(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're here in the studios in Palo Alto, California. Two great guests Linda Tong, general manager of Cisco AppDynamics and Garrick Linn, architect of operations at Match.com. Thanks for joining us. We're talking about AppDynamics, Match.com and customer experience. Mainly around cloud migration. So Linda, great to see you and Garrick, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to see you again. Thank you for having us. >> Same here. >> Linda, you're a CUBE alumni. we've talked about cloud migration application performance, modern application development, all powered by the Cloud, right? So this is really key and people are relying on the cloud and cloud scale and data to drive the digital transformation, the digital services and applications right now. How has the pandemic affected your customers and their expectations for digital experiences? >> Oh boy, I mean the pandemic has been, it has been rough for our customers, you know, and part of that is what Garrick's going to tell you a little bit more about today, but folks are seeing this increase in expectancy of accelerated speed and delivering innovation, building great applications and iterating on them quickly. And frankly, their customers' demands we're engaging with them through digital services. And that has led to this massive increase in, one, the types of technologies that they're consuming to build and deliver these applications. And two the complexity upon how they actually wrap their arms around it and understand what's going on and deliver these great experiences. And so it's been a rough road for our customers and what we find with AppDynamics and Cisco is our ability to partner with our customers to help them wrap their arms around that complexity. >> John: Garrick, I'd love to get your commentary on this because I'll say, Match.com has been at large-scale for many, many years, and now the pandemic comes in now a new user experience, more accelerated, more action, more things are happening, right? So this is truly the hybrid world coming together. I mean, it is kind of the same game, but kind of new patterns are emerging. What have you seen in the pandemic around the expectations and the services and you guys are providing in the digital experiences? >> Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, Match has been around for quite some time. We've been here for over 25 years. We have an interesting mix, heterogeneous, technology, some old stuff, some new stuff. A lot of the mentality that we try to bring is to innovate. The pandemic was, it brought a lot of uncertainty. We weren't really sure how people were going to react. Was it going to be everybody kind of hunkers down on dating definitely is something that requires human interaction in multiple levels. And it turned out that people were still very much interested in getting to a place where they can find human connections and you know Match as a premium product tries to make that delightful. And so we had our hands full, especially at the beginning, things like, by checking the video features, how does that work? What are the expectations? Is that going to creep people out? If we try to offer that, are they going to use it? How are they going to date? How are they going to talk? How can we make sure that they're safe? All these kinds of things went into it. And so when we have been using AppDynamics for you know, years now, well before the pandemic, and we use that in order to get a gauge, not just on the type of traffic and load, but also, "Hey, you've got these new features, "how do they fit into this huge complex environment?" And so some of those timelines that maybe were a little bit more relaxed were very much accelerated, And like a lot of companies, we had to figure out how to deliver on that. >> John: Yeah, Linda, I want to get your thoughts. We've talked about in the past, AppDynamics has been a leader in really accelerating the value for customers. Now with the pandemic, you mentioned these new experiences are being pulled in from the physical world, right? So you have things that were happening on digital in the application space. Now you have more experiences coming in because there's no places to meet face to face. Now it's coming together, but people have been seeing the value. Well, if I can't meet in person Match.com are going to do some things, new things, online chat, whatever. This dynamic of old way, new way is changing and cloud is powering that. What are you seeing in terms of your customers' journeys around what was once pre-pandemic and now post-pandemic? >> Well, a big part of that is more and more of these experiences rely on digital services and these amazing sort of ways to connect with each other and in a very digital space, expectations of customers have changed. So not only do you experience applications and you want it to be simple, easy to use, delightful, and it delivers on the needs that you want. But on top of that, you expect it to be performant. You expect it to be secure. You expect there to be frankly, no hiccups whatsoever, because now this is your way to connect with others. This is your way to find dates or go on dates. And the last thing you want, is watching your screen pixelate, as you're trying to have an important conversation. And these kinds of experiences and these challenges as people build more and more of these digital services to build these connections, frankly, require a lot more of folks like Garrick and his team. They now have to deliver amazing experiences with perfect performance, no security risks, no bumps in the night. And that's really tough, right? Expectations have gone through the roof. >> John: Yeah, the whole story on that one point, just to kind of add live in this was that that whole concept of moving fast used to take months, right? I mean, weeks, months, now it's days and hours. So months to weeks, days and hours but Garrick, this is the challenge. This is the opportunity with the cloud. Can you just take us through your cloud journey and your goals and some of the impacts that has had on your transition to the cloud? What does that look like? >> Yeah, so we've had our on-prem data centers for quite some time, and we started putting our toe in, I guess, although it was a kind of intense at the beginning, just trying to get people on board and to say, "Hey, this is possible." We started out with a fairly small SWAT team then managed within a couple of months, working closely with our developers. We have a lot of smart people, you know, with background or overall, just security folks over devs to just demonstrate that we could do it. So we managed to take something like 80% of our front end traffic for most of the day, just kind of spinning that up, learning lessons from that, knowing what we didn't know. AppDynamics, if we didn't have that would have been almost impossible to get a read if for no other reason, then just one little tidbit. We used to have a data center in Virginia. And so physics being what it is, you know, there's just been a flight that we have to contend with. And for a couple, few years, we hadn't had the 30 millisecond or so round trip latency on there. So all of a sudden we're going back to the cloud that reintroduced this latency. So what does that mean? Will you be asked to sort of glide by and absorb it? How do we track it? How can we figure out what the Delta is between, you know, here's how we've done things on-prem. Here's how it looks out here. If you are the cross, you know, calls and, you know, AppDynamics was what we used to be able to get a read and say, "Hey, look, it isn't as good as we know we can make it, but it's something, it's a starting point. Here's why, we can show you the graphs. We can show you the data. Let's do this thing." So we then pulled back and we have focused this year on actually our affinity apps, which is a collection of applications that are also going to be okay just in, and so we've been asked to get those completely migrated over. We're going to be running in hybrid mode for a while. We're going to need to be able to compare apples to apples, apples to orangutans, all that. And this is one of the main things for you, we describe. >> {John] If I can just follow up on that just real quick, because I think this is a good point. You got the data points, you double down on that. You're looking at real data, and then you look at success and you double down, that's the playbook. So, and the other thing is that you guys actually have a real operation that's running full throttled, right? (John laughs) So, yeah, so I can see that nice balance. What does the future look like beyond that? Because when you got a business that's scaling, it's running, it's like changing the airplane engine out at 30,000 feet. You got to continue to push the envelope. >> Yup, so, and no, exactly right. Again, we're a premium product. And so we've got to back that up. And that means, maintaining high availability. And so over the next few years, we're going to be looking at what have we already do? What can we move in piecemeal kind of way where it makes sense? What are the things that we can rethink? We're also using AppDynamics as part of our containerization initiative. You know, we've got lots of virtual infrastructure, but what is it, again, what does it look like on-prem, in a container, go down the list of different things that might be different. And then to be able to compare that to what it looks like, in the cloud. So it's going to be a while yet, but like a lot of companies, when we got into this, we didn't think it was going to be done in six months. Even if we have to deliver those features at a much faster rate, we know that the long haul, we got to make smart decisions and plan the capacity, and, you know, get there. (chuckles) >> John: That's a real pragmatic approach. Linda, you and I both are sports fans. We've talked in the past about sports, and the old adage, what inning are we in growth? It's to use that baseball metaphor. I would say it's a double header, game one won by the cloud, game two is happening now. And the trend is this end-to-end mature, operationally focused customer base. And IT, where IT has shifted to the cloud right now. And they're having this new view of what modern is. End-to-end, understanding different stacks relative to applications. It's not as simple as it was before, but it's relevant. Can you share your views on how that's playing out because, or do you agree with that? And do you see that as an important part of the customer? >> Yeah, I mean, I think it's, that complexity that the IT organizations are seeing now, as they fully adopt the cloud for all their new applications and start to migrate some of their existing applications over. That world is only increasing in complexity. The way that you can virtualize your applications, break them out into millions of services, the dependencies you have on third party applications or SaaS services. These things only add that many more data points that you now have to cover and think about and make sure that those things deliver upon their SLAs, right? And wrapping your arms around that requires a partner to help you separate signal from noise. Because now you're going into a world without simplicity that you just mentioned has gotten to some point where it's beyond what you can actually sort of keep in your mind. Beyond what you can just look at data and sift through and understand, you really need tools and systems that come together, and understand that data for you and start to represent your business to you in a new way and abstract away those layers of complexity. While you do that, because I think, as you talk about those innings, that first inning, second inning, or rather first game, second game in the series, it's not a full migration to the cloud, right? There are going to be some applications that stay on-prem that stay in their traditional environments and may never move. And then some of them are going to go hybrid. Some will keep parts of the applications on-prem, and they're going to start to modularize components of it. And so it's not going to be sort of a mass scale migration. And then we're all in the promised land. And we deal with the cloud complexity. It's going to be ever increasing complexity. As we now introduce so many variants of applications, so many variants of technology, and what people are going to need is someone who can help them cover that entire estate and understand it at scale. >> John: Yeah, I mean, I think it's the enterprise conversion, if you will of cloud operations on-premises because of the reasons. And now you've got the edge. Garrick, this is the whole kind of end-to-end stack conversation view. And by the way, there isn't one tech stack to rule them all because you have different use cases. You might have an application that needs a financial gateway or have other capabilities. So integration's huge. This only increases the point Linda was making about complexity behind the scenes. How does AppDynamics help you with this for Match.com? >> So we have quite a bit of infrastructure, you know, a lot of it is shared, well, most of all, maintaining, sandboxes for user data and that sort of thing. And so now the navigating that space is always interesting. So for instance, one of the new things that we have coming out is Star.com It's out there right now. It's a dating site that's geared towards single parents. It does share some of the infrastructure, but we're realizing what that means, how is that different, how our registration flow is different, how our subscription flow is different. Where are the things that DevOps are actively trying to improve on and rethink? That's one of the things that we try to focus on when we're trying to kind of pick out, like, is this a good candidate to move over to the cloud sooner or later? Is this a good candidate for something that needs to be maybe bake a little bit more? And having established those baselines with the shared infrastructure, and having a pretty good understanding of how they react, how they work really helps us, you know, tee up these new initiatives and in front of those needs in a more efficient way. So yeah, absolutely. >> John: What's some of the activity you guys seen? And what's the peak activity on Match.com these days? >> Yeah, so dating apps in general, but not so particular we use a nested or breast fractal peak, and it's a pattern that, from what they told me back in the old days, took a little while to realize was a thing. And not just like, oh we changed something and then did this and produced that. So every evening is our peak basically. So with taking time zones into account, obviously, in the United States from about five to 10 o'clock at night or so, we get this, growing, burst of traffic. So that can be anywhere from 23% sometimes. It kind of varies. Then we have a weekly peak where every, you know, Sunday and Monday we expect a higher amount of traffic than we would other days. And it kind of makes sense from an Archer psychology kind of standpoint where, you know, you're coming off of dates, you're trying to set dates up. That's where a lot of that activity is. And then we have a yearly peak, which goes from around Christmas to President's day. Believe it or not, it's President's day, it's not Valentine's day. And so the sort of thing where when we're trying to plan for capacity and we do a lot of, what cost squeeze tests, were not quite as I guess, engineering, but hey, what does it look like if we go down in capacity by 50%, what happens? where are the weak points? A January, Monday night is very different from a May, Thursday in June (chuckles). So we have to predict, we can anticipate some of that, but we don't know for sure, a lot can change in a year. So when we're preparing for a yearly peak, we really have to pay attention. We have to prep. We have to plan for that and work with that to figure out how we can get through it and maintain that level of service. >> That's awesome, and AppDynamics to help you to do that. I'd love to get a bot to give me the optimal dating times, to share with my single friends. Great stuff. Linda, thank you for coming. Great to see you. Congratulations on a great case study. Great story. How large-scale applications and are working in the modern cloud. So congratulations on your success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Awesome, thank you, so good to be here. >> Okay, CUBE coverage of re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies world. Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to the CUBE'S coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin joined by a couple of guys from Dell Technology. Please welcome Martin Glynn, the senior director for product management for PowerMax Martin good morning. >> Good morning. >> Nice to see you. And joining Martin is Matthew Paul, the senior director of product management for PowerFlex at Dell Technologies. Matthew, nice to see you. >> Nice to see you thanks for having us Lisa. >> So our virtual cube this year can't be with you guys in person or the 14,000 other folks that usually attend at Dell Technologies World but a lot of opportunities to engage customers and partners and present analysts digitally, which is great. So Matthew, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about what's new with PowerFlex, this was the kind of the end of the rebrand under the power portfolio that Dell Technologies undertook the last couple of years formerly the VXFlex excuse me, from Scale IO, what's new with PowerFlex? >> Yeah, that's a spot on. So really the idea of us aligning the full power portfolio is kind of a big deal, right? Part of the winning roadmap to at IO, kind of assigned to our customers and our field and everyone that software defined storage is a critical part of the Dell Technologies strategy. If you think about PowerFlex, just to kind of level set, it's really a software defined infrastructure kind of system that brings you the best of traditional three tier infrastructure and the best of HCI infrastructure while being able to make that experience really simple in the enterprise while still delivering exemplary really great performance and scale. In terms of new things, well, just real quick, in terms of kind of new things, we brought interesting topics like native Async replication, secure snapshots, some end to end lifecycle management pieces. So a lot of great innovation in the last year. >> And that was some of the recent announcements. Tell me Matthew, from a customer perspective since you've announced Asynchronous replication snapshots, what's the customer adoption, customer feedback been like? >> Yeah, it's been fantastic. We continue to grow this market really strong, you know, we're focusing on high end large enterprise customers working towards, bringing down also into kind of enterprise and commercial customers, so it'll make things easier to use. But very strong adoption and great investments here at Dell with this product. >> All right, so PowerFlex, Martin, let's go to you PowerMax, talk to us about PowerMax. And then also how it kind of fits into the whole power portfolio. >> Sure, yeah, so thanks Lisa. The PowerMax products, I think was the first product other than of course, the server products to be powered up in the storage portfolio, PowerMax is the sort of flagship sort of derived product that we've had now for, you know, a few decades really been a leader in mission critical data centers. But I think that pace of innovation over the last year just like Matt describing the PowerFlex side has been a really phenomenal. Just about a year ago he came out with a storage class memory, we did fiber channel Endymion over fiber channel, and more recently brought in a few really interesting new technologies, like support for replication, with VVols, cloud mobility, and now, efficient encryption. So the set of things we're enabling our customers to do with their you know, sort of traditional three tier SAN infrastructure is really just unmatched. >> So Matt talk to me about the last six seven months, where are these enterprise customers in terms of leveraging PowerMax for example, when everything just changed dramatically almost overnight. Enterprises in every industry had to suddenly remote workforce. How did PowerMax help your customers pivot and ensure that their digital transformation could support this business surviving? >> Yeah, well, like everybody we were a little worried at the outset, you know lot of uncertainty about how things would play out and the response from our customers has been amazing. You know, they've all sort of really doubled down on using our technology to support their businesses through this new model. So, you know, the business has been really amazing really incredible, and it's been great to partner with our customers that help them continue to deliver the services that they need you know, in this new model. So that part's been, been really wonderful, and as we work really closely with them, some of the things we just came out with, you know, they've helped us to design and deliver in a way that they can best take advantage of so, you know, for example the new cloud mobility functionality that's letting them take information directly off of their mission, critical sort of bedrock sand infrastructure and push it up to an object store. And that could be a local private object store, it could be a public object store like AWS. And so that's you know, it's enabling them to take advantage of some new models and a new approach to doing things. And I think ultimately that's going to help them work through this you know, new normal, we're all participating in. >> Yeah, we want to help those businesses not just survive this time, but be able to thrive, especially as we don't know how much of this remote scattered workforce is going to remain. We're hearing estimates from some of the big technology leaders at all. 50% percent of the workforce is going to remain at home so really helping organizations to maneuver and navigate these challenging landscapes is a big priority I know for Dell Technologies we talked about that with some other guests. Matthew, over to you talk to me about PowerFlex from a workloads perspective, so we can get a good idea for the workloads that it's really ideally best suited for. >> Yeah, I think wanted to just take a quick second on the COVID piece, because we have a couple of really big customers that we had to enable really quickly for curbside checkout and, you know, they were trying to run things, they were putting it on their existing infrastructure, their existing systems, and it just wasn't fast enough, it wasn't keeping up. And by working closely with the customer and designing a system with PowerFlex as the core, allowed us to enable them really quickly to turn from a customer who didn't have this idea of curbside checkout to enabling curbside checkout. So I think working and partnering closely with our customers is a critical part of how Dell Tech is successful and enabling them to kind of work through these tough times. With workloads, Yeah, oh, go ahead sorry. >> That's okay go ahead. >> I was going to say with workloads in general, the way that we have to think about them with enterprise quality or enterprise requirements is really in kind of a scheme of looking at performance, understanding scalability, ensuring we have enterprise class availability, and then last but definitely not least is like how we manage that and how we make it easier for customers to work through those. And when I think about Flex there's two or three key areas that we try to go after, if you, one of the key differentiation pieces around Flex is the fact that we can deploy it in multiple manners. So you can deploy it in an HCI mode, where you have the compute and networking together, or you can go deploy it in a dis-aggregated mode where you have compute and networking, I mean, compute and storage separate. And if those are separate that allows you to scale those independently work really, really well for key database workloads, key workloads like, let's say even like Honda, where you maybe have really high compute but little less storage requirements. So that really allows customers to dial up and down what makes the most sense for them right? The other angle that we're seeing pretty big adoption is around this idea of re-platform or realigning the data center with transformation with software defined scale all block storage. So think about deploying Powerflex in an environment and then being able to use that in a virtual environment in a physical environment, in a container environment being able to have your traditional applications like SQL or Oracle, right along really cool new applications like the ELK Stack or Mongo DB or other things, because of the way that we design our layout, it's really aligned towards being able to re-platform and align in a software defined infrastructure. So customers are using to kind of align those pieces meaning platforms, re-platforming and then also aligning specific applications that require high performance. >> I heard a lot in that and one word that pops up is no, that's good. >> No, I can tell you're passionate about it. >> I love it, yeah. >> And also the customer influence is absolutely critical. I think this is a time you mentioned the curbs I check in, and then I was reading a few months ago about some of the huge brands that were filing for chapter 11 and companies like big retailers that simply couldn't pivot, couldn't digitally transform to even offer curbside check in so that factor alone since us consumers are so demanding was table stakes a few months ago. It still is, but getting an organization able to pivot so quickly is key. Martin let's go over to you, PowerMax, workloads. Talk to me about some differentiators as well. >> Yeah Aatually, if I could I'll start with sort of some similar examples that Matt laid out there, you know, just like we have customers who chose PowerFlex you know, were in environments that made sense for them. We had customers who chose PowerMax to meet similar new demands with the whole, you know pandemic. So we had some really big customers just so okay, now we have sort of line of sight and, you know, across both products, I think the thing that our customers value most is you know, the quality of the experience, the performance of the experience, some of the things Matt mentioned already. But they really pull forward, you know, huge numbers of systems and business, and be able to support you know, where they saw things going. So that was really great to partner with them on that and be ready to help support them and provide a product that they felt really good about making such huge investments in, you know, it was great to see their trust in us and be able to deliver for them. So, that was, I think a big part of the first half of the year, that sort of new, you know, new workloads and new use cases for us on the PowerMax side really revolve around giving our customers new capabilities that can deliver new services for their end users. So one of those is our new support for VVols remote replication. And this really lets us tie together the way that the infrastructure is managed at the VMware level, much more closely to the way that the storage infrastructure is managed. And the result is that our, our customers can do more granular operations for their end users, they can simplify the whole process, and now they can do it on top of our remote replication solution, which, you know going on 20 plus years now, it's really been sort of the gold standard in which they've come to rely on so much. So that's really exciting to be able to offer that to them now, to have it be part of the whole VMware stack that they're deploying and let them use you know, new things like, you know the way VVols works with our cyber site recovery manager, to let them automate you know, the testing, I feel always in the actual fail over. There's an interesting example of how I think our customers are going to take advantage of some of these new technologies as we go forward. >> You mentioned giving customers the ability with the right infrastructure to offer new services. And that's another critical component as we've seen in 2020 is businesses needing to pivot continuously and come up with new creative ideas, products, and services and new ways of delivering those to their existing customers holding onto them and hopefully growing their customer base. And that ability to leverage technology, to deliver new services is also one of the key kind of foundations that will allow businesses to be the winners of tomorrow. Matthew, to you talk to me when you're in customer situations, customers have choice, we know this, ding into me, give me the top three differentiators when you're talking to customers, why PowerFlex is the ideal solution for them? >> That's a great question. I'm glad you asked. (laughs) So I think, you know, as part of being a product guy it's really cool when the intellectual property within your product is software that your company owns and hardware, your company owns. So we're able to do some really cool stuff together to deliver innovative solutions for our customers. But, you know, when I think about my product I think first and foremost, around performance and scale right? You know, several million, IO'S a sub-millisecond response time and anytime someone wants more performance they just add another server, right? So this idea that we scale literally is a key differentiator for the product. A second key differentiator is this idea that I talked a little bit about before that we, you can kind of multi-platform this. So when you roll this out, you can deploy to use it with virtual environments, whether it's VMware or Hyper-V or other virtual environments. You can have bare metal deployment. So if you want to run this with Linux and use software defined storage in the bare metal, we can support that. Or we can go directly to containers. So you can use containers, bare metal or virtual. And so this idea of choice is a