company in the new way. >> Well, I spoke to a Forester analyst in writing that piece on open source who had a great point, he said Facebook and Google are two big successful software companies, neither of which makes. >> Any money. >> Any money, a little bit in Google's case licensing software. They created business models that have nothing to do with the traditional software model, but that have leveraged their expertise in the software that they've developed. And maybe that is the business model, ultimately the business model is building software in order to do something else with it that customers will pay for. >> I think you're on to something. I think your post illuminates that. I think that this is going to be one of those things where in the history books of the tech generation, as we're on our whatever wave of open source generation, this is it, it's not about the business model of the software, it's how the software's being used in the business model of the transformation. That is really really key. Paul, I want to just talk about, really quickly about my observation at EMC. A little bit of editorial moment here. Because, Dell took over. Dell EMC. We've interviewed now eight years, pretty much all the executives at EMC over the years, but there's an EMC mafia developing. There's a lot of people who have left EMC, that we know, we're friends with. Guy Churchwood, CJ DeSai, Josh Conn, Rich DePellatano, Brian Gallagher, BJ Jenkins, Sanjay Murchandani, and many more have left because of the consolidation. Certainly you can't, EMC's going to get consolidated down, but no major layoffs but still enough that some eagles have flown from the nest, as they say and are running other companies. So you have this EMC culture out there of very sales oriented, very customer centric, now running other companies, and I want to give a shout out to all those EMC alumni and mafia out there. Good luck on your new ventures, but the impact here to Dell is a mashup of the two cultures. What's your observation, what's your reaction of that. Have you heard anything? I have some thoughts, but I want to get your reaction because okay, some eagles fly away, you still got the worker bees inside EMC, and now Dell coming together. Thoughts on the culture clash. >> Well, I live in Boston, and so I've been through the acquisition of Prime Computer, through EMC acquiring Data General, through the DEC acquisition by Compaq. All of which were disasters, and all of which where the cultural issues were much bigger than the technology issues. So, I think that that is something that Dell has to be front and center for Michael Dell, is how do you mash up these two cultures. As you pointed out, EMC, very aggressive, take no prisoners, enterprise-oriented sales force. Their sales people make a lot of money. I used to live in a neighborhood where everyone was EMC salespeople. >> John: Buying new houses. >> They were making a million dollars a year. And you've got Dell with its direct model, with its channeled model, and without a particularly strong roots in enterprise sales force and how do you coordinate those. It's not surprising to see people leaving. Of course, in the early days after an acquisition, choices get made, people get promoted and moved in new positions. Those who lose out tend to leave the company. But, I think the sales issue would be something to delve into too. Does Dell want to adopt EMC's sales style, or the other way around? Or is there some way that they can live both in harmony? >> You know, I follow a lot of companies in Silicon Valley as well, I'm out there on the west coast, left coast, as they say. Where all the crazy ones are, as they say. But I got to say, there's been some shrinkage on EMC, but for the most part, I haven't really heard any really negative horror stories. Actually, it's been going pretty well, and I think you bring up an issue of effectiveness with the sales folks. Dell's an efficiency guy, right so you got effectiveness and efficiency coming together. But I think they've handled it well. I really haven't heard any real horror stories. Again, I think that has to do with the founder being actively involved, they're a private company, so they have some room. And I think they've invested in making that happen, so I think generally, props to EMC folks and for the Dell folks on the acquisition. Still not clear the woods yet, it's going to surely be in the products and the revenue, but for the most part, we're going to unpack that. So Paul. >> But you can't, I just wanted to jump in just quickly. You can't minimize customer touch, and EMC was always a high touch company. Outstanding service, they put people on a plane in the middle of the night, charter a private jet in the middle of the night to get someone on site at a customer to fix a problem. As you mentioned, Dell is an efficiency company. That's not a very efficient way to operate. Can they absorb the best of EMC and the best of Dell at the same time? >> Yeah, well we'll certainly tell, I mean they got a lot of competition, Michael Dell saying on stage. (mumbling) startups, essentially what's he's saying is Amazon, there in my opinion, although that's not probly what he really meant but that's my interpretation. But I'm expecting to see the same old EMC world with a twist, and that is, we're doin' good, the messaging's out there, we're going to see how the products compare vis a vis the competition. I'm interested in Vmware piece. Paul, what are you looking forward to? >> I'm looking forward to hearing how this is all going, how this company is culturally, what kind of a cultural chimera they're putting together here that's going to make sense, that the market is going to understand. I also want to hear how they're going to differentiate in cloud, internet of things, we just heard a little bit about that this morning. That's something where I think you're seeing Cisco. The way Cisco's dealing with the cloud these days is to say, don't worry about it, it's all going IOT. It's all going to distributed intelligent devices, the cloud is already history, is what they're saying. So, does Dell have a similar differentiated position on that. I'm least interested in hearing about the new products because it's speeds and feeds. But really, how is this company going to dominate an industry, how is it going to get over some of the speed bumps that we've been talking about for the last 20 minutes that have foiled so many merger attempts in the past. >> One of the tell signs that I look at a conference when I see a lot of AI washing. The good news is, there's not a lot of AI being talked about here, 'cause usually that's just lipstick on the pig, as they say. Except for the case of Google and Amazon Web Services, they do have some AI story, with some real products to back it up. For the most part, you're not seeing EMC glob on the whole machine learning, rah rah. They did talk about it but it wasn't like a big theme. I think they really talked about the packaging of the value. Of the brands together, comments around costs for public cloud, nice little ding there. I'm going to dig into the story. I'm going to really test the story, and I'm going to look at the customer traction. I really want to see who they have on stage, I really want to hear who's really going down the road, how that growth strategy, 'cause I think they're going to win the data consolidation market pretty handily, and the question between HPE and Dell, for instance, 'cause that's really to me the two big horses on the track. Who's going to win the growth. Who's going to be able to lock in their beachhead on the core market, traditional market, and have access to the growth of what cloud will bring and IOT and among other things. >> I think at this point, HP has a better story in that area with their configurable infrastructure, with their pay as you go on site model, really interesting models. I was at HP World in Europe in December, and I came away from that feeling like these guys have some unique talking points here. At least they have a strategy that I think I understand and that is different. Dell is still working through this huge merger and that's a big catch. >> Bottom line is, Dave Donatelli, who's an executive at Oracle told me, he also was an EMC executive, and HPE. The business of provisioning servers and storage (laughing) is not going to be the growth strategy. Now, it might be a component of the overall business model, like software, but ultimately, that business is in decline, and that's a fact. Okay, this is the Cube, bringing you all the coverage of the kickoff from day one at Dell EMC World 2017. Our eighth year, three days of wall to wall coverage. We have two sets, the blue set and the white set. Go to SiliconAngle.tv to find the coverage, also go on Twitter, follow us on the Cube, I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillin, kickin' off Dell EMC World 2017, back with more, stay with us after this short break. (atmospheric instrumental music)