huge differentiator. And then the last one is anchored around this idea that when you scale and you get the benefit of management, you don't have to scale everything at the same time. So in traditional software defined infrastructure on the HCI side you have to scale compute and storage together. So every time you add a node you add compute power and storage power. With power flex, we've been able to effectively split those two pieces off, so a customer could actually only scale what they need. And in fact, if they only want to buy storage side of the solution, you can just buy storage side solution and then you can have existing infrastructure connect to that and it behaves just like a traditional three tier model. So those are, I think are the key things that I think differentiate the product and kind of make it special here at Dell and for our customers. >> Matthew, sticking with you, are there any, I think of things like compliance and healthcare and financial services, especially right now, what are some of the key benefits that PowerFlex delivers, say for some of those essential industries right now? >> Yeah, I think, you know it's interesting 'cause those are two of our largest space and financial is probably our largest space. And really for them, it comes down to, you talked about compliance, you talk about scale and then you talk about management. So we said some really interesting requirements because of scale so large, for example, in our last release we're able to start to do rack level firmware and software updates. So when you look at other solutions they might be doing system at a time, doing updates taking them offline and then running those around. But in our scenario, since we kind of own the SDS layer and the compute side, we can actually do update these for an entire rack in one shot. Dramatically reducing the complexity, dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes to do updates. So that's a real big deal in financial space. And then in terms of healthcare, for example we're the only software defined solution product that can run all of Epic healthcare, all pieces of Epic within our product. All other products run out of bandwidth, run out of performance. So they end up not being able to run all sides of the requirement, whether it's the database back end, or the VDI front end, we're the only one on the market that can do all of that. >> It seems to really be a big differentiator in healthcare as a lot of organizations run on Epic or try to, to help with patient care and care delivery. Martin, last question for you. Give me a snapshot of the partner's perspective over the last couple of years with the rebrand under Dell Technologies, with the power portfolio, how have your partners embraced the simplification? >> So, you know, I think that the overall, this gave them clearer understanding of where and what to sell and what made sense for power max in particular, you know, I think it let them anchor on, you know the flagship product of the legendary performance and reliability of that platform and, you know, gave them an easy way to think about where to position that with, you know, our end customers and, you know, in what ways that the products would benefit their customers the most. So, you know, as Matt described on the PowerFlex side, it starts with our performance and reliability and then ultimately, you know enabling them to do whatever they need to do, so across all the different data services and we got to talk ready about some of the new ones you know, but we also have a lot that we've you know, refined over the years and, you know making it sort of official and sort of the PowerMax envelope what everyone really just sort of simplify how they would consume it all. So, you know, I think, you know maybe one of the thing, you know, worth mentioning in all these new use cases and environments and, you know, all the different applications that our customers are trying to operate and deliver on is, you know, security, you know, so we developed a new capability that we call end-to-end efficient encryption. And this really lets customers do encryption all the way from the host through to the storage. And, you know I think ultimately that's going to help them sleep better at night and also, you know help them avoid some of the things that you've seen crop up now. Now that the world is so digital and all the different threats that our customers face. So we're keeping our finger on the pulse of a lot of different needs you know, whether it's flexibility, performance reliability, but all these new new technologies as well to make sure that we set our customers up to be successful as possible. >> That's exactly what they want to be, successful. Martin, Matthew, thank you so much for joining me on the Cube, sharing the updates for PowerMax, PowerFlex, the differentiators. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Yeah, thank you Lisa this was fun. Alright from my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cubes coverage, Dell Technologies World at 2020, the digital experience. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. This is Dave Volante and with me is Dennis Hoffman. He's a senior vice president and general manager for telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. Good to see you Dennis. Welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> So let's talk a little bit about corporate strategy, which is your wheelhouse. I'm curious, has the pandemic at all altered your thinking on Dell strategy? >> Interestingly enough it hasn't. I suppose it would be standard for me to say that, but if anything, it's just given us both a sense of the challenge of what we had to do as a company to keep doing business. But also it's been really illuminating because it's given us a glimpse of the future. And fortunately, I think we've been pretty well prepared for what's happening. >> Well, I think in a way there's a bias inside of Dell because you guys were probably more work from home than the average company and you, in a way, might've been more prepared for this and maybe your thinking was already headed in that direction. What do you think about that? >> No, I think it's a reasonable thesis. The company is very much a work-from-home oriented or mobile in terms of where we work, an overall, I guess, hypothesis that work's something you do, it's not a place. But we also had a portfolio that benefited from the pandemic and an overarching strategy that was really to help our customers transform digitally. And if anything, the pandemic's accelerated all of that. So again, not without its challenges. And I certainly feel for the folks who get an awful lot of their energy from working with people every day because that's what's missing for an awful lot of folks who are doing an awful lot of what you and I are doing here. But otherwise I think we were biased toward it and it worked out pretty well so far. >> Okay. So it hasn't changed your strategy, but I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. I mean, obviously more people are going to be working from home now, probably at least double. If it was 15 to 20% pre-COVID, it's going to be, let's call it 30, 35, maybe even 40% post-COVID. Maybe it's going to take a while, six, nine months to get there. But I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah, I think ours and the industries at large. Most companies' business continuity plans really centered around natural disasters. In most of those plans, 30% of the population working remotely was the high watermark. Right now, we're seeing whole industries redoing their business continuity plans, factoring in 60, 70% bogeys for how many people or what percentage of their population would work from home. As we surveyed our employees, 90% of people said we be either some form of hybrid work experience or completely remote. So, again, if we're for a bit of a leading edge on this, we're probably going to be tilted even more toward it, but there's been a big change in assumption about what remote work looks like and what you've got to do to make it productive. >> So we're a decade and a half into the cloud or at least the modern cloud era. What's your take on where the industry is today and how it affects your business and your cloud strategy broadly? >> Yeah, it's a fascinating. We're in the midst of an ever accelerating set of cycles or pendulum swings from centralized computing to decentralized computing back to centralized. We went from the mainframe era to the client server era and then even quicker to the cloud era. And now we're seeing the emergence of the edge. The one thing that's constant through all of this is workloads are like water. They seek their ground. Workloads have characteristics. They need performance, economics, security, data gravity. And so we've been firm believers through this whole time that a certain amount of workload's going to end up in a very centralized model. Some is going to end up very decentralized and our job is just to enable our customers to put the workloads where they need to run best. So as you point out, we're quite a ways into the cloud era now. It looks like the edge era is emerging. I like to think of it as really three legs of a stool. You've got work can run in a private data center, it can run in a public data center or it can run everywhere else. And increasingly, everywhere else is being called the Edge, all of it by the way, in a cloud operating model. So big distinction between cloud, the model and cloud, the place. And so in many ways, we talked specifically to certain vertical markets, the cloud era is already beginning to give way to the beginning of the Edge era. >> Well, and at the same time too, you're seeing the hyperscalers recognizing the need for whatever it is, for economics, for legal reasons, for preference or latency moving on-prem. >> Right. >> And so I was having an interesting discussion with the CIO the other day and I asked them, "Well, what what do you look at as cloud? "Cloud is everywhere. "I got my cloud on-prem. "I got my multiple clouds, which is clear. "Everybody's going multicloud." And then he happened to have 17,000 stores that he was looking after. He goes, that's Edge to me. That's all part of my cloud. And now of course, part of your role is telco. So let's talk about that space. You've got the over-the-top providers. They're sucking off the infrastructure that have been built out by the telcos. Cost per bid is coming down. Data uses is exploding. And the telco industry really has to transform its infrastructure. They're not agile enough and they can't wait to get to this new era of 5G. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that, how you see Dell helping. >> Well, as I'll tell you, you characterize it right on. I've in the last several months, spend a lot of time with telecom executives all over the world because of how easy it is to do this sort of thing. And they need to transform. The digital transformation sweeping the rest of the world has caught up with telecom and for a whole bunch of reasons. And some of those you pointed out, right, agility, cost, economics. They're in a funny place. Never has the demand for communication services been greater. And yet never have their financial positions been more challenged. Because they're stuck between an old, fairly proprietary, closed architecture and a handful of vendors and on the other hand, embracing this cloud computing data era where there's thousands of vendors. And they somehow all need to be cobbled together into an open software-defined system that runs on industry standard hardware. And yet most telecoms aren't prepared to do that integration themselves. So for us, we see immense opportunity. It's literally as if a massive 100 billion dollar plus addressable market has effectively decided they need to start buying the kinds of things we've been making for years. And moreover, they are by definition, fundamentally a distributed model. The big difference, I think, between Dell Technologies and a hyperscaler is we as a company we're built in and for a distributed computing world. We deal with very mundane topics like how do you get a person onsite within an hour? And how many spares depots do you have? And all of those sorts of things. Whereas hyperscalers were built for the exact opposite. A world in which they said, "Hey, give me your data, "give me your workloads. "I'll think hard about it. "And I'll give you a very flexible economic model." The Edge puts all of that up in the air and telcos's the leading part of this Edge, right? They're the ones that own a great deal of the Edge. And as you pointed out, 5G is really the thing that's got everybody excited. >> Well, you bring up a good point about the hyperscalers. I mean, their challenge now is they go on-premise. Okay. How do you service and support those customers at scale 'cause everything they do is at scale, it's all highly automated. So that's interesting. At the same time, I wonder you're a strategy guy. You look at what Amazon retail does. They're putting up warehouses everywhere. They're putting points of presence. I wonder if there are analogs to the technology business. It's probably more complicated, right, 'cause you're not servicing, you're just delivering. >> But I think you're right on. There's analogs. Look, we all are what we are as vendors. We all have our business models. Ours is to sell equipment and software and services to somebody. Amazon, since its founding, has really been about how do I insert myself in a transaction and ease that transaction and take a slice? Google's been about democratizing and monetizing the world's data. So Amazon needs access to transactions. Google needs access to the world's data, all the hyperscalers want into telco because they want onto the Edge. The same point you made about on-premises, right, like Outpost or Azure Stack. It's fundamentally admission by a hyperscaler that, "Yeah, I guess all workload doesn't belong "in the public cloud. "It's not all going to end up here." And I think they've got the same challenge when it comes to the Edge. And so people are trying to build their way out 'cause they need connectivity to the Edge. For us, we know that telecoms have to become multi clouds. You've referenced earlier the over-the-top profit problem. Well, they lost the profits from the consumer. B2C, they built the networks, they ran the networks and everybody else took the profit. So now here comes 5G with the promise of business services, real B2B revenue opportunities for telecom. And once again, they're faced with a choice. Either they become the cloud operator and allow the hyperscalers in as part of their multi-cloud or they give up the cloud to the hyperscalers and there go the over-the-top profits again. So it really, I found, a fascinating set of dynamics and an industry that can really use the help of somebody like Dell Technologies. >> Well, that's interesting 'cause as is many markets, consumer leads and then B2B markets open up. Well, how do you think this plays out? I mean, the telcos have very specialized hardware. They got this hardened and fossilized infrastructure. So where do you guys fit in that transformation and how do you see it evolving? >> Well, it's already started in a way, it's from the inside out. So telecommunications companies, as I look at them, as we look at them, they're almost like three companies in one. They have conventional IT organizations that in many ways look no different than a bank. They have their businesses, of course, the network where they spend the vast majority of their money, but it's not homogenous. There's a network core, there's a network Edge and then there's an access network. And then most of them, of course, sell services, business services. So they have lines of business. So we look at them as an IT organization, through the CIO, as a massive network operator through the CTO and then as a business partner, some of whom are even in our channel program and their cloud, their cloud services partners. And that's all through their line of business. So they're starting to open up from the inside out. Data center's going through transformation. It's begun in the network core. Now, the Edge is the next thing. And the RAN, in case of mobile operator, the radio access network, will ultimately come. And so you're right. There's a fossilized infrastructure in some places, but we've already seen the core start to desegregate and it will now ripple all the way out to their Edge and I think frankly through it and right onto the enterprise premise with private mobility. >> And so do you see them taking that infrastructure model all the way out to the Edge and trying to replicate essentially their what would've been monopolies for years or do you see them... It sounds like it's going to be a mix. Some of them are actually maybe going to lean on the hyperscalers and try to become more over-the-top content providers. >> Well, I think two challenges in business right? I guess they say there's three great motivators in business in life, make money, save money, stay out of jail, like revenue, cost and risk. They got a cost problem. They've got to get off the monolithic closed infrastructure architectures. They've got a revenue problem that a lot of the additional revenues and services went to somebody else, the OTT, the over-the-top folks. And so I think you will absolutely see a mix, but nobody can afford. No telecom communications company can afford to simply hand their network over. Unless they've reconciled, I'm just going to be a dumb pipe again, right? And none of them want that. >> Right. = But I think in many ways, they're waiting for somebody to walk in and say, "But here's the answer." And I can tell you that at Dell Technologies, and by that, I mean both within Dell and certainly within VMware, we're very strong proponents of the notion of an open software-defined network architecture built on industry standard hardware. And we're pretty well positioned, I think, to provide it or certainly that's the hope and the thesis behind our business. >> Yeah. So that then allows them to compete much more effectively, to provide, like you say, new B2B services, but it really is their infrastructure has been the big blocker up until recently. And you're right. I mean, network function virtualization has started to see through. We've seen some of the benefits of that and then now they've got to take it to the next level, your point about the Edge. >> Well in the 5G standard or 5G, the next cellular technology generation is actually defined by the three GPP standards. Release 15 was the first one that came out and it specified both standalone 5G networks where you can get all of these benefits and non-standalone where you basically have to mix 5G into the core, rely on the 4G Edge. And that's the only thing that's been deployed so far. So as in many things, the hype leads the reality by a little bit. So we've been talking 5G for a while, but the release 16 that would get you some of the really hyped up features of 5G just released this year. So it's coming and there's a lot of talk about it right now. There's a race to have the largest 5G network in America and the largest 5G network in the UK and so on and so forth. But this isn't really the true power of 5G. That window is still open and it's coming. >> You do a lot of strategy work. You obviously see the opportunity Edge, the term is just enormous. So you got to be wetting your chops at that. At the same time, the requirements are totally different. So I'm curious as to how you, as a strategy expert, dovetail into the architectural decisions that have to be made and the connective tissue between strategy and architecture and actually the whole go-to market, that whole value chain that you think about, how are you thinking about that in the world of Edge? >> Well there's, at the end of the day, two strategy decisions you got to make, where do I play and if I decide to play there, how do I win? So where do you play on the Edge is a very interesting question. Anytime there's a new computing paradigm shift, you go from something that's been pretty stable and frankly pretty horizontal and it becomes pretty verticalized. So the Edge is thousands of things right now. And it's many highly verticalized use cases, manufacturing, mining, retail, even something as simple as campus wifi replacement. So you've got to pick your spot. And for a company of our size, that really comes down to thinking about which of these Edge use cases are going to pop first, which one's going to teach you the most, which one's going to have the right level of scale. And this is where telco and Edge intersect because it turns out one big and easily reachable use case for Edge is to partner strongly with the telecommunications industry where something like 30 companies in the world make up 80% of the capital spending. I mean, you don't have to run a Superbowl ad. You can get all of your customers in a bus, right. So that's why I think there's really this somewhat silent, somewhat subtle and somewhat not so subtle competition for the architecture of the telecom industry as it refreshes, both because of 5G as an inflection point, but also just because of the stuff we talked about earlier, the economics, the need to modernize and embrace open-software defined industry standard architecture. >> And do have visibility at this point as to how portable the race to the telcos identify that sort of new standards? Do you have a sense as to how portable that would be to some of these other use cases or is it really like the software industry of when that started to grow, it was just so fragmented. Now, granted it's consolidated now, but do you have visibility on that yet? >> A little, but I mean the basic building blocks are quite portable. There's radio technology, 5G radio technology and there's a distinction between what might be required say to replace wifi at the Dell Round Rock Campus versus what AT&T needs for Manhattan, right? >> Yeah. >> But basically there's radio technology, which is increasingly becoming software running on industry standard hardware. And then the same sort of virtualization layer that is helpful in basically pulling all of this together, plays there as does the underlying hardware where Edge servers can be built for telco spec and easily modified to be an Edge enterprise use case. That's the base. On top of that however, is often a vertical solution. Like in retail's very timely, temperature sensing and mask detection and distance determination, right? So somebody's going to want to take that capability. And that's not something you're going to bounce off of some public cloud. You're going to want to actually understand in real time, as people walk in and out of the place, are they being compliant with whatever policies I have? So on top of some of this compute and virtualization and to some extent sometimes storage on the Edge, what else goes on that? Is it a video surveillance solution? Is it an automated mining RFID solution? And so we've got a little bit of insight and we know which verticals appear to be largest right now and which ones are going to pop first. And that's where a lot of people are putting their attention. >> Well, it's going to be interesting 'cause it sounds like there's a real long tale there. And you mentioned industry standard hardware and software, but maybe a new industry standard emerges for some of those use cases that you just mentioned where you need very low latency. Maybe that's where ARM gets in and maybe get some massive volume because while it's a long tail, it's also huge. >> It is. I mean, some people are estimating the Edge economy to be four times the internet economy because we get stuff that's going to be written that we don't even... It's no different than we went from... At one point, the only software in the world was mainframe software. And then some knucklehead wrote client server software and it was considered a niche. Fast forward 15 years later, mainframe is a subsegment of the computer industry and it's all client server software. And then we go cloud native. And at first it's a couple of cloud native apps and pretty soon it's a bunch. And this thing just goes back and forth. The difference is or I think the interesting thing is the cycle times are really compressing. I don't know if you've read Tom Friedman's latest book, "Thank You For Being Late", but it's all about how do we thrive as humans in the age of accelerations? Because the theory is we're not getting enough time to catch our breath now between pendulum swings. It's interesting. Same thing happened in cellular technology. I didn't know until I started doing this job, but 1G was real for about... It was the dominant form of networking for 17 years for mobile networking. Then 2G was for around 11. 3G was seven-ish. 4G looks like it's going to be six. So technology just keeps quickening. And it makes the amount of time we get to be horizontal and catch our breath as the industry is stable, there's always an inflection of some sort going on in our industry. And so change is absolutely the new normal. >> Yeah. And some of these things are really hard to predict. I mean, remember TCP/IP used to be this old, reliable protocol that runs the world. >> Exactly right. >> I want to ask you about... Last question is as a service initiative of Project Apex or Apex it's called. And that's obviously not just some kind of gimmick. I mean, that affects the strategy of the entire organization, the way in which customers want to consume the product or platform strategies now. How does that as a service pricing model affect the business that we've been talking about for the last 10 or 15 minutes? >> Well, the good news for us, those of us at the company working on Edge and telecom and all of that sort of stuff is we're actually building the business under the Apex philosophy, right? So our design center out of the gate is as a service. Michael made the observation a long time ago within our leadership team that, back to my comment, that workloads are like water. They seek their ground. There's a difference between where a workload belongs and the interest in a particular operating model or excuse me, a particular consumption model. And get they've been combined for a long time, right? The only way to get the, as a service consumption model, was through public cloud infrastructure. But it turns out that the right place for workload may well be on-premises not in a private data center or it may well be on the Edge not in a public cloud, but people still want to take advantage of the consumption model, right? The economics are the economics. And so for me, doing the telecom stuff, it's, as a service, the heart of the design center from a consumption model right out of the gate, which is frankly easier than trying to retrofit everything else. >> Right. >> But nonetheless, for us as a company, it's just an opportunity to give our customers the choice that they want in terms of not only what they acquire, but how they acquire it. >> Well Dennis, I always love talking to you. You're such a clear thinker and you've obviously gone deep into some of these topics. And good luck in the role in the telco world. It's obviously a huge opportunity. Everybody's really excited about it. And thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Nice chatting with you. >> Alright. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2020, the virtual cube. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxed music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World. Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. I am Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me. Please welcome Puneet Dhawan, the Director of Product Management, Hyper-converged infrastructure for Dell Technologies. Puneet great to see you today. >> Thank you, for having me over. >> And we've got a customer that's going to be articulating all the value that Puneet's going to talk about. Please welcome Greg Altman, the IT infrastructure manager from Swiff-Train. Hey, Greg, how are you today? >> I'm doing well. Thank you. >> Excellent. All right guys. So Puneet, let's start with you, give us a little bit of an overview of your role. You lead product management, for Dell Technologies partner aligned HCI systems. Talk to us about that? >> Sure, absolutely. Um so, you know, it's largely about providing customers the choice. My team specifically focuses on developing Hyper-converged infrastructure products for our customers that are aligned to key technologies from our partners, such as Microsoft, Nutanix, et cetera. And that, you know, falls very nicely with meeting our customers on what technology they want to pick on, what technology they want to go with, whether it's VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, we have to source from the customers. >> Let's dig into Microsoft. Talk to us about Azure Stack HCI. How is Dell Tech working with them to position this in the market? >> Sure, um, this is largely about following the customer journey towards digital transformation. So both in terms of where they are in digital transformation and how they want to approach it. So for example, we have a large customer base who's looking to modernize their legacy Hyper-V architectures, and that's where Azure Stack HCI fits in very nicely, and not only our customers are able to modernize the legacy architectures using the architectural benefits of simplicity, high performance, simple management, scalability. (Greg breathes heavily) For HCI for Hyper-V, at the same time, they can connect to Azure to get the benefits of the bullet's force. Now on the other end, we have a large customer base who started off in Azure, you know, they have cloud native applications, you know, kind of born in the cloud. But they're also looking to bring some of the applications down to on-prem, or things like disconnected scenarios, regulatory concerns, data locality reasons. And for those customers, Microsoft and Dell have a department around Dell EMC Integrated solutions for Azure Stack Hub. And that's what essentially brings Azure ecosystem, on-prem so it's like running cloud in your own premises. >> So you mentioned a second ago giving customers choice, and we always talk about that at pretty much every event that we do. So tell me a little bit about how the long standing partnership that Dell Technologies has with Microsoft decades. How is that helping you to really differentiate the technology and then show the customers the different options, together these two companies can deliver? >> Sure, so we've had a very long standing partnerships, actually over three decades now. Across the spectrum whether we talk about our partnership more on the Windows 10 side, and the modernization of the workforce, to the level of hybrid cloud and cloud solutions, and helping even customers, you know, run their applications on Azure to our large services offerings. Over the past several years, we have realized how important is hybrid cloud and multicloud for customers. And that's where we have taken our partnership to the next level, to co-develop, co-engineer and bring to the market together our full portfolio of Azure Stack Hybrid Solutions. And that's where I've said, meeting customers on where they are either bringing Azure on-prem, or helping customers on-prem, modernize on-prem architectures using Azure Stack HCI. So, you know, there's a whole lot of core development we have done together to simplify how customers manage on-prem infrastructures on a day-to-day basis, how do they install it, even how they support it, you know, we have joined support agreements with Microsoft that encompassed and bearing the entirety of the portfolio so that customers have one place to go, which is Dell Technologies to get not only the product, either in US or worldwide, to a very secure supply chain to Dell EMC, at the same time for all their support consulting services, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. We offer all those services in very close partnership with Microsoft. >> Terrific. Great. Let's switch over to you now, probably we talk about what Swiff-Train is doing with its Azure Stack HCI, tell our audience a little bit about Swiff-Train what you guys are what you do. >> Well, Swiff-Train is a full covering flooring wholesaler, we sell flooring across Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, even into Florida. And we're an 80 year old company, 80 plus. And we've been moving forward with kind of hybridizing our infrastructure, making use of cloud where it makes sense. And when it came to our on-prem infrastructure, it was old, well five, six years old, running Windows 2012 2016, it was time to upgrade. And when we look at doing a large scale upgrade, like that, we called Dell and say, you know, this is what we're trying to do, and what's the new technologies that we can do that makes the migration work easier. And that's where we wound up with Azure Stack. >> So from a modernization perspective, you mentioned 80 plus year old company, I was looking on the website 1937. I always like to talk to companies like that, because modernizing when you've been around for that long it's challenging, it's challenging culturally , it's challenging historically, But talk to us a little bit about some of the specifics, that you guys were looking to Dell and Microsoft to help modernize. And was this really to drive things like, you know, operational simplicity, allow the business to have more agility so that it can expand in some of those other cities, like we talked about? >> Absolutely. We were dealing with a long maintenance window five or six hours every week patching, updating. Since we moved to Azure Stack HCI, we have virtually zero downtime. That allows our night shifts or weekend crews to be able to keep working. And the system is just bulletproof. It just does not go down. And with the lifecycle management tools that we get with Windows Admin Center, and Dell's OpenManage Plug-in, I log into one pane of glass in the morning, and I look and I say, "Hey, all my servers are going great. Everything's in the green." I know that that day, I'm not going to have any infrastructure issues, I can deal with other issues that make the business money. >> And I'm sure they appreciate that. Tell us a little bit about the the actual implementation and the support as, as Puneet talked about all of the core development, the joint support that these two powerhouses deliver. Tell us about that implementation. And then for your day to day, what's your interaction with Dell and or Microsoft like? >> Well, for the implementation, we worked with our Dell representative. And we came up with a sizing plan. This is what we needed to do, we had eight or nine physical servers that we wanted to get rid of. And we wanted to compress down. Now we're definitely went from eight or nine to you servers down to three rack units of space with an edge, including the extra switches and stuff that we had to do. So I mean we were able to get rid of a lot of storage space or rack space. And as far as the implementation was really easy. Dell literally has a book, you follow the book and it's that simple. (Puneet chuckles) >> I like that I think more of us these days, can you somewhat write a book that we can just follow? That would be fantastic. One more question, Greg for you, before we go back to Puneet. As Puneet talked about in the beginning from describing his role, that you know, Dell Technologies works with a lot of other vendors. Why Azure Stack HCI for Swiff-Train? >> Well, it made sense for us. We were already moving, several of our websites were already moved to Azure, we've been a Hyper-V user for many years. So it was just kind of a natural evolution to migrate in that direction, because it kind of pulls all of our management tools into one, well you know, a one pane of glass type of scenario. >> Excellent. All right Puneet back to you. With some of the things that you talked about before and that Greg sort of articulated about simplifying day-to-day. Greg, I saw in my notes that you had this old aging infrastructure, you were spending five hours a week patching maintain, that you say is now virtually eliminated, Puneet, Dell Technologies and Microsoft had done quite a bit of work to simplify the operational experience. Talk to us about that, and what are some of the measurable improvements that you guys have made? >> Sure. It all starts with neither on how we approach the problem, and we have always taken a very product-centric approach at Azure Stack HCI. You know, unlike, some of our competition, which had followed. There is a reference architecture, you can put Windows Server 2019 on it and go run your own servers, and the Hyper-converged Stack on it, but we have followed a very different approach where we have learned quite a lot, you know, we are the number one vendor in HCI space, and we know a thing or two about HCI and what customers really need there. So that's why from the very beginning, we have taken a product-centric approach, and doing that allows us to have product type offers in terms of our Kx notes that are specifically designed and built for Azure Stack HCI. And on top of that, we have done very specific integration to the management Stack, we've been doing Admin Center, that is the new management tool for Microsoft to manage, both on-prem, Hyper-converged infrastructure, your Windows servers, as well as any VM's that you're running on Azure, to provide customers a very seamless, you know, a single pane of glass for both the on-prem as well as infrastructure on public cloud services. And in doing that, our customers have really appreciated how simple it is to keep their clusters running, to reduce the maintenance windows, based on some of our internal testing that we have done. IT administrators can reduce the time they spend on maintaining the clusters by over 90%. Over 40% reduction in the maintenance window itself. And all that leads to your clusters running in a healthy state. So you don't have to worry about pulling the right drivers, right founder from 10 different places, making sure whether they are qualified or not when running together, we provide one single pane of glass that customers can click on, and you know, see whether their questions are compliant or not, and if yes go update. And all this has been possible by a joint engineering with Microsoft. >> Can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution, which is what you're delivering, versus competitors that are only delivering a reference architecture? >> Absolutely. So if you're running just a reference architecture, you are running an operating system, systems Stack on a server, we know that when it comes to running HCI, that means running also business critical applications on a clustered environment. You need to make sure that all the hardware, the drivers, the founder, the hard drives, the memory configuration, the network configurations, all that can be very complex very easily. And if you have reference architectures, there is no way to know, but then running certified components in my note are not. How do you tell then? If a part fails? How do which part to sell or send, you know, for a replacement? If you're just running a reference architecture, you have no way to say the part the hard drive that failed, the one that was sent to the customer to replace whether that is certified for Azure Stack HCI or not? You know, what, how do you really make a determination, what is the right firmware that needs to be applied to a cluster of what other drivers that apply to be cluster, that are compliant and tested for Azure Stack HCI. None of these things are possible, if you just have a reference architecture approach. That's why we have been very clear that our approach is a product-based approach. And, you know, very frankly this is how we have... that's the feedback we've provided the Microsoft to, and we've been working very, you know, closely together. And you see that, now in terms of the new Azure Stack HCI, that Microsoft announced at Inspirely this year, that brings Microsoft into the mainstream HCI space as a product offering, and not just as a feature or a few features within the Windows Server program. >> Greg, I saw in the notes with respect to Swiff-Train that you guys have with Azure Stack HCI, you have reduced Rackspace by 50%, you talked about some of the Rackspace benefits. But you've also reduced energy by 70%. Those are big, impactful numbers, impacting not just your day-to-day but the overall business. >> That's true, >> Last question for you, Greg. If you think about how can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution versus a reference architecture. For your peers watching in any industry. what's your... what are your top recommendations for going with a validated all in one solution? >> Well, we looked at doing the reference architecture's path, if you will, because we're hands on we like to build things and I looked at it and like Puneet said, "Drivers and memory and making sure that everything is going to work well together." And not only that everything is going to work well together. But when something fails, then you get into the finger pointing between vendors, your storage vendor, your process vendor, that's not something that we need to deal with. We need to keep a business running. So we went with Dell, it's one box, you know, but one box per unit and then you Stack two of them together you have a cluster. >> You make it sound so easy. >> Let us question-- >> I put together children's toys that were harder than building the Stack I promise you, I did it in an afternoon. >> Music to my ears Greg, thank you. (Greg giggles) >> It was that easy >> That is gold >> Easier to put together Azure Stack HCI than some, probably even opening the box of some children's toys I can imagine. (all chuckling) >> We should use that as a tagline. >> Exactly. You should, I think you have a new tagline there. Greg, thank you. Puneet, well last question for you, Would Dell Technologies World sessions on hybrid cloud benefits with Dell and Microsoft? Give us a flavor of what some of the things are that the audience will have a chance to learn. >> Yeah, this is a great session with Microsoft that essentially provides our customers an overview of our joint hybrid cloud solutions, both for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, Azure stack HCI as well as our joint solutions on VMware in Azure. But much more importantly, we also talk about what's coming next. Now, especially with Microsoft as your Stack at CIO's a full blown product. Hyper hybrid, you know, HCI offering that will be available as, Azure service. So customers could run on-prem infrastructure that is Hyper-converged but managed pay bill for as an Azure service, so that they have always the latest and greatest from Microsoft. And all the product differentiation we have created in terms of a product-centric approach, simpler lifecycle management will all be applicable, in this new hybrid, hybrid cloud solution as well. And that led essentially a great foundation for our customers who have standardized on Hyper-V, who are much more aligned to Azure, to not worry about the infrastructure on-prem. But start taking advantages of both the modernization benefits of HCI. But much more importantly, start coupling back with the hybrid ecosystem that we are building with Microsoft, whether it's running an Azure Kubernetes service on top to modernize the new applications, and bringing the Azure data services such as Azure SQL Server on top, so that you have a consistent, vertically aligned hybrid cloud infrastructure Stack that is not only easy to manage, but it is modern, it is available as a pay as you go option. And it's tightly integrated into Azure, so that you can manage all your on-prem as well as public cloud resources on one single pane of glass, thereby providing customers whole lot more simplicity, and operational efficiency. >> And as you said, the new tagline said from, beautifully from Greg's mouth, "The customer easier to put together than many children's toys." Puneet, thank you so much for sharing with us what's going on with Azure Stack HCI, what folks can expect to learn and see at Dell Tech World of virtual experience. >> Thank you. >> And Greg, thank you for sharing the story, what you're doing. Helping your peers learn from you. And I'm going to say on behalf of Dell Technologies, that awesome new tagline. That was cool. (Greg chuckles) (Lisa chuckles) >> Thank you. 'Preciate your time. >> We're going to use it for sure. (Greg chuckles) >> All right, for Puneet Dhawan and Greg Altman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Digital Experience. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. This is Dave Volante and with me is Dennis Hoffman. He's a senior vice president and general manager for telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. Good to see you Dennis. Welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> So let's talk a little bit about corporate strategy, which is your wheelhouse. I'm curious, has the pandemic at all altered your thinking on Dell strategy? >> Interestingly enough it hasn't. I suppose it would be standard for me to say that, but if anything, it's just given us both a sense of the challenge of what we had to do as a company to keep doing business. But also it's been really illuminating because it's given us a glimpse of the future. And fortunately, I think we've been pretty well prepared for what's happening. >> Well, I think in a way there's a bias inside of Dell because you guys were probably more work from home than the average company and you, in a way, might've been more prepared for this and maybe your thinking was already headed in that direction. What do you think about that? >> No, I think it's a reasonable thesis. The company is very much a work-from-home oriented or mobile in terms of where we work, an overall, I guess, hypothesis that work's something you do, it's not a place. But we also had a portfolio that benefited from the pandemic and an overarching strategy that was really to help our customers transform digitally. And if anything, the pandemic's accelerated all of that. So again, not without its challenges. And I certainly feel for the folks who get an awful lot of their energy from working with people every day because that's what's missing for an awful lot of folks who are doing an awful lot of what you and I are doing here. But otherwise I think we were biased toward it and it worked out pretty well so far. >> Okay. So it hasn't changed your strategy, but I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. I mean, obviously more people are going to be working from home now, probably at least double. If it was 15 to 20% pre-COVID, it's going to be, let's call it 30, 35, maybe even 40% post-COVID. Maybe it's going to take a while, six, nine months to get there. But I would imagine some of your assumptions have changed. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah, I think ours and the industries at large. Most companies' business continuity plans really centered around natural disasters. In most of those plans, 30% of the population working remotely was the high watermark. Right now, we're seeing whole industries redoing their business continuity plans, factoring in 60, 70% bogeys for how many people or what percentage of their population would work from home. As we surveyed our employees, 90% of people said we be either some form of hybrid work experience or completely remote. So, again, if we're for a bit of a leading edge on this, we're probably going to be tilted even more toward it, but there's been a big change in assumption about what remote work looks like and what you've got to do to make it productive. >> So we're a decade and a half into the cloud or at least the modern cloud era. What's your take on where the industry is today and how it affects your business and your cloud strategy broadly? >> Yeah, it's a fascinating. We're in the midst of an ever accelerating set of cycles or pendulum swings from centralized computing to decentralized computing back to centralized. We went from the mainframe era to the client server era and then even quicker to the cloud era. And now we're seeing the emergence of the edge. The one thing that's constant through all of this is workloads are like water. They seek their ground. Workloads have characteristics. They need performance, economics, security, data gravity. And so we've been firm believers through this whole time that a certain amount of workload's going to end up in a very centralized model. Some is going to end up very decentralized and our job is just to enable our customers to put the workloads where they need to run best. So as you point out, we're quite a ways into the cloud era now. It looks like the edge era is emerging. I like to think of it as really three legs of a stool. You've got work can run in a private data center, it can run in a public data center or it can run everywhere else. And increasingly, everywhere else is being called the Edge, all of it by the way, in a cloud operating model. So big distinction between cloud, the model and cloud, the place. And so in many ways, we talked specifically to certain vertical markets, the cloud era is already beginning to give way to the beginning of the Edge era. >> Well, and at the same time too, you're seeing the hyperscalers recognizing the need for whatever it is, for economics, for legal reasons, for preference or latency moving on-prem. >> Right. >> And so I was having an interesting discussion with the CIO the other day and I asked them, "Well, what what do you look at as cloud? "Cloud is everywhere. "I got my cloud on-prem. "I got my multiple clouds, which is clear. "Everybody's going multicloud." And then he happened to have 17,000 stores that he was looking after. He goes, that's Edge to me. That's all part of my cloud. And now of course, part of your role is telco. So let's talk about that space. You've got the over-the-top providers. They're sucking off the infrastructure that have been built out by the telcos. Cost per bid is coming down. Data uses is exploding. And the telco industry really has to transform its infrastructure. They're not agile enough and they can't wait to get to this new era of 5G. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that, how you see Dell helping. >> Well, as I'll tell you, you characterize it right on. I've in the last several months, spend a lot of time with telecom executives all over the world because of how easy it is to do this sort of thing. And they need to transform. The digital transformation sweeping the rest of the world has caught up with telecom and for a whole bunch of reasons. And some of those you pointed out, right, agility, cost, economics. They're in a funny place. Never has the demand for communication services been greater. And yet never have their financial positions been more challenged. Because they're stuck between an old, fairly proprietary, closed architecture and a handful of vendors and on the other hand, embracing this cloud computing data era where there's thousands of vendors. And they somehow all need to be cobbled together into an open software-defined system that runs on industry standard hardware. And yet most telecoms aren't prepared to do that integration themselves. So for us, we see immense opportunity. It's literally as if a massive 100 billion dollar plus addressable market has effectively decided they need to start buying the kinds of things we've been making for years. And moreover, they are by definition, fundamentally a distributed model. The big difference, I think, between Dell Technologies and a hyperscaler is we as a company we're built in and for a distributed computing world. We deal with very mundane topics like how do you get a person onsite within an hour? And how many spares depots do you have? And all of those sorts of things. Whereas hyperscalers were built for the exact opposite. A world in which they said, "Hey, give me your data, "give me your workloads. "I'll think hard about it. "And I'll give you a very flexible economic model." The Edge puts all of that up in the air and telcos's the leading part of this Edge, right? They're the ones that own a great deal of the Edge. And as you pointed out, 5G is really the thing that's got everybody excited. >> Well, you bring up a good point about the hyperscalers. I mean, their challenge now is they go on-premise. Okay. How do you service and support those customers at scale 'cause everything they do is at scale, it's all highly automated. So that's interesting. At the same time, I wonder you're a strategy guy. You look at what Amazon retail does. They're putting up warehouses everywhere. They're putting points of presence. I wonder if there are analogs to the technology business. It's probably more complicated, right, 'cause you're not servicing, you're just delivering. >> But I think you're right on. There's analogs. Look, we all are what we are as vendors. We all have our business models. Ours is to sell equipment and software and services to somebody. Amazon, since its founding, has really been about how do I insert myself in a transaction and ease that transaction and take a slice? Google's been about democratizing and monetizing the world's data. So Amazon needs access to transactions. Google needs access to the world's data, all the hyperscalers want into telco because they want onto the Edge. The same point you made about on-premises, right, like Outpost or Azure Stack. It's fundamentally admission by a hyperscaler that, "Yeah, I guess all workload doesn't belong "in the public cloud. "It's not all going to end up here." And I think they've got the same challenge when it comes to the Edge. And so people are trying to build their way out 'cause they need connectivity to the Edge. For us, we know that telecoms have to become multi clouds. You've referenced earlier the over-the-top profit problem. Well, they lost the profits from the consumer. B2C, they built the networks, they ran the networks and everybody else took the profit. So now here comes 5G with the promise of business services, real B2B revenue opportunities for telecom. And once again, they're faced with a choice. Either they become the cloud operator and allow the hyperscalers in as part of their multi-cloud or they give up the cloud to the hyperscalers and there go the over-the-top profits again. So it really, I found, a fascinating set of dynamics and an industry that can really use the help of somebody like Dell Technologies. >> Well, that's interesting 'cause as is many markets, consumer leads and then B2B markets open up. Well, how do you think this plays out? I mean, the telcos have very specialized hardware. They got this hardened and fossilized infrastructure. So where do you guys fit in that transformation and how do you see it evolving? >> Well, it's already started in a way, it's from the inside out. So telecommunications companies, as I look at them, as we look at them, they're almost like three companies in one. They have conventional IT organizations that in many ways look no different than a bank. They have their businesses, of course, the network where they spend the vast majority of their money, but it's not homogenous. There's a network core, there's a network Edge and then there's an access network. And then most of them, of course, sell services, business services. So they have lines of business. So we look at them as an IT organization, through the CIO, as a massive network operator through the CTO and then as a business partner, some of whom are even in our channel program and their cloud, their cloud services partners. And that's all through their line of business. So they're starting to open up from the inside out. Data center's going through transformation. It's begun in the network core. Now, the Edge is the next thing. And the RAN, in case of mobile operator, the radio access network, will ultimately come. And so you're right. There's a fossilized infrastructure in some places, but we've already seen the core start to desegregate and it will now ripple all the way out to their Edge and I think frankly through it and right onto the enterprise premise with private mobility. >> And so do you see them taking that infrastructure model all the way out to the Edge and trying to replicate essentially their what would've been monopolies for years or do you see them... It sounds like it's going to be a mix. Some of them are actually maybe going to lean on the hyperscalers and try to become more over-the-top content providers. >> Well, I think two challenges in business right? I guess they say there's three great motivators in business in life, make money, save money, stay out of jail, like revenue, cost and risk. They got a cost problem. They've got to get off the monolithic closed infrastructure architectures. They've got a revenue problem that a lot of the additional revenues and services went to somebody else, the OTT, the over-the-top folks. And so I think you will absolutely see a mix, but nobody can afford. No telecom communications company can afford to simply hand their network over. Unless they've reconciled, I'm just going to be a dumb pipe again, right? And none of them want that. >> Right. = But I think in many ways, they're waiting for somebody to walk in and say, "But here's the answer." And I can tell you that at Dell Technologies, and by that, I mean both within Dell and certainly within VMware, we're very strong proponents of the notion of an open software-defined network architecture built on industry standard hardware. And we're pretty well positioned, I think, to provide it or certainly that's the hope and the thesis behind our business. >> Yeah. So that then allows them to compete much more effectively, to provide, like you say, new B2B services, but it really is their infrastructure has been the big blocker up until recently. And you're right. I mean, network function virtualization has started to see through. We've seen some of the benefits of that and then now they've got to take it to the next level, your point about the Edge. >> Well in the 5G standard or 5G, the next cellular technology generation is actually defined by the three GPP standards. Release 15 was the first one that came out and it specified both standalone 5G networks where you can get all of these benefits and non-standalone where you basically have to mix 5G into the core, rely on the 4G Edge. And that's the only thing that's been deployed so far. So as in many things, the hype leads the reality by a little bit. So we've been talking 5G for a while, but the release 16 that would get you some of the really hyped up features of 5G just released this year. So it's coming and there's a lot of talk about it right now. There's a race to have the largest 5G network in America and the largest 5G network in the UK and so on and so forth. But this isn't really the true power of 5G. That window is still open and it's coming. >> You do a lot of strategy work. You obviously see the opportunity Edge, the term is just enormous. So you got to be wetting your chops at that. At the same time, the requirements are totally different. So I'm curious as to how you, as a strategy expert, dovetail into the architectural decisions that have to be made and the connective tissue between strategy and architecture and actually the whole go-to market, that whole value chain that you think about, how are you thinking about that in the world of Edge? >> Well there's, at the end of the day, two strategy decisions you got to make, where do I play and if I decide to play there, how do I win? So where do you play on the Edge is a very interesting question. Anytime there's a new computing paradigm shift, you go from something that's been pretty stable and frankly pretty horizontal and it becomes pretty verticalized. So the Edge is thousands of things right now. And it's many highly verticalized use cases, manufacturing, mining, retail, even something as simple as campus wifi replacement. So you've got to pick your spot. And for a company of our size, that really comes down to thinking about which of these Edge use cases are going to pop first, which one's going to teach you the most, which one's going to have the right level of scale. And this is where telco and Edge intersect because it turns out one big and easily reachable use case for Edge is to partner strongly with the telecommunications industry where something like 30 companies in the world make up 80% of the capital spending. I mean, you don't have to run a Superbowl ad. You can get all of your customers in a bus, right. So that's why I think there's really this somewhat silent, somewhat subtle and somewhat not so subtle competition for the architecture of the telecom industry as it refreshes, both because of 5G as an inflection point, but also just because of the stuff we talked about earlier, the economics, the need to modernize and embrace open-software defined industry standard architecture. >> And do have visibility at this point as to how portable the race to the telcos identify that sort of new standards? Do you have a sense as to how portable that would be to some of these other use cases or is it really like the software industry of when that started to grow, it was just so fragmented. Now, granted it's consolidated now, but do you have visibility on that yet? >> A little, but I mean the basic building blocks are quite portable. There's radio technology, 5G radio technology and there's a distinction between what might be required say to replace wifi at the Dell Round Rock Campus versus what AT&T needs for Manhattan, right? >> Yeah. >> But basically there's radio technology, which is increasingly becoming software running on industry standard hardware. And then the same sort of virtualization layer that is helpful in basically pulling all of this together, plays there as does the underlying hardware where Edge servers can be built for telco spec and easily modified to be an Edge enterprise use case. That's the base. On top of that however, is often a vertical solution. Like in retail's very timely, temperature sensing and mask detection and distance determination, right? So somebody's going to want to take that capability. And that's not something you're going to bounce off of some public cloud. You're going to want to actually understand in real time, as people walk in and out of the place, are they being compliant with whatever policies I have? So on top of some of this compute and virtualization and to some extent sometimes storage on the Edge, what else goes on that? Is it a video surveillance solution? Is it an automated mining RFID solution? And so we've got a little bit of insight and we know which verticals appear to be largest right now and which ones are going to pop first. And that's where a lot of people are putting their attention. >> Well, it's going to be interesting 'cause it sounds like there's a real long tale there. And you mentioned industry standard hardware and software, but maybe a new industry standard emerges for some of those use cases that you just mentioned where you need very low latency. Maybe that's where ARM gets in and maybe get some massive volume because while it's a long tail, it's also huge. >> It is. I mean, some people are estimating the Edge economy to be four times the internet economy because we get stuff that's going to be written that we don't even... It's no different than we went from... At one point, the only software in the world was mainframe software. And then some knucklehead wrote client server software and it was considered a niche. Fast forward 15 years later, mainframe is a subsegment of the computer industry and it's all client server software. And then we go cloud native. And at first it's a couple of cloud native apps and pretty soon it's a bunch. And this thing just goes back and forth. The difference is or I think the interesting thing is the cycle times are really compressing. I don't know if you've read Tom Friedman's latest book, "Thank You For Being Late", but it's all about how do we thrive as humans in the age of accelerations? Because the theory is we're not getting enough time to catch our breath now between pendulum swings. It's interesting. Same thing happened in cellular technology. I didn't know until I started doing this job, but 1G was real for about... It was the dominant form of networking for 17 years for mobile networking. Then 2G was for around 11. 3G was seven-ish. 4G looks like it's going to be six. So technology just keeps quickening. And it makes the amount of time we get to be horizontal and catch our breath as the industry is stable, there's always an inflection of some sort going on in our industry. And so change is absolutely the new normal. >> Yeah. And some of these things are really hard to predict. I mean, remember TCP/IP used to be this old, reliable protocol that runs the world. >> Exactly right. >> I want to ask you about... Last question is as a service initiative of Project Apex or Apex it's called. And that's obviously not just some kind of gimmick. I mean, that affects the strategy of the entire organization, the way in which customers want to consume the product or platform strategies now. How does that as a service pricing model affect the business that we've been talking about for the last 10 or 15 minutes? >> Well, the good news for us, those of us at the company working on Edge and telecom and all of that sort of stuff is we're actually building the business under the Apex philosophy, right? So our design center out of the gate is as a service. Michael made the observation a long time ago within our leadership team that, back to my comment, that workloads are like water. They seek their ground. There's a difference between where a workload belongs and the interest in a particular operating model or excuse me, a particular consumption model. And get they've been combined for a long time, right? The only way to get the, as a service consumption model, was through public cloud infrastructure. But it turns out that the right place for workload may well be on-premises not in a private data center or it may well be on the Edge not in a public cloud, but people still want to take advantage of the consumption model, right? The economics are the economics. And so for me, doing the telecom stuff, it's, as a service, the heart of the design center from a consumption model right out of the gate, which is frankly easier than trying to retrofit everything else. >> Right. >> But nonetheless, for us as a company, it's just an opportunity to give our customers the choice that they want in terms of not only what they acquire, but how they acquire it. >> Well Dennis, I always love talking to you. You're such a clear thinker and you've obviously gone deep into some of these topics. And good luck in the role in the telco world. It's obviously a huge opportunity. Everybody's really excited about it. And thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you, Dave. It's been a pleasure. Nice chatting with you. >> Alright. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2020, the virtual cube. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxed music)

(electronic music) >> From New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering, New Relic Futurestack 2019. Brought to you by New Relic. >> Hi, I'm Stu Minamin and we're here at New Relic's Futurestack 2019 in the middle of Manhattan. Right next door to Grand Central Station at the Grand Hyatt. Right next door to Grand Central Station at the Grand Hyatt. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Nadya Duke Boone, who's the vice president and general manager of application monitoring here at New Relic. Thanks so much for joining us. >> You're welcome, it's great to be here. >> All right, so, a lot of announcements this morning. Of course, observability front and center Lou talking about how that fits into this space. You have handled really kind of the APM product inside New Relic, so I'm hoping you can help us understand kind of the journey that New Relic's going on. And I've heard in the marketplace, you know, there's AI ops, and there's observability in all of these things. And, you know, APM was the old world for the monolith. So, you know, how does New Relic help live across all of these environments that customers are living in today, and you know, undergoing so much change and new things? >> So as Lou talked about this morning, we think to be an observability platform like New Relic 1, you've got to be open, connected and programmable. That is, we think about that within the application monitoring space, um, we really think it comes down to the matter and issue of like, what are the questions you need to ask. And that really depends on like what stacks you need to see and what are the questions you need to ask. And so, I think it's a false dichotomy to say you need to like, pick a side in observability or monitoring. I think it's really a yes/and. You don't have to pick a side. And with New Relic, what we're able to do whether using our agents and all the rich data they give you or they're using our open platform, the important thing is that we're able to bring it all together in one place. So you can get all your questions answered. >> Yeah, I spent lots of time in my career trying to help break down silos. You know, the traditional infrastructure world, the networking and storage and compute teams. >> Sure >> You know, virtualization helped pull some things together. Software tends to be a unifying factor, but when I look at, you know, the people that own application and the developers. I mean, you've got monoliths, you've got this containerization in microservices coming. You've got the new serverless environments here. You've got a lot of fragmentation inside the customers. How does that impact your business today and are we going to see those, you know, pulled together over time? >> Yeah, what we hear from customers is that, you know, they're going to be running heterogenius environments for a long time. If you're over a year old company, you're not running a single tech stack. You've made choices for your business needs and you need to be able to see across your whole estate. And where New Relic's adding value for our customers, is by bringing this all together and connecting it. So, you can actually see, let's say from a lambda function and our lambda agents, all the way back through your Java monolith and down to the server whether it's running containers or on bare metal, you can see all the way down. And then you can connect it out to you front end as well. And I think it's that ability to see across, is where we're playing. >> All right, uh, can you bring us inside your customers? What are some of the challenges they're facing? And how do you help them along those transformations that they're undergoing? Cause, as you've said, they're going to have this heterogenius environment for quite a long time. >> Yeah, well I think one of the thing they're saying is that they're trying to move faster. And one of the ways they're moving faster is by changing the process by which they build software. So, you know, we've been talking about DevOps for years. We've been talking about Agile for much longer than years. Um, but those changes bring about new needs also, for observability. Cause now, you've got a team that maybe wants to see very deeply with, um, the things they're on call for. But software refuses to break neatly at team boundaries. It just won't, it's going to break wherever it wants to break. So you need to be able to quickly assess, across your whole enterprise what's going on and help those teams talk to you. So, that's definitely a problem we're solving for our customers now. And if I were to pick one more, that I'm hearing, um, well, I'll pick one from this morning and that's cost management, right. As people move to the Cloud, um, its so powerful and easy to be able to start up new services in the Cloud but then, do you know what you have, do you know what is costs, do you know how to optimize? Um, we announced 12 new applications this morning. One of them is addressing exactly that point. >> Yeah, um, okay, what are some of the challenges customers have really monitoring across these different environments? I think cost, it's, well, the promise of Cloud is to help me understand and control my cost quite a bit. But, you know, I understand my data center cost and, in general, much more than I do what I have in the Cloud. >> So, you mean, trying to understand in their software? >> So, I guess, just, if they have these different environments that need to span from a monitoring standpoint what are some of the challenges that customers have and the differences and how does New Relic pull those together for them? >> Well, I think some of it is bringing their teams together. If you've got folks that have a Dev accent and an Ops accent, they may have different points of view about monitoring right? And so, a Dev team might be saying lets go all in on this method or this tool. But an Ops team might be saying something else. And then as you introduce new technologies and maybe now people don't always want to run an agent. They want to have complete visibility over their software. And so, with New Relic, we're giving them those choices. We're giving them, like, hey, you can run an agent, you can, if you've already got stuff at Zipkin, cause maybe, internally, you've got like a great Zipkin champion. Like, great, we're going to be there with you on that too. So, we want to be able to help these teams come together. Um, rather than forcing them to sort of live in silos. >> All right, uh, Lou put a real emphasis talking about platform. And he said platform with a capital 'P'. >> Yeah >> Help us understand a little bit about that and the impact that's going to have for your customers. >> Yeah, absolutely, I think, you know, anyone can say I've got more than one product, therefore I have a platform I think. When we talk about a Platform, we think of software engineers, a Platform is something I can build on. So, I think a capital 'p' Platform is the ability to build apps, to be able to extend it, to be able to add data because you're open. Um, and then the power that we bring, you know, I got to put in my plug, is by connecting it all together. Um, but I think the power of the Platform, um, has been really showing off in the work that we've been doing with our customers to build these new applications. >> All right, um, you mentioned open, which was one of the three features of the Platform itself. Uh, there's open and with API'S and then there's open source can you help us tease through a little bit because there's the openness and then there's some open source pieces. How do those go together and um, I guess, more importantly, what does it mean for the customers? >> Mhmm, thanks for asking, cause I do think those words kind of got tumbled up. So, let's first, let me like tease it apart a little bit. So, first part of open, you sort of already mentioned this, is like, we're open to all data. So, metrics, vents, logs, traces, you can send that data. That's, that's the first thing. You don't have to be running a New Relic agent to use New Relic. The second part though, uh, is that we are actually building and contributing to the open source community software development kits and exporters to make it easy for our customers. And so, we've shipped, we're shipping Open Census and Drop Wizard and Micrometer and exporters and Prometheus scrapers so that these are open source tools that our customers can get, can extend if they need to, to get that data in. So, we're making it easy to get the open data in by providing these open source tools. Um, and we're in there with the communities contributing to the communities as well. And then, finally, you know, the last one is with our new programmable Platform, we are also all in on open source on that. So, we're contributing to open source for folks building on New Relic and our customers are telling us that they're excited to also be able to do that and to share and exchange with each other. >> There's value to the customer and I guess the question is, your relationship with your customer is going to change though. As they're building applications not just, you know, more than just a tool. And I've heard from many of the customers that use New Relic, is, they talk about the partnership. And it really is taking that partnership to the next level. What I say is, New Relic is not coming out and saying oh, we're an open source company and we're building our company around open source. So, you know, it seems that somewhat a maturation of the model but not open source being the be all and end all of New Relic's mission. >> Our mission is to help customers build more perfect software. I mean, that's why we come to work. Is to help them do that and we think this is the right step. Um, to be able to do that and our community around New Relic, as you said, is excited and dynamic. It's great to be here at Futurestack and hear them talking to each other and hear the buzz. I was at our customer advisory board meeting yesterday which is 11 execs from some of our biggest customers and they were talking about how excited they are to see how this is going to help them with their business cause they can connect, now their telemetry data to sort of higher order business problems. Um, and they're also excited to share. So, I think it's the right step for New Relic and our customers. >> There's a lot of startups out there that attack pieces of what New Relic's trying to deliver. Um, you know, how does New Relic look at the landscape out there and the challenge when you're trying to be a platform is, are you providing good enough solutions? Or, you know, are you providing, you know, best solutions across all of these environments? >> Yeah, I think any of our point solutions could go head to head with anything on the market. Um, you know, and the fact that the market is so dynamic is because it's a real problem space for people who are building software. So, folks are going to keep innovating and coming up with new ideas and my mission is to make sure that everyone writing software, is instrumenting it and able to observe it. So I think, I love that more and more folks are joining this conversation. I think it's a great time to be working on monitoring observability. >> Okay, uh, let's start at the top talking a little bit about observability, what should customers be looking at, should they be thinking about that? What feedback are you getting from some of your key customers? Uh, in the space in general and how New Relic's looking to address it? >> Yep, well I think comes down to, a little bit of what we talked about earlier, visibility and answerability and if I were talking to an exec or if I was talking to an engineer, and I was looking at their tools, you know, whatever level you're at and saying, what do you need to monitor how can you get that data in and can you answer the questions? Do you have the tools, the ability to query, to connect the data. Um, to see, hey there's an event that happened and how did my systems change? So I think a lot of it comes down to, is it visible, can I ask the questions? And then for every stack, and no matter what job I'm doing. >> All right, um, when we look at this broad term which gets overused some, but, digital transformation Um, the comment I've made is the long pole in the tent of going through that transformation, really is the application portfolio. You know, I can modernize my platform, I can go to Cloud, but, you know, changing my applications, especially the ones that run my business, is really tough you know. If I'm a company that's been around 15-20 years, you know, I probably have applications that are as old as the company, if not longer. >> Yep. >> Uh, just broadly, how are your customers doing, uh, are they being able to kind of, you know, move along that modernization journey of the application uh, better today than they might have a couple of years ago, or just kind of macro level? >> I think so, I think, you know, between what the Cloud vendors are doing and what we're doing, folks are getting both tools and they're also getting support. I think, you know, the community, the software engineering community is really leaning into this moment. And talking about how to do these types of trasnformations. So I think there's a lot of just, knowledge sharing going on, there's a lot of advice and consulting that you can get. And then I think the tools are lending themselves to being able to do, you know, some people move to the Cloud or lift and shift. Some people use it as an excuse to re-architect. A lot of folks pick and choose. Because not every apps work the same and some apps are, you know, are, um. For some given app, it might be a more relevant time to change it, a more relevant time to let it stay put and you can make those choices. And I think people are approaching it with a certain rational sense. >> Yeah, uh, one last question for you, New Relic's a leader in, according to, the analyst firms that look at the APM market. New Relic's doing a lot of the things that I hear from, you know, the startups getting lots of money thrown at them, so, how should customers think of New Relic today? >> I think, we're the best leading APM product on the market for a reason. And we can never rest our laurel. So I think customers should at us as a trusted partner. Who's going to continue to grow and meet them wherever they are. Our customers are going to Cloud, we want to be there first to meet them there and welcome them in the door. And that comes back to how do we help customers through digital transformation? We're a big software company. We get it, like, we are going through the same, we go through these same questions ourselves. Um, and we talk to our customers all the time. So I think for our customers, it's like, we're the platform and the right partner. Because we're never going to stop. >> Nadya, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations on the launch today and, uh, best of luck going forward. >> Thanks a bunch. >> All right, lots more here at New Relic Futurestack 2019, I'm Stu Minamin, thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. PALO ALTO, California It is a cute conversation, >> living welcome to this special Cuba conversation in Palo Alto, California We're here with our friends on Twitter and influences in the cloud computing edge and open source game. We have our distinguished power panel here talking about if every tech company, every company should be a tech company. And what does it mean in the air of a modern infrastructure? Police to have my kale with ct of everest dot org's from most Gatto's California Rob Hirschfeld, founder and CEO of Rock n Calling in From Where You Calling in from >> Austin, Texas. >> Austin, Texas. Good to have you and Mark Theo Who's with EJ Gravity brand New opportunity. Congratulations calling in Las Vegas. Thanks for coming in, guys. Thanks for spending the time on this cube power panel from the influencers. Always great to see you guys on Twitter with this morning. I woke up, was very active at a Crouch said earlier this morning. And Mark, you wrote a post that got my attention. So I think you hit a nerve that has been sparking around the Internets around the role of technology as couples, they're starting to rethink and building out there enterprise architectures in their businesses. And we're seeing some signals around cybersecurity. Dev Ops certainly has been kind of banging on this drum with cloud computing, and that is that the role of technology plays as a percentage of the business part of the business. And your tweet was simply put, you said every bit. If every business needs to become a tech business, it business has to decide to own its own infrastructure something of that effect, which which triggered me because it's like That's a good question. It isn't just a part of an organization supporting it. Tech is becoming much more instrumental. So I want to get your reaction. What was the motivation behind that tweet? What's your what's your What was your point around it? >> Yeah, I mean, like many of my tweets, they're poorly worded and rushed out, so you know, it's not as clear as it could have been. But the real point of the message wasn't Thio highlight that a technology company has to be all in the cloud or has to own its infrastructure, but rather as a company makes a change towards becoming a technology company. I mean, if we go back Thio you know, 1995 or 1996 when we wanted a library, we went to the library. But now we have Google. We didn't know that Google was gonna become an online the equivalent of a library. But it became a digital company before anybody asked for that solution or anybody was running that kind of solution in some sort of company format and then changed it over. But, you know, Google Facebook, Microsoft's into it. Adobe PayPal. We could go down the long list there. All I t cos in the end, whether you call the technology that they built to run their businesses engineering with a CTO or I t. Is the material. They are in fact, large giant I t organizations that do what they do to make money. And so, as more companies look to make the change as digital transformation takes hold as more efforts are presented to try to get a closer handle on customers to build loyalty with customers, create new engagement models, maybe at the edge, even in traditional application environments, then companies have to make a decision about how they're going toe oh, nightie and whether they're goingto own any portion of the infrastructure of I T. And if they're going to do that, then I don't think that there's any question that they have to own it. Atleast following a model of the way the large providers and the facebooks, et cetera have provided for us cannot continue. In other words, what I've been known to say before, we can't continue to throw more hardware and people at the problem. >> My mike, I want to get your thoughts on this because one of the things that I know you have been involved a lot with security on dhe I t. As well in security, which which is a canary in the coal mine. For a lot of these architectural decisions are all kind of looking at how they hire and build on premise in house around tech stacks. And one of the things that became apparent to me at Amazon Aws reinforce, which is their Amazons first cloud security conference, was most of the ceases. When I talk privately was saying, we don't really believe in multi cloud. We have multiple clouds, but We're investing in people on certain stacks that fit our guiding principles of what we're building as a company. And they said we then go to the suppliers and saying, Here's the AP eyes we want you to support So you start to see the shift from being hiring the general purpose software vendors to come in and supply them with I t stuff Were hardware. As Mark pointed out, too much more, the customer saying No, no, this is our spec build that we built it. And so the trend that points to the trend of a reinvestment of building tech at the core of the business, which would imply to Mark's point around their tech companies. What's your thoughts on this? >> So a nuance. My answer. I think their tech enabled companies more than tech companies like Tech is enabling, whether it's Google or into it or pay power of the other companies. Mark mentioned technologies the base of their companies stack, um, then to go into your security portion, security has to be architected and embedded into the core solutions not bolted on after the fact with vendor solutions like it is today, and I think we've proven time and time again, including the capital one issue as a day or two ago that the current approaches are not working. And, uh, I agree with whomever See says you've been talking thio like being driving a P I integrations and be consumptive of them and telling what you need to build is a much better approach. Would you want to build a custom house with that actually talking to your builder and finding out later? What? What features and pictures have been installed in your home. But what do you wanna have a hand in that from the ground up? I think that's the mischief. >> Well, I want to come back to the capital. One point that's gonna be a separate talk track. So let's hold that thought. Rob, I want to go to you. Because StarBeat Joel, whose prolific on these threads you know, posting is nice Twitter cards on their um, he said, If you know, talk about leasing out extra capacity in a private data centers question Mark, you know, teasing out the question. And then Ben Haines responded and said, Why the hell would you want to be in that business when you have a real business to run again to what Mark was saying about, You know, Tech is going to be everywhere. Why should I even be in the data center? Because I don't want to be in that business. I gotta figure out Tech for the business. So Ben kind of brings that practitioner perspective. What's your thought? Because you're in the middle of this with the devil's movement. Bare metal, big part of it, Your thoughts. >> Yeah, And that's why we really focus on fixing the bear mental problem. Andi, I want to come back to where a bear metal fits with all this because you really can't get away from bare metal. I think the first question is really is every day to send is every business in I t business. And you know, not every business is a Google and strictly a nighty business. But what we're seeing with machine learning and Internet of things and just extension of what was traditionally siloed I t or data center, I t into everyday operations. You can't get away from the fact that if you're not able to take in the data, work with the data, manipulate and understand what your customers were doing. Then you are going to be behind. That's That's how you're gonna lose. You're gonna be out of business on. So I think that what we're doing is we're redefining business into not just a product that you're selling, but understanding how your customers air interacting with that product, what value they're getting from it. We really redefined supply chain in a very transformative way compared to anything else. And that's an I T enabled transformation. >> Ben brings up a good point, but the Brent wanted Friends Point is essentially teasing out mark and yourself a bare metal. All this stuff is complicated. Cut and make investments. Ben's teasing as What the hell business do you want to be in? I think that becomes a lot of this digital transformation. Conversation is Hey, Cloud is an easy decision. We were start up 10 years ago. We don't have I t. We have 50 plus people on growing. We're all in the cloud. That's fine for us. Dropbox started in the cloud. All these guys started class. It's easy as hell to do it. No, no debate there. But as you start thinking, Maurin Maur integration as a big enterprise which wasn't born in the cloud. This is where the transformations happening is what business? What the hell they doing? What's what's the purpose of their >> visit? Yeah, but the reality of you, a cloud infrastructure and how cloud infrastructure is structured does not really take you away from owning how you operate and run that infrastructure, right Amazons than an amazing marketing job of telling everybody that they're not smart enough to run their own infrastructure. And it's just not true way definitely let operations get very lax. We built up a lot of technical debt that we we need to be able to fix. An Amazon walked in and said, This is too hard for you. Let us take it off your plate. But the reality is people using Amazon still have toe owned their operations of that infrastructure. The capital one didn't doesn't get to just get a pass and say, I used Amazon. Oh, well, Too bad. Talk to them. You still own your infrastructure. >> Technically, it wasn't Amazons fall, so let's get the capital. One is this brings up a good point. Converged infrastructure was the Holy Grail, savior for the I t If you go back when we started doing Cuba interviews, stupidity and I would talk about converged is awesome. You got Nutanix kicked ass and grew like crazy. And so then you have the converge kind of meat's maker. When it sees the cloud, it's like, OK, I got great converged infrastructure, but yet the breach on capital one had nothing to do with a W s. It was basically an s three bucket that the firewall Miss configured. So it was really Amazon was a victim of its simplicity there. I mean, there's a >> I mean, this is this is what we're talking about with. To me with this tweet is that we need to look, we need to be better at operating the infrastructure we have, whether it's Amazon or physical assets on your premises. What we've really done is we've eroded our ability to manage those pieces well and do it in a way that builds on itself. And so as soon as we can get on improvement there, I mean, this this is where I went with this threat is if we can really improve our operational efficiency with the infrastructure we have, whether it's in the cloud on premises. You create benefits there than everything you build on top of that is gonna have a nim prove mint, right. We're gonna change the way we look at infrastructure. Amazons already done that on. We think about infrastructure in cloud terms, but I don't think that what they've done is the end destination. They just taught us how to be better running infrastructure. >> Well, it brings up that it brings up the point, and I have so Mike shaking his head to get his thought and mark on this. If I is that I tease problem our operational technologies problem because the world's not as simple as it used to be. It was not. It wasn't. It's not simple. You got edge. You get externally incest cloud players now multi cloud. So information technology teams and operational technology teams whose fault is it? Who is responsible thing? Could you just had a AI bots managing the the filtering and access to history buckets that could have been automated away? What, Whose problem was it? Operations, technology or I t. >> So that I think, to touch upon what Rob was talking about. There's my chain and technology, uh, from the classic sound byte is people process and technology. The core cause of literally every security breach, including capital one is a lack of sophisticated process and the root cause being people, and there's no amount of a I currently that can fix that. So you have to start focusing on your operational supply chain processes, which has, Rob said. Amazon has really solidified, and the company should look to emulate that forces trying to emulate the cloud infrastructure and some of your processed and your people challenges first. And then you can leverage the technology. >> Great point. Totally agree with you on that one >> market. Yeah, I would agree with everything that both Mike and Rob just said, and I would just add that we we don't have any choice but to face the future. That is, I t. And in order to provide the best possible service to our customers for our applications that even haven't been built yet, we have to look at the service is that are available to us and utilize them the best way possible and then find appropriate management and, like so correctly put it supply chain processes for managing them. So I've talked to people who are building unique cloud platforms internally to solve a specific business problem in ways that the individual clouds offered by the Big Three is an example can't do or can't do as well or can't do is cheaply. And the same thing applies to customers who are just using more than one of the big cloud providers. Even for some in some cases, for workloads. That might seem similar because each of the clouds provide a different opportunity associated with that specific set of requirements. And so we don't have any choice but to manage it better. And whether it's we make a choice to use it in our data center because it's more cost effective long term. And that's our single most important driver. Or whether we decide to leverage every tool in our tool belt, which includes a handful of cloud providers. And some we do our own, um, or we put it all in one cloud. It doesn't change our responsibility for owning it correctly, right? And my simple message really was that you have to figure out how to own and I'll steal from Mike again. You have to figure out how to own that supply chain. But more lower down more base is ifs. Part of that supply chain is delivering compute into a data center or environment that you own. Then you have to find the tools capabilities to ensure that you're not making the kind of mistakes that were made with capital or >> or, if you have tools are networks and tools you don't know and look at the quotes. So called scare with the China hack from Super Micro. That's a silly why chain problems? Well, it's on the silicon. So again, back to the process, people an equation. I think that's right on this brings us kind of through the next talking track. I want to get your thoughts on, which is cloud two point. Oh, I mean, I'm putting that term out there on Lee is a provocative way. Remember, Web to point. It works so well in debating about what it what it was. If one if cloud one data was Amazon Web service is, thank you very much. Public cloud. You could say cloud two point. Oh, our second inning would be just what happens next because you're seeing now a confluence of different dynamics edge, um, security, industrial edge. And then you know this all coming into on premises, which is hybrid and public, all working together. And then you throw multi cloud in there from a complexity standpoint. Do you wanna have support Microsoft's Stack, Azure Stack, Google and Amazon? This is this is the fundamental 2.0 question. Because things are more real time. Things are data specific. This costs involved. There's really network innovation needed what you guys thoughts on cloud to point out. >> I think the basic cloud 2.0, is moving to the shared responsibility model. And we should stop blaming people for teams for breaches as architectures become much more complex, including network computing, storage and in service orchestration layers like kubernetes, no one team or individual, individual or one team and manage all of that. So you're all responsible for infrastructure, scalability, performance and security. So I think it's the cultural movement more than the technology movement at the base of >> Rob. What's your definition? Cloud 2.0, from your perspective. >> Oh boy, I've been calling it Post Cloud Is my feeling on this? Yeah, it to me. It's it's about rethinking the way we automate. Um, you know, we really learned that we had to interact with infrastructure via automation and eliminate the human risk elements of. This doesn't mean that we have an automation is foolproof either It's not, but what? What I think we've seen is that people have really understood that we have to bring the type of automation and power that we're seeing in clouding the benefits because they're very riel. But back into everything that we do. There's no doubt in my mind that infrastructure is moving back into the environment. Where is what? Which is EJ from my perspective, and we'll see computing in a much more distributed way and those benefits and getting that right in the automation. Is this necessary to run autonomous zero touch infrastructure in environmental situations. That is gonna be justice transformative, freighted that that environment makes the cloud look easy. Frankly, >> Mark, what's your take? I want to get because, you know, security houses, one element get self driving cars. You got kind of a new front end of of EJ devices, whether it's a Serie Buy Me a song on iTunes, which has to go out to a traditional system and purchase a song. But that that Siri priest is different than what? The back end? Does this simply database, Get it? Moving over self driving cars, You're seeing all kinds of EJ industrial activity. You know, the debate of moving compute to the data. You got Amazon with ground station, all these new infrastructure physical activities going on that needs software to power it. What, you're in cloud to point. It seems to be a nice place not just for analytics, but for operational thing. Your thoughts on cloud to point out >> Well, I mean you you describe the opportunity relatively well. I could certainly go in. I've spent a lot of time going into detail about what EJ might mean and what might populate edge and why people would use it. But I think from if we just look at it from a cloud 2.0, standpoint, maybe I'm oversimplifying. But I would say, you know, if you add on to what Mike and Rob already so well pointed out is that it's best fit right, it's best fit from compute location, Thio CPU type Thio platform on, and historically, for I t they've always had to make pragmatic choice is that I believe, limit their ability on Helped to create Maur you know, legacy Tech that they have to manage, um on and create overhead tech debt, as they call it on DSO. I think judo. And in my book the best case for two Dato is that I can put best fit work where I need it when I need it for as long as I need it. >> That's that's really kind of gasp originals. Well, people got to get the software stood up. That's where I think Kubernetes has shown a nice position. I want to extend this track to another thought, another topic around networking. So if you look at the three pillars of computing computing mean industry, compute storage and networking, cloud one daughter, you can say pretty much compute storage did a good job. Amazon has a C two as three. Everything went great. Networking always got taken to the wood shed. You know, networking was getting, you know, people were pissing and moaning about networking. But if you look at kind of things were just talking about networking seems to be an area that this cloud 2.0, could innovate on. So wanna get each of your thoughts on? If you could throw the magic wand out there around the network doesn't take the same track as Dev ops that gets abstracted away because you see VM wear now doing deals. All the cloud providers they got they're going after Cisco with the networking PCC Cisco trying to be relevant. The big guys you got edge, which is power and network connection. You need those things. So what is the role of the network? And two point If you guys could wave the magic wand and have something magically happen or innovate, what would it be? >> Oh, wait, it's part complaining. It's your world. You know, it's ironic that I said this Thio competitors to my most previous company. Ericsson Company was away. They asked me after an event in San everything was a cloud expo. I just got off stage and the gentleman came up to me and asked me So mark you the way you talked about Cloud. I appreciate the comments you made yada, yada, yada. But what do you think about networking? And I said Well, network big problem right now is that you can't follow cloud assumptions as faras usage characteristics and deployment characteristics with networking. When that problem is solved, will have moved light years ahead in how people can use and deploy i t. Because it doesn't matter if you can define workload opportunity in 30 minutes on an edge device somewhere or on a new set of data centers belonging to Google or 10 Cent or anybody else. If you can't treat the network with same functionality and flexibility and speed to value that, you can the cloud then, um, it's Unfortunately, you're really reducing your opportunity and needlessly lengthening the time to value for whatever activity it is. You're really >> so network, certainly critical in 2.0, terms have absolutely that Mike any any thoughts there? >> So I think you know, there's there's easy answers to this that are actually the answer. You know, I P v six was the answer from a couple years ago, and that hasn't solved in the fantasy of the solved. All the problems, just like five G is not gonna magically transform our edge infrastructure into this brilliant network. The reality is, networking is hard and it's hard because there's a ton of legacy embedded stuff that still has to keep working. You can't just, you know, install a new container on container system and say, I've now fixed networking. You have to deal with the globally interconnected MASH insistence. I think when we look at networking, we have to do it in a way that respects the legacy and figures out migration strategies. One of the biggest problems I see that a lot of our technology stacks here is that they just assume we're gonna pave over the problems of yesteryear, nor them and with network, when you don't get that benefit, what you described with cloud networking, never living up the potential, it's because cloud networking isn't club networking. It's it's, you know, early days of the Internet. Networking is still what we use today. It's not. It's not something you can just snap your fingers and disrupt. >> Well, I mean, networking had two major things that were big parts of a networking and who build networks knows you provisioned them and you have policy stuff that runs on them, right? You moving paintings from A to B, then you got networks you don't own right so that's kind of pedestrian, old thinking. But if you want to make networks programmable to me, it just seems like they just seem to be so much more there that needs to be developed, not just moving package. Well, >> you just said it's traditional. Networks were built first, and the infrastructure was then built around them or leveraging them, so you need to take like in zero. Trust paper. When Bugsy Siegel built Las Vegas, he built the town first and then put the roads around the infrastructure. So you need to take that approach with networking. You need to have the core infrastructure of first and then lay down the networking around to support it. And, as Mark said, that needs to be much more real time or programmable. So moving from ah, hardware to find to a software to find model, I think, is how you fix networking. It's not gonna be fixed by a new protocol or set of protocols or adding more policies or complexity to it, >> so you see a lot of change then, based on that, I'd take away that you see change coming to networking in a big way because Vegas we're gonna build >> our if it has to happen. The current way is not working. And that's why we need the bottlenecks. Wherever >> Mark you live in is the traffic's brutal. But, you know, still e gotta figure out, You know, they got some more roads. The bill change coming. What are your thoughts on the change coming with this networking paradigm >> show? I mean, there are a few companies in the space already. I'm going to refuse to name anyway at this point because one of them is a partner of my new company, not my new company, but the new company I work for and I don't want to leave them out of the discussion. But there are several companies in the space right now that are attempting to do just then just that from centralized locations, helping customers to more rapidly deploy network services to and from cloud or two and from other data centers in a chain of data centers. Programmatically as we've talked about. But in the long run, your ability to lay down networking from your office without having to create new firewall rules and spend months on on contract language and things like that on being able to take a slice of the network you already have and deploy it on DDE, not have to go through the complex Mpls or Or VPN set ups that are common today on defectively reroute destinations when you want to or make new connections when you need to. Is far as I'm concerned, that's vital to the success of anything we would call a cloud two point. Oh, >> well, we're gonna try tracks when he's hot startups. So you guys see anyone around this area? I love this topic. I think it's worth talking a lot more about love. Love to continue on with you guys on that another. Another time. Final five minutes. I'd love to spend with you guys talking about the the digital transformation paradox. Rob, we're talking before we came on camera. He loved this paradox because it's simply not as easy to saying Kill the old man, bringing the new and everything's gonna be hunky dorey. It's not that simple, but but it also brings up the fact that in all these major waves, the hype outlives the reality, too. So you're seeing so I want to get your thoughts on digital transformation. Each of you share your thoughts on what's come home to be realistic in digital transformation, which what hasn't showed up yet in terms of benefits and capability. >> I mean, this is this to me is one of the things that we see happen in every wave. They people jump on that bandwagon really hard, and then they tell everybody who's doing the current stuff, that they're doing it wrong. Um, and that that to me, actually does a lot more heart. What we what we've seen in places where people said, burn the boats, you know, we don't care. They have actually not managed to get traction and not create the long term sustainability that you would get if you created ways to bring things forward. Networking is a good example for that, right? Automating a firewall configuration and creating a soft firewall or virtual network function is just taking something that people understand and moving it into a much more control perspective in a lot of ways. That's what we saw with Cloud Cloud took working I t infrastructure that people understood added some change but also kept things that people 1% and so the paradox. Is that you? Is it the more you tell people, they just have to completely disrupt and break everything they've done and walk away from their no nighty infrastructure, the less actually you create these long term values. And I know there are people who really know you got totally changed everything that disrupted value. But a lot of the disrupted value comes from creating these incremental changes and then building something on top of that. So what? So >> what did what Indigenous in digital transformation, what has happened? That's positive and what hasn't happened that was supposed to happen. >> So when I look att Dev ops on what people thought we were going to do, just automate all things that turned out to be a much bigger lift than people expected. But when we started looking at pipelines and deployment pipelines and something very concrete for that which let people start in one or two places and then expand, I think I think, uh, pipelines and build deploy pipelines are transformative, right? Going from a continuously integrated system all the way to a continuously integrated data center. Yeah, that's transformative. And it's very concrete just telling people automate everything is not been as effective >> guys. Other thoughts there on the digital >> transformation dream. I agree with everything that Rob just said, and I would just add just because, you know, it's the boarding piece that someone always has to say, and nobody in Tech everyone is he here? But you know, every corporation at one point or another in its Kurt in its life span faces a transformative period of time because of product change or a new competitor that's doing things differently, or has figured out a way to do it cheaper or whatever it is. And they usually make or break that transformation not because of technology, not because of whether they have smart people, not because of whether they implemented the newest solution, but because of culture and organizational motivation and the vast majority of like Everything, Rob said doesn't just apply to I. T. A lot of the best I T frameworks around Agile and Dev ops apply to how the rest of the organization can and should react to opportunity so that if I t can be and should be really time, then it only makes sense that the business should be able to be real time in responding to what is being created through I t systems. And right now I would argue that the vast majority of the 80% of transformations that don't see the benefit that they're looking for have nothing to do with whether they could have gotten the right technology or done the technology correctly. But it has to do with institutional culture and motivation. And if you can fix that, then the only piece all add on to that. That again I vociferously, really agree with Robin is that if you want to lower the barrier to entry and you want to get more people into this market, you won't get more people to buy more of your stuff and grow what they own. Then you have to be able to show them a path to taking, getting the most value out of what they already have. There is no doubt in my mind that that's the only way forward, and that's where some of the tools that we're talking about and what we're talking about today on Twitter or so important >> Mike final stops on the >> docks >> on your thoughts on the transmission paradox, >> so the paradox that Robb describe think is set, the contact is set incorrectly by calling it digital transformation should be digital revolution, where the evolution process doesn't end. Transformation makes people think that there's some end state, which means let's burn the votes. That's let's get rid of all over all on prime infrastructure moved to cloud and we're done. And really, that's only the beginning. Which is why we're talking about Cloud two point. Oh, do you have to take that approach that you want to have continuous evolution and improvements, which Segways into what Rob said about de box and automating all the things you don't automate your tasks and processes and you're done? You want to keep improving upon them. Figuring out how to improve the process is and then change the automation five that the is, Mark said. It's a cultural and mental shift versus trying to get to this Holy Grail and state of transforming transformation. >> Awesome. Well, why I got you guys here first off. Thanks for spending the time and unpacking these big issue. Well, two more of it. I'd >> love to just get >> your thoughts real quick on just your opinion of Capital One. The breach, survivability and impact of the industry. Since it's still in the news, who wants to jump for us? We'll start with Mike. Mike, start with you will go down the line. Mike, Robin Mara. >> I mean, the good news for Capital One is I don't think any personal information was breached that hasn't already been exposed by the various other massive reaches. Like I do my so security number as a throw away at this point which never should have been used for identity. But I want All >> right, So there were Do you think >> it's recoverable is not gonna be as critical, say, Equifax, which was brutal. >> It doesn't sound like there was negligence where Equifax seemed like it was Maura negligent driven than just ah ah, bad process or bad hygiene around a user or roll account and access to a certain subset of data. >> I mean, this was someone who stumbled upon open history bucket and said, >> Well, well, look at this >> bragging about it on Twitter and the user groups. I mean, this >> was like from from what the press said, I think there's other companies that may or may not be affected by this as well, so that it's just capital one, which will probably defuse the attention on them and lessen the severity or backlash. >> Rob your thoughts on Capital One. >> Yeah, I wish it would move the needle. I think that we have become so used to the security of breach of the week or the hardware. Very. You know, it is we We need to really think through what it's really gonna take toe treat security as a primary thing, which means actually treating operations and infrastructure and the human processes piece of this, um, and slowed down a little bit. Um, and I always saw >> 11 lawmaker, one congressman's woman said, More regulation. >> Yeah, they don't want this. I don't think regulation is the right is the right thing. I don't know exactly what it is because I think >> regularly, we don't understand. That's Washington, DC, >> But but we're building a very, very, very fragile I T infrastructure. And so this is not a security problem. It's a It's a fact that we've built this Jenga tower of I t infrastructure, and we don't actually understand how it's built, Um, and that I don't see that slowing down. Unfortunately, >> unlike Las Vegas is, Mike pointed out, it's was built with purpose. They built the roads around the town. Mark, you live there now What's your thoughts on this capital? One piece ends and >> I have been said I would say that what I'm hoping sort of like when you have, ah, a lack of employees for a specific job type. Like right now in United States, it's incredibly difficult to find a truck driver if you're a trucking company, So what does that mean? But that means it's gonna accelerate automation and truck driving because that's the best alternative, right? If you can't solve it the old way, then you find a new way to solve it. And we have an enormous number of opportunity. He's from a process standpoint, but also, from a technology standpoint, did not build on this. Pardon my French crap that we have already >> they were digital. Then, when I ruled by the FCC, >> had build it the right way from the start. >> Well, you know what was soon? How about self driving security? We needed guys. Thanks for spending the time this cube talk. Keep conversation. Appreciate time. Mike, Rob mark. Thanks for kicking it off. Thanks. >> Thank you. >> You're watching Cute conversation with promote guests. Panel discussion Breaking down. How businesses should look at technology as part of their business. Cloud 2.0, security hacks and digital transformation Digital evolution. I'm John free. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and Etico System partners. >> Welcome back everyone. You are watching day three of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Sin City Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We have Varun Chhabra who is the Vice President Product Marketing Cloud Dell EMC, welcome back to theCUBE Varun. >> Thanks for having me. >> And Mark Lohmeyer SVG/PM of Cloud Platform VMware. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks great to be here. >> So before the cameras were rolling we were talking that it should be a rap song, VMC on Dell EMC. (laughing) Tell us about the news this week. >> Yeah sure. So maybe I can kick it off. So real excited this Monday to introduce the VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and you know, as I sort of think back to when we first started discussions together between the two companies, we really had this sort of this angle in mind which was how do we bring the simplicity, the agility and sort of the consumption economics of a public cloud model right, but with the control, the security, the enterprise class capabilities, you know performance that customers expect from an on-prem environment and how could VMware and Dell work together to really jointly engineer something that we think would be really special and achieve those goals, and based on feedback that we got from customers, we're really pleased at sort of the reaction to this, and we think that's really going to hit the sweet spot of kind of best of those both worlds. >> So Varun, Dell EMC's been in the private cloud market for a bit, actually it was somebody on the EMC side that, as far as I know, was credited with coming with that terminology so some of this isn't new. Give us what is new about this offering compared to what we've done in the past. >> Yeah. Great question Stu. So essentially what is really innovative about this is that this is taking the public cloud model to on-premises as Mark said. It's a fully managed service where Dell Technologies and VMware are working together behind the scenes to provide that public cloud like experience, the hands-off operations, the ability to provision resources using a cloud portal right and have it be installed for you and set up. Once it's set up, software patches, operating system updates, hardware updates, all of them are basically going to be managed for you. If there's any support issues, the VMware team will file a ticket for you. You don't even need to file a ticket, it will be managed for you. This issue will be resolved. You know we think that this will be a really transformative way for customers to consume cloud resources, and this is all about bringing that cloud model to the data center where there's so much data, that customers already have. >> All right. So Mark there were ripples in the industry, a couple of years ago when the VMware cloud on AWS was out. >> Right. You know some people may have like hey why wasn't it done on the Dell stuff first but the thing I want to ask is, what have you learned from that AWS engagement and how did that impact what you're doing now on the Dell EMC? >> Yeah it's a great question. So I think one thing, so we learn from our customers right and the feedback they give us? One of the things that they shared is look they really like the fact that we're taking all of that grunge work off the table for them right? I mean if you're an IT department and a customer you're looking at for how you can deliver more value to the business right? And patching our software, upgrading our software, being responsible for hardware issues, that's not adding value to the business right? Ensuring their delivery in the application SLA, ensuring the application is secure, helping reduce cost, those are adding tremendous value to the business right? So the fact that we're able to deliver to them a cloud service, allows them to sort of elevate the value that they can offer and so that was one key insight. We wanted to bring all of those benefits to VMware cloud on Dell EMC on-prem. The second thing I would say is just technically you know, it's a very different model to ship a customer software and hardware and say you manage it right? You're responsible for the SLA versus delivering a true cloud service right? It requires a very different way to run your engineering team, it requires this thing called service ownership right? That you're accountable for the SLA of your code running your production, you need to build out a site reliability engineering team, and it really requires a very close engineering relationship between everyone who's working together to deliver that integrated cloud solution. So we're taking all of those learnings and insights that we got from our experience in the public cloud, and now applying them with Dell to bring those same benefits to customers in the private cloud. >> One of the things that we've talked a lot on theCUBE about, in particular this week, is just how close the Dell VMware relationship seems. You have said Stu, and you really know your stuff, that this is the tightest you've ever seen it. And here you are talking about this jointly designed, engineered. Can you describe a little bit about sort of the culture of this partnership and how these two tech giants work together? >> Yeah I can take a stab at it (mumbles). Look this is not new to us. We have been working together for a long time. But I think as you saw on the Keeno stage with Jeff and Pat together, this is a new level of a relationship in terms of having our engineering teams work together, figuring out how to deliver the best customer experience right? We already see that when we made our announcement three weeks ago with VxRail and VMware cloud foundations, being able to manage the entire life cycle, right from the workload all the way down to the physical infrastructure using VMware cloud foundations. This is a natural extension of that model for us. We're taking some of the same engineering work, the tight integration, and then adding on another benefit of managing this for the customer and making things simpler for them. And you know we think this is just the start. We think there is so much more goodness we can uncover for our customers as part of this journey. >> Yeah I think it's great. The only thing I would add is you know, the analogy I like to use is sort of like weightlifting. This is a muscle that we've been building between VMware and Dell for many years now right? Delivering a full cloud service on top of Dell hardware, that's like bench-pressing 200 pounds right? (laughing) So if you just like had never worked out before and someone gave you 200 pounds to bench-press, you probably wouldn't be successful. Now the good news is we've been working together for a number of years now. We've been building that muscle together between the two companies right? VMware on VxRail, VMware cloud on VxRail, and so now we're taking this next step forward, hey maybe we're going from benching 150 to benching 200. We have the ability to get there right? And so in many ways, our ability to be successful at this is based on the fact that we have been working together so well for a number of years now and building on that. >> Okay so Varun, we look at these different solutions in the marketplace and the space and sometimes it's a little tough to differentiate them because you know, you look underneath the covers and you got a lot of hardware geeks you know? I'm one of them, I'm open the back of the cabinet and show me and I'm like oh I recognize that box and I do this but like say for example, if I go talk to Microsoft and I look at Andro Stack, they like don't really think about the Dell server underneath there and the partner they got to have, this is Azure, so when you think about the operating model, when you think about the consumption model, when you think about the applications, this is "Azure". What I've had a little bit of trouble, and I'm hoping you can help me explain is, I think it's a similar type of story but there is no Dell EMC public cloud. There's VMware in a couple of environments so is that the right model to be thinking of? I mean this is as a service, it's a consumption model but are the applications similar to what I had if I've built a stack with Dell and VMware or you know, give me the compare and contrast as to what I've done before and some of the other options out there. >> Great question and I think it's something a lot of customers ask us as well. Look I think this is a very unique offer compared to what we've seen in the market recently for a variety of reasons. But the first thing I'll start with saying is that customers today are already using VMware and LEMC for their existing workloads right? This is essentially the same platform so the tools that they use today vSphere, it's the extra migrate workloads, NSX, VSAN, they are going to be able to carry forward all the work they've done there on this platform. That's why it's no different from that perspective. So the learnings they have, the processes, the automation, the eco-system of back-up disaster recovery that they use today, they're going to be able to use later as well, with this as well so this is less disruptive for them. So that's the first thing. The second thing I'd say is you know, we think we have a unique advantage because we have a long heritage of working with customers in their data centers. Whether its VMware or Dell EMC or us combined together. Being able to manage the complexity, the thousands of variables in a data center that a customer has, where things are not just homogenous, everything is not standardized, it's very very different problem from talking about a homogenous cloud data center where everything is standardized, everything is built for automation. We think we have a unique capability to be able to do that, and not only from a day zero day one perspective, also from a support perspective. You know this is a fully managed service which means if things are you know, if something breaks, we may have to go down and actually go to the customers site and actually fix that. We have a support organization across VMware and Dell EMC already built today. Full scale. Every single country. Wherever people's data centers are. Again a different support model. We think this will be a journey for folks who don't have that built out, and finally, I think, I'm biased, but I think infrastructure matters. If you're going to take a bet on this platform for your edge locations, your retail locations, your thousands of retail locations, sure it's a fully managed service but you need to have the peace of mind that this is going to continue to work for you. Even in a fully managed scenario, it is disruptive if there's hardware failures. So VxRail is a platform that customers all around the world bet on. There's more than 4000 customers at VMware and Dell EMC have jointly driven success with so we think these are going to be unique factors that will create value for customers. >> Okay. So for the support model I understand. The question we've been talking the various solutions in the portfolio is the nirvana is that cloud operating model that I don't need to worry about what version it's running. Whether the latest security patch is in there because that's been taken care of for me. Are we close to that? Are we at that? How does that look? >> That's exactly the idea. That's exactly what we're going to deliver right? And that's powerful for the reasons you articulated. But even more than that I would say it's an amazing vehicle for us to deliver value and innovation to our customers right? You know, traditional model hey VMware developed software. It takes a year or two to develop. We deliver to the customer. They take another six months to a year to upgrade it, it's two to three years' latency between when an engineer has a good idea or a customer asks for something before they can reasonably get to take advantage of it in production. With this new cloud delivery model that we're building together, that latency shrinks down to potentially just weeks right? Because we are upgrading that service on a continuous basis. We can push those new innovations to our customers much more rapidly and they can immediately begin consuming them. Like literally those new features just show up in the service just like on your iPhone or whatever other service you might be using. Same model can now apply to the data center so its an incredibly powerful thing for our joint customers. It's also real exciting for our joint engineering teams right? You think about an engineer. They take pride in seeing the value of their work being used by customers and we can take that from two to three years, to two to three weeks. That's a tremendous thing. >> Real instant gratification. >> Yeah! >> Which makes for a happier employee, which makes for-- >> Time to innovate more right? >> All of that. >> You got it yeah. >> Great. Well Mark and Varun thank you so much for coming on the show. It was great having you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (digital music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to day two of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are coming at you from the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We're joined by Patrick Moorhead, he is the founder and president and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. You're an esteemed CUBE-alum. >> Gosh, this is great, can you introduce me on every show please? >> I would be happy to, delighted. So, Patrick, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about how many, frankly, tech shows you go to a year, you said 40, 45. >> That's about right, I live in Austin but I actually live on a bunch of planes, kind of like you do, right. >> Right, sure, sure, yeah. So this is your 10th time at Ignite, or an Ignite like show, it used to be called Tech Ed, so what are your first quick takes on what this conference, what you're seeing, what you're hearing? >> So, Microsoft has a three layers, like a three-layered cake to their events, you have developers, you have customers, and you have channel. And this is their customer event, so what might seem like rehash or maybe build or inspire is if customers who haven't heard this content before. So it's really about getting them engaged and things like that and, what we've heard, first and foremost is we had 45 Azure announcements but I think the biggest news, was about the open data initiative that, I mean, how often do you have the three CEOs up on stage, where most corporate data sits, with Microsoft, SAP and Adobe, so it was impressive. And that's probably the number one thing so far. >> Okay, let's dissect that a little bit. What are your thoughts, I mean, we're sort of questioning, it's a big idea, >> Right. >> When will customers actually see the benefit and is there a benefit to customers? >> When I look at these big corporate announcements I'm thinking, is this thing paper or is this thing real? How far does it go? I think this is real, when I dug under the covers, in some, bendy NDA things, that I can't give details on, there's meat there for sure, but, where this all starts, is, is two things are going on here, first of all, to do machine learning correctly, you have to have a lot of data, right? Yesterday's big data, is today's machine learning. You have to have it all together, now you can pull in disparate data sources into your enterprise and work on that data, but it takes a lot of cleansing, you know most of the time in machine learning, is getting the data ready to be worked on. What having data interoperability standards means is you can bring it in, you don't have to cleanse it as much and you can do real time analytics and machine learning on it so it's agreement that says, we're all going to come in, if it's customer data, it's going to look like this, with different fields. Now you would think that something like XML could do this, but this is bigger and from a competitive standpoint, I have to ask the big question, where's Salesforce and where's Oracle, they're the two odd-companies out. >> Really interesting, you mention that there were a lot of Azure announcements here, something like 45. I was reading, Corey Sanders had a blog of list and lists and lists and it's typical of what we've seen in the cloud. You and I, we go to AWS re:invents, and it's like let's talk about all the compute instances, all the cool new storage, all the things, there's cheering and, you know, everything for every micro and macro thing that happens there but are there any things that jumped out at you? We had Jeffrey Silver on the program yesterday, he talked about the databoxes, like the Edge and the various versions of those, those seem kind of interesting when we talk about data and movement but anything in the Azure space that got your attention? >> So aside from the databoxes, I was really excited about AutoML. So, three ways you can do ML, you can do everything from scratch, you can take an off-the-shelf API and then you can use something in the middle, which says, kind of like the three bears, right in the middle, Google at GCP announced something like this and so did Azure. And essentially what this is, is it auto-tags your data. It's smart enough to know that this is an image as opposed to you having to start at the very beginning and hand code some data and that's not automatic because the key, so a good example might be an audio machine learning algorithm where, you might need it for an airplane versus a car, versus the factory floor, versus a smart-phone application. Those are all different environments and your algorithm's going to be different but, as an enterprise, you might not have the PhD on staff to be able to do that, but you can't live with the off-the-shelf API. >> There's another thing that kind of struck me, a little bit of dissonance I saw there, you've got a Microsoft surface sitting in front of you, Microsoft, it's gotten into hardware in a lot of places when they talked about their IoT Ps, they're like, we're going to put things out on the edge and then on the other stream it's like, well, but they're open and it's APIs and developers and software, not only Adobe and SAP but the announcement with Red Hat, talking about all they're doing with Linux, how do you reconcile the, I've heard people in Microsoft, we want to completely vertically integrate the stack and that's not something that I hear from the Googles and Amazons of the world, I thought we were kind of past that, no one company can do it all. On the other hand, they're very open and give you choice. How do you look at those pieces? >> This all stems with the slowdown of Moore's Law for general CPU compute. So, as Moore's Law is slowing down, we need to throw different kinds of accelerators at the same problem, to keep innovation going up and to the right at an increasingly faster pace. So people have gone to GPUs and CPUs and almost every one of the big infrastructure players has done that, whether it's Google, Apple, AWS, they all have their own hardware. Part of it is to accelerate time to market, the other is to get a lock-in, I'm still trying to figure out which one this is. Microsoft is saying very clearly in Azure IoT Edge that you can send your data, even if you have their hardware to AWS and GCP and I think enterprises are going to take a quick look. I've been doing this almost 30 years, I've gray hairs to show for it, but you just have to pick your lock-in, right? Enterprise AT always gets locked in and the question is, what you lock in on? If you go with Oracle and then build applications around it you're locked into Oracle. If you go with a certain hardware OEM, you could be locked into a certain OEM with converse infrastructures, so, I think it's just picking the poison, you're going to have some people who are very comfortable with going all Microsoft and you'll have some people who'll want to piece part it together and look to the future We still have people who were brought up on mainframes and they don't want to be there, they want to have flexibility and fluidity. >> One of the things you were talking about with the slow down of Moore's Law, Microsoft and frankly every other technology giant is really trying to stay ahead of the innovation curve. Microsoft, 42 years old, a middle-aged company, and really, in the tech world, a really old company. Is Microsoft effective at this? I mean, do you see, that this is a creative, an ingenuitive, an innovative company? >> Microsoft is one of the only companies that has been able to turn the corner from being aged and experienced, I guess like us, and moving into the new zone and everybody, in everybody's work has had to do that. Analysts used to, I remember getting Gartner and IDC reports on paper, but now it's very different. We're up here on theCUBE, we're on Twitter, we're doing research reports, so everything is changing and Microsoft has had to change too. Five years ago, when Azure hadn't really taken off, they had a billion dollar write-down on surface hardware, bought Nokia, shut Nokia down, you're wondering, wait a second, what really is happening but then Satya came in and, to the company's credit, has completely turned around. I will state though there is a difference between perception and reality, I think a lot of the things that Ballmer had in place were absolutely the right things, I think Satya takes a lot of credit for it, but these things just didn't magically appear when Satya came in. So, a lot of the things they did were right, and it was perceived to be new leadership and therefore they're looking good. >> I love it, 'cause, we had quite a few Microsoft people on the program and a lot of them, 10, 20 years with the company, and they said, it's still the vision that we had but, one articulated it really well, he said, we're even more focused on the customer than ever and that gets me really excited. I want to ask you, when people look at this show, 'cause it's such a broad ecosystem, so many different views, what will they be talking about later in the year? My initial take coming out of it is, I'm a little surprised that we're talking so much about things like Windows 2019 and the Office 365, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, obviously it's Microsoft's strength, it's where they've got the most customers but are they operating still relevant in the future? >> I met with the program manager of Windows 29 servers last night, Erin, and she had said that they had 1,300 people they had to turn away from the Windows 2019 server and there was 4,000 people and I flippantly said, oh my gosh, I didn't think Microsoft still did that, it's all as a service, but I was just kidding of course. But I think that that shows the, how long it takes for people to move but I think what we'll be talking about in a year is has Microsoft delivered on its IoT commitments in IoT Azure Central, how much of their business has moved to, I'll call it, on-prem software in a box, to as a service, so, Dynamics 365, Office 365, and then finally I think we're going to see the workflow, and here's something that my head finally went ding on, is, Microsoft's strategy to surround the data and then do workflow on it to supplant Oracle SAP applications around the data. That's what I think we'll be talking about in a year. >> One other specific I wanted to see if you've got some data on because it's something we wanted to understand, Azure Stack, the press, all agog on it for the last couple of years, I really haven't talked to, I've talked to the partners that are working in, you know, people like Intel, Lenovo, and the like that are doing it but I haven't talked to too many customers they've employed service providers, yes, but what are you hearing, what are you seeing, is Azure Stack a big deal or is it just one of the pieces in a multi-cloud data applications strategy that Microsoft has? >> So, Azure Stack is a big deal and I think that it's getting to it's a slow boil, to be honest with you, the company changed hardware strategies, it was first an ODM model and then it went to an OEM model and a very narrow OEM model. The compute requirements to Azure Stack were too big to some people so it's a slow boil, but I look at what has the competition done? Now to be even a public cloud player, you have to have an on-prem capability. With Google it's PKE On-Prem, you have Greengrasss, and Amazon DB that's on-prem sitting on top of Vmware, so hyper-cloud, multi-cloud is a real thing, I just think it's getting a little bit slower start than everybody had thought. >> Great, well Patrick, thank you so much for your insights. These were terrific, it's great having you on the show. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> From Orlando, Florida It's theCube covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018! Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome, you're watching theCube, On The Ground at SAP Sapphire Now. I'm your host, Keith Townsend. We're in steamy Orlando. Great convention center size of 16 American football fields. Got in about three thousand steps this morning, but you know what, I'm not here to talk about me. We're here talking about the relationship between Microsoft and NetApp. We have Brad Berkey, GM SAP Global at Microsoft and Kevin Zhang, Tech Solutions Pro, and this is a mouthful, SAP on Azure Intelligent Global and you're a black belt? >> Yes. >> Oh wow! >> Yes, I can kickbox. >> You can kick some SAP butt. >> Yes (laughs) oh no, yes, yes we do great solutions. >> So first off let's talk about the NetApp, Microsoft relationship as it pertains to SAP. What's the story behind NetApp and Microsoft? >> The great thing aout NetApp and Microsoft is you both have the same vision, right. For us, it's about our responsibility to help our customers innovate. And NetApp is a key partner for us in our ability to help our customers innovate and provide solutions around SAP. >> So, let's talk about those solutions around SAP. One of the things that's getting pushed an awful lot is that SAP is now cloud ready. We can go to the cloud. We can go to these hyperscalers, such as Azure or As-zure and swipe a credit card and get up and running with HANA. Tell us about that experience. How does that go exactly? >> Kevin? >> Oh yeah, so I don't know if you have heard. We just announced we released a 12 terabyte memory size virtual machine. Our Halo logging instances can go up to 24 terabytes. So we ran the largest SAP workload in the world. There are so many customers, about 400 SAP Azure customer. Personally I work with about 30 SAP on Azure customers and over 77 or 80 SAP HANA on Azure customers. So, it's very exciting and we see that the trend is picking up, the demand is picking up worldwide. >> Wow! Bill McDermott on stage yesterday gave the numbers around SAP HANA in general, 1800 customers. So Microsoft having 400 SAP HANA customers. >> Sure, just to be clear on that. So when we talk about customers that are sitting inside of Azure for their SAP Landscape, that's both traditional NetLever base and HANA base and I think the number that you have is closer to 70 of that larger number. The real important thing that customers are seeing today is the... When people think of cloud, they think about cost reduction. I'm gonna save money because I'm gonna be renting equipment. The true value is in your ability to be nimble to innovate, right? So imagine a customer puts their SAP Landscape inside of Azure and it's NetLever based say the older stuff. At any point along that journey, they can call us up and say, "I want the infrastructure for HANA." They can innovate at will. If they buy hardware that sits on-premise, that hardware's set to run that particular landscape, it's not set to run HANA. So there's some opportunities for the customer to innovate using Azure. It's not just cost savings, it's around efficiencies and the ability to innovate at will. >> So let's talk about hybrid clouds scenarios around that very concept. We had another NetApp partner on that talked about the scenario in which customers have this desire to innovate quickly. Traditionally, in a traditional enterprise, to your point, if I wanted to spin up a HANA workload, I'd have to procure hardware, I'd have to get my bases team to lay down the NetWeaver stack along with HANA. It could be a couple of months before I'm up and running. Then I can innovate, do my innovation. How does Microsoft help shorten that cycle? >> I can speak to it. We actually have another partner here with there model, as well, SUSE. HANA is drawn SUSE right ahead and different flavors of Linux. and they're running on Azure. Today, we are able to deploy the entire SAP Landscape using alternative scripts inside Azure. In 30 minutes, you have the entire SAP Landscape deployed including the large virtual machine M series for your HANA cluster. You also have the ESCS, the central instances and also the AFS Cluster as well as your application servers. All of those things running your automation, your cloud speed in 30 minutes instead of three months. >> So one of the obviously manages of cloud, in general, is this ability to get to agility. There's a concept that once I've innovated in the cloud, I know what the workload is, it's stable, it's not changing that I bring that back in house. Is that something that you're seeing, are people continuing to run these workloads steady state in the cloud as well? >> I think they're gonna run more so in steady state. We don't see them kind of moving it back. The idea that in a traditional SAP Landscape is that everything is always on. >> Right. >> Right. Since the lights are always on, why not I have my own equipment as opposed to renting just compute from a hyperscaler like Microsoft. The reality is, is again, back to that notion of innovating. If I'm gonna role out, let's say, S4 on top of HANA, so you think about Suite on HANA and then S4, I'm gonna set up all of these test environments, multiple test environments, versions of it as I roll out. I'm gonna be really big for a short period of time then I'm gonna roll it out and shrink back down. Also, when I do upgrades, you think about it like if you're doing payroll at the end of the month, I'm gonna be big for short periods of time. So we call that bursting, and it's that bursting that allows you to continually to reduce costs you wouldn't bring back on-prem, where you can't burst, right? Makes sense? >> That makes sense. So let's talk about some of these business conversations that you've had with customers. What have been some of the primary drivers other than the obvious agility? What are some of the conversations that you look at the broader Microsoft portfolio solutions that you're able to bring into customer conversations? >> Two things come to mind. One of which is when you think about enterprise-class security across all domains, right? So right now we provide Azure for Office 365. That's an Azure tenant. And we can give you advance security for that. Imagine that I can provide that same security for your SAP system. I want to give you an example of the type of security solutions. We have an intelligent IOT-based security model that sits inside of Azure that will predict hacks. They'll look at your environment and say, "you look just like a customer who has been hacked" or "you have the attributes of a customer "who could get hacked" and they'll proactively come in and say you need to make these adjustments That kind of stuff sits inside of the cloud in Azure. So it's not just... And again, I think the misnomer is it's just about cost savings 'cause if it was just about cost savings, then at some point, your depreciation models for on-premise hardware as long as you can stay and not change, so not changing would save you a lot of money. So that's why I get back to you, it'll allows you to change without burden of impact. >> Talking about change in the industry, we can't have a 7.5 billion dollar acquisition and not talk about it on theCube. We kind of eat this stuff up. You guys acquired GitHub. Let's talk about the relationship of developers, one of the things I haven't heard a lot, at least in conversations I've had on theCube so far this week have been about the developer. Talk about the importance of the developer relationship and potential integrations with GitHub, if you can, and SAP. >> First, that is one of my favorite topics I have. I came from a development background we call enable agility allow you to run continuous development and continuous integration, and the GitHub has been a integrate part of Microsoft Solution already. We are probably the largest contributor in the GitHub before Google and Facebook where if you ranking based on the history. The open source has been cultural after the Satya takeover as CEO has been our winning grace, open source, and we actually... The majority of our code and our deployment is in the GitHub. In the SAP world, the ARM templates for automation templates, JSON templates, and all the automation scripts we deployed in the GitHub, and we share with customer as a community. If they actually use those scripts through their deployment, continuously improve the scripts for automation. >> So, continuous integration, continued development is not a term that we hear a lot in the SAP world. As we're bringing these concepts from I think thought into reality with services such as GitHub to store DevOps scripts, automation scripts, what has been the business impact of being able to bring a continuous integration, continued development practice to SAP which is usually not big? >> I'll give you a good example. For example, when Brad Berkey mentioned earlier doing the SAP Landscape deployment, you have no N+1 deployment and you want to do a test environment, you want to do a Sandbox to troubleshoot the incidence. Today, with the scripts automation, you can spring up an entire system in three hours, four hours, including S4, including the time old system when you put in the business object BI and the other things together. You can test this and then shut down the entire system and delay the resource group inside Azure. As we move that system, they re-spring up as necessary. Also, we're working with SAP called Landscape Manager which allows you to clone the system inside the Azure. The scripts behind it is actually a computer integration into the dual element type of scripts allows you to replicate system files, allow you to deploy another testing system or training system. It gives you a lot of modern deployment methodology to give you fast agility to the business. >> So Microsoft, the ultimate platform company, one of the things that designates the platform company is that your partners basically make more money than you off the platform. Windows is a great example of a platform. So you have platform, Azure is definitely becoming known as a platform, and then we have NetApp, the data driven company. Talk through the value of the NetApp data fabric, data driven technology and platform as it pertains to the ability to have the same data operation strategy on-prem and in the Microsoft Cloud. >> Okay, I'll give you an example. A lot of our customer, Brad sells a lot of SAP on Azure to many customers. I've supported those customers. Many of them because NetApp has a super, very high speed fastest management, snapshot management to data protection and data recovery and backup, and also the DR capability, customers demand asks us can we actually work with Microsoft in the cloud or use a similar technology. So they deployed the NetApp ONTAP inside of Azure today. And we're able to support AFS file services to file sync from on-prem to the cloud, from one Azure region to another region, leverage those ONTAP snap mirroring and all the technology as well. So to enable to provide an enterprise level file sync, file protection, file recovery and warning replication as well. >> So, you guys are pretty good. I'm trying to throw you curve balls but you're pretty much knocking 'em out the park, so I'ma try to throw another curve ball. Bring the hybrid IT story in for me from a Microsoft perspective when it comes to Azure stack. How does Azure stack play a role in the overall vision whether it's Edge, Core, or like stationed into the cloud, how does Azure stack play a role in it? >> In Azure stacks. It's not for SAP. >> Yeah, okay. Azure stack is a very important overall view from Edge to the entire cloud. We have the 50 regions globally. We have many data centers combined. The largest of public quota from region perspective, but still they're areas, for example, like a cruise ship, like a defense department, they may actually require Edge inside a prime type of technology stack. Azure stack allow you to use the same interface, same view to deploy the technology. When you actually connect it, you can synchronize your subscription. So it can allow you to have end-to-end access from your on-premise into the cloud. Microsoft has the perfect hybrid cloud strategy here, and it allow you to do not only the IaaS and PaaS and also the SaaS solution to our customers. >> So, okay, let's bring the conversation back up a couple of levels and talk, Brad, what have been the conversations here? After the keynote this morning, talking about the intelligent business, the conversations yesterday with Bill McDermott with the super-high energy about SAP going into CRM, what has been the conversations with customers? >> We've had a privilege for a lot of customer meetings in here. The great thing about SAP Sapphire is you got about 20,000 customer attendees here. They're the big ones, and at the C-Suite, so we get to have some great conversations. The customer conversations have been around the notion of the responsibility that Microsoft and SAP have to them. To the point where I was speaking with a customer early, he says, "You have an accountability "to help me be innovative." That's a very important responsibility. A lot of that revolves around enterprise-class security. A lot of that revolves around uptime and legacies between those environments. "What's my performance attribute?" and "Are you going to be there with me forever?" Now when a customer chooses Azure or they choose SAP and they choose Azure, certainly, it's really a three-part partnership. The customer, Microsoft, and SAP as a partnership. If I had to add a fourth one to that, it would be the systems integrator because in the case, Microsoft doesn't upgrade, migrate, move or install anything. So we rely on all the many partners that are here to do that set of work, everywhere from Accenture to Gemini to Brave New World. That was ABC, right? I got those out, right? All of those partners are very key to both Microsoft and SAP to ensure customer success. So a lot of the meetings that we've had here have been with those partners and those customers. >> Wow, to be a fly on the wall for those. I would love to go into more detail. We've run out of time. I'm getting the wrap sign, but I would love to have a conversation around support, integration, way more areas than we have time for. We'll have to get you on theCube again. You're now Cube veterans. From Orlando, this is Keith Townsend for theCube. Stay tuned or stay in the YouTube feed to find out more about what's going on about SAP Sapphire Now On The Ground. Talk to you soon. (lively music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 here in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. And happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, Mark Collier, who's the chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me back. >> Thank you for having us back and thank you again for doing the show in Vancouver, so-- >> Oh man, such an amazing place. Like this convention center, I don't think it's fair to call it a convention center because it's like a work of art, you know? >> And it's my second time here for this show, and I think kudos to your team because you have good enough content that people aren't just wandering around, taking pictures of the mountains. My wife is off seizing the whale watching right now, but everybody else here, they're engaged. And that's what you want in the community. >> Yeah, definitely. I guess you have to make sure you don't lose their attention to the whales and the sea planes, but so far everyone seems to be gettin' down to business. >> You know, I think it would be fair to say that there's some transitions going on in the marketplace in general, and at this show I notice when I got the invitation, it's like the OpenStack slash open infrastructure summit. Got a big track on edge computing, got another one on containers, been talking about containers for a few years at this show, which really interesting to talk about. And I mean, the edge stuff, we were talking about it as NFV and the telcos and all that stuff in the past. What is the OpenStack Summit these days, Mark? >> Yeah, I mean I think that it's evolving to reflect what people are doing with open source when it comes to infrastructure. And so we call it open infrastructure, but basically it's just a world of possibilities have been opened up by, of course, OpenStack, but also many, many other components, some of which came before like Linux and things like that, and some of which started after, like Kubernetes, and there's many other examples, TensorFlow for AI machine learning. So there's kind of this like embarrassment of riches these days if yo want to automate your infrastructure in a cloud-like fashion. You can do so many more things with it, and OpenStack solves a very specific, very important layer which is that kind of traditional infrastructure as a service layer, compute storage and networking. But once you automate that, it's proven, it's reliable, you could run millions of cores with it like some of our users are doing. You want to do more and that means layering other things on top or sort of connecting them in different ways. So just trying to help users get something more out of the technology is really what we're about and OpenStack becomes like an enabler rather than kind of like the whole conversation. Yeah, one of the things I always say in this industry, sometimes we just don't have the right expectations going into these environments. You know, when I think back 15 years ago as to what we thought Linux was going to do. Oh it's going to crush Microsoft. It's like, well, Microsoft is still doing quite well and Linux has done phenomenal. We wouldn't have companies like, Google if it wasn't for the likes of Linux. In an open source you've got a lot of tools out there. So while there are the CERNs and Walmarts of the world that take a full OpenStack distribution and put out tons of cores, I've run into software companies where when I dig into their IP, oh what do ya know, there's a project from OpenStack in there that enables what they're doing. So I've seen at a lot of shows they're like, there's companies that are like, yes, I want it, and then there's like, oh no, there's this piece of it I want, there's that piece what I want. And that's kind of the wonder of OpenStack that I can do all of those things. >> Yeah exactly. I think we've talked before about sort of calling it composable open infrastructure, and making, OpenStack's always been architecturally designed from, in terms of the goals around it, to be pluggable so from the beginning you could plug multiple hypervisors kind of underneath and you could plug different backends for storage and networking, so that sort of concept of being something, integration engine that plugs things in is part of the OpenStack kind of philosophy, but now you see that the OpenStack services themselves are sort of, you can think of them as microservices, and like if you just need block storage you can use sender. And that may make sense for some specific environments, and are you running OpenStack? Well, you are, but it gets a little bit fuzzy in terms of are you running all of it or part of it? And the reality is the things are not as simple as a binary yes or no. It's just that the options are much greater now. >> Well Mark, that has been some of the discussion in the community over the last few years, the core versus the big tent, and now of course with all this interoperability, conversations with both OpenStack participating in other communities and other communities here today, this week. I mean, what's the current state of that conversation about what is OpenStack and how does it interrelate? I think you kind of touched on it with this composable idea. >> Yeah, I mean I think that basically it's kind of like OpenStack is as OpenStack does, you know? So what are people doing with it and that tells you kind of what it is and what people are doing with it. There are a lot of different patterns. There's no like one specific deployment pattern that everyone uses, but probably by and large, by far the most common pattern is OpenStack plus Kubernetes. And so when you talk about the interop piece, this is a really good example where OpenStack has evolved to become a better, kind of better citizen, I guess, of open infrastructure by having more reliable APIs, kind of being a target that tools that build on top can rely on and not sort of have to worry about the snowflakes of different clouds and there's still more work to be done in that area, but we talked about OpenLab, which is an initiative, this morning, that puts together OpenStack, Kubernetes, and other pieces like Terraform and things like that, and does constant end-to-end testing on it, and that's really how you make sure that you know kind of what combinations work well together, and sometimes you just find bugs, and it turns out a couple of changes need to be made upstream in Kubernetes or in OpenStack or in gophercloud or in Terraform, and just if you don't know, then the user kind of with the some assembly required model, finds out and they're like, I don't know, it doesn't work, it's broken. Well, is it OpenStack's fault or Kubernetes's fault, and they don't, they just want it to work. >> So you're saying >> Identified upstream we can fix it. >> You're saying OpenStack has become more of a stable layer of the (mumbles). >> Yes exactly, yes. It has become a much more stable layer. >> Which means there wasn't a whole lot of flashy storage network and compute up on stage actually. >> A lot of the talk-- >> Yeah, it's a really good point. I think it's just really proven in that way, and you know, one of the things that was highlighted was like the virtual GPUs, right? So, if OpenStack is designed to be pluggable, what do people want to have as an option now in terms of compute storage and networking, on the compute side is they want GPUs, because that gives an AI machine learning much faster, if they're bit coin miners, like I'm sure you all are in your basement, they're going to want GPUs. And what was really interesting is that the PTL, like the technical leader of the Nova Project, got up and talked about virtual GPUs. I was back in the green room and like three of the other keynote speakers were like, oh man, we are so excited about this VGPU support. Like, our customers are asking for it, the guy, Mohammad from Vexos, is the CEO of Vexos, he said, our customers are demanding this queens release, which is the latest OpenStack, and we were kind of surprised, they just really want this queens release. So we asked them why and they're like well they want VGPU. So that's kind of an example of an evolution in OpenStack itself, but it's an extension, enabler for things like GPUs, and that's kind of an exciting area as well. >> You know, it's interesting because in previous years it was the major release was one of the main things we talked about. Queens, as you mentioned, other than the VGPUs and that little discussions, spent a lot more time outside, talked to a lot of the users. You talked about the new tracks that were there. And something I heard a lot this year that I hadn't heard for a few years was, get involved, we're looking to build. And I was trying to think of a sports analogy, and maybe it was like, okay, we're actually building more of a league here and we're looking to recruit as opposed to or is it rebuilding what exactly OpenStack 2.0 is in the future? >> Yeah, that's a really interesting point. You're absolutely right, and I can imagine or can remember sort of talking to some of the speakers as they were working on their content, and I don't think I totally picked up that that was a big trend, but you're absolutely right, that was a major call to action from so many different people. I think it's because when we think about what we are as a community, I talked about how we're a community of people who build and operate open infrastructure, and it's really about solving problems, and if you're as open to community collaboration and you want to solve problems, you can't be afraid to stand up and say we have problems. And sometimes maybe that feels awkward. It's like the tech 101 is get up and say you solved all the problems and you should buy it today. It's online or downloaded or whatever. And I think we just realized that the magic of our community is solving problems. There's always going to be more problems to solve, now you're putting more pieces together, which means the pieces themselves have to evolve and the testing and integration has to evolve. Like it's just a new set of challenges and sort of saying, here's what we're trying to solve, it's not done, help us, actually is more, I think, true to kind of what the community is all about. >> I'm wondering, do we know how many people are at the show this year? >> I don't have the exact count. I think it's around 2600, something like that. >> Yeah, so fair to say it might be a little bit less than last year's North America show? >> Yeah, it is a little bit less. >> And what are you hearing from the user? What are the main things they come for? That you got the new tracks, you've got the open dev conference co-located. What kind of key themes can you get from the users? >> Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we found is that we have twice as many cloud architects this year than a year ago. So I think there's always this period of time where conference attendance is driven by curiosity. Like, I've heard about this thing, what is it, or it's the cool factor, hype curves and all that stuff, I want to learn about it. At this point people know what OpenStack is. We've got tons of ways you can learn about it. There's local meetups, there's OpenStack Days all over the world, there's content, videos online. It's just not like a mystery anymore. Like the mystery draws in kind of the people that are just poking around to learn. Now we're at that point of, okay I know what it is, I know what it's for, I want to architect a solution around it, so seeing twice as many cloud architects I think is an interesting data point to think about how we're shifting more towards, people are not asking if it's proven, they're like it's been proven for whatever, two, three years, however, the perception is, but the technology is just very, very solid. It's running infrastructure all over the world, the largest banks and so on and so, I think that's kind of how things are shifting to what else can we do and put on top of it, now that it's a solid foundation. >> I wonder, sometimes there's that buzz as to what's going on out there. There was a certain large analyst firm that wrote a report a couple months ago that wasn't all that favorable about OpenStack. There's others that watching on Twitter during the keynote, and they're like, they're spending all their time talking about containers, why isn't this just part of the Cloud Native Con, KubCon show? What's the foundation's feedback on, what are you hearing kind of, what's your core deliverables? And why this show should continue in the future? >> Sure, I mean I think that what we're hearing generally from users and seeing in our data as well as from analysts like 451 and IDC, those are a couple of different reports coming out, like right now or just came out, that Jonathan mentioned this morning, I think is adoption just continues to grow, and so you know, I think people are not looking at just one technology stack. And maybe they never were, but I think there was this kind of temptation to just think of it, is it containers versus VMs or is it Kubernetes versus OpenStack? And it's like, no one who really runs infrastructure thinks like that because they might have thought it until they tried it, they realized these things go together. So I think the future of this conference is just becoming more and more centered around what are the use cases? What are the technical challenges we're trying to solve? And to the extent we're getting patterns and tools that are emerging like the lamp stack of the cloud, so to speak. How can people adopt them? So you think about cloud as taking all kinds of new forms, edge computing, those are the kinds of things that I think will become a bigger part of the conference in the future. I do like the open infrastructure angle on this. I mean, as infrastructure folks, right, you know that that storage compute network doesn't manage itself, doesn't configure itself. >> Mark: Totally. >> Doesn't provision itself. And so a lot of the app layer things should rely on this lower layer. And I thought last year in Boston there was this kind of curious OpenStack or containers conversation, which seemed odd at the time, and that's clarified, I think, at a number of levels from a number of camps and vendors. >> Yeah I agree, I think we have done our best from our point of view, from the foundation, myself, and the others that are involved in our community to try to dispell those myths or tamper down that kind of sense of a rivalry, but it takes time and I do feel like there is kind of a sea change now. There are just so many people running in production with various container tools, predominantly Kubernetes and in OpenStack that I think that that sort of myth that they're, that one's replacing the other, it's hard for that cognitive dissonance to last forever when you're given like the hundredth example of like somebody running in production at scale. Like they must be doing it for a reason, and then people start to go, well why is that? >> And I did like the comment you did make about cloud is not consolidating and simplifying, right? Even at the Dell Technologies World show, Michael Dell got up and talked about the distributed core, which is a little bit of an oxymoron, but the fact is compute and compute is everywhere, right? And it's not only, it's on the edge, it's on telephone poles, it's in little boxes in our, you know, going to be on our walls, in our walls, right? And this open infrastructure idea can play everywhere. It's not just about an on-prem data center anymore. >> Yeah and I think that's a big part of why we started to say open infrastructure instead of cloud, just because, I mean, you know, I guess we spent 10 years arguing over the definition of cloud, now we can argue over open infrastructure. But to me it's a little more descriptive and a little less kind of, I don't know, a little less baggage than the term cloud. >> Yeah, definitely differentiates it as to where you sit in the marketplace. And one thing I definitely want to give the foundation great kudos on, the diversity of this show is excellent. Not just that there was a welcome happy hour and there's a lunch, but look at all the PTLs, the project leads that are there, a lot of diversity, up on stage. It's just evident. >> Mark: Thank you. >> And it's just something kind of built into the community, so great job there. >> Thank you, I'm very proud of the fact that we had just so many excellent keynote speakers this morning, and you know, that's always something that we strive for, but I feel like we got closer to the goal than ever in terms of just getting broad representation up on the stage. And some amazing leaders. >> It's always nice from our standpoint because we always say give us your keynote speakers and give us some of the main people making things happen, and it just naturally flows that we have a nice diversity, from gender, from geography. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> From various backgrounds, so that's good. All right, want to give you the final word. Take aways that you want people after the show or maybe some things that people might not know if they didn't make it here for the show. >> I mean, I think, you know, the number one take away is it's all about the people, and we want to make it about the headlines or the technology, and even the technology is about the people, but certainly the operators are not, like I said, logos don't operate clouds or infrastructure, people do, so getting to meet the people, seeing what they're doing, like the Adobe I mentioned, they're marketing cloud. They have 100,000 cores of compute with four people operating it. So if you've got the right four people and the right playbook, you can do that, too. But you got to meet those people and find out how they're doing it, get their recipe, get their playbook, and they're happy to share it, and then you can run at that kind of scale, too, without a big team and you can change the way you operate. >> Yeah, I know I said in my last question, but the last thing, I know there's been a big emphasis to not just do the two big shows a year, but the OpenStack days and other events globally, give people, how do they get involved and where can they come to find out more? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad you asked because, there are so many ways to get involved and of course it's online, it's IRC, it's mailing lists 24/7, but there's no substitute when it's about the people for meeting in person. So we have the two summits a year. We're also having an event which is called the PTG, which is really for the developers and some of the operators will be coming this fall as well where we're having it in Denver, but the summits are the big shows twice a year, but the OpenStack days are really important. Those are annual, typically one to two day events, in 15 plus countries around the world. One in particular that is going to be really exciting this year is in Beijing. You know, we've had that for the last couple of years. Huge event, but of course, others throughout Europe and Asia. Tokyo is always an awesome OpenStack day, and then there are quite a few in Europe as well. So that's another way you can get involved. Not necessarily have to fly around the world, but if you do have to fly around the world, being in Vancouver is not a bad spot, so. >> Yeah, absolutely, and boy we know there's a lot of OpenStack happening in China. >> Yes there is. >> So Mark Collier, thanks again to the foundation for allowing theCUBE to cover this. >> Sure. >> And thanks so much for joining us. >> Mark: Thank you. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back here with lots more of three days wall-to-wall coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music) (shutter clicks)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. Day two of Dell Technologies World. Loads of people here, 14,000 in attendance. 65 hundred partners, analysts, press, you name it. It's here talking about all things transformation. We're very excited to welcome back to theCUBE, Sam Grocott, senior vice president of Infrastructure Solutions Group Marketing. Welcome back! >> I'm psyched to be here, thanks for having me again. >> Lots of news, lots of buzz. >> Mhm. >> Break it down. >> We're powering up the modern data center. I think that was a big theme of this morning's keynote. We're very much focused on taking the, what we refer to as the pillars of the modern data center, to the next level, and being able to introduce a handful of new products this week. Very, very excited about them, and I think we're getting the feedback and response we expected. >> Stu: Yeah Sam, I heard Jeff actually said powers that brand that I want to hear. You know. >> Sam: Yeah. >> We got the PowerMax and the PowerEdge, and you know. >> Sam: You might want to get used to it a little bit. >> Yeah. >> Sam: You might be able to connect a couple trends here. We're powering up the modern data center, but we're not done yet. Obviously today and this week was a big push there, with the introduction of of PowerMax, the new PowerEdge servers. As well as the VX rail, VX rack XDC enhancements. But this is a journey we're on, as we power up the portfolio, and we're just getting started. >> Stu: Alright. Sam, give us the update on the portfolio. You basically have marketing for all the Dell EMC >> That's right. >> Which is the data centerpiece there. EMC you know, Joe Tucci always used to say, overlap's good, I never want to let a wedge in there. But the critique would always be, it was like oh my gosh, I can't figure out, you know, what that portfolio is. >> Sam: Right. >> It's kind of sprawling. So, how do you balance the breadth and meeting what the customers need. And how should we be looking at, both from a product and a market standpoint? >> Yeah, so, you're right. Our history is no creases, no gaps, choice for everyone. Options for everyone. The alternative, one product for everything. We've always chosen not to go that path. However, there is a balance here that I think we all strive for. And that's something that I'm working very closely with the rest of the ISG team and Jeff's team to really understand as we move forward and power up this portfolio. How do we walk that fine balance of choice and flexibility for customers and partners. As well as simplification and simplicity for end users that want to make sure that they're deploying the best upreach solution for their needs. And not confuse them at any time. So, it's a fine line. I think we're making good progress there, we're going to continue to do that as we move forward. >> When you're talking with customers, the users, what is it that they're looking to power up? What, how is it actually applied within an organization? >> Sam: The big shift going on is this world of traditional enterprise applications that are certainly considered mission critical, tier one. Those aren't going anywhere. Those are needed to require the highest levels of resiliency and data services, and everything you would expect from an enterprise grade ray. What is new is the next generation applications that have historically been run in a sandbox, off the beaten path, a line-up business, an architect. Built their own thing, and then guess what, it became important. In fact, now mission critical. This is where you find things like AI, ML, deep learning, IOT. When it becomes mainstream and important, guess whose problem it becomes. It moves to IT. Because that's where they run their end to end data services, their resiliency plans, their data replication plans, business contingency. The expectations of those use cases now, are at the enterprise level. So the bar is being raised there because they don't want sprawl of use cases and applications, especially for their mission critical use cases. So that's what we're focused on. As those apps become mission critical, providing them solutions that give them the enterprise-grade capability, but the performance and capabilities they expect for that other segment of the market. >> Sam, when I look at the portfolio, I wonder if you could speak to really who you're targeting with the messaging. Think back ten years ago, well, EMC was a storage company, Dell was primarily server and PCs and the like. Now we're talking digital transformation. Powering the future. Jeff and Michael and Allison went through all of these trends >> Transformations, yeah. >> How do you position where the products fit and who you're hitting, who some of the chief constituents that you will add to with. >> Yeah, it's gotten more complex. There's no doubt about it. Especially as the next generation work loads emerge in various spots of the organization. As well as some more, as you talk about digital transformation, you're really moving up the stack so to speak in terms of type of people you're selling to. So we've got the world's greatest sales force in the industry, but we've had to modernize them as well. So we've gone through this product modernization. How do we modernize a sales force that of course can have the storage admin conversation. The backup admin conversation. That's what we've been having for 20 years. But that's no longer good enough. You've got to be able to pivot, and go up into the CXO level in terms of the leadership of the IT department. The line of business leaders, which a lot of times are architects or specialists within a given field. And frankly even some cases, in my role, the CMO you're selling into because it's a business data analytics engine, or something that's providing new insights, new markets, and new businesses. So it has gotten more complex there, and the skills required to sell at the byte level all the way up to the boardroom level, is of paramount importance as we go forward. So we spend a lot of time on that now. >> We were talking with a gentleman from TGen earlier today, Stu and I were. It's such an exciting topic, biomedical research. Sequencing the human genome, and how much faster they can do it now, and how much more data they're generating. But they have such potential there, you mentioned Stavros for example, to be able to use that data, combine it, recombine it, to people always say, oh, actionable insights. It's one thing to be able to get actionable insights. It's another thing to be able to have an infrastructure and agility to be able to capitalize on them and deliver differentiated products to market. Revolutionize the customer experience. From a digital transformation perspective, are you finding any industries in particular, you mentioned biomedical research, where they're kind of really leading the charge here and helping you guys develop the product strategy? Or is it more horizontal? >> Sam: Yeah, I think genomics and medical and the health industry are great examples of traditional, large businesses that also play very aggressively in early adopters. I was kind of born and raised in a small company called Isilon, that is now part of the Dell EMC portfolio. And what we are able to do with a breakthrough, leading edge technology ten years ago was we went right after a vertical, go to market strategy, so genomics research, media and entertainment, manufacturing. These are areas that are large businesses but they make big bets on emerging technology, because it's the only place you can go to get those next generation capabilities as those applications mature over time. The great thing about within Dell EMC and the ISG portfolios, we have solutions that can now meet both of those roles needs. More so as they start to mature and become mission critical. I think we're even more well-positioned to help them lead through that transformation that we're seeing going on in all those different verticals today. >> Sam, one of the the things we heard in the keynotes, is are some of the emerging trends. Give us a little look forward, your ISG group, what kind of things are hot on your plate? Especially if you kind of look at the enterprise customers. What's kind of near term and give us a little bit of a roadmap. >> Sam: Yeah. Couple things. I would certainly say cloud, and moving to a cloud, first cloud enabled world. That is really driving a lot of our roadmap innovation as we go forward. So it includes everything from mobility of information, from an on-ram hybrid, to exclusively cloud native off-ram. We're innovating in all of those vectors. You really can't just pick one anymore. So that's a key area. As well as cloud-based analytics and telemetry information. Leveraging the cloud to understand how your infrastructure is operating over time. I would say that's definitely a major area of investment. The other major areas, we have a vision of autonomous infrastructure, within the storage world. Autonomous storage. Really eliminating the need for the day to day management of storage, because the system is so smart, it really takes care of all those typical tasks that consume a storage administrator's, system administrator's day to day. We are in the business of creating outcomes and helping our customers create outcomes. The more we can get them out of the managing and migrating and protecting data and into the application there, where they're adding a lot more value to the organization. I think that's a win-win for both organizations. So machine learning AI as the technology, that's going to allow us to enable an autonomous infrastructure, really make the infrastructure invisible so you can focus on your applications and your outcomes. >> What are some the things that you're hearing from channel partners in terms of, they're on the front lines, often dealing with customers that are at some stage, of a digital, of a transformation journey, we'll say. What's some of the feedback that you're hearing from the channel, we know that there's a number of announcements, we spoke with Cheryl Cook this morning. >> Sam: Yes, good, good. >> How are they being enabled to deliver these solutions, to help drive autonomy for example? >> We've got, in parallel to Dell Tech World, we've got the Global Partners Summit, we've got just an enormous amount of the channel community here for this event. We did make some key announcements, including the Dell MC Ready Bundle. I think it's a great, Ready Stack I should say. Its a great example, which reflects the feedback that they've given us, is give us all the pieces to be successful, to stand up a IT transformation, in their customer's environment. Train them, enable them, package it for them, to make it easy and seamless for them to go in and be that trusted partner for those organizations. So that's one example of the direct feedback from the channel partners. They asked for that offer. We responded very, very quickly. And now we've provided them that kind of end-to-end, kind of reference architecture to build your own Dell EMC end-to-end CI infrastructure. So, very excited about that, and that's direct feedback from the partner community. >> Alright, so that's partner. How about the customer feedback you've gotten so far? Went through a lot of announcements. I can't even imagine how many customer sessions are going on here. >> Sam: Oh yeah. >> What's the consensus so far? >> The excitement is around MVME, and look, we're not first to market. I'm totally okay with that. I'm fine admitting it here in theCUBE. But we are the first to get to market the right way. And that's really what I measure ourselves on. We didn't just build our own custom MVME modules. We didn't build something that would be difficult to add on to, in terms of MVME over-fabrics, or storage class media. We built something architected via software defined architecture, with an end-to-end MVME implementation. Our customers love that because it gives you the right away benefits of performance, but it also in the future, in that they'll be able to easily add in storage class memory, MVME over-fabrics when it becomes available into that system. So its not a forklift upgrade. It's built for today as well as tomorrow. They love that aspect. >> So if customers, their pent-up demand for the MVME solution, can you give us any guidance as to is this going to be 10%, what kind of, how fast will adoption be of something like this? >> Sam: Yeah, so, the reality is, its still fairly early days there as well. We expect this to be an offering that's going to start small and grow over time. That's why, in the high end space where PowerMax is complementing our BMax line, the Bmax 950 and 250 are not going anywhere any time soon. For our organizations that need to bring those next generation applications together, and need that real-time response, PowerMax is the way to go. We expect 60 to 70% of all organizations by 2020 to have at least one real time application running in a mission critical environment. That's one. 60 to 70%. So I would say its still early days. You're going to have a specific need for that level of performance to go to MVME. But it's going to start accelerating here over this year. Particularly with MVME over-fabrics coming to market later. As well as storage class memory. That's going to accelerate it even more. >> Stu: Alright Sam, just want to give you the final word. >> Yep. >> Take aways you want people to have understanding Dell and the Dell EMC portfolio when they leave DELL EMC Dell Technologies World 2018 this year. >> Yeah, certainly I hope they see the investments we're making to power up the portfolio. I think the announcements we made this week have been fantastic in terms of responding to market needs, customer needs. And frankly, I want them to learn more. I want them to watch more and more of theCUBE, to learn deeply how things are rolling out. What was the mind behind the madness of building these products. I know we've got a large amount of the team speaking in theCUBE, but whether its in theCUBE, or through the sessions, learn, adjust. Because everybody's modernizing, everybody needs to transform, this is a great opportunity for them to do that with their skill set and their knowledge in the industry. >> Lisa: Everybody does need to transform. Sam, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE again. >> Thanks for having me. >> Lisa: For sharing what's new, and what you're doing, leading marketing for all of Dell EMC. >> Sam: Thank you, thank you. >> Lisa: You've been watching theCUBE, we want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin, for Stu Miniman, we are live day two of Dell Technologies World in Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (pop music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE Media's, theCUBE's exclusive coverage for three days for HPE Discover 2017. We're on day three, down to the wire here. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE with my co-host Dave Vellante, my partner in crime with Wikibon. Our next guest, Ric Lewis. Software Defined Cloud Senior Vice President, President and GM of HPE, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And Kate Swanborg, Senior Vice-President Tech Communications and Strategic Alliances, DreamWorks Animation. Welcome back as well. >> Thank you. >> John: Great to have you guys back. >> It's good to be here. >> So obviously DreamWorks, you guys are a big customer, Ric you are now leading up the team for Software Defined infrastructure, as we call it programmable infrastructure, a lot of great things. >> Ric: Yeah. >> Synergy we talked heavily about last year. >> Ric: Yeah. >> I kind of was geeking out with you on that in terms of all that programming ability and automation. Meg story this week was simplifying hybrid IT, which is the key part of where Software's coming in. >> That's exactly right. >> And so we got DreamWorks here, what's your vision in how that's going to happen? How do you take that simple message and put it into practice? >> Yeah so, we're completely about making hybrid IT simple, and we have three primary vectors that we're driving in order to make that happen. The first is our hyperconverged appliances that we deliver, and the second is HPE Synergy, our composable, and the third is our hybrid IT management stacked software that we have. And we've got momentum across all of those. In Hyper Converged, you guys know we acquired SimpliVity, it closed in February. Got a lot of customers on that. We had Red Bull on-stage here at Discover talking about their use case of that in their racing. It was a packed house, people completely interested in all the things we're doing in hybrid IT. That's SimpliVity. Synergy, we now have almost 400 customers that have adopted Synergy. We started shipping in volume in December, and DreamWorks Animation is one of those customers, and real excited for you to hear a little bit about how they're using it, but we had, I think we had around 10 customers from Synergy across all kinds of verticals and use cases, including service providers that were on-stage here. And the final thing is our hybrid IT management stack, a program that we introduced here at Discover called Project New Stack. So, that's what's going on in Software Defined & Cloud, it's a lot right now. >> And we had a SimpliVity customer on by the way, they were really glowing. >> Yeah. >> Great to see that happen. >> That was a great story. >> Great story, Kate, so DreamWorks, you guys have a business, you've got to put a product out there and so you got to look at technology, make it work for you, and sometimes you got to get in the weeds, there's pieces and pieces, at the end of the day you got a product to deliver. How are you guys taking some of the things that are coming out at HPE and putting them into action? What are some of the things you're doing? >> Well, I think one of the things that is often surprising to people is just how much technology we consume to make a CG feature animated film. These films take 80 million compute hours to render the images, petabytes of storage and we're typically working on five or six active films in production because they take us four or five years to make. And so we want to be able to have the capability of releasing two or three films a year, we must have simultaneous production. But of course, not all of the productions are exactly the same, and we've also got other media opportunities, whether it's television or theme park. And so, what's critical to us is that we're actually able to provision the right amount of digital resource to the right project quickly and easily so that as those creative inspirations are growing and burgeoning at the studio, we've got the resource behind it in an effortless fashion. >> And how are you making that happen with the Synergy for example, because last year we were looking at thinking well this has got a lot of potential. I mean you can do it through the orchestration, making the management work kind of takes that, abstracts away a lot of the complexity. How are you guys dealing with that, I mean how have you put that into action? >> Well, we've been working within a hybrid environment for years now, so the idea of a hybrid environment isn't new to us. The key however, is that it's labor intensive. It's time-consuming. In order to get all of the right configurations of the networking and the storage, the compute to actually work in a realtime environment for our artists, that has taken us an enormous amount of effort over the years. What we're looking for in the Synergy deployment is to reduce those weeks down to days and those days down to hours. Once we're able to do that, our engineers can go off and focus on the niche technology solutions that actually matter to the artists. And that's where we want to get the business benefit. >> And with Synergy, compute, storage and fabric all managed under the same management domain. >> That's right. >> Single API that you can get access to all those resources, so it makes it super easy. It's the world's easiest way to do infrastructure as a service, it's built into the platform natively. >> That's right, and one of the things that's been so impressive to us is that we've been working with the Pointnext team to come in and actually configure this for our environment. Everybody uses a high-performance compute environment, but nobody's is exactly the same. The configure ability of this and the customability of this to our environment has been critical, and we've seen incredible benefits from that. >> So Ric, we kind of pushed you in theCUBE last year, cause you were saying "there's nothing like this in the marketplace". We said, okay define what's different. (John laughs) One of the things you touched on was the fluid pools of infrastructure. >> Yes. >> And Kate, what you just described is bringing technology to different digital teams. >> The dynamicism if you will. >> Absolutely. >> Being able to dynamically configure the thing, yes. >> So, let's test it. I mean, it sounds like that's exactly what you're doing, and how is this different than the infrastructure that you used to have? >> So, the reason that it's different is that we've got, we've got a simply said, a single infrastructure. We've got a compute farm, we've got storage, and historically what we had to do was actually partition off certain pieces of that for certain productions in order to protect their resources. The problem with that is that any given day, particularly in a creative environment, maybe they're using all of it, maybe they need more, maybe they need less. The challenge is is that historically if they needed less we can't reprovision that to another production in order to take advantage of their inspiration and their business motivations. Now we can. Now we have the opportunity to actually have the infrastructure be as dynamic as our creative environment, and that's saying a lot. >> And you can reconfigure those resources three clicks, five minutes, you literally can deprovision -- >> Kate: That's it. >> So the old way they're like bitchin and moanin, where's the servers? >> Absolutely. >> Right. >> And running around scrambling. >> They're on order. (all laugh) >> Six weeks. No this what we're talking about. >> Yeah. >> This is about speed, right? I mean this is -- >> It absolutely is. >> Alright, so I want to ask you a question about the HPE event. You mentioned you're here. So, a lot of people go to these events and they try and extract all the action. You've heard a lot of firsts, last year was Synergy first, big claim there. We're hearing some security stuff with servers here. >> Ric: Yeah. >> As a practitioner that comes to these shows, what's your strategy when you come to an event like HPE Discover, and obviously the schmooze is going on and getting wined and dined by HP, a big customer, but like when you go in there, what are you looking for, how do you connect the dots, what tea leaves do you read, what's your strategy? >> Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that really interests me about Discover is we've got a deep partnership with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. We're talking to Hewlett-Packard Enterprise all the time. So we might actually think that we know what's going on. It's not true, there's so much innovation happening that when we bring our team to this show, we learn things that could really help our business. I'll give you a great example, so we learned this week about SimpliVity. Now, we had sort of heard about it, but we had not taken our time out of our schedules to really understand how that could help our VM environment. Our team's sitting in one of the panels this week, and he's texting other engineers on our team going "We have got to look at this next week at DreamWorks Animation". That's the kind of environment this is. I'll tell you something else, New Stack, we're going to lean heavy into New Stack because we believe that the innovation that we're seeing in that space is really, finally going to deliver on this promise of cloud that's been out there. >> What specifically about New Stack do you like? I want to just double down on that. Is it the rule of your own, is it the flexibility, what's the big thing there? >> Well, again this is one of those things where our team today is actually writing code and creating architectures that are sort of New Stack-like, but we're having to do it, we're having to invest our own time. It's trial and error, some of the things work some of the things don't, and that time is not being spent focused on our animation productions. The fact of the matter is, here's Hewlett-Packard actually doubling down and making sure that there is going to be a robust solution that works, that we can bring into our environment. >> We're in enterprises across the world every day. We're having these conversations, and most enterprises are doing kind of a roll-your-own cloud kind've thing. >> That's right. >> They're playing with OpenStack, they're playing with Kubernetes, they're playing with all these tools, they got a bunch of custom code, but we're really what we're trying to do with New Stack is take the best of what they're all trying to do, constrain that down, take our standard Software Defined infrastructure as the base, put a stack on top of that that they can count on to do a private cloud with bridge-to-hybrid capabilities, that's standard, that ships, that delivers and has updates, so that they're not messing around with it. Their developers don't want to spend time doing that, they just want to have a private cloud installation that has hybrid capabilites and have it installed. >> This is super relevant, this is super relevant, and we call you a tech athlete because you want to go out there and deliver value to your group and actually build products, right? >> That's right. >> The film. But Dave's team just put out the True Private Cloud Report which shows on PRAM, cloud-like environment, $260 billion dollar TAM, but the notable thing is that the labor costs were non-differentiated spend is going up by a $150 billion shifting in 10 years. >> Yeah. >> That's exactly the point here that you're talking about, is my guy's aren't working on the product that they need to be building. They're doing the R&D, so the OpenStack and all these things you're talking about, they're doing the R&D. Here, you're doing the R&D, delivering the product to the customer. >> Well and when we deliver that, we're still going to leverage all of those technologies. OpenStack is a key part of New Stack. Kubernetes is a key part of New Stack, but what we're doing is pulling that together so that they don't have to curate their own private cloud. >> Kate: That's right. >> We create that, deliver it in a way that's an appliance-like way, just like we deliver Hyper Converged today, in a controlled plane that manages that hybrid IT estate and gives them visibility into public cloud uses and private cloud, and it's really going to help them a lot, and it's going to help a whole lot of other customers cause we're making it standard and easily deployable. >> Well, we've seen this story unfold over this decade, where the corner office has said I don't want to spend money on that caching and provisioning. Okay, so go to the cloud. And then IT said, well, eh, we can't do that. (laughs) Okay, and so they get in with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and others say what's the answer? Okay, but what you've described is this horizontal infrastructure capability that you can throw any workload at. >> That's right. >> And so my question is, what does it mean for the business? Does it mean you can do things faster, you have happier animators, you can do more movies, what does it mean? >> I think it means a couple of things. First of all, opportunity cost. In our business, a new opportunity for a creative endeavor, that comes up all the time, and the key is is that you want to be able to explore that as quickly as possible. Creative ideas work out sometimes, sometimes they don't, but they key is is that if takes you time and effort and money to just explore it, you've got an opportunity cost you don't want. >> Yeah, yep. >> Something like Synergy will allow us to provision resources to new ideas and new potentials quickly enough, easily enough, and at a cost-effective measure, so that we can actually determine which creative endeavors are going to work more quickly in our environment. That's a huge deal. >> So you were missing opportunities because of the infrastructure limitations, is that right? >> That's -- >> The mockups and everything have to get done. >> That's right! >> All the CG work. >> Again, when our filmmakers have a new idea for a new sequence, a new character, those types of characters, they take tremendous amounts of resources. I often talk about the dragon in Shrek. Back in 2001 we released Shrek, and it had this beautiful, huge pink dragon in it. And she was fantastic, but frankly she was so complex and so computationally heavy, we actually had to cut her out of parts of the film because we couldn't produce the shots she was in. Fast forward a few years, and we decide to make a movie called How to Train Your Dragon that's nothing but dragons. The key is is that we never want to be in a position again where we're tabling a great creative idea because we can't resource for it. And solutions like SimpliVity and Synergy and particularly where we're going with New Stack and the ability to actually harness the cloud without having to do all the work ourselves, that's going to bring that potential to reality. >> John: And then you know, your application in this opportunity cost is for your business. Other companies have apps, right? So their opportunity costs are very similar. >> That's right. >> John: This is the classic how shadow IT was born. >> Oh, yes! >> And people want to experiment, show proof of concept. Not a PowerPoint, an actual demo of real working product. It may not have the scale there, but you get to that point of where it's workable. >> Look, every business is facing some element of this right now, and I will tell you the other reason of the two reasons that I think that this is going to make a difference. It's future-proofing our environment. >> Ric: Yeah. >> The world is so dynamic right now, things are changing so quickly. Even in our environment with media and entertainment, the world of what people want to consume and how they want to consume it and the nature of how we're looking at innovation in both filmmaking techniques, as well as new media opportunities, the key in all of that is is that we have to be dynamic in order to be future-proofed. These types of solutions give us the confidence that we're actually putting the money in the right place. It's an investment in our future. >> Earlier you mentioned Pointnext services, and the narrative from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is my inference is it's more cloud-like. Do different types of business models. Are you seeing that? I mean, is it more than just a new name, a new brand, are you starting to see an evolution of the way in which you engage with Hewlett-Packard services? >> We absolutely are, and it's one thing to talk about strategy, but at the end of the day, you don't call up your technology and have a conversation with it, you call up people. And what we're seeing is that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is investing in a level of expertise within the Pointnext services organization that is unparalleled. That is a massive change over the course of the last five, six, 10 years. These folks are coming into our environment now and we're finding that we are inspired by their strategies. We're not having to teach them about our business, they're actually coming in with all of these other learnings that they've gotten from all of these corporations and they're looking at our ambitions and going hey, we think we've got some ideas here. I'll tell you, our engineers are hard to impress. >> That's the truth. >> They are used to, what was your phrase, rolling it on their own. >> Yeah. >> They are used to being responsible, and they have very little tolerance for actually giving other people time within our organization. Pointnext has blown them away. We could not be doing the work that we're doing on Synergy as quickly and as effectively, installation and strategy around that without the Pointnext team. >> Well, that's the proof, that is the proof in the pudding in my opinion when your people who are, I won't say cocky, but they're kind of, sounds like they're pretty cocky. (laughs) >> Ric: Confident. >> But that you're in a, you're in media entertainment. It is one of the most disruptive, being disrupted markets right now. Smart Cities, IoT, media entertainment it's, you're the leading trend in IT right now, media entertainment. >> And in our team, there's simply no tolerance at DreamWorks Animation for technology getting in the way of the business. The fact of the matter is technology always has to be enabling the storytellers, enabling the filmmakers, enabling the business and ambition. And the key is is that our engineering team, they feel responsible to that. One of the things that we're finding with the new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, the Pointnext team, Ric's team with the Synergy deployments, is that we actually feel like we've got a partner that can up our own game. >> John: Good. >> And we do deep beta programs with them on everything that we're doing to make sure that we're meeting that next generation of what they need. It's a fantastic partnership. >> Well Ric, congratulations on the success, and Kate thanks for sharing all the great stories and your experience DreamWorks Animation. Great to see that trend, again media entertainment, you guys are doing great stuff. We're doing our share with digital TV here, we're not a, we live on the edge of the network with theCUBE here at HP Discover. With DreamWorks Animation, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, stay with us for more day three coverage here in Las Vegas at HP Discover. We'll be right back. (tech music)